‘What about Chicago?’ is no excuse (Part 2)

“What about Chicago?”

If you write about Black Lives Matter long enough or decry police brutality often enough or pay attention to conservative news outlets frequently enough, you’re going to hear “What about Chicago?” as an attempt to invalidate your point of view – even if you’re more than 1,700 miles away.

In a recent letter to the editor a suburban Phoenix man writes: “What utter hypocrites the ‘BLM movement’ and

reporters are! Story after story on the pages of the paper about … George Floyd was wrongfully killed by a white cop.

“Yet, when 3-year-old Mekhi James was killed along with 13 others in one weekend in Chicago, the BLM hypocrites are silent, and the story is relegated to Page 6. It looks to me that the only time ‘Black Lives Matter’ is when a white male kills the victim.”

To address his concerns, I called Amara Enyia, a community organizer and former Chicago mayoral candidate, and Jerry Oliver, an Arizona State University professor and former police chief in Detroit and Richmond, Virginia. Both are African American.

This is the second of a two-part Q&A. (Answers have been edited for clarity and length.)

Question: Chief Oliver, what do you know about the problems Chicago faces?

Jerry Oliver: From my perspective, what’s happening in Chicago or Baltimore or some of the other major cities that are predominantly African American stems from the same issues that came out of the George Floyd situation, and that is that systemic, institutionalized, accepted racism over the years has caused police departments to hire and promote people who are there for the wrong reasons.

Q: Do you see structural racism at play anywhere else in these communities?

Oliver: In these cities, we have redlined and built projects and collected African American people, people of color, into small areas of poverty, neglect and hopelessness.

And what I’ve seen as a police chief is that in areas where there is hopelessness, you will find violence.

It’s important that we deal with the institutionalized racism.

These systems aren’t broken; they’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do, and that is to keep certain people under control or to neglect them or to make sure that they don’t have the same equality that other people in this country have.

Q: What’s the solution?

Oliver: We’ve got to re-imagine systems across the board, in housing, in education, you name it.

It’s very, very important that we realize it all comes from the same systematic, Jim Crow-era institutions that were built to keep people under thumb.

Q: Is it a false equivalent to compare police violence to intercommunity violence?

Oliver: Yes. These are separate problems that have separate solutions. Not that the situations aren’t based in the institutional racism or divisiveness that’s occurred in this country. They’re different because it takes a different response to the systems that have been put into place to deal with criminal justice issues and the systems that have been put in place to deal with residential issues, specifically Black people crowded together over time in hopeless situations.

The answers are pretty much the same, but the problems are different.

Q: Specific to police, there are plenty of good officers. How can we create a better environment for them?

Oliver: The large majority of police officers that I work with are not only good, but they’re exceptional.

If I had to write a book today about my 45 years in policing, I would entitle it “In the Company of Heroes.”

But I would include a chapter on some of the worst people I’ve seen who were in policing. They were people who came into it for the wrong reasons. They were not hired in the spirit of service. They were hired in the spirit of being a warrior and dominating communities.

We’ve got to change the paradigm and make sure that police officers that come in have the right heart.

It won’t be just rules. And it won’t be just laws. It won’t be regulations. It won’t even be training.

It’s making sure that we hire people with the heart for problem solving and supporting people and doing the right thing. They can then join many, many other police officers who are doing exactly that.