Via BlueOregon, a cop in Washington state was apparently fired for “Policing While Black.”
Attorney Trumble’s brief also includes excerpts from a deposition given by Ridgefield resident Jaclyn Emter, who said City Manager Fox told her Oct. 2 that he fired Mealing the previous week.
“I said, ‘Well, why did you fire him?’ ” Emter said in her deposition, according to Trumble’s legal brief. “And he said, ‘Because he’s black.’ “
Meanwhile, Pam at Pandagon reports on a WalMart customer who was harassed for buying gift cards while black.
two Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies appeared. One grabbed Pitts by the arm. He objected to the rough handling and asked if he was being arrested. “We need to talk with you about this forged check that you brought in here,” Pitts quoted one as deputy saying. The deputy said later Wal-Mart had called and reported that Pitts had committed a felony.
But there was no forged check, and no felony – apparently, just some WalMart folks who couldn’t believe that a black man was paying for a large order with a corporate check.
Of course, these things – such as driving while black, shopping while black, biking while black, walking while black – are all commonplace enough so it’s no longer even news. They’re all subcatagories of what Derek Jennings calls Being While Black.
A while ago, I commented that judging by infant and maternal mortality statistics, Blacks and whites in the US live in different countries; whites live in a first-world country, Blacks in a developing country.
When I lived in a predominantly Black area of Portland (of which there aren’t many), I noticed the same sort of thing. I’d walk the streets unharassed, but I’d be walking past police stopping and questioning Black folks every day. As a white person, I live in the USA, land of the free and home of the slogan. But a lot of blacks in effect live in a totalitarian state “behind the iron curtain” in a cold war movie – you know, the sort of movie where police constantly stop ordinary citizens and demand to see their papers.
This reminds me of a story I came across in an acquaintence’s livejournal today:
The writer lives in Louisiana.
I still vividly remember being picked up at the airport once by my brother-in-law, and the looks and comments we got while we loaded my luggage into his car. This was shortly after he and my sister had returned from their honeymoon, and part of the reason why I remember it is that, because as we are now family, he was able to vent about it on the drive home. The day-to-day crap many people of color have to put up with in this country is ridiculous.
It’s not just an American thing: a British diplomat was stopped at an airline check-in desk because a British Airways employee couldn’t believe that a black man would have a diplomatic passport.
This makes me so sad. Why is our country still like this??
I noticed a long time ago (in college) that the demeanor of the black students from America was very different from those of black students from some other countries. Those from America seemed very defensive and (to my eye then) a little paranoid. Then I met a black woman from South Africa – this was still during apartheid – and she was like the American blacks only even more so.
That was when I realized that the wariness came from the expectation that they would be unfairly jumped upon merely for being black, and it made me unutterably sad that this country, which is supposed to hold equality and freedom in such high esteem, can treat so many of it’s own citizens so shoddily.
I get accounts of Being While Black every day, the latest being at an AME church where a funeral was being held. Afterwards, as people congregated outside to talk, like people often do after church, four police cars showed up to circle the block, as the officers gawked out at the groups of people. Then two plainclothed detectives came out, probably from the department’s gang unit. The teens were resigned, because it was just business as usual from the police. The older people were the ones who called in and complained.
The thing is that many people think if you throw a cultural sensitivity course a cop’s way, it will change this mentality, but it’s so entrenched and the only way to change it, is to change the institution of policing itself, away from the two-tier program of serving and protecting Whites by policing people of color.
The local police got it in their heads about a month ago that the street in front of my driveway was a perfect spot for DWB stops. Probably because there’s no car in the driveway and the house next door is usually vacant. Two in the same number of weeks (not counting the ones that might have occurred when we weren’t at home.) This really burnt my ass. My husband and I both started conspicuously writing down cop info and standing in our driveway so we could get a good look at what was going on in the squad car. Haven’t noticed any stops since, and since I’m unemployed, I’m home a lot.
It’s great to live in such a racially enlightened town, let me tell you… >:
Isn’t it? Well, at one time, our two cities were battling over the “Mississippi West” title. :P
I watch traffic stops a lot of all kinds. Sometimes, they are informative, like if the person stopped is Deaf and it takes them over an hour to find an interpreter, then that’s a situation that needs improvement to serve that community better, as well as the police officers. OTOH, there are lots of stops where the police pull people over on the basis of race. Every once in a while, you can see that it’s someone familiar, like a city government employee sitting on the curb.
I was reading about the fallout from the SFPD videos and the union president almost apologized for the misconduct, but then went on to blame it on the neighborhood which he compared to Iraq(hyperbole, much?). So, if you are racist, sexist and homophobic as a police officer, it’s not your responsbility, but that of the communities you are insulting. The POA president’s comments were familiar b/c I read them on my blog almost daily, when it comes to race and gender.
Our police chief has decided on the eve of the end of the stipulated agreement with the state to create and implement a new “cultural sensitivity” training program. So he’s created his usual hand-picked, by-engraved invitation-only panel to assist him with this task, keeping most of the public out of it. Not that it will do any good, any more than throwing a bucket of water would quench a forest fire.
The town I live in is unusual in that we have poor areas that are heavily policed. One or two of these areas are mostly populated by minorities and the other two are three are mostly white. I’ve noticed (and been stopped myself on occasion) that police tend to just randomly stop people in these neighborhoods as if they are looking for drugs, duis, or other illegalities.
The interesting part is when I worked EMS everyone knew that the worst neighborhoods on the weekends were the primarily poor and white ones. They had more incidence of both random violence and domestic violence calls.
I personally live in a mixed neighborhood. I mean racially mixed, economically mixed, and mixed in terms of family structures. I have called the police on two occasions in the seven years we have lived here. Once because my daugher told me that a teenaged boy was selling drugs down from our house, and I later saw him doing so. The second time when someone left their pitt bull loose that jumped my fence and attacked my dog. Oddly enough, both of the people involved were white.
I first lived in the South when the Air Force stationed me in Selma, AL in the mid 1960’s. I recall finding it odd that a lot of the elderly Black drivers would mosey along at about 10 mph slower than everyone else. I finally found out that in the decades before, while others might get away with driving 5 mph over the speed limit without fear of getting a ticket, Blacks had to drive at least 5 mph less than the speed limit to avoid being cited. While this wasn’t so much the case at that time, some older drivers had developed such a habit, that they continued driving that much slower than others.
I’ve seen some complaints of African-American drivers now get pulled over for driving too slow…
Interesting thing about neighborhoods and police…
I spent most of my time in my city living in a poorer neighborhood which was a mixture of Black and Latino families, gradually turning into a mixture of Latino second generation or older families and newer immigrant families. My old neighborhood became gentrified, and more of an influx of Whites and Asian-Americans, which made it by the last census, a pretty even mixture racially, if not by economic class. Most of the business owners were Asian-American, except for some businesses owned by African-Americans(barbershops, beauty salons) and Latinos(markets, restaurants) and newer Latino immigrants(primarily vendors and some day laborers).
The police are either all there, complete with mobile trailers or hardly there at all. Fairly high crime rate, homicides, drug dealing, drivebys, etc. but the police were content to let it remain as it is(i.e. let the gang members kill each other off) as long as it didn’t spill into the surrounding neighborhoods. If it looked like it was going to, then they came in, all at once, and they rounded people up in groups, because they had no idea who anybody was in that neighborhood. All, or nothing, was and is their motto.
Most recently, there was a record number of homicides this summer involving Latino on Blacks(due allegedly to the prison gangs’ influence on the local street gangs) and towards the end, vice-versa. That and the fact that it was an election year, brought back the mobile trailers. Traffic pretext stops are highest there, than anywhere in the city.
The other predominantly Latino communities are an older one, mostly with deeply rooted families, and some new influx of immigrants. Most of the day laborers for example congregate there. You need an invitation just to walk down the streets from one of the families who’s been there forever. Very estranged from the police, historically up to the present.
The other, is a newer neighborhood from an annexation not too long ago. Mixture of working class African-American and Latino families. Fairly high crime rate, but not as high as the predominantly White neighborhood next to it which has a high level of violent crime(maybe b/c of meth use, the apparent drug of choice among Whites in my city). Guess which one sees more cop activity and pretext stops. And very little narc activity in the Whiter neighborhood than the ones populated by predominantly minorities.
New neighborhood is primarily White and African-American middle-class. I was actually gentrified out of my old neighborhood as it is getting piecemealed, or colonized(depending on what term you like best) out to make room for the expanding state university’s needs for its student population. The only cops I see in my new neighborhood are the ones following me. Though I’ve heard DWB stories in my newer neighborhood, complete with comments by officers such as “you don’t look like you belong here”.
In the western part of my state, troopers used to be notorious for ticketing people who were Driving While Hispanic. When there was a story on it on national TV, it didn’t look too pretty.
Just last week, someone told me he didn’t want his daughter living on a particular Carribean island because “it’s full of black people.” “Yes,” I told him, “it’s their island; they are people of color.” He looked at me like I was crazy.
As long as the inequalities in America still exist between blacks and whites, this will continue. Many people think that we have become a more tolerant society. I am an African-American Studies major and I have been doing some research this semester in the highest levels of sociology, and it is hypothesized that while overt racism has gone down, covert racism and prejudice are still at the same levels and in some ways, worse than in the 1940’s. Many surveys show that people are more “tolerant” but there are deeper analysis that people are just as prejudice: They are just getting better at learning to hide it. The more education you have, the more likely you are to hide it from others and yourself. Cognitive dissonance is key in this.
The reason the study of black studies is very important compared to other minority groups is that as Anna J Cooper said: Where I enter, my race enteres with me. No other minority group has experienced slavery institutionalized en masse for 200 years that has become the country heritage. The black minority group has become a domestic colony within a nation that has not been given the tools to defend itself from its oppressors and is constantly exploited by the white masters. Over 54% of whites say that black people are too lazy to lift themselves out of their condition (based on sociological studies by Healey). What whites and others don’t understand is that the trauma of black slavery is still alive today and that the black community is constantly exploited.
Another issue is the police. Police brutality against blacks are widely documented and it is best to look at the COINTELPRO information that was found showing that the FBI and police orchestrated several assasinations of black power leaders and non-violent direct action leaders. The only reason we know about this is because a group stole the papers from Pennsylvania (was it from Media, PA? I forget) and published them. They have been verified as the papers of the COINTELPRO program. Why should the black community trust the police when they have constantly showed racist action against them and only go into the communities to arrest them (I am not saying there aren’t good cops out there, I’m saying is tha tmost cops do not live in black neighborhoods with the people, but look like invaders because they refuse to live with them because of privledge/safety/choice)
Jessica:
They don’t hide it. People’s beliefs about race are postulates. All other knowledge is organized to take it into account.
This (which will likely annoy a few folks)
http://www.prometheus6.org/node/11727
…is drawn from a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press report. You may find the post and conversation interesting; you’ll definitely find the Pew Center report interesting.
A while back I realized the USofA was a colony, with a colony’s economic and political system (i.e., exploitative)…and we still have the same basic system. We get jerked hardest but EVERYONE gets jerked. The really sad part is, the only white folks with an inkling of how hard folks are being jerked are the libertarians, and judging by their “solutions,” they’re insane.
in my midwestern city, i teach at a private school that has about a 12% black student population. while we accept students from a variety of economic backgrounds, most (black and white) are upper-middle-class or higher. i do not get the impression that the black students hang out in different neighborhoods from the white students, or that they spend their free time much differently, on the whole.
yet, by the time they graduate, most black boys report having been pulled over by the cops, and most white boys do not.
sad. just very sad. i mean we all try to be post-“why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along” but sometimes you just have to say “why can’t we all just get along?”
I read about the COINTELPRO papers. The FBI used to also collaborate with tribal police at American Indian reservations to kill off AIM activists as well.
No, police officers do not live where they police. The L.A. Times did an article showing a map where LAPD officers lived, and 10% of them lived in a nearly all-white enclave in L.A. County called Santa Clarita. Others lived in Palmdale and SimiValley(which is why the Rodney King trial got moved there).
In my city, about 80% of our officers live in the city, but only because of a financial incentives to buy houses there through a generous housing plan. Still, the vast majority of White officers live in a few of the “white-flight” neighborhoods in the city. Black and Hispanic officers live there and in other cities. However, even with the housing plans, more and more of our department’s White officers are moving to the southern part of the county, which is mostly White, and also a stronghold for White Supremacism as the “white-flight” neighborhoods in the city become more racially integrated.
There is often so much racial friction within departments between White officers and Black officers for example, and I once told this Captain during this forum that if the White officers can’t get along or treat the Black officers with respect in the department, how then can they be expected to be trusted with how they treat people in the communities? Then often, the Black officers feel they have to be harsher in the communities to prove themselves to the White officers, because the department is still structured as White and Male. It is also dangerous to be a Black cop particularly plain-clothed in a police department because so many of them get beaten or shot, or killed by White officers, including incidents in the LAPD, NYPD, Oakland PD and Providence PD.
P6, I liked your post at your site. I think I was referred by a search engine to your site once when you posted a link to an L.A. Times article on LAPD cops with multiple shootings. One of those cops interviewed, lateraled to my city’s agency after three shootings in the LAPD, then shot an unarmed man in my city, which led to his retirement.
I have a blog on our PD and it was pretty quiet, b/c it was private until some police officers in our department crashed it a couple months ago. They don’t like the blog and they never liked me, but when it comes to racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes, well, they are doing my work for me in showing what goes on inside their agency. Their big thing now, is celebrating w/ beers and laughs, Stanley “Tookie” Williams execution early this morning.
I guess they thought I’d be shocked at their behavior, but I’m not really, b/c they put their department on the international map when they joked and celebrated the killing of an unconscious African-American woman by officers in 1998. And if you were to ask community members what a typical cop in our agency would do upon Williams’ execution , their response would be to celebrate, laugh and joke about it. So there you are.
But it goes back to what Jessica said in her post:
“Why should the black community trust the police when they have constantly showed racist action against them and only go into the communities to arrest them?”
Why indeed. The more progressive officers(and I know a few) understand this, and they work hard to build bridges btwn the department and the communities, bridges which get burned or torn down by the officers who just want to go into these neighborhoods in full force, then go back to the locker room and tell their racist and sexist jokes about the people there.
I had a friend in my childhood who “looked black” but she had white parents. This seemed okay to my prejudiced mother. She was my best friend in middle school. She taught me a lot about life and love and helped me mature a little more. Recently, I was talking with a former coworker who commented on her parentage. She took delight in telling me that my friend’s grandparents were indeed “black”, and that there had been an interracial marriage, and that is why my friend could pass for “white”. Her prejudice was blaringly apparent when she talked about another coworker who was going to marry “one of those black people”. (sigh)
My daughter also had an African American friend who was her best friend. They went into a local store, and the store clerk followed her around, practically acting like her shadow. They never bothered my daughter. It was disgusting to me that they picked on this child solely because she was black.
As a lawyer in Santa Clarita California I can attest to the fact that the general population is comprised of white folks, the police do not live in the area they patrol generally speaking. This makes for a disconnected police force and often dicriminatory arrests for criminal offenses.