Wayne Bennett is an attorney in Philadelphia who writes the blog Field Negro, and earlier this week he highlighted an episode in Charlotte, NC that is archetypal of the power dynamics of white supremacy that has formed the framework of our culture, and our government institutions, since the before the founding of the nation (for more on that history, see my earlier diary White Privilege and White Entitlement give rise to White Supremacy— Whiteness as Property):
Tonight my racism chase takes me to Asheville, North Carolina. And for those of you who don't know, this is supposed to be one of the most progressive cities in the Tar Heel state.
"Federal authorities are investigating body camera footage from August that shows two white police officers Tasering and beating a black man whom they accused of jaywalking in Asheville, N.C.
The footage,
obtained by The Citizen Times, has created an uproar in town. One of the officers has resigned, and the police chief has offered to follow suit.
“The city is in outrage,” Councilwoman Sheneika Smith said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Facebook was flaming. It was on fire.” The beginning of the video, which was taken last year, shows Johnnie Jermaine Rush being approached by Verino Ruggiero, an officer in training, shortly after midnight on Aug. 25 at a street corner near a baseball stadium in Asheville, about 120 miles west of Charlotte.
“You didn’t use the crosswalk four times in a row,” Officer Ruggiero says in the video.
“All I’m trying to do is go home, man. I’m tired!” Mr. Rush says. “I just got off of work.”…
During the arrest, Mr. Rush was shocked with a Taser, choked and beaten by Officer Hickman, according to police records.
At several points, while pinned to the ground, Mr. Rush cried, “I can’t breathe!”
The camera footage also shows Officer Hickman hitting Mr. Rush on the head over and over with a closed fist, and Mr. Rush crying out in pain as he is shocked with a Taser.
Tasered, beaten, handcuffed and arrested for jaywalking. Because he’s Black, and the officer White.
No one here should be under the illusion this was somehow an aberration or that such episodes have decreased in recent years:
A report by retired federal and state judges tasked by the San Francisco district attorney’s office to examine police practices in San Francisco found “racial disparities regarding S.F.P.D. stops, searches, and arrests, particularly for Black people.”The judges, working with experts from five law schools, including Stanford Law School, found that “the disparity gap in arrests was found to have been increasing in San Francisco.” (Officers in San Francisco were previously revealed to have traded racist and homophobic text messages, and those working in the prison system had reportedly staged and placed bets on inmate fights.)
In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15 percent of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42 percent of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).” ...
The Department of Justice’s investigation into the behavior of police in Ferguson, Missouri, found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.” The scathing report found that the department was targeting black residents and treating them as revenue streams for the city by striving to continually increase the money brought in through fees and fines…
A 2015 analysis by The New York Times found that in Greensboro, North Carolina, police officers “used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists—even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.” That pattern held true for police departments in four states. In Greensboro, “officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason…
A controversial working paper by Harvard professor Roland Fryer Jr. found that police officers are more likely to use their hands, push a suspect into a wall, use handcuffs, draw weapons, push a suspect onto the ground, point their weapon, and use pepper spray or a baton when interacting with blacks...
A study by the Center for Policing Equity found, as characterized by a preview in The New York Times, that “African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.” The study looked at 19,000 use-of-force incidents between the years 2010 and 2015.
Nor should anyone think for moment that White supremacist police officers haven’t been emboldened by their Commander-in-Chief:
THERE ARE MANY troubling aspects to President Donald Trump's decision to pardon Joe Arpaio: the erosion of the rule of law, the implicit endorsement of Arpaio's racial profiling, the specter of more pardons for loyalists down the line. But equally troubling is the way it underscores the administration's approval of police brutality as a central component of its conception of law and order.
Trump said as much last month, when he spoke to law enforcement officials in Long Island. "Please don't be too nice," Trump said, discussing the handling of suspects. "Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over?" he said by way of example. "You can take the hand away, OK?"
The officers laughed and applauded
To get a clear, and grim picture, of what is happening every day across the country, and how African-Americans are disproportionately the victims of aggravated assault and murder by police, spend a few minutes reviewing the info-graphics of Mapping Police Violence.