BlackAmazon links to this Texas Monthly article about the case of Billy Ray Johnson, a disabled black man who was knocked unconscious by some white partiers and then dumped unconscious on a deserted roadside for several hours. Johnson lived, but with severe and apparently permanent damage. What makes the case particularly outrageous is that two juries have refused to do more than slap the perpetrators on the wrist, and now the town’s white residents are inclined to excuse the perpetrators and blame the victim.
Here’s a few quotes from the article:
And yet, after Corey, Wes, Colt, and Dallas were each arrested and charged that October with aggravated assault (Lacy, who cooperated with investigators, was not charged), they were seen, by some, to be victims as well. “These boys’ names are ruined for life,” Corey’s mother, Martha Howell, later told one reporter. “And [Billy Ray] is better off today than he’s ever been in his life. He roamed the streets, the family never knew where he was. Now in the nursing home he’s got someone to take care of him.” […]
Wilford Penny told the Chicago Tribune one month after stepping down as Linden’s mayor that the incident had been “an unfortunate and senseless thing” but that “the black boy was somewhere he shouldn’t have been.” […]
When I met with the jury foreman, a warehouse manager named John Reed, he explained that some jurors had thought Billy Ray—who had taken the stand to give a few halting answers—had faked his symptoms and had practiced seeming slow and walking poorly. “As far as I’m concerned, everyone’s to blame,” Reed said. “Wes Owens shouldn’t have carried him out to that party, and Billy Ray should have known better than to go drink beer with a bunch of white boys.”
Stupid racist assholes.
(Notice how, in that last quote, Wes Owens gets a last name but Billy Ray Johnson doesn’t?)
* * *
That last quote from the jury foreman (“Billy Ray should have known better than to go drink beer with a bunch of white boys”) reminds me a bit of the frequent response people give after hearing about a rape — “she should have known better than to be drunk in that part of town/ that bar/ that dorm room” etc.
But it’s not reasonable to suggest that black people spend their entire lives avoiding ever being alone with white people. Likewise, it’s not reasonable to suggest that women to spend their lives cloistered like nuns (or prisoners) for fear of making themselves vulnerable to rape. You might as well say, “well, she shouldn’t have been crossing the street; she had to know that crossing the street made it more likely she’d be hit by a car.”
Not useful advice.
We need to get to a point where fewer people, commenting on these horrible attacks, say what boils down to: “The victims should have stayed in their place, then maybe they wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”
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“And [Billy Ray] is better off today than he’s ever been in his life. He roamed the streets, the family never knew where he was. Now in the nursing home he’s got someone to take care of him.”
That reminds me of Barbara Bush’s comment after walking around the AstroDome, that the breach of the levees in NOLA, and the subsequent destruction of homes and relocation of their residents to Houston, was working out pretty well for a lot of them.
Holy shit.
Where was this?
Holy shit that makes me angry and sick. I love the casual assumption that white people are violent animals and that black people should just know this. I ALSO love the assumption that it’s ‘roughly equivalent’ to be a violent animal and to NOT assume that other people are violent animals. This insults and offends me on so many levels. Holy crap, this is awful.
Wow.
I’ll bet you the jury foreperson could give you a hell of a lecture on ‘state’s rights’.
This is what I think of when I see someone with the stars and bars.
Yep, it sounds just like what Barb Bush said.
I wonder if both the race and disability aspects of this crime were noted as hate crimes. Often disability is considered irrelevant to the motivation for the crime. Well, and disability caused by the crime actually benefitted the victim if he was of a certain class anyway, right?
Blue said, “Well, and disability caused by the crime actually benefitted the victim if he was of a certain class anyway, right?”
I’m not sure what you mean here, but it sounds like the jurors didn’t take his disability seriously because they thought he was faking or exergerrating his impairment.
And to Joe, I’m loving your comment.
“I’ll bet you the jury foreperson could give you a hell of a lecture on ’state’s rights’. ”
So could I. But those shitheels would have gotten an up close and personal experience with the state pen if I had my preference.
So whats your point?
I could also give you one hell of a detailed description of several ancestors death marched across the country. Thats what *I* think of when I see the stars and stripes.
As could the legislators responsible for, e.g., California’s medical marijuana laws, which have regularly been ignored by the Feds, with tragic results. In general, we’re better off with power devolved to the states than concentrated in the hands of the Federal Government. But utopia is not an option, and you have to take the good with the bad.
That’s beside the point, though, since this isn’t a state’s rights issue, unless you’re suggesting that jurors be flown in from the coastal cities to sit on trials in Texas.
This is the stars and bars.
I meant the Battle flag of the confederacy in the previous post. Not the the stars and bars. (Thanks for the correction)
In general I think that states rights are good and that the federal government has seriously over stepped it’s proper authority in many areas.
This was a riff on the previous thread.
Pheeno, my point is that a lot of racists like to pretend that the succession of the southern states wasn’t motivated by a desire to perpetuate slavery.
A great deal of them ape what they hear and couldn’t actually go into detail on it, because they’re ignorant racist assholes and wouldnt actually know what states rights were ift hey walked up and kicked them in the balls.
I hate to drag this all offtopic, but . . .
“Pheeno, my point is that a lot of racists like to pretend that the succession of the southern states wasn’t motivated by a desire to perpetuate slavery.”
I really reccomend the book _A People’s History of the Unites States_ by Howard Zinn.
Briefly, if the war was about slavery, the Emancipation Proclimation would have come before it, not towards the end, northern states would not have returned runaway slaves, etc. Do you really think that northerns states would have sent their young men into the bloodiest conflict ever to free the slaves? The same states that had sundown laws and segregation?
Slavery has had a lot of horrible echos that continue to resonate through the US today, and the attitdues of victim-blamers quoted in the post really illustrate that. It’s clear they see the victim as less human than his attackers. This has much greater import than do the causes of the civil war.
amp: please make the preview feature optional. it really hoses my browser
I thought this war had ended. And the fact that a posting about a hate crime against a Black man and disabled man has evolved into a thread on states rights and the Civil War is interesting over 150 years later.
I believe this crime was in Texas. Not the place to kill or torture anyone, what with the most executions annually except for an occasional year when they’re beaten by Oklahoma. Not the place to be if you’ve killed or are even suspected of killing a White person especially if you’re Black. OTOH, James Byrd, jr. aside, not much will happen to you if you kill or torture a Black person. Home of Tulia, where Black residents and White residents in relationships with Black residents were paraded through the streets in their sleepwear and charged with drug dealing based solely on the testimony of a perjuring, incompetent racist police officer. If it hadn’t been in part due to their perseverance and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, most of them would probably be serving prison terms of 20 years, 90 years and in one case, 300 years.
Not to pick on Texas, because it’s got 49 other states to keep it company in terms of racist behavior especially institutionalized racism, whether it’s against Black people, Latinos, Asian-Americans or American Indians. People of one of these races, biracial or multi-racial individuals. So having a pissing contest about what state or region of the country was the most racist then and now in a country which is so steeped in colonialism, imperialism and racism is well, I guess academic. Because there is no enclave or oasis away from racism in this country, not even in liberal enclaves or conservative ones, not historically and not presently and probably not in the future either.
Near where I live, we had a similar case involving a Black man who went to a bonfire with some Whites and ended up being chased by them, slashed in the back by a straight razor causing permanent nerve damage and smashed in the head by a broken bottle. It turned out there were Western Hammarskins at the party, and the WHs are one of the largest racist skinhead gangs in the western part of the country. So incidents like this can happen everywhere. But I know my neck of the woods and how bad it is, so if anyone has any criticism about it, I’d agree.
The problem is if we think about how bad our cities, towns, states, country are rather than saying this is worse now or then than that, we avoid having to look at ourselves and say what am I going to do today to address these issues in my midst? And when you do that honestly, it’s uncomfortable, unpleasant because it forces you to take a hard look at yourself. When I see something, read about a community of Black or Latinos being racially profiled by police, or Black families having their rental applications thrown away by the landlord who collects my rent or who is down the street, or the store that I shop at sends its security guards to tail a Latino individual who is shopping, or the Muslim women who attend the mosque down the street or across town are afraid to go to the store because their veiling identifies them as Muslims or accurately or not as Arab-Americans to people hostile to both, to all these things and many others, what will I do?
I wonder what the ethnic and racial composition of the jury was. And those references to Johnson by only using his first and middle names and calling him a “black boy”.
Because Billy Ray Johnson didn’t nearly die because of “states’ rights”. He nearly died because White men knew that they could beat and torture a Black man and be backed up by their city’s residents and the justice system. They caused severe and permanent injuries and left him on a deserted road, so it probably wasn’t their intention that he live. But if he did, they weren’t too worried about getting into trouble either.
They wouldn’t be nearly as surprised as we are to hear the comments which we have read in the article posted.
And the men should also have been charged with a hate crime for attacking a disabled person. Yes, they said that they thought he was faking or exaggerating his disability but they also said that he shouldn’t have been partying with White people also and these rationales were both used to refuse to hold White men accountable for attacking a Black disabled man in similar ways and for similar reasons.
And these men were right. They remain free despite committing a horrendous system because as bad as their actions were, the system that supports them is much worse. And that system exists everywhere in this country.
This should read “The problem is if we think about how bad our cities, towns, states, country are rather than saying this is worse now or then than that, we have to look …
Sorry for any confusion.
With all due respect to Mr. Johnson and to the heinous crime committed against him, I wonder why the liberal/left and the civil rights establishment can never bring itself to criticize hate crimes against whites such as the recent Long Beach assault? This double standard while hypocritical in itself, doesn’t go unnoticed by poor and working class whites who I would argue become more open to racist propaganda from the right.
The notable exceptions on that LB case were John Ridley (on Huffington’s blog) and Earl Ofari Hutchinson (both black men) who argued for black leadership to speakout against such crimes.
And I would also add for the liberal/leftists who claim to value black life that while hate cirimes and police brutality are certainly issues that need to be addressed, the leading cause of death for black males 16-34 is homicide, primarily by their peers. Homicide (and general violence) as an issue is much larger and of much greater concern to regular urban black people, which is obvious point that white liberals can’t seem to grasp. Since that fact doesn’t fit in the nice and neat ideological box of white supremacy, the liberal/left is pretty much silent instead of offering some type of leadership or support.
Actually, in many cases the northern states weren’t returning runaway slaves, and that was one of the complaints given in some (all?) of the southern states’ declarations of secession. Under the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), free states were required to return runaway slaves to their masters upon request, and several of the states either failed to enforce this or passed laws repudiating the obligation to do so.
Hard to grasp? No. Hard to miss? Yes, when shootings of African-Americans are happening in your neck of the woods.
And what do conservatives have to add to Black-on-Black violence except to advocate more prisons to lock up more African-Americans and also more Latinos because more and more Black-on-Black violence is becoming Latino-on-Black violence or vice versa in large part because of these practices. In fact, most hate crime allegations in my two-county area are filed against Latinos or Black gang members for killing people of the opposite race, most of whom aren’t in gangs.
Or more stricter laws that are mainly passed to alleviate the fears of Whites that this violence will spill over into their neck of the woods and laws that are passed usually in response to rare incidents when it does. But these laws do the same thing, fill the prisons to beyond capacity(as in my state, we’re exporting our inmates to facilities in other states or even federal facilities in the case of gang members).
(I’m not addressing White Supremacist gangs which are also violent and organize on a larger scale that is pretty frightening if you’ve ever seen one of their confiscated arsenals like I have, because to most people including too many in law enforcement, these gangs are still viewed as social clubs or organizations.)
I’m asking because neither work in the long-term. Because neither addresses the issues of why gangs exist in the first place and why. And many intervention programs start with teenagers or adults and not young kids, because even kids as young as seven are susceptable to joining gangs. Many places outside of larger cities see gang violence not long after after-school programs, little league programs and other programs are cut. Or there’s little vocational training, few jobs besides those in illegal businesses and neglect by city services(except by police during the “let’s make the city safe for those White tourists” suppression measures because otherwise as long as the violence is contained in a neighborhood, you won’t see much police response). Addressing family issues is important because most gang members getting out that I have spoken with were under guardianships. Some abused or neglected. Some multi-generational gang membership. I don’t know if this is typical in other places.
These measures that are advocated by many conservatives and more than a few liberals are short-term “solutions” designed to alleviate the public and to help the campaigns of elected officials and they are expensive. Where I lived when it got bad, the department would park the mobile SWAT team trailer next door and do its suppression operations out of it. Years later, the department still does that. Los Angeles is about to make that same mistake under its current chief, William Bratton that it did under prior chiefs like Darryl Gates. In five years, the “solutions” will actually add to the problem and worsen it. I saw it happen in my own city over a 15 year period. The worst years are more frequent.
Suppression methods that target large populations of people say based on race, gender and geography(i.e. Black men in a particular neighborhood) also breed further distrust between community residents and law enforcement and trust is critical between the two to address the apprehension of the 10% individuals who commit the majority of the violent crimes. How are residents supposed to risk their lives to report some one who killed someone in front of them to police officers who mistreat them or family members most of the time? It’s only through maintaining police accountability through mechanisms the public can participate in and trust that these issues can be addressed. That’s a tough one to sell to law enforcement agencies still operating under a paramilitary structure and “watchman” style of policing. It would also help if D.A. victim/witness programs would offer more services to family members of victims who were killed who were associated with gangs.
For example, do you know what the reaction of LAPD officers was to Bratton’s latest gang suppresson plan? Well, at the LAPD’s Web site, officers wrote that we’ll do it IF you basically toss out the department’s complaint process and the need to investigate any filed complaint against a complaint as mandated by state law. So much for accountability and it just goes to show how much that agency has learned while in its sixth year of a five-year mandated reform process.
OTOH, if you read the book, Walking with the Devil written by a former Minnesota police officer, he explains how it’s possible to combat violent crimes without violating people’ s rights or eliciting a lot of complaints against police officers.
So the issues of police accountability and combating violence go together. White liberals often pay little or no attention to the latter because they don’t live with it or they believe that the two are mutually exclusive and in opposition . Conservatives most often disregard the former and sometimes use the latter to offset African-Americans who criticize any racist institution.
Drydock,
I wasn’t aware of that case before today (I googled for it after reading your comment). Of course, I agree that it’s appalling that this happened, and my heart goes out to the victims.
Looking through google blog search, I see that literally thousands of blogs have commented on the Long Island beating case, mostly right-wing blogs crowing about supposed liberal hypocrisy.
In contrast, I couldn’t find any right-wing blogs commenting on the Billy Ray Johnson beating, although I did find a couple of dozen lefty blogs commenting on it. The search was a bit confounded because there are a couple of minor celebrities also named Billy Ray Johnson.
So my first question to you is, have you gone to right-wing blogs and accused them of being hypocrites for commenting on the Long Island beating but not about Billy Ray Johnson? If not, why not?
Secondly, having read a little bit about the Long Island case, I might now post on it — but I doubt you’d agree with my post. Unlike the Billy Ray Johnson case, where there’s not any real doubt about what happened, the Long Island beatings feature a lot of doubt — not only about what happened (one eyewitness says that one of the victims threw the first blow), but also over if the teens who were arrested and convicted even committed the crime.
Particularly appalling is the witness ID procedure the cops used, which is virtually guaranteed to cause false IDs. (The police showed the victims and a witness the suspects, and said “these are the people who attacked you; do you recognize them?”). Based on that alone, I’d say “not guilty’ if I were the judge (I don’t say “if I were on the jury” because there was no jury in this case).
You may be thinking I wouldn’t say that in a case involving white suspects and a black complainant. If that is your thought, you’re mistaken.
Third, do you realize that my post wasn’t about a beating per se? It was about the community reaction to that beating. In contrast, despite the mixed messages of the judge, I don’t see a similar community-wide reacting seeking to blame the victims of the Long Island beatings, or to suggest that they were at fault merely for being out in public in a place where there were black children. (If you know of such reactions, please provide links.) If there was such a widespread reaction to the Long Island beatings, shared by people as prominent as the mayor at the time the beating took place, then it would be a parallel case to the Billy Ray Johnson case.
Fourth, what I find most interesting about the Long Island case is that the convicted beaters were nearly all female. If they really are guilty, that’s really unusual; nearly all group beatings are committed by men or boys, as far as I know. However, the 911 caller said that the beaters were men, and (as I said above) the IDs were terrible, so it’s unclear if all the convicted girls really were guilty.
Ampersand- I was accusing the liberal/left on the hate crime issue of hypocrisy, not you. I’m glad you did your post, I think you did a good job in highlighting the idiotic community response to a repugnant crime. I brought up the Long Beach case (not Long Island) because it was recent and widely covered in the papers and TV like CNN, so there is a good chance that people would be familiar with it. Unortunately, I haven’t seen any progressive blogs (except Ridley’s piece on Huffington’s blog) cover it.
I don’t usually post on right wing blogs because I’m not particularly interested in dialoging with them. I’m interested in dialoging (or polemicizing) with people like you and some of the people who post here–people I see as progressive and are willing to put some energy into social improvement. I understand that most right wingers aren’t going to lift a finger against racism but that doesn’t the liberal/left off the hook.
Though I’d probably disagree with you about the convictions in the Long Beach case, I’m more interested in the liberal/left and black political leadership giving these crimes a pass and not forcefully condemning them (and yes due process needs to be insured for the defendants as well). Also the serious intimidation of the (black) witnesses was appalling. An ugly form of the “stop snitching” ethos.
While the LB case was particularly violent and got a lot of attention, black on white hate crimes aren’t rare, and Hutchinson put them at 20% of total hate crimes. I live in a Oakland and this type of BS happens all too much, it’s just rarely gets any attention.
Radfem- I know you do anti- police violence type work and I think that’s a worthy thing. However, generally speaking crime and violence is the number 1 urban issue where I live in Oakland, CA. And I’d imagine the issues aren’t all that different in other urban areas. The liberal/left pretty much runs the local government here and the violence situation is seriously out of control. If prisons and cops aren’t the solution, I don’t see the left offering much of an alternative.
A (white) friend of mine who has done anti-cop brutality type work, last year went to a large community forum in East Oakland. He said speaker after speaker (working class Latinos, blacks and Asians) got up and demanded more police and more police action. The left pretends this isn’t the case but it is.
Actually, folks in Oakland should be asking where their city leadership is hiding all the money, but that’s another topic.
Most of the local governments here are conservative(as tends to be true in the state’s valleys), well actually all of them are locally and they all have similar violence issues. It makes no difference because at the city level, most politicians are bought and paid for by development interests to really be conservative or liberal. Try self-interested. I think Oakland has a lot of that and no, I’m not a huge Jerry Brown fan. He might be liberal but he’s pretty law and order as well and you find the two paired together more than you’d think. In fact, as governor, he signed the Peace Officer Bill of Rights and when he ran for Attorney General last year, most of the police unions and most of the police management organizations supported him.
Here, you get both. When there’s a lot of crime, some neighborhoods request more police, but the difference is that they want the police on their terms with say in how they will police their neighborhoods and on their terms too often that’s not what they get. What often happens here with suppression methods is that often times, it eliminates or lessens the immediate crisis but then the city has to justify having high-cost SWAT teams, specialized units and lot of patrol officers in the neighborhood so they start doing sweeps and lots of racial profiling stops and then there’s more anger and resentment towards them and rightfully so and then the same community members who wanted them in want them out again. Because it’s their neighborhood, they want it back which is one reason why many of them feel the police should be there, but then when the police want to do it their way or the highway(part and parcel of the police culture), then there’s tension and a strong feeling that the police force aren’t protecting them but occupying them.
Even if suppression wasn’t overstepping its bounds in communities and was effective, it would still cost too much and take too many resources away from other parts of the city to be in place long, which means it can’t be a long-term solution strictly on the terms of the suppression methods perspective. No city or county could afford it. Most police budgets even without special suppression actions are nearly half of a city or county’s annual budget.
I think it’s more of the issue of inviting the police in to help or partner with you in addressing issues of crime and violence and not having them instead invade and make all the decisions, shutting the community out of the process entirely. I go to forums to address gang violence. And I go to forums addressing police accountability and misconduct issues. Often it’s the same people and it’s not like someone’s going to necessarily be one way or the other because often people who support police to help them are often the ones who will experience misconduct. I’ve helped people file complaints or their family members file complaints who previously were supportive of police actions during periods of shootings. Maybe it’s conservatives including White conservatives as well as White liberals who think it’s an either/or propositition. In reality, not really, it’s called being between a rock and a hard place.
But suppression has failed. It’s been done and done and done again, and the gang violence issue is worse now in some ways than it was, and often cyclical anyway. Often it’s not until you live amongst violence that you realize that it stops for the shot term but it comes back with a vengance. Partly, because of the fact that sending gang members to prison in large numbers actually helps the prison gangs get a bigger foothold in what goes on outside. Gang members who commit crimes FTMP don’t give a hoot about going to prison, to them it’s almost the same world as the outside, so tossing a bunch of them in prison for a longtime doesn’t solve the problem, except to take a relatively small number of the hundreds of thousands there are just in my state who will be replaced by many more.
I think intervention programs work and mentorships are effective and they work locally pretty well, but the problem is that these programs are on such small scales for a much larger problem. You have to tackle the issues of poverty, family issues including parents who are incarcerated, job training, job issues, health care, educational issues, etc. Institutional racism also is a major driving factor and that’s one few conservatives are willing to address at all or admit still exists. It’s a lot easier to just toss people in jail but it doesn’t work in the long term. It just worsens the situation.
Also gang intervention grant programs have dried up since 9-11 when the vast majority of the available funds went out of community policing and gang intervention programs and into homeland security. So you have more cities and counties competing for less and less funding.
One thing about community forums, were there any police present at the forums, either officially or just sitting in(and often, they do send plainclothed in)? Because I find that whether or not the police does attend, often affects the dialogue as well. That’s true in L.A. as well. Don’t know about up north. Also when you talk one on one, then you start hearing concerns about policing, racial profiling, police violence from community members. If they know that you are one person to talk to on this issue, they will seek you out so I hear a lot on police issues one-on-on even during forums where people want more police. These issues aren’t always as separate as people often think.
Another thing about community forums is that they are often crisis-based. If you have had three gang shootings, then yes, any forum addressing that or at that time wil stress more police. If you’ve had an officer-involved shooting or a high profile incident involving police misconduct, then any forum on that issue or those incidents or around the time of those incidents will focus on that. It’s the conversations you have with individuals between forums which often tell you the most of what’s going on in a neighborhood.
And I’m cynical, because if I had a dollar for every community leader who complained to me about police brutality and problems who then turned around at forums and praised them and then said they needed more, I’d be rich. And I understand where they’re coming from in a sense but what happens is that when you attend forums often times, you have to look below the surface.
And even in these communities, you have an officer-involved death or shooting, you will hear about it. I’m not as familiar with the police department in Oakland but I do know it’s had issues including a well-known incident where a Black officer was shot and killed by two rookie White officers. That incident I believe led to either federal or state intervention.
And last time an African-American was shot in one neighborhood in my city last year, you had several hundred people gather there pretty quickly and they started yelling and screaming at the police and calling them murderers. After that, any time the police stopped an African-American motorist or pedestrian, crowds would gather and engage them verbally. Tension was so high in the neighborhoods about the officer-involved shooting that even a White man was shot and killed that even elevated tensions towards the police.
“And I’m cynical, because if I had a dollar for every community leader who complained to me about police brutality and problems who then turned around at forums and praised them and then said they needed more, I’d be rich.”
What rarely gets addressed is “more” doesnt always equal “well trained”..or even “good”. Wanting more police doesnt mean you’re going to get the ones worth a damn. Hiring more people doesnt do squat if you’re not hiring the right people.
My brother-in-law noted that people will often request taht his division set up speed traps in residential areas to catch speeders from out of town. Then, a week (or less) later, when folks realize the RESIDENTS are getting a lot of the tickets, they’re asked to leave.
Police are, well… police. They enforce laws as their job. And the laws are what they are; they don’t vary by city. I am personally not a fan of the many atrocious criminal codes in this country, at the state and federal levels. But I feel a bit uncomfortable with folks demanding policing “on their terms”–though maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean. Can you elaborate?
Oakland, CA police have a lot of problems with racism. In the 50’s, when lots of African Americans started moving to Oakland, the police department made a descision to start recruiting police from southern states, because they knew how hoe to deal with those people. As in, the Oakland police chose to import cops who they thought were more likely to be racist.
The crime rate in Oakland can be directly tied to the economy. The number of cops makes a difference only in that it provides a few jobs, but not one bit in crime reduction. Times with lower crime rates are directly tied to times with more economic opportunity (and fewer young people, but that’s another issue). When the economy got crappy, the crime rate shot up.
Yeah, so what about racist whites beating up a black disabled man? Racist communities beget racist violence which is tolerated by the community at large. A hate crime is a threat against all people belonging to the disempowered class as the victim. Black folks shouldn’t go hanging around with white folks because they might get beat up. stay in your place.
What about black folks engaging in race-motivated violence against white folks? Racist communities beget race-based violence, which is not tolerated or excused by the authorities. White people at large may feel threatened, but they do not receive the message that they should not venture out, instead they feel anger and the minority group for causing trouble. the minority group should stay in it’s place.
Seriously, hate crimes are terrorism against minority groups. It’s just not the same context at all when a dismpowered group targets an empowered group. It’s terrible for the individual victims, but it doesn’t victimize their community at large.
That’s true pheeno. In fact, often it’s the push for “more” within a short period of time that causes cities to take shortcuts in the hiring and screening process or to reduce the things that might disqualify a candidate. Most often, if there’s a shortcut what suffers is the background check(which includes interviews with people in relationships with and people they have worked with) and/or the psychological evaluation.
What happened in D.C., Dade County Florida and other places was that when they did this, large numbers of officers were arrested within three years for various crimes and investigated for misconduct on a large scale. The common denominator that they had was they graduated from the classes coming after these changes.
Sailorman, I’m talking about a style of policing that is more in line with a Community Oriented Problem Solving philosophy than the paramilitaary occupaton type policing you most often see in inner cities and poor neighborhoods. What some experts refer to as the “watchman” style.
Yeah, Oakland’s police department is under consent decree and was slapped by a federal judge in 2005 for noncompliance. Departments don’t wind up under the watchful eye of federal judges and monitors unless they exhibit a pattern and practice of violations against the residents of the city or county and lots and lots of complaints are made. Less than 20 law enforcement agencies in the country are currently or have been under consent decree by the federal government since the legislation authorizing these pattern and practice investigations was passed by Congress in the mid-1990s.
Also, complaints were up in 2004 and 2005 and it was discovered that over 500 complaints went uninvestigated by the department’s internal affairs division, which is a violation of state law.
Radfem- Thanks for your thoughts on the issue. A few details on Oakland– Ron Dellums is the new mayor who is pretty far to the left, so we’ll see pretty soon what he’s going to do. I would just mention that local leftists originally backed Jerry Brown 8 years ago in getting him elected. Under Brown crime went down until the last year or two and since then homicides and crime has skyrocketed to 80’s /early 90’s crack era levels. I know of so many violent incidences to friends, co-workers, aquantices I’ve lost tract. In the last year or so I know a guy who was shot, another beaten so bad he was crippled, lots of assaults, robberies. I’ve in witnessed two muggings, one of which was pretty violent. Roughly speaking in Oakland, crime is the top issue followed by schools and jobs. And yes to some degree they all have some relation to one another.
The big police scandal in recent years here is the riders case (you can google it), which also doesn’t fit into an easy box of white supremacy. Here we had racist cops of color (Filipino and Mexican) framing up blacks (118 in a lawsuit) and a white cop snitching. A judge threw a bunch of legal conditions on the OPD, which the cops have openly responded to by saying that they aren’t going to aggressively police (kind of a pseudo-work action), which I think is probably part of the crime increase.
I don’t really see cops and prisons as really a sustainable solution to violence, but until the liberal/left makes reducing violence a high priority we will see working class people of all races move to the right to solve problems that are very immediate and life threatening.
Les– Your narrative about the history Oakland cops is true from what I’ve heard from older Oakland residents. I disagree with some other points.
1. The economy is directly tied to crime.
The economy in Oakland, while not great hasn’t particularly gotten worse in the last year or two. Homicides increased 57% in 2006, the economy doesn’t explain it nor is anybody locally really even making that argument. Most people are just perplexed. Apparently mid western cities are also seeing this spike and nobody has really come up with an adequete theory as to why
2. The number of cops makes no difference.
Oakland has about 700 cops, which comparatively to other cities is low (per capita-wise). If you were to start a petition for an initiative in Oakland to reduce the number of cops to lets say 300, not only would you be laughed at by Oakland residents but I would argue crime would dramatically inrease if it were by some miracle passed. By the same token if you increased the number of cops to 10,000, you might have a police state but crime would decrease.
A few years ago we had measure Y a local initiative to increase taxes for more cops. While some leftists tried to defeat it, it won by around 70-30% in a city that’s 70% people of color. I voted against it but I understand why a lot of my black neighbors had Yes on Y signs in their windows something a lot of liberals can’t grasp.
3. Oakland’s problem with racist cops.
Like I’ve argued the main problem as seen by most residents of all colors is not cop brutality but crime. Crime is a vastly higher priority, which isn’t to there are no issues wth the police. I went to community meeting about crime last week. Lots of older black residents, who’ve endured living with racist cops, were primarily concerned with the escalating violence.
4. Hate Crimes:
Your argument is that crimes hate crimes against minorities need to be taken more seriously than majority groups. I would argue that is a 1. formula for bad race relations 2. Individual justice is important in my book regardless of other issues even if the community wide impacts might be different, which is also an important. In my opinion it’s not an either/or.
Actually, like most pattern and practice investigations, the one into Oakland was spearheaded by a single incident in Oakland’s case a corruption scandal, but often as in Oakland’s case, the investigation spreads out into every aspect of the department’s operation. If you look at Oakland’s agreement with the federal government, you’ll see that the reforms cover a variety of different areas in the department. If a department like Oakland is included along with others in cities like the LAPD, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Tulsa then it’s in a rather small group of agencies with problems serious enough and deeply entrenched enough to warrant federal intervention(which isn’t done lightly especially in this current presidential administration which prefers to allow local agencies to deal with problems, not outside ones). It’s probable that the federal agencies had their eye on Oakland even before the “Riders” scandal broke. Also, before federal intervention and the scandal, the state attorney general’s office was considering launching a similar investigation against Oakland(and also Oxnard’s police department) so they were getting complaints.
It’s rare that two outside agencies even consider investigating the same agency. Rarer to have both the state and federal government agencies investigate the same one. I can think of one city in that elite group. *sigh*
Having been interviewed during one of these forms of investigations, the questions you are asked cover a wide variety of areas. It’s an interesting process.
The race of individual officers is not as significant as many people believe it is when trying to show whether or not the culture of a department is itself racist or White Supremacist which many are. How many law enforcement agencies aren’t predominantly White and/or male? Few of them. Black and Latino officers can definitely be racist and part of that system, in large part because they are viewed with suspicion by White officers to begin with and also because telling on your fellow officers will pretty much end your law enforcement career. Where is the rule that only White officers are racist?
Actually, quite a few of the people working on violence in my city are if not leftists(which are far and few between in my two-county area), democrats. The neighborhood residents who have seen suppression actions initially appear to reduce crime and then later seem to come back even higher support both police actions that are more selective in terms of whom they target. This kind of policing is in the long-run much more effective than doing wide sweeps of every individual who falls within a certain racial, gender and/or age range which is fairly broad. They also push for better programs for young people especially those who fall in the target range to be recruited into gangs. Intervention programs and mentorships have been successful in my city, but have been used on a small scale. They also raise the money to pay for programs because there’s not as much money spent by the city in terms of providing services at parks and recreational centers in these neighborhoods as in more affluent ones.
It’s our very conservative city government that refuses to do its part at the very least, its obligation to provide city services like cleanup. For example, a realtor may call the city to pick up debris at a property he’s showing and if it’s in a wealthier neighborhood, they’ll have it done the same day, if it’s not in a wealthier area, it might take a week or longer to get someone out from either refuse or even public works depending on what kind of debris.
What suppression strategies and wide-spread sweeps have done when applied by themselves is to change the gang violence from intraracial between members of different gangs to interracial between different gangs with targets being members of certain races regardless of gang affiliation or not. This has been seen in the valley regions and is starting to be seen more and more in larger cities like Los Angeles. That’s why our older residents are more leery of these tactics, because they know they’ll see some reduction, the politicians will slap themselves on the back and then about a year, they’ll see it back tenfold.
I’ve had friends who have lost relatives to shootings, known people who have been shot to death on their porch, and others who were doing ministry in a park and have been shot at. I’ve had encounters with gang members when I’m out with friends who are either Latino and Black that have been scary in the sense that you don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve been mugged, fought off an assailant at my apartment, had a gun held against me, had more guns pointed at me than I can recall. Had guns pointed at me by plainclothed officers who thought I was someone else and thought I was being robbed. Nearly got shot by a police officer also plainclothed while walking across the parking lot with my groceries. Nearly got shot by some kid who pointed a gun in my face to scare me. So I’m no stranger to crime and neither are my neighbors. People here just know what’s not working and have no desire to repeat strategies that not only don’t work, but target innocent people who have nothing to do with crime due to their race, age and where they live.
Police staffing should be an issue for many in Oakland because the department is relatively understaffed for a city that size. But like Pheeno said, it’s quality not quantity and few cities seem to know the difference. It’s also providing policing that treats all people fairly regardless of their race, gender, age, economic status and so forth as well as providing police that are accountable to the communities they serve.
I don’t think the issue of police misconduct or the issue of violence in communities will ever be addressed by either conservatives or leftists because as you’ve said, often both see one side of the coin and completely ignore or underplay the other, and what I’ve found is that the two are interrelated and almost hard to separate from each other. At least in my city, most residents who face both issues headon every day can see that relationship and that’s true in others as well and that comes through conversations with community residents on both of these issues.
It’s going to have to take individuals who don’t strictly adhere to either philosophy to address these issues and the even larger issues that play into both. But I don’t see individuals going to the right to address the issues of crime, simply because when it comes to crime and the criminal justice system, both Republicans and Democrats are not that far apart on their positions on these issues.
And why is there always this assumption that pushing for police accountabilty and beliefs about the hiring of more police officers are contradictory viewpoints? Just like the assumption that if you push for accountability and oppose misconduct and the actions taken by police agencies to excuse it or explain it away, then you oppose police departments. If you oppose the current racist, sexist, homophobic culture in law enforcement agencies then you oppose the profession’s existence.
The profession and its agencies have a lot of changes to make before they can ever do this so often, when there’s more violent crime, there will often be more calls for police services. When there’s an officer-involved shooting or other similar incidents, there will be more calls for police accountability and often calls for a civilian review board which Oakland also already has. In fact, it has a fairly strong model in place and civilian review mechanisms don’t just arise in a vacuum.
At least at community meetings and in the public sphere one issue may prevail over the other. In between these conversations are taking place among community members. It’s called being between a rock and a hard place.
I’m asking about the apparent contradiction between accountability and police staffing because I asked my city government(again) when it’s going to deliver on 25 positions it had promised last year. Strange, it’s the conservatives who always say the city can’t afford to create those positions although it can throw millions of dollars at housing developers often taking this money out of accounts and funds established for providing city services. But being a student of local history, I have seen what happens when my city’s agency is understaffed. Again on both fronts in terms of police brutality and misconduct and also in terms of addressing violent crime.
If you tried to get 10,000 police officers, it’s the city government who would laugh at you. Right before one of them got on the phone with a developer and promised him more money out of the coffer. But Oakland doesn’t need 10,000 anymore than it would want 300.
If you look at many federal and state consent decrees over law enforcement agencies, you will often see the issue of inadequate staffing be raised. I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t an issue in Oakland’s.
Thanks for the explanation, Radfem–I had a feeling I was misunderstanding what you were saying and it seems I was ;)
Rachel: I’m not sure what you mean here, but it sounds like the jurors didn’t take his disability seriously because they thought he was faking or exergerrating his impairment.
It was my poor attempt at sarcasm. I’d agree that it sounds like the jurors didn’t take his impairments seriously, but I don’t believe their accepting his disability at face value would have lessened the prejudice of their judgments so much as altered the nature of them. Given the evident racism in their judgments, that is. My understanding is that his mental impairments and race worked together to make Billy Ray Johnson a special target for this violence, just as prejudice of both conditions allowed the jury to discount the importance of any damage done to him.
Still, I don’t think it’s credible that the jurors actually believed he was faking or exaggerating his impairments, if his history in the small town of Linden (pop. less than 2500) is accurately portrayed in the article. Everyone was pretty clear that his mental capacity made him an easy mark and vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation long before this attack. Over a decade in a small town without his grandmother protecting him as she’d done before his death. To deny his disabilities in jury judgment was simply a way to use his impairments and the iconic image of the dangerous, mentally unstable black man to feed their racist beliefs.
Another area where disability enters the mix is this assumption that
When nondisabled people roam the streets and act without family permission, it’s called independence and adulthood. When disabled people do it, it’s a crime. A crime that’s often punished by being institutionalized. Barry Corbett offered an excellent eyewitness report on nursing home life–a lot like jail, but more drugs.
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I am happy to hear Billy Ray Johnson won his case.