by Chris Hayes
“Your shots were all over the place,” Carifi said. “The scenario ended at this point because he got off multiple shots with his shotgun. Most likely you’re—”
“Toast,” I said.
“—in trouble,” Carifi said diplomatically. “Now on this particular scenario,” he continued, “this might happen a hundred thousand times. The people will listen to you, and it will end calmly. But it’s that one out of every hundred thousand, two hundred thousand calls that this happens.”
And there’s the nub of it. Let’s imagine you’re watching two men argue loudly in the middle of a street. It’s tense and uncomfortable. You might call the cops in hopes of making sure it doesn’t escalate. This isn’t an everyday occurrence (though it depends on where you live), but it’s routine enough that it presents no great crisis. I’ve witnessed such scenes in numerous countries, particularly in Italy, where loud, performative arguments on the street happen as a matter of course. In that context, no one so much as bats an eye, let alone calls the cops, unless punches are thrown. People argue loudly sometimes! That is not the case in the United States, where loud public arguments, indeed any displays of disorderliness, often carry more than a wisp of genuine danger, because you never know if the hothead who cut you off in traffic, or the drunk in the booth next to you at the bar, might be packing.
Policing in an environment awash in guns is fundamentally different from policing in one that isn’t. In every interaction in the simulator, I wondered when the gun would appear, and when I’d find myself reaching for my holster. Obviously the training environment and the desire to expose me to as much “action” as possible exaggerated the fear of the ever-present gun.
But afterward, in a conversation with former cops, they all told me the threat of the gun weighs heavily. Over his years as a cop and a supervisor, Steve Osborne told me,
I was involved in literally thousands of arrests. And everything goes smooth, everything goes smooth, it goes smooth. For me, it was when I least expected it, I had little to no warning, you go to ring the guy`s doorbell, there was some Wall Street guy, I went to go lock him up, he answered the door with a gun and a vest on. Stopped two guys in the street just to question them, the guy pulls out a gun for me and the next thing I know I`m in a fight for my life so you always have to be prepared.
THE SAME SPECTER OF the gun haunted Ferguson. The protests after Michael Brown’s shooting were almost entirely nonviolent. Chaotic, sometimes. Boisterous, aggressive, and profane. But the through line for most of them was that the protesters seemed in much more danger than the police. The police had guns, which occasionally they would take out and aim at protesters. The protesters had, at most, glass bottles to launch at the cops in their riot gear. On the long nights that would inevitably end in tear gas, as the standoffs grew tenser, and as disorder beckoned, my own anxiety centered on the possibility that we were just one hotheaded cop away from another dead body.
But on the cold night in November 2014 when St. Louis County state’s attorney Bob McCullough announced the grand jury’s finding for Officer Darren Wilson, it was a very different scene. We arrived at a protest outside the Ferguson police headquarters an hour or so after McCullough announced that no one would be prosecuted for Michael Brown’s death. There was more than a bite of menace in the air. Young men stalking around with their faces covered. Children, families, and elders who had been mainstays at earlier protests seemed noticeably absent, or they headed away as they sensed trouble was about to start. In the several-block walk from where we parked the car to the street outside the police headquarters, I thought I heard the faint sound of gunfire but convinced myself someone was just setting off firecrackers.
We stood across the street from the headquarters, where a single squad car was parked in an otherwise empty parking lot. About a dozen cops in full riot gear stood in front of the car, impassively taking in the scene. Down the block someone started lighting a cop car on fire, and the crowd surged in that direction to watch. Most of the police looked on as well, sensing, it seemed to me, that the odds were not going to be in their favor if they ventured into the streets.
I started down the street to get a closer look at the commotion around the car that was being set on fire (a process that actually takes a while, as I’ve learned) when I heard a pop pop pop. Firecrackers, I thought again, but then I saw the crowd running full tilt toward me, and then I heard the sound again and actually saw the fire coming out of the muzzle of a handgun about forty feet away.
Mayhem and chaos reigned. Onlookers ran in every direction and fell to the ground for cover. We crouched behind the news van positioned at the scene for our live shot (that wasn’t going to happen), and I looked across the street. The cops in full riot gear had taken cover behind their lone cruiser. Crouched on the far side of the vehicle, some were peeking up over the hood and scanning for the shooter. They looked like an army squad in a war zone. And they looked legitimately terrified.
We scurried off in the car we’d parked a few blocks away, to the site of the original protests on West Florissant. There we watched as people broke into and looted several of the stores on the block, setting a few of them on fire, including a storage space directly across from us. As we continued to broadcast unfolding events, an air of sadness and rage hung over it all. The block took on the smell of a campfire, as the storage space burned. And while the scene was surreal and chaotic, it didn’t feel particularly menacing or dangerous, certainly not the way those gunshots had. Then late in the night, a burst of automatic gunfire rang out just fifty yards away and sent us scurrying indoors.
How darkly magical is the presence of the gun! How remarkable its power to transform the order of things. The scene without the gun had been chaotic, boisterous, and angry, while the one with the gun was dangerous, panicked, and flight-inducing. They existed in two parallel dimensions, and at the first crack of gunfire, we warped from one to the other.
Amid the adrenaline, I felt an acute stab of empathy for those police officers huddled by the cruiser earlier in the night, and then for every cop who moves through this country of ours where there is more than one gun for every man, woman, and child. I saw just for the briefest of instants, with my nose pressed to the pavement beneath the news van, the way the presence of guns, their easy concealability and ubiquity, transforms the very essence of disorder. For those tasked with enforcing the state’s authority, unruliness is uncomfortable. Cops don’t like it anywhere. And cops in any society clash with protesters and use all kinds of tactics, some rough, others less so, to suppress and disperse them.
Many other wealthy democracies have traditions of far more robust street protest than we have in the United States. When I spent six months living and studying in Bologna, leftist protests complete with Molotov cocktails, riot gear, and tear gas were a relatively frequent occurrence. But the difference in Bologna, and almost everywhere else in Europe and Asia, is the near total absence of guns. A gun has transformational power.
Sure enough, before very long, Ferguson saw gun violence against the police. In March, a few months after I saw the gunshots and burned cars outside the Ferguson police department, two police officers were shot, one in the face, while policing a protest in that very same spot where they’d taken cover that night. The gunshots were fired by twenty-year-old Jeffrey Williams—it’s unclear whether he was a protester. Williams told police the shooting had nothing to do with the protests, saying he fired in self-defense when someone else with whom he had a conflict rolled up on him. Both cops survived, thank god. The five Dallas police officers at a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest murdered by a crazed, anticop spree shooter weren’t so lucky. Same for the three officers drawn into a deadly ambush that same year in Baton Rouge.
This threat, the threat of the sudden bullet, extends to every single aspect of policing. Finnish and Japanese police, I’m sure, are summoned to noise complaints all the time, but they arrive at the site without harboring the nagging fear that the interaction will
end in gunfire. There simply aren’t very many guns in Finland or Japan. (In 2013, Finnish police fired their weapons collectively a total of six times.) And as rare as it is in the United States for someone during a noise complaint to randomly grab a shotgun and start firing, as happened in my simulation, it’s a possibility one must train for.
THE GUN IS PROTECTION and solace. In neighborhoods that are quiet and far from crime and danger, it represents some kind of last personal means of ensuring your own turf. You live in the Nation, and if the Colony comes knocking in the dead of night, you can keep it at bay. In neighborhoods like Freddie Gray’s in Westside Baltimore, or in the West Side of Chicago, or in Compton, California, where the state’s monopoly on violence is broken or nonexistent, a gun makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. If the law won’t protect you, you need to protect yourself.
The Second Amendment, its most strenuous defenders like to tell us, is the ultimate check against tyranny. (This despite the fact that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world.) They argue that an armed populace repels tyranny, but its practical effect has been the opposite. If the people are armed enough to threaten the state’s control, then the state’s monopoly on violence is in question, and it therefore often acts less like it’s enforcing the law than putting down an insurrection.
An armed populace must be subdued with even greater arms. During the Crack Years, the period in the late 1980s when crack was entering urban America and drug turf wars escalated, mayors in major cities decried the fact that their officers were “outgunned.” American society has witnessed a kind of arms race between its citizens and its police, resulting in forces that in many places patrol and occupy rather than police, that straightforwardly view themselves as waging war. “We have a war. We are going to be successful,” the Los Angeles police department’s infamous Daryl Gates told the press in the late 1980s. “Whatever we need to do to be successful, we will do it.”
It was Gates who first created SWAT teams, whose use, as Radley Balko documents in Rise of the Warrior Cop, has since exploded. We are now a nation in which SWAT teams armed like special forces in Afghanistan show up at quiet homes in the dark of night, shoot dogs, and terrify residents, all to bust someone for growing pot. And what Seth Stoughton calls the “warrior worldview” has infected law enforcement everywhere. “Under this warrior worldview,” he writes, “officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies.”
The more guns are out there, the greater the possibility you, an ordinary citizen, might be on the wrong side of one, a certain line of thinking goes. And so the more it makes sense to be armed yourself. Indeed, after every major mass shooting event, just as sure as the cameras flock to the scene and a national debate about gun violence briefly reemerges, gun sales spike. It turns out that wall-to-wall coverage of people being brutally killed by a gun is the best of all advertisements for gun sales.
A few days after twenty people were murdered in the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, I visited a local gun shop run by a former local cop named Mike Wirz. The phone was literally ringing off the hook. “Normally the business increases after things of this nature,” he told me between calls. While this particular mass shooting was the closest to home, it wasn’t the first high-profile mass murder that had happened in the six years since he retired from San Bernardino sheriff’s department and opened his gun shop. The pattern was, he told me, pretty darn consistent. “You see people calling who have never owned a gun in their entire life trying to find out how to purchase a gun, when they can pick it up, when they get one, where they can get training for firearms.”
“What is that about?” I asked him.
“Just fear in general.”
IV
It is more than “fear in general” that maintains the Colony. It is, in fact, a very specific type of fear: white fear.
Despite the fact nonwhite people are disproportionately the victims of crime, the criminal justice system as a whole is disproportionately built on the emotional foundation of white fear. But then, that isn’t surprising. American history is the story of white fear, of the constant violent impulses it produces and the management and ordering of those impulses. White fear keeps the citizens of the Nation wary of the Colony, and fuels their desire to keep it separate.
In fact, I don’t think you can really understand why the Colony was built, how America created the largest prison system in the world, without reckoning with the potency of white fear and its deployment. And to illustrate just how pervasive and powerful it is, it’s worth taking a little time to play a bit of mass incarceration whodunit.
All things being equal, we’d expect more crime to lead to more people in prison, and indeed, in key periods over the last forty years, the rising levels of crime led to large increases in the prison population. But that is far from the whole story.
Scholars of prisons often talk about the “punishment rate,” which is the number of inmates per one thousand reported crimes. It is a useful measure, because it captures how punitive the society is relative to how dangerous it is. Between 1960 and 1980, as the crime rate spiked and the existing system processed the increase, the punishment rate actually fell dramatically. That is, we locked up a relatively small percentage of people compared to the overall number of crimes committed. But starting in 1980, the punishment rate skyrocketed. And then, crucially, even as crime began to fall and then fell sharply in the mid-1990s, the incarceration rate continued to rise. Why did this happen?
Perhaps the most politically fashionable answer at this moment is the War on Drugs. And for good reason: its launch marked a major surge in aggressive, militarized policing. Beginning in the late 1960s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, the federal government expanded its efforts to combat the sale and consumption of illegal drugs. When President Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, more than two hundred drug laws were brought under one statute. In 1973 Nixon created, through an executive order, the Drug Enforcement Administration to enforce the CSA, which would grow from a budget of $75 million and 1,470 agents to a budget of over $2 billion and 5,000 agents. The Reagan administration would later launch an expensive and expansive propaganda effort to curtail drug use under the slogan “Just Say No.” Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, established a White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The number of people in state and federal prisons serving drug sentences increased nearly 1,270 percent, from 24,000 inmates in 1980 to 304,500 in 2014. Years later Nixon aide John Ehrlichman seemed to offer up a smoking gun when he told a reporter:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The federal War on Drugs went hand in hand with a similar push at the local level. In cities across the country, police departments shifted resources toward drug enforcement. In 1980 the percentage of drug arrests as a proportion of all arrests in Baltimore was 8 percent. In 2003 it went to 39 percent. In Chicago it rose from 5 percent to 28 percent. In New York it grew from 5 percent to 14 percent.
This unprecedented shift in policy has been rife with obvious, violent, and absurd contradictions. There’s strong evidence that white and black people use marijuana at identical rates, and yet black people are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, and in some states, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, they are up to eight times as likely to be arrested.
These glaring disparities and racial injustices have rightly focused tremendous e
nergy on ending drug prohibition, a movement that has had striking political success in the last decade. But the War on Drugs accounts for only about 20 percent of the increase in incarceration.
Indeed, in the final years of the Obama administration, many have called on the White House to take the lead in releasing nonviolent drug offenders, who have become the most high-profile category of the incarcerated in political campaigns to reduce imprisonment. But the federal government could release every single nonviolent drug offender currently serving time in a federal prison, and the United States would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Activists, reformers, and politicians have also targeted the harshness of criminal sentencing. In 1984 President Reagan signed the Sentencing Reform Act, which established mandatory minimum sentences that constrained judicial discretion. In 1986 Congress passed laws creating a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. This change was widely understood as racially biased due to the consumption of crack in poor neighborhoods. It went hand in hand with so-called “truth in sentencing” laws and with parole reforms that vastly curtailed the eligibility of prisoners for parole, meaning they were far more likely to serve more of the sentences on the books.
All these increases in sentencing at state and local levels had a profound effect. Before the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the average federal drug offender could expect to serve 58 percent of his sentence, with the remainder on parole. After 1986 that increased to at least 87 percent. From 1986 to 1997 average federal prison sentences for drug offenders more than doubled from thirty months to sixty-six months.
But John Pfaff, a law professor and economist at Fordham who does empirical work on the causes of mass incarceration, points out that even as incarceration exploded in the 1990s, median time served has been either flat or in decline, while the number of arrests for drug law violations increased from 500,000 in 1982 to 1.5 million in 2007. He argues that the number of people being thrown into the system (through arrests and prosecutions), not the total time they spend there, has driven mass incarceration.