For the People

by Larry Krasner

  The city agreed that Maria should get some money, but it flatly rejected any change in policy. With some real or feigned regret, the city attorney explained there was just too much politics around renegotiating the safeguard we sought into the FOP contract. The FOP would never support it, so the city refused to try to negotiate it. They would pay more instead. Maria needed the money and accepted it.

  Maria’s and Zoe’s stories are about ordinary human frailty and individual abuse of power. The perennial forms of police corruption are all about abuse of power: Dirty narcotics officers either start out corrupt or become corrupted by greed and power. They steal money, drugs, assets. They steal overtime compensation by aggressively illegal tactics that keep them busy testifying in court, including illegal stop-and-frisk and illegal car stops of anyone driving while Black. Dirty narcotics cops brutalize, physically abuse, and sometimes sexually abuse people who are subjected to their power when they raid properties or search and arrest them on the street. They lie until their tongues are tired in court to profit from and to cover their own crimes. Some resell the drugs they steal. All dirty narcotics cops eventually end up as allies with some drug dealers against others because those alliances are how the dirty narcotics cops get their profitable information to use against their drug dealing partners’ competition. For some slimy cops, a narcotics assignment is too tempting to resist. For honest cops stuck in a narcotics assignment, the pressure to go along and cover up can amount to a threat on their lives.

  And these are not the only stories of a jaw-dropping institutional vacuum of accountability. How can a city or a police department that doesn’t fix this engender trust in the community? Why would a vulnerable victim of crime come forward? Why would a blameless witness trust police not to shift blame? Who will a police force that elevates bullies attract as applicants besides bullies? What will stop officers from leveraging their governmentally given power to mistreat their ex-partners, like Maria and Zoe? And in a culture that tolerates such conduct against significant others who resist, what can we expect to happen to people they never loved, people who have no such significance and resist?

  It was the autumn of 2015. Khadijah Costley White wrapped her hands around the handlebars of the bike she was pushing past City Hall. The bike was slightly off-balance, its basket lightly weighted with the vegetables and fruit she had just bought two blocks back in the giant train shed that has housed Philly’s great farmers’ market for over fifty years, the Reading Terminal Market.

  She was pushing the bike past traffic, pushing it across crosswalks, and getting ready to ride home where there was less traffic when she spotted a wall of police, mostly bike cops, blocking the entry doors of the cement-and-glass cereal box that is the Municipal Services Building (MSB). Scores of mostly quiet people, many older, were facing the police in the chill air, obviously precluded from entering its glass doors. Frank Rizzo’s statue was there, thirty yards away from the doors and facing the same direction as the officers, away from the building and toward the public. And then Khadijah remembered why the public was there.

  The pope was coming, so the city wanted to “clean up” by banning the feeding of homeless people in public. There was an outcry from church groups and other do-gooders over the ban, including many whose congregations and groups viewed helping the homeless as their duty. Many had done it for years. Liberal Catholics who were waiting on a visit from the most vocally anti-poverty pope in recent memory were also offended at the city’s hypocritical embrace of the pope by pushing the homeless away: loaves and fishes; take all you have and give it to the poor—that stuff. The outcry forced a public hearing, which the city scheduled on its turf, in a room in the MSB that was too small for the public, the size the city wanted. Government doesn’t like dissent. But, where it’s unavoidable, government prefers dissent in a smaller room holding fewer angry people, especially when there are cameras. So government limited public access to the hearing, which effectively divided the public and conquered the many people who were stuck outside. Between the increasing darkness, decreasing temperatures, and lack of bathroom access outside power’s hallways, most of them would leave without the news media ever knowing they came.

  Khadijah had spent most of the day, and almost every day for months, in seclusion, typing her Ph.D. thesis in communications for the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Annenberg School. She was tired that late afternoon, but also happy knowing that the next day was supposed to be a break from her monkish life, a celebration. In a public ceremony, Khadijah was set to receive a Women of Color at Penn Award for outstanding achievement as a graduate student from the hand of a local celebrity news anchor. Khadijah’s mother, sister, and others were just arriving from out of state to attend the ceremony. She felt a good, home-cooked meal was in order. But, as she saw the gathering of people between Frank’s back and the MSB, she also felt that a brief stop to encourage those waiting to get in, whose cause she shared, was in order. Given her communications talent, maybe she could persuade police to relent a bit—bathroom access, a warmer interior space where people could wait, a bigger room for the hearing, whatever she could do before going home.

  Governments like to talk about cleansing, and cleanups. Beware when they use those words to talk about what they want to do to human beings. That night, the city was feeling pretty good about its last so-called cleanup of Occupy protesters and was ready for more, having swept the encampment of a hundred or so Occupiers from the plaza around City Hall close to a year prior, ostensibly to rebuild the plaza—the outgoing mayor’s pricey legacy project. The city’s police sweep of tent-camping and day-tripping Occupy protesters and a few homeless people became known as “eviction night.” Police arrested and the Philly DAO prosecuted dozens of random people at City Hall on misdemeanor charges for nothing and next to nothing—a professor, a union president, many young activists, and Khadijah, a frequent day-tripper with Occupy who supported their cause of economic equality. I first met her in a room full of “eviction night” clients before trial. She immediately made the top of my short list of best witnesses to call at trial if necessary. She was a verbally brilliant, joyful, churchgoing, radical graduate student whose future appeared limitless. At trial, they were all found not guilty without her having to testify.

  As she pushed her bike past Frank, toward the line of cops holding their bikes in front of the MSB doors, Khadijah was feeling pretty good, too, about her progress on her dissertation, standing tall during Occupy, the trial acquittal that kept her résumé intact, her family’s visit, a nice dinner, and the award the next day. She talked to people and went to the police line, where the officers were holding their own bikes. Smiling, she tried to cajole, charm, joke, and tease a couple of the reassigned, stony-faced narcotics cops holding bikes on behalf of her varied but increasingly irritated allies behind her.

  Some police specialize in protest. Philly has a unit called “civil affairs.” But the bike cops Khadijah met were mostly narcotics cops, who are not ideal peacekeepers for protest. Narcotics policing attracts a personality type and breeds a culture, like any other unit. Narcotics officers’ work is more physical than verbal. Many narcotics cops view themselves as warriors doing battle with an enemy on dangerous ground, a culture that is one more pernicious legacy of the failed war on drugs. If warriors are scared, they hide it. In public at least, they need to win, to control and dominate the situation. Their first impulse is not to turn the other cheek, to de-escalate, or to listen when protesters question government authority with free speech. Anything less might suggest weakness to the “enemy.” Often, they are less trained in free speech than they could be. Their daily work involves chasing and catching drug dealers, some armed, who are actually breaking the law, unlike peaceful protesters who usually are not.

  Unexpectedly, the police line lurched forward and away from the building and toward Khadijah and the rest, who were mostly stationary. A police bike entangled with hers
. An officer kicked at her bike. One officer angrily told her to step back, but her bike was caught, her basket full. She put her hand on the officer’s handlebars to disentangle the bikes while saying she hadn’t moved—that he had come at her. And then another officer threw her bike down, spilling her groceries away from the basket as she turned and reached toward her bike. In the commotion, the commanding officer lightly stumbled when his heel caught on a step behind him as his officers advanced at his command to push the crowd farther back. Khadijah was yanked off her feet and over and behind the police line, cuffed on her wrists, and arrested. Police grabbed her by a couple of fingers; for a moment, she felt like her fingers were being pulled off. At first, she yelled “You’re hurting my hand!” Then she screamed, “They’re breaking my fingers!”

  The first I heard of Khadijah’s being locked up was a desperate phone call from her family. They wanted her out of custody ASAP, ideally in the few hours remaining before the award ceremony. I knew there was no way to jump the line of people waiting twelve to thirty-six hours for a bail hearing. Khadijah’s only chance to make the ceremony honoring her was for the city to drop her case immediately, even if they revived it later. I reluctantly placed a call to someone I’d known slightly for years, a city official, who was a bureaucrat and wouldn’t care about Khadijah or her family, but might see the value in avoiding blowback in the press over an iffy arrest of a rising star set to receive an award that day.

  I knew the bureaucrat I called was particular. He dressed precisely, frequently adjusting his collar or tugging his tie to make it vertical and smooth, sometimes even tucking his tie into his pants while seated. A year earlier, he was sandpaper in Occupiers’ ears, circulating and speaking dismissively to protesters who weren’t thrilled with his pro-government suggestions for their protest plans. After a few weeks of the Occupy encampment had passed, he went from suggestions to threats—walking around hinting that an incoming police commander wouldn’t tolerate Occupy’s encampment as the city had so far. When he said it to an activist social worker and Occupier I knew, born in Dublin during the Troubles, she responded: “You wee man, why don’t you go supervise yourself? We’re doing just fine regulating ourselves, thank you very much.”

  I called the bureaucrat and began to explain. He didn’t recognize Khadijah’s name or the details of the arrest I was trying to describe at first. I explained the urgency of Khadijah’s getting out of jail, whatever happened with her case. In between smacking sounds from whatever food he was eating, he said, “Oh, you mean the one with the big mouth.” He said he was a witness to the event and would testify against Khadijah at her criminal trial. He didn’t say what criminal thing she had done meriting his testimony, other than that she had a “big mouth.” He rejected even trying to do anything to get her to the award ceremony on time. He also didn’t mention there was video of the incident, taken by hard-to-spot city cameras mounted high on the walls of the MSB, which housed his office. The call ended. I later learned that at some point he watched the video, if he hadn’t already watched it when we spoke. Within a few weeks, he did nothing to stop the video from being recorded over “automatically,” before any of us knew it even existed.

  The award ceremony came a few hours later. Some of Khadijah’s family watched in the auditorium as her best friend, Maryan, a history grad student, received Khadijah’s award. Miles away, she was seated in a jail cell with a splint on her throbbing hand to straighten out her broken finger, thinking about the acceptance speech she had already written. I found out later that when the audience learned where Khadijah was and why she could not attend, they cheered.

  Unless police violence is on video or is witnessed by, well, let’s say a pope who is willing to testify, it is mostly unaccountable. When there are broken bones, scars, or temporary but visible injuries more explanation might be required to show that police force was legally justified, but there are ways. When force is not justified, some of the blue sometimes use baseless criminal charges, phony police paperwork, and untruthful testimony to explain away their own mistakes, misconduct, or crimes.

  Police paperwork written at Khadijah’s arrest said she was the aggressor—vegetables, fruit, bike basket, and all. She harassed police, then assaulted them with her bike, and intentionally used her hands to push the giant, white-shirted commanding officer in the chest—supposedly the same zero-tolerance commanding officer the MSB official told Occupy was coming. According to police, Khadijah’s push made the giant commanding officer fall. He avoided injury only because the people behind him caught him. That’s what the city and the police said; those were their words, in essence. And the Philly District Attorney’s Office said the government’s words were good enough, as usual, and turned them into criminal charges against Khadijah that threatened her future, for the second time.

  Video that the city couldn’t erase said something else. Fortunately for Khadijah, someone was recording people waiting outside the MSB when her fictional crime was said to have happened. Against the gleaming white expanse of the commanding officer’s shirt, the image of Khadijah’s deep brown hand pushing him would have been stark. But the video proved her dark hand wasn’t there, just as her supposed harassment, aggression, and assault weren’t there. The commanding officer’s “fall” looked like a stumble that came as his heel seemed to catch on a step. Other things were missing from Khadijah’s case as well: a valid arrest; a legal reason to break a finger Khadijah urgently needed to type her dissertation. And there was no reason to lock her in a cell awaiting a bail hearing while her fretful, disappointed family watched her award presented to the air. The charges were fake. We won her criminal case, again.

  Then we sued the city and the police in federal court for their violence and their plot to maliciously prosecute and convict Khadijah for things she hadn’t done. Khadijah’s jury for her civil lawsuit consisted mostly of white people from politically conservative rural or suburban counties, as do most federal juries in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The jury heard the police version and the testimony of the city official who said Khadijah had a “big mouth.” When I questioned him, pushing hard on why the video he controlled and saw within days of the incident was passively erased on his watch, his irritated defensive answer was “I’m not a detective.” Some jurors who had been studying his face looked down. Others looked away.

  Khadijah testified while we played the video repeatedly and slowly, punctuating her testimony with moments in the video. The jury saw that white expanse of the police commander’s shirt, untouched by a dark brown hand every time the video was slowly replayed. They didn’t look away; they chose to believe their eyes, which confirmed Khadijah’s words. She was a truly great witness. We won. And the darkness of her skin helped persuade a white jury, for once.

  What police did to these women was not just a reflection of ordinary human frailty or mundane evil. It is symptomatic of a lack of accountability in policing that enables it and much worse. Heinous crimes have been committed by people who have operated within or close to law enforcement and hid behind its shield. The Golden State Killer is a prolific serial rapist and serial killer whose decades of bloody crimes started while he was a police officer and continued after he was fired for what should have been a clue: He was caught stealing dog repellent and a hammer from a hardware store.

  Civilian Ted Bundy served on an anti-crime commission, where he learned about gaps in law enforcement information sharing in the 1970s. He planned traveling murders with that knowledge and committed them wherever he went until his capture. Extraordinary evil and depravity are able to flourish in law enforcement where there is unaccountable power. It is emboldened by a culture that allows more mundane evil—the abuse of wives and lovers and contractors and business partners and drug dealers, drug users, and anyone else whose lives and rights stand between immoral officers and their selfish goals.

  But the problems in police accountability go beyond individual evil:
They also stem from the structures and incentives of our police departments and in American laws that allow and embolden deception and disrespect for the individual rights our Constitution is supposed to guarantee.

  Consider, for example, how a Philadelphia police officer gets paid and promoted on patrol: The police department calls it “activity.” “Activity” comprises certain kinds of actions recorded in a patrol officer’s daily logbook. Supervisors are trained to demand a lot of it. A pedestrian stop, pat-down, search is an activity. Or stopping a car and searching it and/or its occupants. But you can’t just stop and search a car—police need a good, constitutional reason to do so. But if they follow the Constitution, they won’t make as many stops or searches, and their activity numbers will go down. Eventually, their supervisors notice and require them to “articulate” reasons and make more stops. Lost in this system is the good policing that goes with a patrol officer stopping into every business along a commercial row until the business owners start to confide, or developing relationships on every block with neighbors who keep a close eye on everything that happens there. Those things aren’t counted as “activity” even though they stop crimes from happening and solve crimes when they do.

  Promotions and pay depend on having high levels of activity. Many officers make tens of thousands of dollars per year through overtime; some officers make more money in overtime (and far more than any government lawyer in the room) than they do from their regular pay. “Articulating” what happened can mean adjusting the truth to improve a case, giving a constitutional story that justifies an unconstitutional search, or including your fellow officers who witnessed nothing in the case so they, too, can feed from the overtime trough. A few lies about what happened in the street mean five police officers get paid overtime to show up and testify in court. It’s a win for profit, not policing or justice or truth. An honest cop once told me, “In the academy, they told us do what you want then articulate the reasons later. That’s what they taught us.” This becomes a culture of testifying to win cases (or “testi-lying” as almost everyone in the courthouse calls it), for money and promotion and for self, which is rationalized as necessary to protect the public from terrible people (predominantly poor people and people of color) whose rights don’t matter and whose supposed threat justifies stealing from taxpayers to pay unjustified overtime and other extra compensation to police.