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Racism in America
a topic worth discussing
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Racism in America
a topic worth discussing
by Bill Murray
The "unfortunate" incident this week in which a Harvard University professor was briefly arrested by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, local police sergeant may have a silver lining.
It may provide a forum for American's to talk about a topic worth discussing .. Racism in America. |
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Even the President weighed in .. twice.
Refusing to talk about the issue is like not wanting to mention the elephant in the room, but we here at LA Community Policing believe this topic far too important to deny.
On Friday, July 24th, we used our radio talk show to engage in a discussion on Racism in America .. the first of many times we'll do so.
Here's a link to the "Community Matters" show:
"Community Matters" - 022
"Community Matters" covered the topic of Racism in America, following the incident that occurred recently between an African American Cambridge professor and a local police officer. Bill Murray, founder of Los Angeles Community Policing (LACP.org), led a spirited discussion during which several people participated, including an Asian immigrant from Florida, a professional white woman from Ohio and a black man from Maryland. |
And here is the police report mentioned during the show:
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Here's how the LA Times newspaper covered the story on Saturday (three stories):
A power play, not prejudice
The controversial arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by a white police sergeant in Cambridge, Mass., was not necessarily about race. At its heart was a classic show of authority.
By Sandy Banks
July 25, 2009
I can already envision the hate mail this column will generate. Every time I write about anything involving race, my inbox fills with invective -- racial slurs, rants about the "welfare crowd," suggestions that I stop whining, go back to Africa and turn my "affirmative action job" over to some slighted white person.
So I know a bit about how Cambridge, Mass., Police Sgt. James Crowley must have felt when he was insulted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. after showing up to investigate a possible break-in at the professor's home.
Being accused of racism hurts, makes you want to fight back. My job requires that I not be goaded into incivility, because it's not my personal honor hanging on my response, but the reputation of my newspaper and the dignity of my profession.
I wish Crowley had thought of that during his public face-off with Professor Gates.
We don't know all the details of their encounter, but what began with Gates trying to dislodge his jammed front door ended with the 58-year-old African American scholar in handcuffs, under arrest for being -- according to Crowley's police report -- "loud and tumultuous."
The disorderly conduct charge was dropped, but the stain it left seems destined to spread. The incident has reignited a national debate over racial profiling, and even drawn the president into the back-and-forth.
But this is not as simple as black suspect, white cop. And race might not be the bottom line.
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I was angry when I first heard the news. If "Skip" Gates -- prominent scholar, author and friend of Barack Obama -- can be arrested on his own front porch simply for mouthing off to a cop, then the rest of us "loud and tumultuous" black folks surely better stay inside.
Then I cringed when I read the officer's account of Gates' alleged tirade, riddled with the kind of "yo' momma" insults we used to trade on the school playground. I could feel Gates' fury, and imagine Crowley feeling bound to flex his power.
According to the police report, Crowley had been summoned by someone who thought Gates was breaking into the home. Gates seemed incensed by the presumption and was initially uncooperative.
But once Gates produced his driver's license and Harvard ID, it seems to me the officer's job was done. No crime, no suspect, no need to hang around.
Instead, the scene escalated. Gates began yelling for the officer's name and badge number; Crowley ordered the professor onto the porch. Gates called Crowley racially biased; Crowley warned him to calm down and unsnapped his handcuffs.
That's when the officer's actions turned a minor altercation into a national drama.
The story resonates here in Los Angeles, where the Police Department is finally shedding its generations-old reputation for callous treatment of minorities and general rudeness to civilians. The department still has a ways to go; hundreds of racial profiling complaints have been filed in recent years, and the LAPD has not considered a single one valid.
But at least our cops are more civil when they pull you over.
That's by design, said Capt. Bill Scott, a 20-year veteran who commands the northeast San Fernando Valley's Mission Division.
"We're training to have thick skin, not to take things personally," said Scott, a former training officer. "Even if the person you're dealing with is verbally attacking you, you can't react to that."
Encounters with police can be traumatic for reasons officers might not understand, he said. "If somebody's upset, you have to allow people some room to vent. There's an acceptable range of venting that's allowable and understandable."
Was Gates outside that range, I asked, with his alleged yelling and accusations of racism? "There's no perfect formula for what's allowable," Scott said. "It depends on what that officer was comfortable with. You just can't let it get to the point where somebody's safety is at risk."
I asked him if Crowley was on a power trip? "Without knowing all the facts," he said, "I don't want to be critical of that department and that officer."
But he was clear on something that every officer ought to remember.
"It's always a better outcome when you can resolve a situation by using as little of your authority as possible. And a lot of that is how you perceive the other side. . . . And whether you're willing to explain what you're doing. Instead of just issuing an order."
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It would be naive to ignore the racial dimensions of this. A successful black man being interrogated in his own home, Gates may have seen the white cop as disrespectful. And Crowley, a well-regarded white officer, probably expected deference, not insults, from the black man he'd been called to help.
But at its heart, this is a power struggle that didn't have to happen. The police -- as Obama put it before he felt compelled to back off -- acted stupidly.
I can see hands poised over keyboard now, ready to unleash a flood of e-mails. So here I go:
Professor Gates should have been more polite. The officer arrived to investigate a crime report. Gates may have had a legitimate gripe, but that does not excuse the rant described in Crowley's police report. Police officers deserve respect -- just like teachers and grocery store clerks and even newspaper reporters.
Sgt. Crowley should have been able to defuse the situation without bringing the handcuffs out. I understand that police officers have a difficult job to do, but taking guff is part of the job description. A police department's reputation and success rest on the attitude of its officers.
We ought to stop seeing this as a referendum on racism and ask what it says about the attitude police officers display toward the taxpayers who fund their paychecks.
We rely for our safety on their good judgment. Yet every time I write about some cop embroiled in a controversy, I hear from people of every race -- teenagers, housewives, businessmen -- relaying stories of encounters with rude or unreasonable police.
In the end, this may not be at all about racial profiling, but about the line between dangerous defiance of police and mindless submission to authority. And whether being "loud and tumultuous" ought to land a righteously angry man behind bars.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks25-2009jul25,0,5466063,print.column
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Black males' fear of racial profiling very real, regardless of class
Several African American professionals find professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s recent encounter with police all too easy to relate to. Their lingering question is when to speak up.
By Richard Fausset and P.J. Huffstutter
July 25, 2009
Reporting from Atlanta and Fort Wayne, Ind. — Like Henry Louis Gates Jr., they are professionals, men of status and achievement who have excelled in a nation that once shunned black men.
And for many of them, their only shock -- upon learning of the celebrated scholar's recent run-in with police -- was the moment of recognition.
They know too well the pivotal moment Gates faced at his Massachusetts home. It was that moment of suspicion when confronted by police, the moment one wonders, in a flash of panic, anger or confusion: Maybe I am being treated this way because I'm black.
Next comes the pivotal question: Do I protest or just take it?
Kwame Dunston says he has made the calculated choice to take it -- repeatedly. The public school administrator says he has been pulled over more than 20 times in the last decade, but has rarely been issued a ticket. What factor other than race, he wondered, would account for all of those stops?
"It's more important for me to make it home than to fight for a cause I'm not going to win," he said.
Dunston, 36, a New York resident who was in Atlanta this week, pointed to the interior of his 2006 Toyota Camry. It was showroom-clean. He doesn't want police to think he has something to hide.
"My job," Dunston said, "is to make sure they don't have any question about what's inside the car."
Such anxiety, deeply rooted in the African American experience, has endured into the era of the first black president.
For many black men, the feeling of remaining inherently suspect never goes away, no matter their wealth and status and the efforts by police forces to avoid abuses in profiling.
Lawrence Otis Graham, author of a book on affluent African Americans, said wealthy blacks may, in fact, be subjected to more racial profiling than others.
In upscale white neighborhoods, they sometimes stand out. In fancy restaurants, they're sometimes mistaken for help. "We become almost numbed by the constant presumptions," said Graham.
New attention
Those issues came crashing back into the spotlight with the arrest of Gates, a 58-year-old Harvard University professor, on July 16.
Early that afternoon, Cambridge police showed up at Gates' home, responding to a tip on a possible break-in. Gates was inside the house, after reportedly forcing open a stuck door.
According to his police report, Sgt. James Crowley asked Gates to step outside to talk, and Gates began screaming, accusing Crowley of being a "racist police officer."
Gates was arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct, a charge later dropped. A number of people -- most prominently, President Obama -- rushed to his defense.
But Lorenzo Wyche, 32, is among those who wonder whether Gates picked the right time to take a stand. Wyche, a black restaurateur and Atlanta resident, said that his generation may not be as quick to ascribe nefarious motives to police as Gates' generation. "I didn't grow up with dogs chasing me down," he said.
And yet Wyche is also gripped at times by the gnawing suspicion that his black skin makes him a target. He was recently driving in midtown Atlanta. In front of him, an attractive white woman walked across the road, catching his eye. Behind him, a white policeman turned on his lights and pulled Wyche over.
But there would be no fireworks. The officer warned Wyche about an expired tag on his Porsche, and drove away.
"So that was my moment," Wyche said, with a laugh. "Did he run my tag just because I stared at this white girl?"
Wyche figures he will never know whether he was profiled. He prefers this mystery to the possible more serious outcomes. At the same time, the difficulty in proving profiling has created problems for police. Last year, members of the Los Angeles Police Department's civilian oversight panel were incredulous when department officials announced that not one of more than 300 racial profiling complaints was found to have merit.
A Times review of department documents later showed that no claims of profiling -- more than 1,200 -- had been upheld in at least six years. (Racial profiling isn't confined to black men; women and other groups can be targeted as well.)
But LAPD Chief William J. Bratton dismissed criticism, saying that profiling allegations hinge on what the officer was thinking, and therefore are nearly impossible to prove. "How," he said, "do you get inside someone's mind?"
For some black men, the solution is to try to avoid the possibility of confrontation altogether. Graham, the author, lives with his family on a large spread in the mostly white suburb of Westchester, N.Y. When the house alarm goes off, his wife goes to the front gate to meet police. He fears that if he goes instead, they will mistake him for an intruder.
Vibert White, a University of Central Florida history professor, recalled driving along an Indiana highway and spotting a line of cars pulled to the side of the road. All of the drivers were black men. So White, too, pulled over, figuring that was expected of black men.
An officer walked up and asked him why he had stopped.
"I told him that I'd seen the line of cars and just reacted," said White, 51. "He told me, 'Sir, you can go on with your business.' I realized how deeply ingrained this lesson had become -- of not causing a ruckus, of just playing the game, of doing what you needed to do in order to live your life."
Years earlier, he said, he had challenged a traffic stop and ended up in handcuffs.
In Detroit, Tony Spearman-Leach, 42, chief communications officer of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, said he gets tailed by police three or four times a year. He gets pulled over, on average, once a year, but has never received a ticket.
He keeps his replies clear, respectful and short. Each time the officer walks up to his black 1991 Volvo S70 sedan, his mind weighs the same questions.
"I know it's because I'm black, and I'm driving the most conservative car you can get your hands on," Spearman-Leach said. "But you have to weigh what to do. If I fight, am I going to escalate the matter? Is this a battle worth fighting?"
Fighting it
Leach's answer has always been no. But before the Gates incident, other black voices had been encouraging people to say yes.
In January, Baratunde Thurston, a contributor to the influential blog Jack & Jill Politics (which bills itself as a voice of the "black bourgeoisie") argued that with a black president entering office, it was important to speak up about such issues, rather than bury the lingering problems of race.
In the past, speaking up has sometimes brought real change. In 1992, Robert L. Wilkins, a Washington attorney, refused a Maryland trooper's attempt to search his rental car with a drug dog. His federal lawsuit forced the state to enact a new training regimen for troopers, and to end race-based blanket drug sweeps.
But fighting back does not always yield such results.
In 1997, Aaron Campbell argued with sheriff's deputies in Orange County, Fla., after he was pulled over for a suspected lane-change violation. He was pepper-sprayed and thrown in a police car. Campbell happened to be a major in the Miami-Dade Police Department.
"I think that if I was a white major on the turnpike, and was stopped unlawfully, they would have said, 'Hey, major, go on about your business,' " Campbell said.
Campbell was found guilty of resisting arrest. The sheriff's deputies said race had nothing to do with it. Campbell's federal civil suit went nowhere.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-racial-profiling25-2009jul25,0,5049851,print.story
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Obama seeks to defuse furor over his police remark
Conceding that the Gates case and its ensuing racial debate has taken focus off his healthcare overhaul, the president says he chose the wrong words. But he stops short of apologizing.
By Peter Nicholas
July 25, 2009
Reporting from Washington — President Obama on Friday backed off his contention that police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a black Harvard University professor on disorderly conduct charges at his own home -- hoping to tamp down an escalating racial furor that has diverted attention from his policy agenda.
The president, making a rare surprise visit to the White House press briefing room , said he had chosen the wrong words in saying the Cambridge, Mass., Police Department had blundered. He said his comments had "obviously helped" to ratchet up a debate about race relations that was growing more tense by the hour.
"So to the extent that my choice of words didn't illuminate, but rather contributed to more media frenzy, I think that was unfortunate," Obama said.
The president on Friday also phoned the arresting officer and the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., inviting them to the White House to discuss the disagreement over a beer. In a statement to the black news website the Root , which Gates heads, Gates said he "would be happy to oblige" and meet with Sgt. James Crowley.
Obama stopped short of apologizing for his remark about the police , which he made during a prime-time news conference Wednesday. But he said that in his conversation Friday with Crowley, he acknowledged that "I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically -- and I could have calibrated those words differently."
At the Wednesday news conference, Obama had used stark language in blaming Cambridge police for an arrest that he said should never have happened. Over next two days, he tempered his position, saying Gates might also have been at fault.
"I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling professor Gates out of his home to the station," Obama said. "I also continue to believe, based on what I heard, that professor Gates probably overreacted as well."
What led Obama to this point began with the report of a break-in at Gates' home July 16. Cambridge police arrived on the scene and questioned Gates, who after returning from a trip to China had been seen trying to force open the front door.
In his police report, Crowley said Gates had been "very uncooperative" and had accused Crowley of being a "racist police officer."
Gates' supporters have said that he posed no threat and was treated with more suspicion because of his race. Gates was arrested on disorderly conduct charges, which were later dropped.
Obama's remarks Friday came just hours after a news conference held by Cambridge police union officials, who said the president needed to apologize. Crowley was present but did not speak.
Without a full picture of what happened, Obama should have stayed out of the discussion, union officials said. Particularly hurtful was Obama's attempt to link the arrest to racial profiling by law enforcement, they said.
Sgt. Dennis O'Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Assn., said: "The supervisors and the patrol officers of the Cambridge Police Department deeply resent the implication and reject any suggestion that in this case or any other case they have allowed a person's race to direct their activities."
Stephen Killion, president of the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Assn., said: "I think the president should make an apology to all law enforcement personnel throughout the entire country who took offense to this."
The dust-up follows months of relatively smooth relations between the White House and law enforcement. The biggest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, had not endorsed Obama in the 2008 election. Still, its leaders spoke in favor of the president's nominations of Eric H. Holder Jr. for attorney general and of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
Also, police groups were pleased that Obama directed billions of dollars in stimulus funds to policing.
Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police's legislative office, said he had been "taken aback" by Obama's criticism of the Cambridge police. "He had been pretty good to law enforcement," Pasco said.
Obama's attempts Friday to put the Gates matter to rest reflected growing apprehension at the White House that the incident threatened to overwhelm the president's crowded policy agenda. Keeping the nation's focus on his proposed healthcare overhaul has become increasingly difficult, Obama conceded.
In one respect, Obama did not backtrack: He seemed unwilling to drop the idea that race played a part in Gates' confrontation with police.
Describing Crowley as an "outstanding police officer," the president said: "Even when you've got a police officer who has a fine track record on racial sensitivity, interactions between police officers and the African American community can sometimes be fraught with misunderstanding."
Normally sure-footed at news conferences, Obama had waded into a racially charged dispute without knowing all the facts -- as he acknowledged -- and came down squarely on the side of Gates, a friend. His word choice left Cambridge police feeling demeaned.
Democratic political advisors said Obama needed to make a clarifying statement aimed at defusing the issue, and he needed to do it quickly.
But he faced a challenge finding a way to acknowledge the feelings of the law enforcement community without angering African Americans and black political leaders, many of whom said that Obama's initial take on the case was correct.
"He's facing cross currents on this," said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist who is African American. "There are African American politics here, and African Americans have an expectation of their president to speak up and respect them."
Lanny Davis, a veteran of the Clinton White House and author of "Truth to Tell: Tell it Early, Tell it All, Tell it Yourself," said after Obama's appearance Friday: "The president lanced the boil. Do it now rather than later."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-gates25-2009jul25,0,326677,print.story |
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