Wednesday’s presentation by Citizens for Juvenile Justice was extremely powerful and damning. New Bedford has serious policing problems. The departure of a police chief will leave both a vacuum and uncertainty about what sort of leadership replaces him. And the city has a mayor who couldn’t be bothered to attend the unveiling of a study of 5,000 police stops, all of which took place over the last 5 years of his incumbency. Thankfully, New Bedford has many friends and residents who do care.
After the killings of Erik Aguilar and Malcolm Gracia by New Bedford police — which alone cost the city $1.5 million in settlements — all the same conditions still exist today and it is only a matter of time until New Bedford experiences another police killing. Action is needed to fix bad policing both at the national, state, and municipal level.
Some people may not like hearing it, but the heart of the problem of police killings is American racism. While police forces and sheriffs may no longer officially be the slave catchers they were created to be, their modern counterparts still control and surveil Black and brown neighborhoods like military occupiers. Indeed, many of today’s police officers have had recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. And aided by the Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 program, America’s police forces not only look like military occupations but use identical equipment.
As CFJJ reported, people in non-white New Bedford neighborhoods feel that the NBPD “essentially operates as an occupying force in poor neighborhoods of color.” For the most part, White America’s neighborhoods are spared this bad- and over-policing. While many white Americans have joined the calls for police reform, many more simply don’t want to know what goes on elsewhere.
But thanks to body cameras and mobile devices we are finally seeing just how bad 21st Century policing in America really is. And this includes police training. Whether it’s de-escalation, dealing with mentally-ill people, or the finer points of patrolling neighborhoods, America’s police basically don’t have a clue. And this is precisely as designed. Because the goal of America’s police forces is not so much to “protect and to serve” as it is to keep Black and brown people in line.
Time and time again mental health emergencies turn into police slayings. Time and time again traffic stops result in a homicide. Time and time again authoritarian police “compliance” rapidly resorts to force. Time and time again interrogations turn into tragedies. Given that police officers are trained intensively to kill with skilled center shots but lack training in psychology, social work, or any of the skills that might actually serve the public, it is no wonder that so many interactions end up with a Black or brown death. For this reason, we’ve seen numerous proposals to divert police funding into the hands of agencies that actually provide human and mental health services to the public. Let police investigate real crimes but leave the rest of human services to the real professionals.
Police impunity compounds aggressive over-policing, poor training, and the misplaced use of armed police officers for social services and traffic control by rewarding bad policing. The few cases we now see of officers being tried for homicide are a totally new phenomenon. And they have only come about as a result of public outrage. Unfortunately, these cases, rare as unicorns, do not represent a consistent commitment to racial justice in which police officers receive the same justice as everyone else. On the contrary, over decades police impunity has become enshrined in law thanks to a legal doctrine known as “Qualified Immunity.”
As Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-7) wrote in a fact sheet to accompany H.R.1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act: “The court’s broad interpretation of this doctrine has allowed police to violate constitutional rights with impunity, providing officers immunity for everything from unlawful traffic stops to brutality and murder. Qualified immunity shields police from accountability, impedes true justice, and undermines the constitutional rights of every person in this country. It’s past time to end qualified immunity.” But, as of this moment, impunity is still the rule and the Chauvin trial the rarest of exceptions.
Compounding the structural defects mentioned previously is the absence of community control. Police departments are structured as paramilitary organizations whose members take orders from higher-ups. Therefore, just as we saw in the George Floyd killing, police usually defer to a ranking officer even when it is obvious that a murder by one of their own is in progress. Just ask former policewoman Cariol Horne, who was fired in 2008 for stopping a white officer from administering a lethal chokehold to a Black man. She didn’t “go along to get along” and it cost her a job and her pension.
In a society that refuses to see itself as a police state, why do we blindly accept that police departments look exactly like branches of the military? Who, actually, are police waging war against? Moreover, how is paramilitary organization consistent with fulfilling a municipal services function? And why are citizens completely locked out of managing police forces? You may not like the answer, but here it is anyway: because the goal of America’s police forces is not to “protect and to serve” but to keep Black and brown people in line. Public management of police departments would upend this function pretty quickly.
Following a killing, police are usually permitted to investigate themselves, with police unions setting the terms of investigations and interrogations. District attorneys, who have daily, fraternal, interactions with the police, almost always refuse to prosecute even the most egregious misconduct. We saw all this unfold after Malcolm Gracia’s murder, and America has seen it play out hundreds of thousands of times. The officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times? — he went back to work yesterday.
None of this is what any sane person would call justice. In fact, the bitter phrase “criminal justice” has become such a cruel joke that many of us can’t manage to put those words between our teeth. America may fancy itself as a nation of laws, but each time someone charged with enforcing laws breaks them with impunity while elected representatives look the other way, it shreds our democracy a little bit more.
National and state legislation is needed to set us on a different course. As of this writing, only a handful of states have lifted qualified immunity for police officers. The Massachusetts House, which only very reluctantly passed a police reform bill in an overtime session last year, preserved Qualiifed Immunity after intense lobbying by police unions. This should tell you who many Massachusetts legislators really represent.
Last month the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.1280, the George Floyed Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which addresses policing practices and law enforcement accountability. It increases accountability for police misconduct, requires more transparency and data collection, and eliminates discriminatory policing practices. It also enables federal prosecution of unconstitutional practices by state and local law enforcement, limits qualified immunity in some cases, authorizes the DOJ to subpoena police departments more easily, create a police misconduct database, and mandates the body cameras and the reporting of incidents where force was used. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful this legislation will clear the Senate.
Changes to policing policy, such as the 19 recommendations Citizens for Juvenile Justice offered New Bedford residents, can make a big difference. For too long police forces have not only enjoyed complete impunity but also relative freedom from public controls and mandates. These at least represent policy changes. But they are recommendations, not absolute requirements. For that you need legislation. Yet too many mayors and city councilors habitually defer to the police on police matters while hypocritically micromanaging schools and other municipal departments. Too many legislators defer to police, sheriffs, or police unions. This sloppy, lazy governance has contributed to sloppy, unaccountable policing — precisely what is to be found in most of America’s police departments.
One obvious solution is to vote more wisely. But let’s not be naive. Those who want to preserve 21st Century American policing are constantly told that, without the police having carte blanche (run that through Google Translate some time) anarchy would rein and blood would run in the streets. What they really mean is — without police impunity the Black and brown people would rise up and overrun us.
In the end only complete citizen control of police forces, including the end of Qualified Immunity, will change the structure, practices, reporting, investigations, hiring and firing, discipline, and prosecution of bad cops. Instead of a primary mission to subdue the non-white population, police might then actually start serving communities who hire them.
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