New black offifficers, court offifficials rethinking policing

BIRMINGHAM, ALA. — Veteran Alabama law enforcement officer Mark Pettway grew up in a black neighborhood called “Dynamite Hill” because the Ku Klux Klan bombed so many houses there in the 1950s and ’60s.

Now, after becoming the first black person elected sheriff in Birmingham— on the same day voters elected the community’s first black district attorney — Pettway sees himself as part of a new wave of officers and court officials tasked with enforcing laws and rebuilding community trust fractured by police shootings, mass incarceration and uneven enforcement that critics call racist.

In a state where conservative politicians typically preach about getting tough on crime, Jefferson County’s new sheriff ran and won on an alternative message. He favors decriminalizing marijuana, opposes arming school employees, supports additional jailhouse education programs to reduce recidivism and plans for deputies to go out and talk to people more often, rather than just patrolling.

“Going forward we need to think about being smarter and not being harder,” said the Democrat Pettway, 54.

While the nation’s law enforcement officers are still mostly whitemen, and groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and Black Lives Matter call for sweeping changes in the criminal justice system, minorities appear to be making gains nationwide.

In Pettway’s case, strong turnout by African- American voters, combined with national concern over police shootings of unarmed people of color, helped him defeat longtime Sheriff Mike Hale, a white Republican, said professor Angela K. Lewis, interim chair of political science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Winners in other cities attributed their success to similar factors.

Houston voters elected 17 blackwomen as judges in the midterms.

Midterms voters in five North Carolina counties elected black Democratic sheriffs for the first time, including Gerald Baker in Wake County. He defeated a longtime Republican incumbent by campaigning on ending the county’s participation in a Trump administration program to detain people suspected of being in the country illegally and advocating for greater police accountability.

The message resonated in a county where a deputy and two highway troopers were charged in the beating of a black man earlier this year. Kyron Hinton suffered injuries including a broken nose, multiple dog bites and a fractured eye socket.

“If we make a mistake out here in the actions that we take then we should take responsibility for those things,” Baker said in an interview after the election.

Yet despite gains by people of color, officials like Baker still represent a minority in U.S. law enforcement.

A Justice Department report released in 2013 showed law enforcement agencies had become more racially and ethnic ally diverse over a 26- year period, yet the nation’s overall lawenforcement community remained overwhelmingly white and male.

Local police departments, which typically patrol inside city police jurisdictions, were about 73 percent white, the report said. Sheriff’s offices, which usually patrol in less urban areas and often operate county jails, were even whiter, at about 78 percent.

The report said research found that African-American, Latino and Asian-American communities were all underrepresented within police agencies relative to the populations they served. The disparity was greatest among blacks in areas where black population is proportionately largest, said the report.

In Birmingham, Sheriff -elect Pettway said he wants to increase hiring among minorities and women after he takes office in January. The department’s roughly 680-person staff should better reflect the county’s population, which is almost evenly split between blacks and whites, he said.

Some of Pettway’ s positions track those of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, with about 3,000 members in all levels of police work. The group opposes arming teachers and held a conference last year to broad en communication between police and citizens.

Pettway said he plans to increase the use of police body cameras, which he said was a big selling point during his campaign.