The first two steps toward uplifting young black men are simple: Stop killing them and stop locking them in prison for nonviolent offenses.
That is the first sentence of
this powerful Washington Post column by Eugene Robinson for Tuesday's paper, whose title I borrowed for this post.
As is usually the case, it is extremely well-written and to the point.
"Broken windows" policing, as it is also known, is often justified by a rationale that aggressive policing in minority communities is appropriate because that it is where the crime is. Robinson notes that they might well point at Freddie' Gray's history of drug arrests and the fact that he ran, because if he had nothing to hide he should simply have stood there.
But this argument overlooks a universal phenomenon: We find things where we look for them.
If police concentrate their patrols in a certain area and assume every young man they see is a potential or probable criminal, they will conduct more searches — and make more arrests. Which means a high percentage of young men in that neighborhood will have police records. Which, in turn, provides a statistical justification for continued hyper-aggressive police tactics.
Please keep reading.
Robinson looks at the data. For example, NYC's "stop and frisk" program, which was ruled unconstitutional by a judge, was justified in part by a claim that the goal was to get weapons off the streets. But as Robinson notes, an ACLU study, which found that 85% of stops in 2012 involved African-Americans or Latinos, also found that
minorities were found to be carrying weapons just 2 percent of the time, while 4 percent of whites who were stopped and frisked had weapons.
Robinson argues that the data
strongly suggests is that officers, when deciding whether to stop and frisk whites, exercised greater discretion. It suggests police were more likely to single out whites who genuinely had something to hide and to detain African Americans and Hispanics indiscriminately.
As to the claim that violent crime has dropped as a result of such an approach to policing, while it is true that it has dropped in cities taking such an approach, there has been a similar drop in cities that do NOT take such an approach, so that the claim is suspect.
Further, the largest single reason for incarceration is for non-violent possession or sale of drugs, including marijuana. Thousands of Blacks are imprisoned for such offenses, Blacks are four times as likely to be charged with such possession even though marijuana use among Blacks and Whites is roughly equal.
Robinson again reminds us of the differential on cocaine, referring to ACLU data showing
African Americans facing drug charges are imprisoned at a rate 10 times that of whites — and that sentences for black men are nearly 20 percent longer than those for white men, on average. Punishment for possessing or selling crack cocaine remains vastly greater than for an identical quantity of the upscale powder variety.
Simply put, the war on drugs has largely been a war on minority men, even though the level of drug use between whites and minorities is roughly equivalent.
What Robinson does not mention is that the war on drugs is a key element in the boom of the private prison industry, a sector of the economy that has grown at a horrific cost to the minority communities of this nation.
Robinson returns to Freddie Gray, acknowledging that he was "hardly a pillar of the community." To lead into his final words, he wonders if Freddie Gray might possibly have been able to turn his life around, and then writes
Perhaps not. We’ll never know.
When he saw police, he ran. Was that illogical? The officers chased him down, pinned him in a folded position “like origami,” according to a witness, and tossed him into a police wagon. Was that necessary?
The answer to both questions is no. Therein lies the problem.
Some might argue that Freddie Gray is with his record hardly the poster boy we should use for attacking "broken windows" policing. I disagree
Our rights under the Bill of Rights applies to all PERSONS - regardless of any obvious commitment of crimes in the present or the past. As soon as we rationalize violating or limiting the rights of some on grounds of presumed criminality, we jeopardize the rights of all and police begin to become a threat to public safety rather than guaranteeing it.
In a recent attack on a satirical publication in France, many in this country across the political spectrum accepted the motto "Je Suis Charlie" in recognition that if that publication's speech rights could be threatened so could those of us all. Certainly in a country with our First Amendment we should understand that.
Might we consider as well the statement "I am Freddie" in recognition that if he can be treated so brutally with some justifying the brutality, we are all in danger?
Or as Shakespeare has Shylock say, "if you prick us, do we not bleed?"
Robinson asks two questions: was it illogical for Freddie Gray to run, given the experience of a Black man in Baltimore under "zero tolernece" policing? Was it necessary for the police to treat him as they did.
The answer to both questions is no. Therein lies the problem.
The problem for all of us, for if it is not for all of us, then we have abandoned the notion of a civil society where the rights of all are supposed to be respected, and then like it or not the rights of all except those the police choose to respect are in jeopardy.