“The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. . . . One in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. . . . We’ve sent a quarter-million kids to adult jails and prisons to serve long prison terms, some under the age of 12. . . .
“Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders have been forced to spend decades in prison. We’ve created laws that make writing a bad check or committing a petty theft or minor property crime an offense that can result in life imprisonment. We have declared a costly war on people with substance abuse problems. . . . Presumptions of guilt, poverty, racial bias, and a host of other social, structural, and political dynamics have created a system that is defined by error, a system in which thousands of innocent people now suffer in prison.”
The words are of Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard Law School graduate, and are from his book
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, published by Random House in October. They appear in
Challenging the justice system, a
Washington Post column by his Harvard Law classmate, columnist Ruth Marcus.
First a caution - she thinks the no bill in Ferguson was the right decision. Please ignore that when reading her column, which will give you a good sense of some of the issues, and includes some of Stevenson's personal experience with police.
I also suggest you also read Dana Milbank in today's Washington Post. In a column titled Eric Garner case offers Obama a moment to seize, he compares some of the strong rhetoric on the Garner case from those on the right to what he considers Obama's somewhat tepid response so far.
Please keep reading.
First, what neither column acknowledges is that in Staten Island the DA apparently only offered the grand jury the option of a murder charge. That seems excessive, and an almost deliberate attempt to obtain a no-bill. The evidence from the video tape would much more easily have sustained an indictment for a lesser charge - reckless endangerment, manslaughter, etc.
That said, there is still the problem of the action itself, not just by the officer charged, but by the others who did not stop him from using the prohibited choke hold. There is the entire notion of a violent arrest of a person doing a misdemeanor, who was not fleeing or resisting arrest, and the ignoring of his repeated statement that he could not breathe.
Allow me to quote one section of Milbank:
“How this cop did not go to jail, was not held responsible, is beyond me.”
“When you look at what they did to this guy and putting him in a chokehold like that, it’s inexcusable — absolutely inexcusable and brutal.”
“This is ridiculous. . . . It’s obscene. It’s grotesque.”
“Here’s a guy who was not resisting arrest, was not being a jerk.”
“This is the New York police completely out of control . . . [M]anslaughter absolutely should have been considered. Why that wasn’t considered is beyond me.”
And who uttered such phrases? The Rev. Al Sharpton? Lawyers for the Garner family?
Actually, these sentiments were voiced Thursday by Glenn Beck, one of the fiercest warriors of the right.
There is an opportunity right now to have a broader conversation. The Garner case is shocking. So are the shootings in Cleveland and Brooklyn, especially the former.
But I offer a real caution. If you think that the presence of video showing excessive force will necessarily lead to indictment and conviction, remember the California trial of Stacy King and the other officers who brutalized Rodney King.
I strongly believe that there are a number of issues that must be addressed simultaneously. Racial bias and fear are certainly a major part.
So are how we recruit, train and supervise police.
So is the tendency of many large bureaucracies to cover up wrongdoing by their own and attempting to deal with it internally - for the police is it often described as the Blue Wall of Silence, but we have seen similar patterns with pedophile priests in the Roman Catholic Church, and in the lack of accountability for the vast majority of the financial crimes of Wall Street that almost destroyed the world's economy.
We need an honest examination of our entire criminal justice system, from investigation to how and who we arrest, to how we present evidence to grand juries (and also how some prosecutors abuse their discretion by not bringing cases to grand juries and in what they present, as we have seen in both Ferguson and Staten Island), to how we prosecute (think George Zimmerman), to how we incarcerate and for how long.
We really need to rethink how we do policing. The militarization of the police is clearly a part of the problem. Police should not be in opposition to the communities they police, but rather should be part of them.
But we also need to be honest about race.
When one in three black males will wind up in the criminal justice system, something is wrong in our society, and we need to step back and examine all factors, including the ongoing racism that still permeates far too much of our society,
We have much to think about.
We have much to consider.
We need to have the conversation now, before even more get unnecessarily killed.