Attacks like this one in Los Angeles — and the one recently in Bed Stuy that has the New York City Police Department and police union at war with Mayor DeBlasio — are an assault on the notion of civil government. Police, as Djelloul Marbrook points out, are representatives of civil authority — they are empowered by the citizenry to serve and protect and to uphold the laws agreed to by what is supposed to be a representative government. As such, they deserve respect, though that does not put the institution or individual officers above criticism.
Police, however, at least many in New York City, appear to differ, with thousands turning their back to the mayor in protest during a funeral for one of the two officers killed in Bed Stuy.
As he rose to deliver the customary mayoral eulogy, thousands of uniformed officers outside silently turned their backs on him in a pointed display of disrespect as his image filled the large screens broadcasting the service
Angered by the mayor’s qualified sympathy for nationwide demonstrations calling for police reform, some New York police officers had similarly shunned de Blasio as he arrived a week ago at the hospital where Ramos and his police partner, Wenjian Liu, were declared dead.
DeBlasio was elected on a reform platform and, as Reuters points out, has”has struggled to balance the interests of police critics who helped elect him and the officers who now work for him.” This, according to police union president Patrick Lynch, represents a “betrayal.” Once officer, quoted by Reuters, put it bluntly:
“A lot of people feel he has taken a side, and that side is not ours,” a New York police officer said on condition that her name be withheld because of a department ban on unsanctioned media interviews.
This neatly sums up the problem — that many police officers (and, yes, some of the protestors, as well) see this as an us-against-them issue. By acknowledging that the protestors have legitimate grounds for their criticisms and a right to protest, DeBlasio has taken sides. He is with “them” — the protestors — and, therefore, against the police because any criticism of the police must be ruled out of bounds.
It is the police demonstrating that they believe themselves above criticism, that they view anyone who calls their behavior into question as an enemy and that they do not need to address the very real problems that exist within the institution.
The fact is there is a palpable disconnect between the police and minority communities and people of color more generally. Many minority residents of largely poor areas feel as if the police function as an occupying army, while those blacks and Latinos who live in less racially or economically segregated areas say they feel as though they are watched far more closely than their white neighbors. This is what my students tell me and I have no reason to disbelieve them.
Is this fair to the police? That is not the point. The numbers show a disparity in arrest rates and other interactions. There may be rational reasons for the disparities, ones that have nothing to do with structural bias. We can — and should — have that discussion.
But the issue at hand is one of trust, and we have reached a point where it is clear that police have lost the trust of African-Americans. A Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll conducted in August found wide disparities in the trust of local police departments, with blacks being more likely than whites to question the work that police are doing.
Fully 70% of blacks say police departments around the country do a poor job in holding officers accountable for misconduct; an identical percentage says they do a poor job of treating racial and ethnic groups equally. And 57% of African Americans think police departments do a poor job of using the right amount of force.
Overall, according to the poll, only 10 percent of blacks say police departments do either a good or excellent job of holding officers accountable or of treating racial and ethnic groups equally, while just 6 percent say police do a good or excellent job of using the right amount of force.
It is in this context that Mayor Bill DeBlasio made his remarks — quoted here from Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast — about how he and his wife have “trained” their son to interact with police, should it happen.
Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face—we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.
The comment, as Tomasky points out, “was completely unremarkable and so obviously true that in other contexts we don’t even bat an eye when someone says it.” He goes on to add that
two decades’ worth of statistics tell us that black men are killed by police at 21 times the rate white men are, and yet half the public has persuaded itself that police treat blacks and whites no differently. And it’s controversial for a mayor with a black 16-year-old son to say something so obvious—indeed, what every parent of a black son has to say.
This should be the focus of the public debate — how the police can win back the confidence of African-Americans and Latinos, how we can make it so that parents no longer have to prepare their black sons for a hostile world. Instead, we are caught in a cesspool of divisive political rhetoric pushed by the New York police union and its allies, who seem to have respect for free speech and protest only when they benefit their own cause.
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Hank Kalet 