Coop Scoop: White Supremacy Is Not The Only Cause of Bad Policing

Reducing everything to race misses the bigger picture.

April 22-23, 2021

Issue #71

By Marc Cooper

There cannot and will not be significant police reform in the near future and it’s not just because of White Supremacy. The world is much more complicated than slogans.

There will be no wholesale reform because we have a completely irrational system of policing that is not fit for change. The United States, nearly alone among large, industrialized democracies, has no uniformed national police.  We don’t even have any real national standards for recruitment, training and drilling.

Almost 18,000 separate and distinct local, state and federal law enforcement departments pock mark the national territory. Just about every Podunk town, village or hamlet has their own police force, some as small as one officer.  The towns and cities that don’t field their own cops, rely on local county Sheriffs who also have no national standard and tend to be elected (meaning these are political jobs exposed directly to local political pressures and in rural America they tend to be very right-wing).

We learned via the events in Ferguson, Missouri last year that thousands of smaller police departments exist primarily to produce revenue for their de-industrialized, struggling towns and burbs. They are compelled to issue as many violations and tickets as possible that then link to local courts that pile on ridiculous fines for late payment or failure to appear.

Eventually, half the town and sometimes almost the entire population in poorer jurisdictions wind up with outstanding warrants because they didn’t have the $200 to pay for a real or imagined rolling stop and they certainly don’t have the $1200 needed to clear the warrant for failure to appear.

All of this a great incentive for local cops in small towns to make minor traffic stops knowing there is a better than even chance that the motorist will be wanted.  Note the case in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota this week – a police “department” made up of a grand total of three patrol officers (until the killer of Daunte Wright resigned last week to face an investigation).

Blacks make a great target not just because of their skin color, but because they are likely to be in a lower socio-economic bracket and are therefore more likely to be wanted on this or that warrant.

Things work out no better in the big metro police departments, be they in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles or, for that matter, in Minneapolis.  Poor people are also preyed upon for traffic stops as they present a target -rich environment for those who are wanted. Those big city cops are also trained to be constantly on the lookout for “threats,” especially from poorer and minority districts. They come out of the training academy with pent up fear they that they face immediate and imminent danger and therefore should be prepared to beat or shoot their way out of any trouble.

Internal police culture also drags down much chance of reform. Police are an insular Brotherhood and Sisterhood who are deeply entrenched in an Us Vs. Them culture that tolerates routine lying about what fellow cops are up to. Look no further than the original Minneapolis Police Department’s press release the morning after George Floyd’s public execution:

“Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. [He was, in fact, dead.] Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.”

One big lie from top to bottom. And if it has not been for the courageous 17 year old who filmed the entire spectacle, in spite of Officer Chauvin’s threat to mace her. we would have never heard anything more of this case.

Credit goes also to Chief Arradando who, tipped off by a community member on the phone, viewed the tape and immediately fired Chauvin (and then testified against him in court).

The warrior mentality that pervades most police departments can best be understood by reading the fine book, “Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City” by Rosa Brooks.

This is a pretty special book as Brooks, a tenured middle-aged liberal law professor at Georgetown, took months off to serve as a reserve officer (For those lefties among you, Brooks is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich and no doubt as named after Polish/German revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg). What she writes is both sympathetic to the individual cops she worked with while perfectly describing an entire criminal justice system rife with racism at every level. Brooks, in an interview, answered this when asked her biggest takeaway from her experience:

“It reinforced something that I already believed deeply, which is that one of the biggest problems is that police officers are trained to go into situations primed to see threats. They’re trained that every time anybody reaches into a pocket or a bag or the glove compartment, Oh, this person could pull out a gun and shoot me. Sure, [a very small number of] people who reach into a pocket are going to pull out a gun. But the other 99.99 percent are innocent people. And we don’t say to cops, “Your job is to protect the 99.99 percent of people who are not a threat to you, even if they reach suddenly into their pocket.” Instead, we say to them, “Your most important mission is to go home safe every day. Your job is to anticipate threats.” And that’s going to lead to a lot of dead kids.”

No question that some popular pressure exists on congress to act on police reform.  The Biden administration is pushing its omnibus George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that would impose reform even on small local departments. This bill, already passed by the House but headed for trouble in the Senate includes:

— Bans no-knock warrants, chokeholds and carotid holds

— Ends “qualified” immunity that currently shelters cops from civil liability

— Stiffens the legal standards on reckless behavior

— Increases anti-discriminatory training

— Mandates local departments to use body cams funded by the Feds

— Creates a national police misconduct registry so that cops dismissed from one dept for misbehavior cannot be hired again

— Funds local communities to establish police reform commissions

— Limits militarization of police

— Strengthens the DOJ’s power to conduct “pattern and practice”  investigations of police departments and provides grants for state attorneys general to conduct their own probes.

Newly-seated Attorney General Merrick Garland has just opened a much-needed pattern and practice investigation of the Minneapolis police department and you can be sure there will be more to follow.

These investigations usually result in a court-backed consent decree where departments are forced to reform.  The LAPD is probably one of the better success stories of this DOJ tool. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, however, is a prime example of how that oversight does not work.

You can also be sure that not much else is going to happen outside of DOJ and a few departments with enlightened brass.  If you think that ten Republican senators are going to sign on to the bill outlined above, you might have been maced one time too many.

If ten GOP senators give the nod to police reform you know it will be a maimed and hobbled version of the Floyd Act and that Democrats will accept it because even some in their own ranks are bearish on reform and they lack the 50 votes for a bill with teeth. 

Indeed, Republicans – Republican politicians—are now part of the backlash to the Derek Chauvin conviction. Just as the Chauvin conviction was coming down, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (leading the unofficial GOP presidential pack!) signed a new law that waives liability for anyone who drives their vehicle into and through any protest declared a “riot” – and the law defines a riot as an unauthorized protest of four people or more.

Florida is also considering Republican legislation that would criminalize peaceful protest by making any arrest at a protest a disqualifier for state employment or student loans. Blocking traffic on the highway would also be upgraded to a felony.

DeSantis’ curtailment of civil liberties sets the tone and the marker for a whopping 81 bills in 34 states proffered by Republicans looking to curtail what has been legal dissent.

Hardly a harbinger for the Republican Senate to drop any hammer on the cops.

Regardless of Senate inaction, a lot of room has been opening for some reforms in many localities and that fight now has to be escalated. 

We cannot however move forward by remaining in the past and not sharpening our take on the issues we face and realistic proposals for change.

I was struck watching cable news, an hour or two after the Chauvin verdict, when thousands came into the streets of Minneapolis to mark the conviction.  The cameras interviewed a well-groomed, neatly dressed fortysomething white guy, clearly a professional, who said he had come out to show his support for the verdict.

What he then said was gob smacking. “I just want to know what to do,” he said. “I realize I have this privilege and I don’t know how to help. I even googled it to see what I could do.”

It would be easy to mock this guy but the question he raises actually has great relevance.  In our current atmosphere, where political protesters tend to place White Supremacy and Systemic Racism at the root of every social ill, I imagine it can be quite confusing for a well-meaning but apolitical White person to figure this all out.

The professional $5000-a-day Diversity Trainers would tell Mr. White Man all he has to do is read White Fragility and his subsequent guilt will absolve him.

I am ready for the pushback but here goes:  I think we are doing ourselves a dis-service by continuously raising the bogeyman of Systemic Racism.  I think a more accurate description of our ills is that our system, all of our systems, all of our actions, have certain levels of conscious and unconscious racism baked into them.  But that is different than Systemic Racism.

Slavery is systemic racism.  Jim Crow is systemic racism.  These are indeed systems that simply cannot function without the overt, public humiliation of Blacks.

Which “system” do we have today that legalizes such discrimination?  I would argue that, apart from the absurd discrepancies in sentencing cocaine-based drugs, we no longer have “systems” that are wholly dependent on race.

The civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s absolutely needed to change a set of legal systems –de jure racism—that made the lives of Blacks not matter.  Somebody, black or white, who joined that movement knew exactly what they had to do. They had to dismantle those systems. And they did.

Today, circumstances are very different than 1954, 1964 or1965.  What system are we trying to change today?  Certainly, policing remains a key area. Blacks are disproportionately targeted by police, but policing isn’t much fun either for most Whites.

Oppression of blacks – and most Americans—doesn’t begin when they are pulled over by a cowboy cop.  For most of the population it begins every morning at a job that doesn’t pay enough, with rent that cannot be paid, with kids who cannot afford a doctor, with university applications that cannot be funded and so on. And the police are always poised or called upon when these daily tribulations boil over.

The biggest problem we face in America today – not in 1860—is gross class inequality that continues to widen and impoverish more and more Americans.  Down near the base of this of this social pyramid, you will, of course, find a greatly disproportionate group of Blacks and Latinos. And guess what? You will also find tens of millions of white workers who might, and I say might, be better treated by cops than blacks, but still suffer the rest of the indignities that the bottom ¾ of Americans are exposed to on a daily basis. Cops kill unarmed blacks disproportionately. But many more unarmed Whites are killed by police than Blacks every year.

We cannot and should not deny the existence of quite intense forms of racism in America (As well in most countries. I was in South Africa a few years ago and the local Blacks were attacking and laying siege to exiled Zimbabweans because…. because…I guess because they were others). 

The race reductionists who claim that everything in America is determined by skin color are dead wrong.  Things in America are primarily determined by your socio-economic class and this is the one thing, the most important thing, that most Blacks have in common with most Whites.

If you can figure out a way to reform America and reduce racism and inequality by being a race reductionist, well, then, good for you and please let the rest of us know how to do it.

Until then, I am going to stick to my old-fashioned formula that we need a multi-generational, multi-racial coalition to reverse the spreading inequality, authoritarianism and attempts to curtail civil liberties and democracy itself. Blindly blaming every ill on White Supremacy will get a lot of folks Googling but will accomplish nothing.

For a much more detailed dive into how “antiracism” can be an excuse for avoiding more progressive change I recommend this essay by Adolph Reed Jr. ++

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