Plaintive fence signs, shown below, divide a Brooklyn middle school's basketball court from the street but summon us to heal social wounds. The individualism in American culture makes this impossible. It was manifest in mythic notions of the gunslinger or vigilante on television, the prestige of astronauts or sports stars in real life as I came of age in the Sixties.
Now it's about “Building One's Personal Brand.” Park Slope's Barnes and Noble bookstore had amply stocked “how-to” shelves when I popped in to cool off from my soup kitchen shift, but I searched in vain for a “common good” collection. Yet the survival of our democracy demands that we wake up and see clearly to adopt these student signs as a mandate for action.
I don't recall ever hearing a police official express remorse for the death sequence exacted upon unarmed people of color. The refrain that “the vast majority of cops are good people while a few bad apples cause problems” has echoed for decades. The orchard on its perimeter if not at its heart is rotting.
How is it that Wilmington, North Carolina police officers even in private could think it fine to confide the urge to “slaughter Blacks,” launching “race war”? Even if only several so spoke, what can we deduce about that city's police leadership and culture?
Aurora, Colorado police in riot gear marched in formation alongside a peaceful outdoor park performance of violin sonatas memorializing the late Elijah McClain before invading with tear gas, routing onstage musicians and families having lawn picnics. McClain, 23, heading home at night from a convenience store was roughed up, and knocked down by police officers whose assault left abrasions all over his body, the Coroner said. A sedative police at the scene had ordered injected provoked the young man's fatal heart attack. He “was resisting arrest,” they asserted.
How could that happen after so many such episodes elsewhere should have induced cautious police behavior? Why attack a youth whom they outnumbered? Who ordered police officers to attack the memorial? Why?
Aurora officers mimicked the carotid hold that subdued McClain, used on his neck to restrict the blood flow, posing for each other in celebratory portraits — a Jim Crow lynching practice. Policing began with slave patrols.
We've just learned that the late Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, killed by police officers who’d breached the wrong door with guns blazing was still alive for five minutes as she bled out, unaided.
Need we cite more? We could cite the victims yearly as we do at New York's World Trade Center site for the 9-11 dead. Where's the intelligence, morality or remorse?
“Just some bad apples. Most cops are good.”
Confession, remorse and pledging amends are tenets of the three major faiths. The sacred vows in temple, church and mosque should serve civil society but police leaders afraid to seem weak recoil, clam up, then cough up cliches with elected leaders complicit.
Where is courage to address the wrongdoing — and empathy to join us in mourning? Does one need psychotherapy to know that humility emanates from inner strength?
The post-World War II Nuremberg Principles require one to resist an immoral order; “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him of responsibility for a crime against peace.” Yet Aurora's rank and file marched in lockstep to their teargas attack
Did the “vast majority of good cops” have no openings on their schedules that day? Did no one object? Were conscience and dissent “collateral damage” when the Department of Defense from 1997 to 2014 transferred $4.3 billion in military grade weapons to the nation's police departments, as PBS reported? The methods and mindset soon followed.
Houston Chief Art Acevedo describes police-community relations as “the heroes and the haters,” a divisive false choice. “If you're not sworn you don't know the job,” I was told as I chaired the NYPD Training Advisory Council's Race Subcommittee after police officers' banned chokehold killed Eric Garner — for which Commissioner James O'Neill, after five years with melodramatic anguish fired Daniel Pantaleo but not his abettors.
The status quo is untenable. Salvation lies in speaking truth toward common ground.
George Mason University Professor Joseph Montville, a 23-year international diplomat, found that “healing and reconciliation in violent ethnic and religious conflict depend on a process of transactional contrition and forgiveness between aggressor and victims. The process involved examination of the conflict history, acknowledgement of injustice, and losses, and taking moral responsibility for them.”
Federal Consent Decrees filled the void with court-ordered police reforms in Ferguson, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, New Orleans, New York and elsewhere. The Obama Administration enforced fourteen such mandates but Trump's first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, abolished them all; Bill Barr, his second, enables Trump's present authoritarian deployments of Federal forces to Portland, Chicago and Albuquerque.
The cycle of police abuse and civil protest, public demands and defensive officials typically concludes with a blue ribbon commission's incremental suggestions though the seminal 1968 Kerner Commission report is worth reading. It exposed structural racism, condemned white society for creating and condoning the ghetto, found that police brutality had caused 1967’s urban uprisings, and foretold “two nation's, one Black, one white, separate and unequal.”
Its documented poverty-to-crime correlation suggests we review the momentary notice paid to Sandtown's economic deprivation after Baltimore police officers killed Freddie Gray, legs shackled, shoved into a van on his stomach, hands cuffed behind him, without a seatbelt for the “rough ride” ahead.
President Obama could have acted. He’d had his 2008 transition team study Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives. Obama instead cast his lot with Wells Fargo, Bank of America and more financial institutions “too big to fail” with FDR's models still there for us.
Substantive police budget cuts to boost affordable housing, health care and jobs, then toyed with but discarded, must happen now on local levels to push policing from a warrior to a guardian identity as Sir Robert Peel's “Principles of Law Enforcement” (1829) defined it.
“The ability of the police to perform their duties,” wrote Peel, a British Prime Minister, “is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.” Facilitated discussions toward a vision of social justice that reduces crime as it improves people's lives would help both sides build the civic bond Peel conceived.
Police unlearning punishment would dispel public rage. The advent of restorative justice would lift public trust. People of color at last could feel safe. One could take pride in policing.
We would celebrate the work that brought us common ground and achieved those Brooklyn students’ ideals. Wouldn't “Democracy” be a memorable brand?
