On May 20th, 1961, John Lewis and Jim Zwerg were about to die in Montgomery, Alabama. They were Freedom Riders, and they had just arrived by bus. Upon their arrival, they were greeted by a mob of whites, many of whom were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, who attacked the Freedom Riders as they disembarked. One of the last things that Lewis saw before passing out was Floyd Mann, Alabama’s Director of Public Safety, who fired warning shots at the mob, driving them back before moving on to rescue another Freedom Rider, William Barbee, who was being beaten by a crowd with iron clubs and baseball bats.
Floyd Mann was an extraordinary person. The day before, over the objections of Alabama Governor John Patterson, Mann’s friend and patron since the third grade, Mann assured Attorney General Robert Kennedy that if Patterson ordered him to protect the Freedom Riders from the Klan, Mann could protect them. Mann had protected the Freedom Riders from Birmingham to Montgomery that morning with a phalanx of State Police; he had gone to Montgomery to protect them in person because he rightly suspected that the Montgomery authorities lacked his commitment to the law.
Floyd Mann was an extraordinary person, and the image of him, and the archetype he embodies, lies large across our collective imagination. He was, as David Halberstam writes, a lawman; and we know instantly what he means: a man who enforces the law fairly, who says the truth even at the risk of his own position, who stands up to their friends when they are wrong, who will if need be defend right with his person. Or, as Floyd Mann described his actions that day, he was “just doing what had to be done.”
We, as Americans, believe in the Lawman. We trust him. And we have built a vast apparatus, touching the lives of every American and millions more around the globe, which depends on the Lawman to function effectively. Are you concerned about who decides when to authorize a drone strike? Worry not, Lawmen are deciding! Whether the question is who is investigating claims of police misconduct or who gets their phones tapped and emails read, the answer is always the same. Lawmen are doing it. And we trust Lawmen.
But Floyd Mann knew better. The problem with police work, Mann said, is that “by its nature it tended to attract a certain percentage of sadistic people, who enjoyed the job because it legitimized the natural meanness.” He thought the solution was for a good police chief to set limits for his officers.
Another legendary Lawman, Frank Serpico, became famous for leading the fight against corruption within the NYPD nearly half a century ago. Here’s his evaluation from last fall of how that is going:
Law enforcement agencies need to eliminate those who use and abuse the power of the law as they see fit. As I said to the Knapp Commission 43 years ago, we must create an atmosphere where the crooked cop fears the honest cop, and not the other way around. An honest cop should be able to speak out against unjust or illegal behavior by fellow officers without fear of ridicule or reprisals. Those that speak out should be rewarded and respected by their superiors, not punished.
We’re not there yet.
Indeed, we don’t even seem to be making progress. In January, the Harvard Public Heath Review conducted a study of deaths due to legal intervention in the United States between 1960 and 2010.
Their results:
Between 1960 and 2010, 15699 US deaths were classified as due to legal intervention, of which 63.3% (n=9934) occurred among men age 15-34. Among these men, 5489 were classified as white (55.3%) and 4204 as black (42.3%), a percentage 3 to 4 times that for the US black population (e.g., 1960: 10.5% black, 88.6% white; 2010: 12.6% black, 72.4% white). Only rates for the black men exhibited a sharp rise and fall (1960s-1970s) followed by a post 1980-plateau; rates for the white men exhibited far less variation (Figure 1, Table 1). The rate ratio for black vs. white men for death due to legal intervention always exceeded 2.5 (median: 4.5) and ranged from 2.6 (95% confidence interval [CI] 2.1, 3.1) in 2001 to 10.1 (95% CI 8.7, 11.7) in 1969, with the relative and absolute excess evident in all county income quintiles.
Our results indicate that the excess black vs. white mortality rate among men age 15-34 due to legal intervention is both longstanding – and modifiable. Given documented greater underreporting of black vs. white homicides by police officers, the results also likely underestimate the black vs. white excess. Moreover, the lack of sharp difference by county income quintile, post-1980, stands in contrast to well-documented inequities by county income level for both infant mortality and premature mortality (death before age 65), suggesting that societal determinants of deaths due to legal intervention are driven by additional or different aspects of societal inequality.
To unpack that a little, black men are killed due to legal intervention at a significantly higher rate than whites, regardless of income. And there has not been any significant change in this over the last thirty years.
In fact, time has failed to show improvement at every level of the security state. The National Security Agency is forbidden from spying domestically by the National Security Act of 1947, a proscription reaffirmed by Executive Order 12333 in 1981; in 2015 they are now able to look at nude photos of Americans. In 1971, the FBI shut down their infamous COINTELPRO program, admitting that their spying on and infiltrating on domestic political dissidents was a violation of their first amendment rights; forty years later, they did the same thing to participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The FBI had an entire forensics unit giving fraudulent testimony for over 20 years; similar problems with forensic evidence have been found in St. Paul, Philadelphia, Detroit, Texas, and North Carolina, but despite reporting on these issues going back over a decade, nothing has changed. We have an epidemic of rape within our prison system, with over 80,000 prisoners - people who are in the custody of the state - raped every year. Twelve years after the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, two states have complied with it. The ACLU estimates that just from the time the act was passed until 2012, nearly two million prisoners were sexually assaulted. Outside of our prisons, the rate of rapes and the conviction rate for rape has not shown meaningful improvement since the 1970s.
These examples, and the countless more that could fill story after story, are not evidence of a few bad apples distributed throughout our city, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. These problems reach every level of government, every aspect of law enforcement, from prevention to investigation to prosecution to corrections. The problems have proven persistent over long periods of time, despite the work of civilian review boards, internal affairs divisions, fine investigative journalists, state and federal laws, and the judiciary at every level. The system itself is rotten, and our efforts to date have not made very much difference. And until we are able to see the problem as systemic, until we acknowledge that our criminal justice system has failed to reflect our priorities, our values, and our laws, until we come to grips with the notion that Lawmen are unable to successfully deliver the justice we want, we will continue to find our will and purpose thwarted. Do we really want another forty years of failed, piecemeal reforms?