A Missouri GOP official bemoaned in an interview published Monday that race had been injected into the conversation about the Ferguson, Mo., shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer.
“This is not just a tragedy for the African American community, this is a tragedy for the Missouri community as well as the community of what we call America,” Matt Wills, Missouri Republican Party executive director, told Breitbart News. “Injecting race into this conversation and into this tragedy, not only is not helpful, but it doesn’t help a continued conversation of justice and peace.”
Wills’s comments came in the context of the Breitbart report that “liberal organizers” had established voter registration booths amid the ongoing Ferguson protests.
“If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is,” Wills said. “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate.”
Race has been a prominent topic since Officer Darren Wilson shot 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9. Wilson is white, and Brown was black. The Ferguson police force is almost entirely white, though it serves a community that is two-thirds black. The same goes for the Ferguson city council.
Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson said last week that race relations were “a top priority.”
And then there is the broader racial context. Mother Jones reported last week that research shows African-Americans are disproportionately affected in incidents of police violence. The ACLU has also reported that people of color are disproportionately involved in militarized police actions like the kind taken against Ferguson protests since the shooting.
How dare they urge protesters to turn their rage into productive action.
…but ignoring ‘race’ is gonna fix things right up…
Another fine example of the GOTP’s terminal HIH syndrome.
HeadInHindquarters.
Unusual for the GOP not to think in terms of black and white.
Face it. It’s racial. That’s why there’s so many black people outside all night. You notice that? You notice all the whitey pro-cop counter-protests? Its, “Change it! Change it!” vs “Keep it the same! Keep it the same!”
But it is all about race.
I came across a 61 year old study of police brutality that is still relevant today. The study, “Violence and the Police,” was part of a PhD dissertation by William A. Westley and published in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jul., 1953), pp. 34-41. This paper focuses on how police come to legitimize their illegal use of violence on the citizens they are to protect.
While Westley does not identify the city, he describes it as “a municipal police department in an industrial city of approximately one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants.”
One important factor is that recognition and promotions come from making lots of arrests, not from maintaining the peace. In Westley’s words, “Patrolmen feel that little credit is forthcoming from a clean beat (a crimeless beat), while a number of good arrests really stands our on the record. To a great extent this is actually the case, since a good arrest results in good newspaper publicity, and the policemen who made many “good pinches’” has prestige among his colleagues.”
There are strong pressures to solve “big crimes.” As one patrolman told Westley, “If it is a big case and there is a lot of pressure on you and they tell you you can’t go home until the case is finished, than naturally you are going to lose your patients.”
And when abuse helps solve a crime, police adopt an “ends justify the means” mentality. Another officer explained to Westley, “There is a case I remember of four Negroes who held up a filling station. We got a description of them and picked them up. Then we took them down to the station and really worked them over. I guess that everybody that came into the station that night had a hand in it, and they were in pretty bad shape. Do you think that sounds cruel? Well, you know what we got out of it? We broke a case in ------. There was a mob of twenty guys, burglars and stick-up men, and eighteen of them are in the pen now. Sometimes you have to get rough with them, see. The way I figure it is, if you can get a clue that a man is a pro and if he won’t cooperate, tell you what you want to know, it is justified to rough him up a little, up to a point. You know how it is. You feel that the end justifies the means.”
There is also a feeling that the courts often let the guilty go free or off with a lenient sentence. As one rookie policeman told Westley, “One of the older men advised me that if the courts didn’t punish a man we should.”
A most revealing bit of data from this study is the question the police answered about when the use of force was legitimate. The wording of the question was, “When do you think a policemen is justified in roughing a man up?” There responses were:
37% Disrespect for police
23% When impossible to avoid
19% To obtain information
8% To make an arrest
7% For the hardened criminal
3% When you know the man is guilty
3% For sex criminals
Other than “when impossible to avoid” and “to make an arrest” the other categories are not legally justified reasons to “rough someone up.”
The number one justification, a justification over a third of the police legitimized had nothing to do with criminal behavior. After reading the eyewitness reports of Michael Brown’s killing, that might was been what set off officer Darren Wilson. Apparently, Mr. Brown was pulling away from Wilson’s grasp. When he got free, he turned his back on Wilson and walked away. That is when Wilson got out of his patrol car and shot at Brown.
Officer Wilson didn’t follow the advice of one policeman in Westley’s study about how to rough up people who show disrespect, “If there is any slight resistance, you can go all out on him. You shouldn’t do it in the street though. Wait until you are in the squad car.”
The Michael Brown killing is just one of many police killings and beatings of black citizens that have been highlighted in recent weeks. One Ferguson officer was caught on video calling the black protestors “F-ing animals.” But police prejudice is not new. Here are comments from three different policemen in Westley’s study.
“The colored people understand one thing. The policeman is the law, and he is going to treat you rough and that’s the way you have to treat them. Personally, I don’t think the colored are trying to help themselves one bit. If you don’t treat them rough, they will sit right on top of your head.”
“You can’t ask them a question and get an answer that is not a lie. In the South Side the only way to walk into a tavern is to walk in swaggering as if you own the place and if somebody is standing in your way give him an elbow and push him aside.”
“In the good districts you appeal to people’s judgement and explain the law to them. In the South Side the only way is to appear like you are the boss.”
Westley concludes that these attitudes and behaviors exist in part because of the unique nature of the police officers’ job requirements. As a low paying and low status job, this is one way to “improve their social status” both in a psychological sense and for career advancement. The get tough attitude commands some degree of deference from a public fearful of being roughed up. And as noted above, promotions and status within the occupation are based largely on arrests.
For more up to date examples, read Matt Taibbi’s “The Divide: American Injustice in the
Age of the Wealth Gap.”