By Charles Davis
“Maybe you shouldn’t just be obedient,”
Reginald Jones-Sawyer, Sr. told the crowd. Instead of just teaching children to
be meek and compliant with law enforcement, “maybe we should start teaching our
young sons to ask for IDs—ask them to remember names and badge numbers"
when they're stopped by police. Maybe we should all be more vigilant, he said.
“When you see our young people
stopped, you stop and start recording what you see," he said. Let members
of law enforcement know that their every move will be scrutinized.
"Obviously," though, "with the flash off"—the police don't
need another excuse to shoot.
I didn’t expect Jones-Sawyer, a
Democratic member of the California State Assembly, to sound like such a
firebrand when I first showed up to the hearing on police violence organized by
the California and Hawaii chapters of the NAACP. He’s a politician and his job
is to legislate, to diffuse community anger over out-of-control police by
channeling it into non-binding resolutions and stern floor speeches. But speaking
to me in the lobby of the California African American Museum in Los
Angeles—after I assured him I do not work for a porn site—he said that what he
really wants to do is “start a grassroots effort to combat [police brutality].”
Perhaps he wanted to reduce the
expectation that one can solve the persistent problem of police violence
against communities of color through the electoral system. To me, though, it
sounded as if he was genuinely disturbed by the recent spate of police killings
of unarmed black men, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to Ezell Ford
and Omar Abrego in LA. It’s time, he said, for communities of color to go on
the offensive.
“Right now, we’re acting like
victims,” Jones-Sawyer told me. Indeed, he taught his own children to be passive
around police to stay alive; to keep their hands at “ten o'clock and two
o'clock on the steering wheel, look forward, don’t make any sudden moves.” But
one day, he said, his oldest son challenged him: "Why's the responsibility
on us to not get beaten and killed by police? Shouldn’t it be on the police to
stop brutalizing us?"
His answer was glib, but not
wrong: "Because you could die." But it did get him thinking.
“We need to stop that victim
mentality and be more aggressive,” he now believes. That means not just
teaching kids to be compliant, but to be vigilant; to not be meek in the face
of injustice, to not stand by while a member of the community is victimized by
members of law enforcement, so that “it becomes very difficult [for police] to
behave that way”—so that they “know that the repercussions are going to come
immediately, from anybody.”
“I don’t want to see another
African-American father coming to a mic almost in tears because he’s had to
train his son to be submissive during a traffic stop and he still gets
arrested—and he still has a record,” he said.
There were plenty of tears at
the September 12 hearing on “Solutions to Police Brutality,” as Jones-Sawyer,
members of the NAACP national board, and fellow Assembly member Steven Bradford
heard testimony from people of color who said they have experienced firsthand
the brutality of local police. A young Latina woman, for instance, spoke of an
officer slamming her head against a wall and then jamming his knee in her back,
leaving her with five slipped discs over what was a false arrest—one she was
later charged with resisting.
Film producer Charles Belk
recounted how, after dining at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, police there
mistook him for a bank robber and arrested him while he was walking to his car.
Despite his innocence, Belk had to spend thousands of dollars on legal fees to
get that arrest off his record, which Assemblyman Jones-Sawyer told me has him
considering introducing legislation to eliminate the cost of expunging a
potentially career-killing false arrest.
“Officers used me as a punching
bag,” another man testified. “This happened on the front lawn of my own home.
It felt as if my innocence was taken,” he recalled. “How many times is this
going to happen to us young black men before we as a community do something
about it?”
One mother started sharing a
similar story involving her son being brutalized, but wiping tears from her
eyes, lost her voice 30 seconds in.
The stories painted a picture
of LA police gone wild, but they were all anecdotes, and ultimately, apologists
for police brutality could dismiss them as such. Unfortunately, hard data on
police violence is hard to come by—and not knowing the full extent of the
problem makes it hard to adequately address it, argued Peter Bilbring, a senior
staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California. “We know precisely how many shark attacks
happen in American water,” he told the panel, “but we do not know how many
civilians were shot by a United States law enforcement officer.”
So we can only guess. This
much, however, is certain: Police in America are shooting to death a lot more
people than police in any other developed nation. According to the FBI, there
are about 400 “justifiable” police homicides annually in the US, though an
effort to compile media reports on officer-involved killings indicates there
are more than 1,100 people shot to death by police each year (that’s a 9/11
death toll every three years). In the last year for which there are records,
police in Germany, a nation of 80 million, killed all of eight people. In
Britain and Japan, with a combined population of 191 million, zero people were
killed by members of law enforcement.
An effort to track homicides
here in Los Angeles County, meanwhile, found that no criminal organization
kills as many people as the police. Since 2000, members of local law
enforcement have killed at least 589 people (the Los Angeles Times says 591)—or
about one person every week—according to a new report from the Youth Justice
Coalition, a grassroots organization run by and for young people of color who
have been affected by state violence. Each year, from three to eight percent of
all homicides are committed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department or
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office—and it’s only been getting worse.
“Law enforcement use of force
resulting in death is higher now than when LA had twice many murders,” says the
report, based on data from local media and the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office.
Though the overall number of murders in 2013 was less than half the number in
2002, police killings—“officer-involved shootings,” in the agency-eliminating
words of cops and journalists—rose from 36 to 44, or from three percent of
homicides to seven percent. Though they make up less than ten percent of the
population, nearly a third of those killed were Black.
The Youth Justice Coalition is
petitioning California Attorney General Kamala Harris to appoint a special
prosecutor to investigate police violence, arguing that local prosecutors
depend too much on the cooperation of police for other investigations to
properly investigate police wrongdoing.
That could be a good, practical
first step, said Keyanna Celina of the Coalition for Community Control Over the
Police, but that’s only a band-aid. What we need is more systemic change, she
argued: an all-elected civilian board that can exercise complete control when
it comes to hiring and firing members of local police departments, from the
sheriff on down. “We want power in the hands of the people."
A lot of people applauded that
line.
