Policing in the real world
Our law enforcement agencies focus their efforts on certain areas, and certain groups, for reasons beyond ‘racism’
‘It’s been nearly threeand-a-half decades since I killed Edward Randolph,” wrote David A. Klinger in Politico Magazine in May, “but when I fix my mind on those desperate seconds from the time he thrust the butcher’s knife … and the moment I shot him ... it can seem like yesterday.”
Klinger, a cop-turned-professor in Missouri, has studied (and lived) policing and the use of deadly force for 35 years. But he remains unhardened, penning a confession of the anguish felt of taking a life, further perpetuated by his Christian faith. A lone voice, his call for sobriety is drowned out as emotionally charged protesters have gripped the public’s attention — from Ferguson to Baltimore — and as the media enables a flawed picture of trigger-happy, racist and heartless cops.
In lockstep, are a growing number of activist-journalists; tech-savvy millennials whose fire-in-their-belly resolve matches their self-righteousness. Among those is Desmond Cole. In a cover story of Toronto Life magazine, he neatly interwove his experiences with police to his views on the justice system. It landed like a bombshell amongst the chattering class.
In a matter of weeks, Cole transformed from a freelance journalist of the garden-variety kind, to a media star du jour. He dismissed Mark Saunders, the black police chief and 30-year veteran — with experience in Community Safety Command, Urban Street Gang Unit, Intelligence Division and Homicide — and successfully pressured Toronto Mayor John Tory to alter his stance on police carding because of “eroded public trust.” Cue the groundswell; with the black and blue across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area feeling the heat, and the provincial government considering provincewide regulations.
Police carding is the documentation of individuals for the purpose of public safety through investigating a specific offence. But this complex, littleknown policy has been framed in the public as “two simplistic halves,” writes Christie Blatchford of The National Post. “One saintly (those who bravely oppose carding), the other ghastly (the retrograde dummies who support it). There’s almost no room in the public space to breathe on the topic anymore, let alone to offer a different view.”
Public relations departments are flabbergasted on how to counteract a compelling narrative — “I’ve been stopped by cops on the street 50 times. I’m not a criminal” — as the Toronto Life cover broadcast. Even the mayor’s change of heart (not mind), was fuelled by the “personal stories I’ve heard in recent months and even before,” with Tory acknowledging Desmond Cole in his press announcement.
The dull reality is that police “go where crime occurs. We go where the community calls us to go,” Deputy Chief Peter Sloly told the Toronto Star. “I want my officers to be talking to people on the street engaging them, finding out what’s going on,” offered Peel police Chief Jennifer Evans. Carding is an “invaluable” intelligencegathering service, police union president Mike McCormack declared in 2010. “You’re recording data, setting up associations, knowing who’s involved (in gang activity).”
THE ELEPHANT IN THE (CANADIAN) ROOM
Activist-journalists like Cole blame racial profiling. But Phillip Atiba Goff, a UCLA psychologist and founder of Center for Policing Equity, who served as an independent reviewer of the Toronto police, countered that it is “not necessarily discrimination and instead, is affected by where crime occurs, victimization, demographics and even policing policies and patterns.” A Toronto Star analysis in 2012 revealed that Patrol Zone 121 — with the highest black population of the city’s patrol zones at 28 per cent, and the most heavily carded area — is rife with violence, with 34 homicides in seven years. “This is what kids see out their windows,” the paper writes. “Four men were shot in a housing complex next to 121 Humber, including a 19-year-old with a bullet in his chest, a 17-year-old with two bullets to the face and an 18-year-old with gunshots to each of his legs.”
The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente was more pointed in a 2002 column, noting “blacks account for 8.1 per cent of the population, they account for nearly 27 per cent of all the charges laid for violent crimes — homicides, sex assaults and gun offences,” and the felons are “disproportionately Jamaican.” She noted, “Our society is deeply conflicted over minoritygroup statistics-keeping. When it’s for socially progressive reasons, such as employment equity and affirmative action, we think it’s virtuous. But when it records negative behaviour, we think it’s terrible.”
EQUALITY BEFORE U.S. LAW?
In citing academic studies on drug offenders, robbery and burglary defendants, and the death penalty in the United States, John DiIulio, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that there aren’t racially disparate sentences. “If blacks are overrepresented in the ranks of the imprisoned, it is because blacks are overrepresented in the criminal ranks — and the violent criminal ranks, at that,” contends DiIulio. “Even if racism exists,” wrote Patrick A. Langan, a statistician from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, “it might explain only a small part of the gap between the 11 per cent black representation in the United States adult population and the now nearly 50 per cent black representation among persons entering state prisons each year in the United States.”
Jason L. Riley understands the frustration. He grew up black in a single-parent household in the inner city, and losing two of his siblings to drugs, he now writes for the Wall Street Journal, having authored Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
“Blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes,” he said in a college speech earlier this year. “Blacks constitute about 13 per cent of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 they committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. … So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions between police and crime-ridden communities will persist.”
The media, writes Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, and author of Are Cops Racist?: How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans, disregards “the fierce desire of so many innercity residents for safe neighbourhoods.” Debbie McBride, of South Bronx, N.Y., told Mac Donald that the police’s deterrence policies are welcome. “I’m serious, I love it. Me being a woman, I feel safe. I can get up at 4 a.m. and start working,” she said. “I’m so happy that the cops are here.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California — Berkeley, has noted New York City’s “Guinness Book of World Records crime drop.” From 1990 to 2009, the homicide rate dropped 82 per cent, with Zimring attributing nearly the majority to policing, and controversially, stop, question, and frisk (SQF).
SQF, like police carding, is predominantly used in highcrime neighbourhoods, and allows police with a “reasonable suspicion” and “for his own protection” to question and/or conduct a pat-down if needed. Its proactive emphasis is on averting crime. “Stop, question, and frisk, which the Supreme Court of the United States has found to be constitutional, is an important part of that record of success,” said former mayor Michael Bloomberg, citing a reduction in incarceration by 30 per cent, and 8,000 seized weapons.
Yet for all its success, District Judge Shira Scheindlin deemed the program unconstitutional in 2013, citing discrimination, with over 80 per cent of the stops being directed at blacks and Hispanics. Yet according to statistics, this stop percentage is actually lower than the amount of crime suspects from these groups. In 2011, blacks — at just 23 per cent of the city population — committed 73 per cent of all shootings, but were only 53 per cent of stops. “We’re so afraid to tell the truth,” said Tony Barksdale, a black cop in the NYPD. “Often the entire neighbourhood is black, so of course, you’re going to be stopping blacks — based on their behaviour.”
ROOM TO GROW
Yet for all their troubles, police forces have room to grow. Toronto’s Police and Community Engagement Review (PACER), which consulted with a wide swath of stakeholders including community groups, academic institutions and law societies, reveals an overwhelming desire for greater intercultural dialogue and sensitivity training. This is particularly apparent in lower-income neighbourhoods in the U.S., where police militarization has emboldened.
In the Harvard Law Review, Professor Seth Stoughton bemoans the adaptation from the warrior mindset, the mental toughness to survive in specific life-threatening situations, to the warrior mentality, one that harbours a kill-or-be-killed perspective. Stoughton advocates the guardian mindset, which “emphasizes communication over commands, co-operation over compliance, and legitimacy over authority,” along with “patience and restraint over control, stability over action.”
Bridging this gap will force us to answer uncomfortable questions, such as if we’re truly willing to embrace all the facts? In shouting “I can’t breathe,” as he was being chokehold during his arrest, Eric Garner’s death became a potent symbol of the police’s unnecessary use of force. But the 350-pound Garner suffered from numerous health ailments, and his death was “the unfortunate synergy between his disease of morbid obesity and actions most police perform countless times with only transient discomfort to the arrestee,” wrote Dr. G. Wesley Clark in the American Thinker.
Garner, who had been previously arrested 34 times and was out on bail, pleaded innocence: “I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me,” as he persistently resisted arrest. “He was continuously fighting with the officer. What really killed him?” a cop told The Economist.
Bridging the gap between our police and our communities is going to mean acknowledging some uncomfortable truths about who is committing violent crimes
TRIAL BY PUBLIC OPINION
In July 2013, 18-year old Sammy Yatim was causing a ruckus aboard a TTC streetcar in Toronto, when he was shot and killed by police officer James Forcillo, with a bystander recording a cellphone video. You know what happens next. The shaky video went viral, leading newscasts, and leaving viewers with questions, yet a “city-wide consensus quickly formed: this 18-year-old didn’t have to die.”
When the hysteria dissolved, it was discovered that “Yatim had a stiletto switchblade and had tried to slash the woman’s throat,” writes Mary Rogan in a Toronto Life cover story. The “shy and quiet” Forcillo had never fired his gun until the incident, mirroring statistics that 99 per cent of arrests in Toronto happen without the use of force.
“The 10 seconds you see of a man being hit with a baton, it looks horrible,” an officer told The Economist of the missing context, “but you don’t always know what that man was doing. Any use of force looks horrible even if it’s completely necessary.”
In the online version of the Toronto Life article on Yatim, the top-rated comment decried the “implicit condemnation of trial by social media frenzy. Both sides have human stories to tell.”
Somewhere in Missouri, David A. Klinger is quietly nodding his head.