Policing in Black and Blue

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis has opened a window onto the complexity of race as a factor in policing. A conventional assumption has been disrupted—that racism alone drives police brutality against Black citizens. Yet it would be a mistake to use the tragedy as an excuse to discount racial bigotry’s role in police behavior nationwide, and perhaps even in this case.

Unlike many other police killings of unarmed Black men, there was no frightened, trigger-happy white cop. There was no white-dominated “law enforcement” apparatus structured to keep Blacks down. Nichols was a young Black man beaten to death after a traffic stop by five Black officers in a mostly-Black police department headed by a Black police chief in a Black-majority city.

It’s a rare lineup of elements, and it has forced questions that seem to have nothing to do with race: about how police recruits are screened, how they are trained, how they are socialized once they’re in uniform, and how rules governing the use of force are designed and enforced.

Yet none of those areas is impervious to insidious racial stereotyping. They are all vulnerable to subtle interactions between race and power. Even Blacks, in keeping with a pattern seen broadly in multiracial settings, may internalize the negative stereotypes of themselves that are taught by the larger, white society.

Therefore, when America’s longstanding images of the Black man as aggressive, violent, and dangerous are lodged in any officer’s expectations, high anxiety can provoke preemptive force—by Black cops as well as white. The nervousness is enhanced during traffic stops, which cops are trained to believe are more life-threatening than the data show.

From 2016 to 2021, about 60 officers were killed by drivers they’d pulled over, a rate of less than 1 death per 3.6 million stops, according to The New York Times.  As Kalfani Ture, a Black criminologist and former Georgia cop, told The Times, “Police think ‘vehicle stops are dangerous’ and “Black people are dangerous,’ and the combination is volatile.”

Police officers tend to encounter the worst of humanity, which naturally shapes their perceptions of the citizens they confront. So in high-crime neighborhoods where officers expect to see drug dealers, thieves, and other miscreants, conclusions are easy to jump to, especially when racial stereotyping is added to the mix.

Cops are also empowered to expect compliance with their instructions. A good number of police killings occur when someone defies an officer’s order to get out of the car, lie on the ground, give his hands up for cuffing, or the like. It takes a cool head for a cop not to take it personally; anger can quickly translate into violence.

Because Blacks’ power in America has been so restricted historically, and because they’re sometimes resented when they do have authority, Black officers don’t necessarily react better than whites to a civilian’s disobedience. As James Baldwin wrote in 1955, “In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”

We don’t know what was going on inside the minds of the five Memphis officers who have been fired and charged with second-degree murder. They were part of a tough anti-crime unit with the  unfortunate name Scorpion; it has now been suspended. We saw them on video slashing and pummeling Nichols long after he was helpless and limp, suggesting some deep spasm of rage.  

The tough-guy policing posture has been widely adopted in the U.S., even as some departments are now trying to teach de-escalation techniques. American police in some cities have been militarized, with camouflage uniforms and olive-drab personnel carriers, taking them far from the benign Norman-Rockwell image of the friendly neighborhood cop.

Indeed, a white Los Angeles probation officer, Jim Galipeau, saw the police as little more than a gang. “Cops and gang members are much more alike than they are different,” he said thirty years ago. “If you could get them together, they can relate to each other. L.A.P.D. is the baddest gang in L.A.”

Are Black cops different? Yes and no. An O.G. (original gangster) in L.A. nicknamed Snoop (alias Fred Hill) told me this story while Galipeau listened and contradicted nothing:

 On several occasions, Black officers participated in a scheme to get drug dealers and gang leaders rubbed out when there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them. “They arrests the guy on a trump charge and take him to the police station. Impounds his car,” said Snoop. “He’s in the station waiting to bail out. During the time he’s in the station, two officers, all Black, put on a black beanie, some local gloves, and get their weapons and drive through his rival gang area, drop the windows out of his car, shoot somebody down, take it back to the lot, put it back. In the morning the youngster bails out of jail, gets in his car, and soon as he drives in that area and stops at a gas station, he gets killed.”

A 16-year-old drug dealer in South Central L.A. gave me this observation about Black cops back in the 1990s: “When you’re driving in a car and there’s three people or maybe four people in the car, you always up to something, in the police eyes. They’re telling us, ‘Too many black heads together. You-all are gonna do something.’ . . . Sometimes Black police try to show off for the white cops—you know, frisk you all hard, and you’re like, ‘Damn, brother, what’s going on?’ . . . When there’s two blacks, they be cool. Sometimes, not all white police is like that, though. Some white police is just as cool as the next.”

No reliable national data exist on the behavior of Black and white police officers. The Washington Post database on police killings by gunfire (about 1,100 people annually, the vast majority armed) contains the race of the victims but not of the cops.

One difficulty in making comparisons is that Blacks tend to be assigned to higher crime Black neighborhoods, where they would be expected to make more stops and more arrests. Correcting for that bias, a study found that Black officers in Chicago tended to make fewer stops, fewer arrests for minor crimes, and to use force less than whites. And the force they used was less likely to cause injury.

The researchers examined police records of 1.6 million “enforcement events” involving 7,000 officers from 2012 through 2015. Blacks used force 32 percent less frequently than whites. They stopped 17 percent fewer white citizens than white officers did, and 39 percent fewer Black citizens. “Most of the differences,” the authors wrote, “involved discretionary stops for ‘suspicious’ activity or minor violations.”

                There has been reasonable speculation that if the Memphis officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death had been white, they would not have been fired and criminally charged so quickly. And if Nichols had been white, he wouldn’t have been beaten so brutally, or at all. These are guesses, but their credibility testifies to a fact of American life: that race is often present, even invisibly. The question is what weight it has in a particular circumstance.

Precisely because the racial element in Memphis is ambiguous, the tragedy presents an opportunity for new thinking, free from the dogmatic polarization that has shaped the country’s debate.

Neither extreme in that debate can fix the problem. Adherents of neither “Defund the Police” nor “Blue Lives Matter” have practical answers. They have played to a stalemate that ensures only continued misdeeds and abuse.

The police can be reformed, but not defunded, i.e., abolished. The blue lives that matter need protection by redefining their tasks to conform with their skills, not as psychologists or social workers or traffic clerks putting themselves and motorists in danger to write up broken tail lights.

The common ground is there. It just has to be mapped.