Why more diverse police
departments won’t put an end to police misconduct.
By Jamelle Bouie
When the video begins, all you
hear is yelling. “It was just a cigarette! Mister, it’s just a cigarette, sir!”
The video focuses, and you see a plainclothes police officer holding
17-year-old Marcel Hamer to the gutter with his foot. He bends down, punches
the man in the head, and tries to arrest him. “Do you wanna get fucked up?” the
office says, “Yeah, get it on film,” he continues. At this point, the young man
is unconscious and unresponsive, and his friends are still shouting, screaming
that he’s knocked out, begging him to get up.
This footage—taken on June
4—comes from New York City, and follows video of a similar incident from August
in a nearby neighborhood, where an officer pistol-whipped an unarmed
16-year-old for briefly running away from police.
But there’s an important
difference between the two videos. In the second, we see a familiar scene:
black youth, white cops. The first, on the other hand, shows something less
common: a black youth and a black cop.
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In the aftermath of the
shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown—a black teenager—was killed
by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, we learned that Ferguson Police
Department was nearly 95 percent white in a town where blacks were the large
majority. Residents wanted change. “We want answers, we want justice in our community,
we want diversity,” said Rev. Derrick Robinson in one of the early protests.
On the last point, at least,
Ferguson city leaders agreed. “We hire everyone that we can get,” said Mayor
James Knowles when asked about police diversity. “There's also the problem that
a lot of young African-American people don’t want to go into law enforcement.
They already have this disconnect with law enforcement, so if we find people
who want to go into law enforcement who are African-American we’re all over it
because we want them to help us bridge the gap.” Likewise, during one forum,
Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson said, “The perception is if we don’t have
the diversity, we don’t have the understanding, and perception is reality.”
But there’s a problem. For as
much as police diversity has value for image and community relations, it’s not
clear that it does anything to cure the problem of police abuse and brutality
in black and Latino communities. Just because an officer is black, in other
words, doesn't mean he’s less likely to use violence against black citizens.
Just because an officer is
black, doesn't mean he’s less likely to use violence against black citizens.
The best look at this comes
from Brad W. Smith, a researcher from Wayne State University in Detroit. In a
2003 paper, he looks at the impact of police diversity on officer-involved
homicides in cities of more than 100,000 residents and cities of more than
250,000 residents. Regardless of city size, there wasn’t a relationship between
racial representation and police killings—officer diversity didn’t mean much.
At most, in smaller cities, female officers were more likely to commit
shootings than their male counterparts, a fact—he speculates—that could be tied
to sexist pressures on female officers, who might feel the need to act “tough”
to prove their bona fides.
What mattered for police
shootings wasn’t the makeup of the police department, it was the makeup of the
city. In all measured cities, an increase in black residents brought an
increase in police shootings. In smaller cities, a substantial change in the
proportion of black residents resulted in a slight increase in the predicted
number of police-caused homicides. And in the larger cities, the same change
increased the chance for police-caused homicides by a factor of 10 compared to
smaller cities. Put another way, the quickest way to predict the number of
police shootings in a city is to see how many blacks live there.
And, in turn, the most likely
victims of fatal police shootings are young black males. According to a
ProPublica analysis of federal data on police shootings, young black males ages
15 to 19 are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than their
white counterparts. “One way of appreciating that stark disparity,” notes ProPublica,
“is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to
have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is
jarring—185, more than one per week.” What’s most relevant for the diversity of
police departments is this fact: While black officers are involved in just 10
percent of police shootings, 78 percent of those they kill are black.
The glib response to stats on
blacks and police is to cite so-called “black crime” or “black criminality.”
But this depends on a major analytical error. Yes, blacks are overrepresented
in arrest and conviction rates. At the same time, “criminal blacks” are a tiny,
unrepresentative fraction of all black Americans. If you walked into a group of
1,000 randomly selected blacks, the vast majority—upward of 998—would never
have had anything to do with violent crime. To generalize from the two is to
confuse the specific (how blacks are represented among criminals) with the
general (how criminals are represented among blacks). Statisticians call this a
“base rate error,” and you should try to avoid it.
In fairness, you could apply
this to police as well. The number of cops who shoot—much less shoot black
Americans—is a small percentage of all cops. Why judge the whole by the actions
of a few?
But there are problems here.
Policing is a profession backed by the state and imbued with the right—and
reasonable latitude—to use lethal force. Even if we’re looking at a small
number of cops, it’s still a serious problem when those who shoot are most likely
to kill people from a specific group. Moreover, the problem of blacks and
police goes beyond shootings to general interactions between black communities
and law enforcement. We know, for instance, that officers are more likely to
use force against black protesters than white ones. The stats on shooting are
just one part of a larger dynamic that applies to police departments across the
country, not just individual cops.
The history of American
policing is tied tightly to its relationship with black Americans and other
minorities. The earliest police antecedents were slave patrols and anti-native
militias, built to suppress rebellion and combat Native Americans. After the
Civil War, Southern whites used police as a new tool for control, terrorizing
blacks under the guise of law enforcement, from lynchings—often organized or
supported by local sheriffs—to convict leasing. Elsewhere, in the industrial
cities of the Northeast and Midwest, policing became a pathway for immigrant
mobility. At the same time, police attention turned to black migrants, who were
condemned as lazy and criminal. As historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad describes,
police during the New York race riots of 1900 and 1905 “abdicated their
responsibility to dispense color-blind service and protection, resulting in ...
indiscriminate mass arrests of blacks attacked by white mobs.”
The antagonism between blacks
and police would continue through the 20th century. As BuzzFeed’s Adam Serwer
notes in an essay on Ferguson, the urban riots of the 1960s—and beyond—were
fueled by police abuse, “The recipe for urban riots since 1935 is remarkably
consistent and the ingredients are almost always the same: An impoverished and
politically disempowered black population refused full American citizenship, a
heavy-handed and overwhelmingly white police force, a generous amount of
neglect, and frequently, the loss of black life at the hands of the police.”
For a more vivid picture, there's James Baldwin's 1960 essay on Harlem—“Fifth
Avenue, Uptown”—where he describes the meaning of the white policeman in the
black ghetto:
They represent the force of the
white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s
criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his
place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what
will happen should his rebellion become overt.
This isn’t ancillary to the
present question of diversity and policing, it's vital. The culture of policing
evolved in a context of racial discrimination and racial control, where
departments were charged with containing blacks, not protecting them. The
demographics of policing have changed since the middle of the 20th century, but
the culture has moved more slowly. And while we have minority officers,
they—like their white counterparts—operate in an atmosphere of suspicion and
distrust between communities and law enforcement.
“Regardless of who is carrying
out the police function,” writes Brad Smith, explaining his results, “police
will always be seen as representatives of the larger establishment. As such,
tensions between police and citizens may be a function of the police role.”
Over the weekend, activists
launched renewed protests in Ferguson and St. Louis. Thousands of people
marched for Michael Brown, demanding justice for the slain teenager. On the
other side were scores of police, prepared to make arrests if necessary. And in
both groups—police and protesters—there were black Americans. From a distance,
it’s hard to tell if this mattered for people on the ground, but my hunch is it
didn’t. We want to believe that diversity can transform the relationship of
police to the communities they serve. But odds are good that it doesn’t, and it
won’t. Given the fraught history of blacks and law enforcement, blue—it
seems—is the only color that matters.
