In addition to the erratic and immature behavior of the current president when it comes to matters of national security and health care, another pressing issue is the question of exactly how this administration will respond to the difficult challenges faced by police and communities of color. Currently, they stand in violent conflict, and the only thing Donald Trump has proposed is threatening to send in the National Guard.
Our newly minted Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, has claimed that he hasn’t even read the Department of Justice’s report on the deeply troubled Chicago Police Department, claiming that it is more “anecdotal than scientific.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions acknowledged Monday that he hasn't read the Obama-era Department of Justice reports on abuses committed by police departments in Chicago and Ferguson, Missouri. Sessions, who is now the nation's top law enforcement official, said he's only read summaries of the two reports, according to Reuters, and, apparently, he found no reason to read on. "Some of it was pretty anecdotal and not so scientifically based," he commented. [...]
The conclusions drawn by the DOJ following its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department were far from "anecdotal." The report found that African Americans accounted for 93 percent of arrests made by Ferguson police despite being just 67 percent of the city's population; that black residents were more than twice as likely to have their cars searched during traffic stops despite being more than 25 percent less likely to be caught with contraband than white drivers; and that some discretionary citations like "walking in roadways" were issued nearly exclusively to black people.
If this is the kind of “in-depth” analysis we can expect from Sessions, exactly what’s in store for the future of police and public relations remains in serious doubt.
As shown by the video above, there are many who are openly opposed to the core arguments of the Black Lives Matter and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” movements. Some claim that various instances of police brutality and violence that are the centerpieces of these movements are “isolated incidents” that have simply received exorbitant media hype. They argue you can find just as many if not more incidents of police brutality against white citizens as you can black or brown.
They argue that situations such as the shooting of Tamir Rice are far more deserving of attention than that of Michael Brown, who they continue to contend was a violent, strong-arm robber and thug based on the video footage from the local market taken several minutes before his final, fatal shooting despite. They argue this despite the recent release of additional footage from the store which puts many of these presumptions in doubt.
And there was also considerable forensic evidence indicating the Officer Darren Wilson’s story was false, as I’ve previously written.
Wilson claimed that “Brown punched him hard with his right hand”, but that was the hand Brown had the cigarillos in which would have softened the blows and further Wilson didn’t have any bruises on the left side of his face indicating that he’d been hit. All of his bruises were on the right side and back of his neck indicating that they occurred as a result of Wilson grabbing and holding Brown while he struggled to get away, rather than attack. We discussed the fact that Brown couldn’t have been shot from the front as Wilson claims because he was hit in the back of his right bicep.
How’d he get that wound from the front? Ricochet? Heat-seeking bullet?
He was also grazed on the inside of right inner arm, and one of the only ways for that wound to happen is if his hands were up palm forward when that shot was fired. If that was the case the bullet would have continued and re-entered, hitting him in the upper right chest — and he has a another wound in that exact spot.
The DOJ didn’t determine that “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was a lie — they made no definitive determination at all as to where Brown’s arms were as he was struck, but the one place they couldn’t have been is where former Officer Darren Wilson claimed — at his sides.
Lastly the claim that Brown “charged” is disproven by the timing of the shots — based on an audio recording and the distance he travelled based on the blood trail — which was 15ft. in 4-6 seconds for a best possible speed of 3mph to 1.54mph which is not a “charge”, that’s a boy whose been shot in the chest stumbling and falling, only to be hit in the top of the head and in the eye as he landed. That being the case Brown was never a threat to Wilson, and his killing was a deliberate cold-blooded murder. An execution.
The first and largest problem with any macro analysis of these issues is the fact that most police departments completely fail to voluntarily self report the full number and scope of these incidents to the DOJ. This causes outlets such as the Guardian and Washington Post to take up the effort to give us definitive data on the number and type of arrest-related deaths that occur each year. Following the lead of such efforts, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has used similar methods to update their own information—and the results have been stunning, as shown below via Mother Jones (emphasis added):
The bureau's researchers identified 1,348 arrest-related deaths from June 2015 through March 2016 using media reports and crowdsourced information—an average of about 135 deaths per month. For June through August 2015, they also surveyed police agencies and identified an additional 46 arrest-related deaths—or 12 percent more—than the number the bureau had tallied independently for that time period. Extrapolating the data, and correcting for the police-reporting disparity, the bureau estimated there were about 1,900 arrest-related deaths in the 12 months ending May 2016.
The lack of reliable federal data on police-involved deaths received national attention in August 2014 after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. In the absence of reliable numbers, the Washington Post and the Guardian US began tracking officer-involved killing in 2015 using media reports and crowdsourced information, a model the Department of Justice drew on for its new program. The Guardian US determined that police killed 1,146 people last year during interactions on the street. By contrast, police departments reported just 444 police shootings to the FBI in 2014
Police departments themselves reported just 444 fatal police shootings in 2014. Since then, the Guardian has found 1,146 during 2015 and 1,096 during 2016, well over twice what the FBI Uniform Crimes Report had included. The Bureau of Justice Statistics is now estimating the true number may be 1,900 in 2016, which is more than four times what had been previously reported to the FBI.
Going back to the Guardian data (which is currently searchable and sortable), they found in 2015 that black people were killed by police at a rate of 7.69 per million, while white people were killed at a rate 2.95 per million. That’s a ratio of 2.5 to 1. In 2016, they found those figures to be 10.13 per million for Native Americans, 6.66 per million for black people, and 2.9 per million for white people—still a 3 to 1 and 2 to 1 ratio, respectively. So even though in total numbers more whites (584 and 574 respectively) than blacks (307 and 266 respectively) may be killed by police per year, their relative rate compared to the available population is nowhere near proportional.
Bottom line: police are still two to three times more likely to kill minorities rather than whites.
In the DOJ’s report on Chicago, there were similar disparities and issues.
While the DOJ's report on the Chicago Police Department didn't include the same sort of of statistical analysis on racial disparities, it too was based on much more than scattered "anecdotal" evidence. Per the Chicago report, DOJ investigators "reviewed thousands of pages of documents" on the department's "policies, procedures, [and] training plans, [as well as] Department orders and memos, internal and external reports, and more." The DOJ also conducted hundreds of interviews with police officers, city officials, and community leaders and members. When the report was released, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters that the abuses committed by Chicago officers disproportionately impacted residents of color. Here's some of what the DOJ found regarding Chicago's police force:
- Deadly force was used disproportionately against black residents.
- Only 1-in-6 recent graduates of the police academy interviewed by the DOJ "came close" to properly articulating the legal standard for use of force.
- Chicago's police review board received more than 30,000 police misconduct complaints over the five years reviewed by the DOJ, but fewer than 2 percent of those were sustained or resulted in discipline. During that same period, CPD investigated 409 police shootings, but found only two to be unjustified.
- White residents were three-and-half times more likely to have an allegation of police misconduct sustained than black residents. White residents were six times more likely to have their use-of-force complaints sustained than Latino residents.
- A 2016 review of the department's dashboard cameras conducted by the department itself found that the audio capability for 80 percent of the cameras were either not working or had been tampered with.
- Officers commonly colluded to cover up wrongdoing by their colleagues, and officers facing misconduct investigations were coached by union attorneys in a manner "experts had [not] seen to nearly such an extent in other agencies."
- Officers routinely picked up and questioned known gang members about drug activity and dropped them off in rival gang territory if they did not cooperate, putting their lives at greater risk.
Jonathan Smith, an official in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division under Obama, called Sessions' admission that he has not read the Chicago or Ferguson reports "extremely troubling."
This is far more than just the result of “media hype.”
In his parting letter the outgoing U.S. attorney for the Chicago area, Zach Fardon, shared many thoughts on what the future direction of policing should be in that region. Some of those thoughts were in line with many of the ideas we’ve heard from Sessions and even Trump—but then again, many were not.
“What would a National Guard presence say to folks in those neighborhoods? This is war, and you are the enemy. The Chicago of bike paths and glistening lakefront, and economic opportunity — that’s not your Chicago, it’s ours and we will protect it,” Fardon wrote. “This is not war. Wars are fought between enemies.”
And the most important thing for the city, in Fardon’s view, is something Sessions has hinted he doesn’t want to do. “Number 1, get that Consent Decree,” Fardon writes in a list of his top five priorities for addressing Chicago’s gun violence.
The Obama Justice Department implemented more than a dozen consent decrees on various U.S. city police departments, all intended to correct flaws they identified with the use of judicial review. But Sessions remains in opposition to such measures and following the report on the Chicago PD, a consent decree has yet to be enacted.
Sessions has been critical of the concept of consent decrees for years, and particularly down on using them in the context of law enforcement reform. He inherits several such court-backed reform agreements from the Obama administration — calling their ongoing enforcement into question — but in Chicago, he can prevent one from even being struck.
This would leave the current issues with the Chicago PD largely in place and unchanged. One of the largest problems is the fact they grossly fail to solve the murder cases that occur within the city. Their clearance rate—meaning the rate that a suspect is identified in a case, let alone arrested or tried—is dismally low. The Washington Post did a rather stunning report on this last year, noting that although today’s murder rate in Chicago is less than one-half what it was 20 years ago, the clearance rate for murders has fallen from more than 80 percent back then to just below 26 percent last year.
In 1991, Chicago police solved about 80 percent of all homicides in the city, compared with about 62 percent by police nationwide, according to data from the FBI and Chicago police. Since then, the national rate has remained fairly constant, but Chicago’s dropped below 26 percent last year, the worst clearance rate for police in any large city in the country, The Post analysis shows.
“Everything has just gone south in Chicago,” said Thomas Hargrove, founder of the Murder Accountability Project, a Washington-based nonprofit group that tracks unsolved homicides nationwide. “Everything has hit Chicago harder. Their murder rate is higher than other cities, and their failure to solve those murders is much worse.”
There are a great many reasons for this dramatic drop off. Chief among them is the tendency for Chicago police to let the families of victims shoulder most of the weight of the investigation themselves, and their tendency to be non-responsive to those families when following up on leads.
Many contend that the growing ledger of unsolved homicides here and across the city leaves killers free to commit more violence and leads to a feeling of general futility.
“It’s a cyclical tsunami, all stemming from, I think, a systemic disregard and disrespect for constituents that police take a pledge to serve and protect,” said state Sen. Jacqueline Y. Collins, whose district includes West Englewood.
Collins said there is a “lack of commitment and follow-up” by homicide detectives that is exacerbated by a lack of trust between the predominantly white police force and black residents in the highly segregated city. “Many of the homicides, if they go unsolved, perpetuate the violence because that individual will continue to prey on the community,” she said.
The many scandals, high levels of corruption in the department, and recent buyout that decimated the ranks of their detectives has left their investigative divisions largely understaffed and overwhelmed, causing them to put far more of the burden in solving these crimes directly on the families of the victims.
To compensate for the gaps in intelligence, residents say some homicide detectives have pushed victims’ families to gather evidence and provide investigators with leads. Angelo did not dispute this.
Rosemary Palmer-Gant, 59, said detectives urged her to help find her 32-year-old son’s killer.
In June, William Tristen Palmer was found dead in the passenger side of a car near the family’s West Englewood home, shot multiple times.
“When my baby was murdered, I received phone calls from several people because we started getting information right away about who the killer was,” she said. Palmer-Gant said she and family friends turned over what she had to investigators, including links to the Facebook profile of the alleged killer.
“She was following up on every lead,” Palmer-Gant said of the detective. Then, she said, that detective was reassigned. The new investigators told her that they needed more information.
“They said, ‘Why don’t you go get one of the witnesses?’ ” Palmer-Gant recalls. She said she was stunned and told them: “You want me to go and knock on the door of the person who’s supposed to have something to do with my son’s murder?”
His killing remains unsolved.
When murders and violent crimes go unsolved it leaves a scar, a trauma on the surviving family. When this trauma is repeated over and over, it can be little surprise that it produces frustration that leads to negative outcomes. Suppose Mrs. Palmer-Gant had gone to the home of the persons she suspected of killing her son, and suppose she had done so while armed, and a confrontation had broken out. Perhaps many of the shootings and killings we see in low murder clearance areas such as these are exactly the result of police inaction. Failure to produce results leaves individual citizens to find their own forms of “street justice” for those they’ve lost over the years in prior confrontations.
And then there are those who are simply afraid to go to the police at all, because they fear repercussions.
Some residents said the “no snitch” rule that police blame for unsolved homicides applies to gang members and not to most people in the community. But they said witnesses fear cooperating with police — even anonymously — because detectives can’t assure them that they will be protected, especially if they must face the accused in court.
“People are afraid because not all of the police, [but] some of them, say you’ll be protected. But then, you open your mouth and your house get shot up,” said Clarence Franklin, 31, a former gang member and now a youth advocate for the nonprofit I Grow Chicago who has lived in West Englewood since 1996. “Snitches get stitches.”
Rather than dedicating focus and resources where they are most needed, the tendency in many cities is to focus those resource on cases that are more high profile, and the victims more affluent rather than poor.
Residents say, and police acknowledge, that some high-profile cases, such as the recent killing of Nykea Aldridge, the cousin of Chicago Bulls star Dwyane Wade, receive more police attention and are more likely to be solved.
“It’s in the big-money part of the city. It’s someone with a name, or someone with a connection, and it’s the headline,” Angelo said of “heater cases,” or high-profile homicides. “And that moves manpower.”
Within two days of Aldridge’s slaying, which drew national media coverage, two suspects had been arrested and charged.
If you have money, or affluence, or fame, your issues get addressed. If you’re poor and nameless—they don’t. There are a great many factors driving violence in places like South Chicago. There’s a lack of jobs, gangs, guns, despair, hopelessness, poverty, as well as police indifference and corruption. Where there’s money, problems get solved—but time and time again the poor pay a price which they can scarcely afford.
Exactly what Sessions or Trump will do to help this problem in any effective way remains unclear. Both of them seem more than willing to fear-monger over the issue, using completely faulty facts and data at the drop of a hat, rather than work to construct any meaningful solutions.
“What’s going on in Chicago?” Trump said. “I said the other day, what the hell is going on?”
In response to Trump’s question, somebody in the crowd yelled, “Democrats!”
The room burst out in laughter. Trump smirked and said, “There’s a lot of truth to that.”
No. There really isn’t.