Evan McMorris-Santoro
WASHINGTON — One question
defined the eight-hour opening session of the President’s Task Force on 21st
Century Policing Tuesday, hosted Tuesday in a TV studio at the Newseum.
Crime is down, just about
everywhere, but public perception of police has has remained steady for
decades. White Americans are generally happy with policing, while nonwhite
Americans are generally unhappy. Why?
Witnesses mostly said the
answers focused on the police themselves. There was testimony from academics,
civil liberties advocates, and police-protest leaders criticizing police
training, tactics, and even the language police use when dealing with suspects.
Bad language from police, Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus from the
University of Nebraska, said, leads to a culture of invincibility among cops
and anger among citizens who view the police as disrespectful.
Then, just before the lunch
break, police leaders testified.
They were not ready to pin the
blame on cops. Law enforcement leaders blamed budget cuts, political
correctness, and the unintended consequences of laws passed to make law
enforcement more effective for the problems plaguing community relations with
the police that serve them. Leaders of the Fraternal Order of Police and
International Association of Chiefs of Police bristled at what they saw as the
suggestion that police are racist in the way they enforce the law.
Cops should face the same
scrutiny as everyone else when it comes to fixing community relations, said
Chuck Canterbury, FOP president.
“We all have the same
responsibility towards society. I don’t think a police officer should be held
to any kind of a higher standard,” he said in response to questions from task
force members. “But we should take the lead and we should work with the communities
to help build that trust.”
In his opening statement,
Canterbury lamented a “subculture” that he says “celebrates…resorting to
violence and disrespect to police.” The media has given a “shoulder shrug” to
violence like the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after a grand jury declined to
indict Officer Darren Wilson. Police are “wary” of some interactions in the
wake of the Brooklyn shooting of two police officers, he said, and that’s why
he’s pushing for violence against police to be included in hate crimes
statutes.
Richard Beary, president of the
IACP, said “current smear campaigns aimed at law enforcement” had made policing
dangerous in the current environment. He likened the attitude toward
rank-and-file police officers to “the treatment of Vietnam vets coming home in
the 1970s.”
To men like Canterbury and
Beary, policing is misunderstood and often mischaracterized. They blamed
politicians for asking more and more of police while, they said, giving them
fewer resources to do it with. Policing now, they said, includes social work,
anti-terror work, and answering the call for drug overdoses and other calls
that aren’t public dangers. They said police hands had been tied by laws that
prevented them from using their discretion in arrests in many cases, or for
lawsuits and public sentiment that punishes police when they let someone go who
later commits a high-profile crime. Racism is an accusation mostly without
foundation that is thrown around a lot, Canterbury said.
“One of the worst things in a
police department is you don’t ever want to be accused of arresting somebody
because of their race, which is an accusation that occurs a lot,” he said.
Activists from the protest
community seemed put off by the tone of the police leaders. “Three of you
sounded extremely combative,” Connie Rice, a task-force member and civil rights
attorney from Los Angeles who helped lead LAPD community relations efforts in
2003.
Between panels, Carmen Perez
executive director at the Gathering For Justice, a self-proclaimed “police
reform” organization originally founded by Harry Belafonte, told BuzzFeed News
the police leaders were “a little aggressive” in their public comments.
Not all police leaders
addressing the panel or on the task force felt the same way. Andrew Peralta, a
police lieutenant with the Las Vegas police department who also serves as
president of the National Latino Peace Officers Association, agreed with the
academics and activists calling for new training regimens and community
outreach programs to bring police and communities together.
Police have generally favored
the use of body cameras by officers on the beat, another area where they
overlap with the activist community. Roberto Villasenor, chief of police in
Tucson, Arizona and a task force member, also said he was “floored” by holes in
police use of force data wasn’t more available. Activists and academics
addressing the panel uniformly called for better data collection by the federal
government on local police forces.
The defensiveness by many
police leaders in recent weeks has defined the push for changes in policing,
with cops in New York City openly rejecting Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio,
who they see as an anti-police crusader. The White House policing panel,
co-chaired by former Obama Department Of Justice Office Of Justice Programs
director Laurie Robinson and Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey,
is charged with bridging that gap and creating viable, tangible recommendations
for improving police-community relations by March 2. There will be at least
four more public meetings of the task force before it sets out to write the
recommendations, which the co-chairs will deliver to Obama.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael
Nutter testified before the task force Tuesday along with two other big city
mayors who have faced the same kind of police-community divide on the local
level that the task force is trying to fix across the country. In an interview
after his testimony, he acknowledged that tensions among rank-and-file officers
and activists are high, but he said there are national solutions to be found.
They might take some time to go into effect however.
“It’s clearly possible to
recommend a change. Change is not going to happen in 90 days,” Nutter said. “I
think the president was smart, given the situation in the country right now, to
not have a six-month, a nine-month a year-long process. Because that’s just
more frustration. Look, we know what a lot of these issues are all about. This
is nowhere near rocket science. This is not even science. It’s just common
sense. So we know what the [issues] are. Put it together, get it out there, let
the public know that we’re really serious about it.”
