Police Brutality

In her article about the alleged police brutality on campus two months ago, Sheila Dugan was disappointed in the lack of calm, critical, and well-informed discussion about the incident. Discussions on race characterized by these attributes are indeed scarce. In part, this is because people still have different fundamental beliefs about race. Some still believe that race implies inherent biological differences, despite modern scientific evidence that shows that the way we define race has no biological foundation (Europeans can be more genetically similar to black Africans than black Africans are to other black Africans). Others believe it is a socially constructed phenomena and struggle to gauge its current influence over our society. Many come to the conclusion that their race has no bearing upon their life. Others find that their race is a great burden that prevents them from achieving a high quality of life. Similar to how dough eventually rips when a baker stretches it beyond its limits, the two opposing sides of debate on race are so polarized that there is a hole where the informed, well-supported, middle ground should exist.

The absence of such a middle ground has led us to, as Dugan says, structure the dialogue on race and police assault unproductively, rather than in a critical and action-oriented manner. Dugan laments that we have missed the opportunity to engage in a serious debate on race, noting that the pertinence of the incident has already begun its decline. She concludes that the potential for serious discussion about police brutality and race has passed and that our attention will naturally shift toward the aftermath of the congressional elections. This left me wondering—how can we let the discussion pass when Brown might remain less safe for some of its students than for others? I decided that if some members of our community haven’t the luxury of forgetting this incident, then neither do I.

In an effort to ignite discussion I want to offer my perspective on Police Brutality in the United States and in Rhode Island.

Like most freshmen, when I caught word that a student had been beaten up by cops in my first several weeks at Brown I was extremely surprised. Upon hearing that student’s story firsthand, along with other student’s stories of violence or mistreatment by the local police, I became deeply worried. My primary concern was that the physical safety of members of my school community had been violated. I participated in the protests following the incident to express support for the student whose safety was compromised, and for the right of all of my peers’ to a safe learning environment. I am participating in COPAIT (Commission for Police Accountability and Institutional Transparency) to continue to ensure that this right is secured for everyone in our community.

My secondary concern was that the officers’ abuse was informed on either a conscious or subconscious level by the student’s race. I do not know whether the violent acts of the Providence and Brown police were provoked or unprovoked, because I was not there. Yet I strongly question whether the police did not use excessive force and I will urge you to do the same for several reasons. Firstly, the Providence Police Department’s prosecution has decided to drop their charges against Chipalo Street, which suggests that the involved officers may have performed wrongdoing. The way in which black and Latino males are stereotyped as criminals in the United States, and the way the law-enforcement perhaps unconsciously acts on those stereotypes, further exhort us as intelligent and rational people to pose the question of whether excessive force was used against one of our peers.

A recent study on race and criminal attitudes performed by UCLA’s department of psychology confirmed that white-Americans trust the American criminal justice system far more than African-Americans. It offered two reasons for the divergent attitudes toward the criminal justice system. The first was the “criminal hypothesis,” which attributes African-American’s greater distrust of law enforcement to the fact that they have higher crime rates, and thus more negative interactions with the cops. If this assumption holds that antagonism toward the police and the justice system increases along with higher crime rates, then one can expect that people of increasing socio-economic status, who have less interaction with the cops, would have increasingly positive attitudes toward the police. While this proved true for white-Americans, its converse proved true for African-Americans. Rather, the antagonism and distrust of police among black citizens grew in conjunction with their socio-economic status. (Peña, Race and Criminal Attitudes).

The second reason for the contrasting attitudes of whites and African-Americans toward the justice system is that African-Americans are disproportionately subject to discrimination by the system. This reasoning made more sense with the study’s finding that blacks of higher socio-economic status showed greater dissatisfaction with law enforcement, because those more economically and socially successful are more likely to be educated and aware of the discriminatory nature of the system. From this reasoning the study confirms that, as many other studies have shown, “police and internal security forces function not only to prevent crime and maintain general order, but also to maintain and reinforce the hierarchical order of power relationships between dominant and subordinate groups within the social system” (p.4, Peña) Law enforcement systems are designed to fulfill their role as preservers of social order by upholding laws in a neutral and unbiased way, but in practice they maintain social hierarchies by dispensing greater punishment to those with less power in society (Peña, Race and Criminal Attitudes).

The study concludes that security is the primary “hierarchy-enhancing” social institution & policemen often have greater desire to enforce social hierarchies than others. A number of testimonials from current Brown students have recently been published (they were recited at a demonstration during parents weekend) which support the study’s conclusion. The following is one such testimonial:

“Early this fall I hosted a party in my dorm. DPS showed up at 3:30. The officers screamed “Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up!” and “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” The other officer eventually called us “Motherfuckers.” I said, “You don’t have to talk to us like that.” He responded abruptly and aggressively. He said that if I didn’t “shut the fuck up” that I would be “locked up.” Officer Timothy Dube’s response was even more aggressive. He jerked me by the shirt and attempted to pull me outside the room. I pulled away from the officer and said several times, “Why are you putting your hands on me? Don’t put your hands on me.” He said, “Come talk to me outside pure playa. Come here gangsta.” Since when did I become a gangsta?”

This does not imply that most police officers are blatant racists, yet it does suggest that some are particularly invested in preserving the status quo, which has been a white dominated social hierarchy since the beginning of our nation.

This understanding of the dual purpose of law enforcement is useful, especially because many studies have shown that it is not an exclusively American and racial phenomenon. Instead, the differing treatment of dominants and subordinates by the criminal-justice system occurs across a great range of political systems and nations, in countries as disparate as Zaire, the UK, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Jamaica, Sweden, and even Canada.

Information I’ve found about the United States’ and Rhode Island’s justice systems leads me to question even more strongly whether excessive force was used against Chipalo Street that late evening in Brunonia.

The U.S. judicial system has historically been very racially biased, and current trends indicate that not much has changed. To this day, Latino-Americans and African-Americans are victimized and incarcerated for the same crimes disproportionately ( www.humanrightswatch.org ) Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000) . On average, between 1973 and 1999 African-Americans were 89% more likely to be victimized by violent crime of all types than European Americans. “This higher rate of crime victimization includes all major crime categories such as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).” In 2000, Rhode Island’s ratio of the percentage of black people incarcerated to the state’s percentage of black residents was eight to one! (Census Bureau 2000) In this context it is not difficult to see how law enforcers in Rhode Island may often have a racial bias.

Along with the racial bias ingrained in the very nature of law enforcement systems (and the RI law enforcement system in particular), there are also stereotypes associated with African-Americans that make them appear especially dangerous to officers. The popular book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, articulates the power of our unconscious mind to make leaps of insight, especially focusing on how those leaps can be superior to rational thought processes in some situations while it can lead us to make grave mistakes in others. As an example of such a mistake, Gladwell recounts a Bronx, NY shooting, which began with a simple intuition by the NY police and resulted in an innocent death. Late one night in 1999, a four-man team of officers sighted a possible criminal suspect. In actuality, it was a Guinean immigrant who decided to go outside his apartment for breath of fresh air after a long night’s work. The officers’ subconscious minds registered that he was black, that they were in a low income neighborhood, and therefore that he was probably the lookout man for a nearby robbery. These “blink” judgments led them to accost him, scare him into hiding behind a corner, and to shoot him multiple times when he attempted to pull out his wallet. In stressful situations, like those that policemen face every day, stereotypes are used to make quick judgments, and those stereotypes of black-Americans contribute to the especially hostile and suspicious treatment by the cops.

An event that recently occurred at Whitman, a small liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Washington, reveals the underlying stereotype (i.e. the untrained subconscious reaction) that informed the “blink” judgment that the cops made that late Bronx evening. Last month, a few Whitman students attended a “Survivor” themed frat party dressed in black face from the waist up, claiming to be “savages”.They published pictures of the event on Facebook, as any college student would after a night of belligerence..While some who viewed the pictures laughed along with their peers in the comments, others were outraged that these individuals would so blindly espouse the stereotype that people of African descent are primitive and savage-like.

Following some deliberation, Whitman’s administration sent out a message regretting its ignorance of, “the long history behind the tradition of whites dressing in blackface in the U.S., and (that) it is a history with direct ties to slavery and other forms of significant humiliation and oppression of African-Americans. It is important that Whitman students know about this history, in order to appreciate and fully understand the implications of adopting blackface costumes on any occasion, and in particular, why others in our community would find the costumes and the photos insensitive, offensive and upsetting.” While we might think our colleges and universities to be above such racist considerations, the evidence demonstrates that even our loftiest educational institutions hold such biases.

In light of the recent report on Brown’s history of slavery, we can see that our own institution has a special responsibility to African-American students to create a welcoming and safe community. The report included several suggestions for reparative action. I suggest that Brown be accountable and more transparent about instances of police mistreatment so that we might begin to change our society’s destructive patterns. Instead of focusing on the past, by building memorials and issuing dramatic statements as to its historical importance, Brown could seek to end discrimination within its institution by ensuring equal and respectful police treatment through systems of feedback and support. This is a basic thing Brown might do, and until it does so, COPAIT, the umbrella group opposing police discrimination and mistreatment, will attempt to do it for them. This at first glance seems disconnected from the issue at question, but upon reexamination it is the sole of the same shoe of racialized brutality.