One of America’s greatest remaining challenges is the specter of violent crime. Current White House resident Donald Trump has promised to “eliminate all crime,” arguing that it is the worst it’s been in 45 years (which it isn’t), that black people can’t walk out their front door “without being shot” (which they overwhelming can), and has repeatedly pointed to the city of Chicago, saying that the violence is so bad that he might soon “send in the feds!”
Though it is sometimes easy to ignore the alt-factual ravings of our current truth mangler-in-chief, honesty does require that we look at the problems in cities like Chicago—and do so unflinchingly. Honesty requires that we mourn for the unconscionable police shooting of Laquan McDonald and its subsequent cover-up. But it also requires mourning the deaths of hundreds of others in the South side of Chicago who simply wanted what we all want: a chance to live, work, play, thrive, and survive, only to have it ripped away by white hot bullets often fired at the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
The first problem for Donald Trump is the fact that “the feds” have already been to Chicago, and here’s what they found as they examined the Chicago Police:
- Shooting at fleeing suspects who presented no immediate threat;
- Shooting at vehicles without justification;
- Using less-lethal force, including Tasers, against people who pose no threat;
- Using force to retaliate against and punish individuals;
- Using excessive force against juveniles;
- Failing to effectively de-escalate situations or to use crisis intervention techniques to reduce the need for force
- Employing tactics that unnecessarily endanger officers and result in avoidable shootings and other uses of force;
- The city fails to investigate the majority of cases it is required to investigate by law.
- When it does investigate, the questioning of officers is aimed at eliciting information favorable to the officer, and investigators do not confront officers with inconsistent physical evidence.
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The city does not take sufficient steps to secure accurate and complete witness statements, including by preventing officers from concealing misconduct.
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Discipline is haphazard, unpredictable and does not deter misconduct.
This weekend I had a chance to catch episodes from a new documentary series on EPIX produced by the likes of Shonda Rhimes, Jesse Williams, Norman Lear, and JJ Abrams called America: Divided. The series originally began airing in October 2016, before the election, and does a deep dive into many different difficult American issues.
The first episode on Chicago crime and police problems features actor/rapper Common, who may be better known from starring in rom-com movies with Queen Latifah. But Common became politically relevant when Republicans objected to his participation in a White House Poetry Slam with President Obama, painting him as being sympathetic to an alleged cop killer when he had written a song that argued the accused had been wrongfully targeted.
Common is a native of Chicago and in this program he begins with the shooting of McDonald and manages a one-on-one sit down with Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. The former chief had just been relieved of his position in the wake of the release of the McDonald shooting video and filing of first degree murder charges against the officer who fired the fatal 16 shots, but before the eventual firing of the seven other officers who attempted to cover the shooting up.
McCarthy argues, as many police have, that there have only been 19 police shootings in Chicago last year while another 3,000 people were shot in the city at the same time. Seven out of 10 of those shooting victies were black, and 90 percent of those shootings go unsolved.
Mathematically it’s true that the police aren’t killing anywhere near as many as other people are in Chicago, but it’s also true that the number of police killing of citizens has been greatly covered up. For many years the FBI Uniform Crime Report has only recorded 400 incidents of police in “justifiable homicides,” largely because many departments fail to report their information and they’ve never recorded the number of shootings that were considered unjustified. The Washington Post and the Guardian have scoured media reports and found the shooting count to be as high as 1,100 in a given year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has more recently released a report with estimates that are as high as 1,400 arrest-related deaths per year.
Criminal justice researchers have long argued that official counts of police killings, which rely on voluntary reports from local police departments, are woefully incomplete. Over the past decade, about half a dozen efforts by activists, volunteers and media organizations have sprung up in response to widespread outrage about high-profile killings by police officers to try to fill the breach using information from media reports and other sources. Their annual death toll estimates since 2013 have generally ranged from 1,100 to 1,400, more than twice as high as the counts from official government sources.
So it’s not nearly as minor an issue as McCarthy would paint it to be. But to his credit, he correctly points out that the divide between police and the black community dates all the way back the imposition of slavery, where white police were often the enforcers of that horrible policy and that challenges such as poverty, lack of opportunity, and education make bridging this gap of trust and crime challenging.
Rather than looking at police violence and street violence as opposite issues, Common takes McCarthy’s argument seriously: that these problems are intertwined, and that addressing one also requires addressing the other.
Walking through the the neighborhood with state prosecutor candidate Kim Foxx, who herself grew up in Chicago’s housing projects, Common gets some candid talk about the police from young people in the neighborhood.
Foxx: I can’t fix the States Attorney’s office without the public helping me. How do I convince you to work with me, and to work with the police because they’re part of the problem and part of the solution.
Clamensa: The trust is down for the police, and the politicians. Don’t nobody trust them. They just let you down.
Foxx: We got people getting locked up, we got people getting killed.
Block C: Yeah, the violence in the city is real crazy.
Foxx How many people do y’all know who’ve been shot or killed in the last year.
Young Man: Oh man, that count over 30.
Block C: Me personally, I know like 13 people that have been shot. Like 4 that’ve been killed, one of them was a family member.
Young Man: Facebook is becoming a big obituary for Chicago. Big graveyard. You stay here, it’s like youz waiting to die. It’s messed up here.
Clamensa: You can’t even raise yo kids here. They can’t go out the front and ride a bike or jump rope. The ice cream truck don’t even come down the block.
Young Man: It’s messed up man, and the police ain’t doing nothing about it. So you got to protect yourself.
That last bit right there is striking. I know what he’s saying because I grew up in South Central L.A. and the situation was largely the same. The police were not there to help and they were very often a threat, particularly to the law abiding members of the public.
Block C: I have never in my life called the police on anybody and I’ve been in so many jams, I mean jams.
Foxx: Why?
Block C: I Don’t Trust Them.
Young Man: If you know a group of people, right, and all they do is harass you, and you need help because there’s a situation going on, are you gonna call those same group of people?
I have the answer to that: Hell no.
Basically what you’re going to do is try to take care of the situation on your own. You’re going to try to defend yourself—very often with a gun. So when we look at the problems of “gun violence” in places like Chicago, it’s not always the case that a person simply having a gun in their possession is a “bad guy.” They might be someone trying to defend themselves from someone else. This is how the broken trust with the police has directly led to the increase in violence in the city. This was the case when Chicago Police shot the fleeing 17-year-old Ronald Johnson in the back. He was armed, but police ignored the fact that he had been the victim of the attempted shooting, which brought them to the scene in the first place.
Common also talks to activists at the Invisible Institute, who have struggled for a decade to gain 15 years of police complaint data and plot it on a heat map.
This map largely matches the map of economic poverty and enrichment in the city. The parts of the city populated with the poorest people who are least able to afford legal protection are exactly the same people who have been least served by the police. You would also find a match with a map of the number of shootings and murders in the city. The correlation between poor policing is directly linked to higher rates of violence.
A full 99 percent of complaints from black citizens were dismissed. Some officers racked up 40 to 50 complaints each. Neighborhoods like this don’t just happen. They are the direct result of racial red-lining which causes racial segregation in cities like Chicago and restricts the ability of people to escape these open-air economic prisons as they slowly turn into shooting galleries.
Common then visits the local jail and talks to the sheriff, who states that the most common prisoner in the jail is there for retail theft, most often stealing food, and that because they can’t afford to pay for a bond they’ll spend as many as 100 days in jail. And we thought we abolished “debtors prisons.”
He then goes to talk to some of the inmates at a nearby prison and they talk about how difficult it is once you been incarcerated to break the cycle and become gainfully employed after they check the box “convict” on a application.
He talks to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, who documents that more black men are currently under supervision of the criminal justice system than were enslaved at the end of the Civil War.
The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.
Alexander documents how things changed in just a few short decades.
Alexander: The war on drugs sweeped millions of black Americans off the streets mostly for non-violent drug offenses…. Here in Chicago you have a city that suffered as much as any did from de-industrialization and the disappearance of work. In the 1970’s about seventy percent of African-Americans had blue collar factory jobs. By 1987 that figure plummeted to twenty-eight percent, work vanished, Jobs were shipped overseas. De-industrialization. The collapse, literally the economic collapse of black communities. Now did we invest in those communities? No, we declared war.
When you look at which neighborhoods have been most affected by mass incarceration and the drug war, when you look at who is actually now committing acts of violence, where young people are acting out with enormous fear, rage, despair, broken heartedness right? These are kids who’s family members have been cycling in and out of prison, these are kids who believe that no matter what one way or another their going to jail. These are young folks who grew up in the age of mass incarceration. And we want to just blame them, and say we want to get “tough on them.” Tough on them like you got tough on their daddy? Or their grand-daddy? Tough on them like that, how did that turn out?
The economic collapse, the educational collapse, and the collapse in trust of police and politicians have left generations of young people in desperation and without hope. Many of these young people are survivors of violence and members of families that have directly seen violence where again, 90 percent of those cases go unsolved and unpunished. We see these exact problems in areas where we have created job deserts, followed by the influx of the drug trade as a last-ditch source of income as well as a balm to alleviate the emotional pain of being left destitute. Today, it’s referred to as the “opioid epidemic.” Cities like Chicago simply had more time stumbling down this road, and now we see the exact same stories—with the exact same rise in gun violence—in middle-class white cities such as Dayton, Ohio.
We have common ground when it comes to these problems. What has happened to us in some cities is a lesson to those in other cities who may have been previously spared and are now feeling the stress or economic divestment pressing down on them. It may have been our sons and daughters dying due to guns and drugs, but now it’s starting to become theirs.
These issues are to a large extent the same exact ones that Donald Trump ran on. But the question remains: what are his solutions? Bullying China and Mexico for a better deal? Will the few factories he does bring back open up in the South side of Chicago or other underserved, poor communities in our cities? Will his “law and order” focus help, or will it further exacerbate the problem, relaunching Reagan’s prison pipeline? Will sending in the National Guard make these people trust the police, or help bring people out of poverty?
There are solutions to these problems, but we must face them honestly or we will fail to end the downward spiral—not just for black people in an inner city jobs desert, but for everyone.
If you can find this series, watch it. Just about every episode is dynamic and enlightening and absolutely worthy of Emmy and Golden Globe consideration. If they were to make an Episode 2 about the Flint water crisis with Rosario Dawson, an Episode 3 about housing discrimination with Norman Lear, or an Episode 4 with Jesse Williams on school resegregation in Florida and combine them into a film like Spotlight, they would have Oscar buzz all over them.