After spending the night in Hays, Kansas, we made our way east along Interstate-70, past Russell, past Wilson, past Salina, past Abilene, until I began to see signs for Topeka, Kansas. Topeka public schools were the impetus for the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the US Supreme Court that outlawed segregation in public schools. The parents of Linda Brown, a third-grade student at a Topeka public elementary school, filed a lawsuit against the Board of Education after Linda was denied admission to a nearby, all-white school. Instead, she was bused to a segregated all-black school. The case was taken up by the NAACP, who advanced the argument that segregated schools were not equal, and therefore unconstitutional.
I made a mental check and realized we would be arriving in Topeka during the 50th anniversary of that decision. I said to my wife, “I would be very surprised if there is not a museum there.” Just as the sun was rising over the horizon, we saw a sign that said, “Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.” We got to the site before it opened, so we slept in the car for a while and then went to a nearby diner. The site is a former public school that has been turned into museum. It opened at 9 a.m. and we stayed until about 2 p.m. It wasn’t a big museum, but it was well curated. We got pictures; we got posters. It was very interactive.
There was a replica of the bus Linda Brown and other black children rode to school because they couldn’t attend the school just blocks away. The rule, barring young Linda and her fellow black children from attending their neighborhood school, was the impetus for the landmark case. We saw photos of Linda Brown, her parents, the harsh differences in the schools black and white students attended. The kids saw photos of Thurgood Marshall, the young civil rights lawyer for the NAACP who presented the Brown v. Board of Education case to the Supreme Court. Marshall later became a Supreme Court justice. It was a spiritual awakening for me and my wife. For the kids, it was informative and fun.
The next stop was Kansas City. If you’re in Kansas City, you must tour the American Jazz Museum, go through the Negro Leagues Baseball Hall of Fame, and sample some of the city’s famous barbecue. So, we did. Our next stop was St. Louis. In all my travels across the country, it would be my first visit to St. Louis. We saw the Arch, because when you’re visiting St. Louis, that’s what you do, but I was looking forward to seeing an old friend and colleague.
Jeff Fulton was my supervisor when I had been in D.C. He is a great guy and was very helpful to my career. We’re politically poles apart, but that never mattered to Jeff or me. He helped me by exposing me to things I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to, involved me in conversations that I wouldn’t normally hear, shared with me information that I wouldn’t normally come across. One of the biggest things he did for me was to recommend me for an audit team. I did it and it was a great move for me. The Bureau has teams of agents who audit the field divisions like mine in Seattle. The purpose of the audits is to assess their use of our prime information systems to ensure they are not being abused by officers.
Our key information system is the FBI’s National Criminal Information Center, which everybody in law enforcement refers to as NCIC. NCIC is a database filled with millions of records about criminal offenses, dangerous people, and unsolved crimes. For instance, NCIC contains a huge database just on property crimes, including stolen guns, boats, cars, license plates, car parts, and securities. It also has tons of personal information. Any US citizen who has had contact with law enforcement, whether they were local cops, state troopers, or federal agents, probably has had his or her information logged into the system. The data on people might include whether they are on the National Sex Offender Registry, whether they are on supervised release from custody, or if they are foreign fugitives. The database lists missing persons, known gang members, suspected terrorists, and people who may be wanted for crimes or just for informational purposes.
Thousands of law enforcement agencies—local, state, and federal—are constantly adding information to the system, based on their encounters with the public. At the same time, thousands of individual law enforcement officers are accessing the system as they do their jobs, from checking on a person’s priors while making a traffic stop to researching individuals during high-level surveillance. Access to this powerful database has made law enforcement much more effective. It’s like having the keys to the castle. But it’s not a given. Agencies from sheriff’s departments to state police to local law enforcement can lose their access to NCIC. If your officers are using it for frivolous reasons or they are violating the protocol, the FBI can kick you off the system.
Technically, any law enforcement officer could use NCIC to run a neighbor’s information through the system to see who they are, but that’s not what the system is for. You can’t just say, I’m suspicious about my daughter’s boyfriend because he has pink hair, tattoos, and a nose ring, and run him through the system. There have been rogue officers who ran a woman’s license plate through the system and then used the information to call her for a date or to stalk her. You can go to jail or lose your job for doing that. Each agency is responsible for auditing the use of the system by its officers. That was my job as a member of the Bureau’s auditing team. I’d travel to our different division offices—Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, Kansas City, Miami—to make sure that our use of the program was compliant. The job brought me in contact with people at some of the highest levels in the Bureau—assistant directors and the heads of our regional divisions. It also forced me to sharpen my analytical skills, verbal skills, and writing skills. Instead of doing widgets and digits as part of my job, I was interviewing possible future bosses and colleagues about their procedures. If they meet you and they are impressed, perhaps you are then a person they want on their team. I am forever grateful to Jeff for giving me that opportunity. So, I wanted to stop by and say hello, and thanks.
We were staying at the Embassy Suites in downtown St. Louis. It was August, and the humidity was so thick you could swim through it. I remember observing that almost everybody working in the hotel was black—the cleaning crew, the reservation clerk, the bellman, everybody in the restaurant, except for the hostess. By contrast, all the managers were white. It sort of had a plantation feel. We had breakfast, and before we got ready to leave, I went to the front desk and asked a young black woman for directions to my friend’s house. In those days, there were no Google maps or GPS on smartphones. I explained that I was going to Wildwood.
She gave me directions and then asked, “What are you going out there for?” I thought it was an odd question. I explained to her I was going to visit a friend. She cautioned me to be careful. “Why?” I asked. “Is it a bad neighborhood?” I would learn later that day that it was an upscale community of single-family houses where the median household income was twice the national average. “No,” she replied. “It’s not bad. It’s just, you know.” Ten years later, I would learn what she meant by you know.
Like most Americans, prior to 2014, I had never heard of Ferguson, Missouri. When it erupted into protests and flames on August 9 following the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a local police officer, I had to go look it up on a map. I discovered it was a small suburb of 21,000 people in northern St. Louis County, 10 miles north of downtown St. Louis. It was Ferguson and other communities in the same area that the receptionist was warning me about 10 years earlier. It was a small town where cops were white and black people weren’t welcomed.
Like most Americans, I observed events unfold from the safety of my home hundreds of miles away. I monitored the TV channels and read the newspaper accounts on my laptop with dismay and disbelief. I made a few appearances on national television as a law enforcement analyst to give my perspective on the shooting. I was saddened by the shooting death of yet another unarmed black male and the destruction that followed it. I was stunned to learn that while two out of every three residents of Ferguson were black, the mayor was white, the police chief was white, as were nearly all the police officers. Th
e city manager was white, the municipal judge was white, the prosecuting attorney was white, the court clerk was white, and all but one of the six city council members were white. It sounded like the description of a town in the Jim Crow South prior to the civil rights movement.
Imagine that in reverse. It is 2014 and you are a white person in a city where 67 percent of the residents are white, but every elected official and appointed official save one is black—mayor, city council, finance manager, city attorney, municipal judge, court clerk. And all but 4 of the city’s 54 police officers are black.
As the demonstrations and violence in Ferguson continued, the media breathlessly reported events—the latest in a 50-year-long history of racial upheaval in America—as though they were somehow new. The contentious relationship between police and African-Americans and the resultant black backlash has been part of our nation’s modern-day legacy, longer than most Americans have been alive.
The first revolt was in Cambridge, Maryland, a small community of 12,300 that sits on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Cambridge, one of Maryland’s oldest cities, was founded in 1648. It later developed and grew, fueled by the canning industry, which canned oysters, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes. Its workforce and the city were financially centered around Phillips Packing Company, which once employed as many as 10,000 people. The city’s economic base was so strong at one point that four teams in the old Eastern Shore Baseball League—the Canners, the Cardinals, the Clippers, and the Dodgers—were all located in Cambridge. But by the early 1960s, Phillips Packing Company had closed as the nation’s food tastes changed. Unemployment shot up—7 percent among whites and 29 percent for blacks. The hard times began to exacerbate long-standing racial divisions that had lain dormant during a booming economy.
Long after the Supreme Court ruled public-school segregation unconstitutional, Cambridge staunchly maintained separate schools for blacks and whites. African-Americans were segregated into the all-black Second Ward, west of Race Street, which served as the unofficial dividing line between the black and white communities. Beginning in 1962, the city’s African-American community, led by the Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee, began pressing for greater access to employment, housing, and desegregated public schools. In 1963, the city exploded in fire, destruction, and death, following allegations of police brutality. Martial law was declared, the violence between blacks and whites subsided, and the unending history of black riots began. In 2014, Ferguson was just the latest in a steady historical drumbeat of African-American communities in revolt: Rochester, New York, 1964; New York City, 1964; Philadelphia, 1964; Jersey City, New Jersey, 1964; Paterson, New Jersey, 1964; Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1964; Newark, New Jersey, 1964; Chicago, 1964; Watts, Los Angeles, 1965; Cleveland, 1966; Chicago, 1966; Newark, 1967; Plainfield, New Jersey, 1967; Detroit, 1967; Harlem, New York City, 1967; Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967; Rochester, New York, 1967; Pontiac, Michigan, 1967; Toledo, Ohio, 1967; Flint, Michigan, 1967; Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1967; Houston, 1967; Englewood, New Jersey, 1967; Milwaukee, 1967; Minneapolis, 1967; York, Pennsylvania, 1969; Hartford, Connecticut, 1969; Augusta, Georgia, 1970; Asbury Park, New Jersey, 1970; Dallas, 1973; Houston, 1980; Miami, 1980; Crown Heights, New York, 1988; Overton, Miami, 1991; Los Angeles, 1992; St. Petersburg, Florida, 1995; Cincinnati, 2001; Oakland, California, 2009; Anaheim, California, 2012; Baltimore, 2015; Milwaukee, 2016; Charlotte, 2016.
In response to these urban explosions, most of us—black and white—condemn the incidents as senseless violence. Radio commentator Larry Elder famously called the Ferguson demonstrators and rioters “monkeys.” But long ago, many cautioned that we dismiss the motivation behind these events at our own peril. Nicholas Johnson, a University of Iowa law professor, was a Federal Communications Commissioner when he first began to fathom the meaning of the revolts.
During the late 1960s, when scores of US cities went up in flames, Johnson said, “A riot is somebody talking. A riot is a man crying out: ‘Listen to me, Mister. There’s something I’ve been trying to tell you, and you are not listening.’” The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. abhorred violence, but he agreed. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” he said. He then offered this prophetic observation 48 years before Ferguson:
“Riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. [America] has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.”
The accuracy of his prediction is frightening and damning. We have watched black angst convulse into violence in city after city, decade after decade.
Historically, the spark that invariably ignites each of these smoldering, impoverished communities is negative interactions with police. The encounters range from the all-too-familiar to the obscene. An unarmed black teenager is shot dead by Florida police; a 23-year-old Latino Vietnam War veteran is beaten to death by six Houston police officers and thrown into a nearby river; two Newark policemen, upset because a black cab driver signaled and then passed them while they were double-parked, beat and arrest him and then charge him with assaulting them.
A Dallas police officer, trying to force a handcuffed 12-year-old Latino to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, plays Russian roulette with his service revolver and shoots him in the head, killing him. A black man is found beaten to death in his jail cell; police explain that he died after he fell from his bed. A black salesman, and former Marine, on a motorcycle dies of injuries sustained at the hands of Miami officers after he surrendered, following a high-speed chase.
While each of those incidents started with a police encounter, police officers aren’t the only culprits. While police officers are complicit, they are just the most immediate and visible link in a chain that includes government officials, public priorities, and community consent. Unfortunately, when such incidents occur, we look for answers almost solely inside police departments, divorcing the officers’ actions from the political, community, and societal norms that underlie their actions.
We point our fingers at police as though the wrongs within their departments or those committed by even the most racist or aberrant officers begin and end with them. They don’t. Law enforcement does not operate in a vacuum.
First, officers are products of their communities, and have the same biases, prejudices, and assumptions that we all do. In the worst cases, those individuals must be weeded out of our departments or excluded through early employment screenings. Typically, large police agencies have multilayered hiring processes that include panel interviews, polygraph examinations, psychological examinations, and full-scope background investigations. These multilayered processes are supposed to eliminate unworthy candidates for employment into positions of public trust. They should, but recent history shows they don’t. Additionally, most police agencies are small—less than 50 people—and may not have a robust screening process.
Second, police, particularly at their lowest ranks, are foot soldiers who are given targets and directives by higher-ups inside and outside the department who expect clearly defined results. Historically, these higher-ups haven’t always cared how those expectations are met. Law enforcement did not create the Jim Crow laws in the South and discriminatory laws in the North and West or, afterward, designate which neighborhoods were unofficially off-limits to blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. It was their jobs, however, to enforce those policies by arresting, jailing, and brutalizing anyone who violated them.
When heroin was rooted in African-American neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s, law enforcement did not decide that black addicts should be arrested and jailed, instead of being treated for their addiction. Government officials and the citizens th
ey represented did. The mere possession of the paraphernalia used to administer the drug made someone subject to arrest.
Law enforcement did not create the war on drugs. Richard Nixon did in 1971 to avert Americans’ attention from his administration’s policies in Vietnam and in the nation’s streets. Still, we were tasked with implementing it, which we did with extreme prejudice. We were the first cog in a process that rounded up addicts, tore apart families, and destroyed neighborhoods. We racked up thousands of arrests, and seized thousands of firearms and tons of drugs as we were ordered to show our superiors and the public that we were performing our jobs. We targeted black neighborhoods, though all the statistical evidence showed that white Americans were selling and consuming most of the cocaine. And when we used questionable, often coercive, and sometimes brutal tactics, few questioned our approach.
Then, as now, US senators and members of Congress, state representatives, mayors, and city council members were the ones pushing harsh law enforcement policies for political expediency, most often to the detriment of the poor and people of color.
Few cite pressure from the business community, for whom police protection is a priority, whether we’re talking about liquor stores, football stadiums, flower shops, or shopping malls. Businesses cannot survive without customers and employees, and, as officers are told, neither will abide an area seen as unsafe. Make it safe, we are told.
No one points to civic leaders and city planners who impress upon law enforcement the importance of crime-free tourist and entertainment districts, from which cities derive vital tax dollars. The lifeblood of many American cities, these areas cannot be seen as unsafe. Make them feel safe, we are told.
The Black and the Blue Page 9