Black people and police both suffer from attempts at social control
The irony of the agony being experienced by police officers across North America in the wake of the ambush of so many of their comrades by a black man last week in Dallas, and of the endless agony of North American black people at the hands of police officers, is that the suffering of both groups is at the hands of the same culprit.
While the police would rather they were facilitating social justice and that black people, like everyone, would be benefitting from it, both sides are instead victims of a system that has a hard time shaking off its historic antecedents of being intended for social control.
The criminal justice system in both the United States and Canada has retreated in recent years from living-up to its modern-day ideals. Instead of legitimizing each society by constitutionally policing and fairly deliberating the guilt or innocence of those suspected of committing crimes, it has slipped back too much into a system of managing the behaviour of the impoverished, a disproportionate amount of whom are black.
The reality is the majority of black people in the United States who are poor are so because they are still recovering from slavery and from a litany of laws, policies and attitudes that followed black emancipation and maintained some of the worst disadvantages of slavery.
Blacks in Canada are disproportionately poorer because so many of them come from impoverished countries where their recent ancestors were slaves as well. They started here with little more than nothing and many of them have not yet caught up, either. And catching up is getting harder, if not impossible. The behaviour of poor people needs to be controlled in such situations. Their revolt is feared. They need to be made to accept their lot in society — accept it or go to jail.
The criminal justice system across North America has responded to this need, hopefully unwittingly, by sentencing people to jail and detaining them in pretrial custody in record numbers and lengths of incarceration.
Police forces such as Toronto’s continue to grow and proactively feed the courts with an endless stream of poor people to detain and jail. The police, more certainly unwittingly, become the tools of trying to maintain the viability of unequal societies.
This isn’t planned — there is no malevolent brain trust directing it — but a system originally designed for social control is vulnerable to individual acts of choosing security and one’s own privilege over social justice. No more egregious example of this exists than the fact there are more people in jail now awaiting trial, who have been found guilty of nothing, than there are people serving sentences. How is that possible if the goal is social justice?
The poor are “the other” and the other is always feared. Watch the videos of the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Whatever else can be said of the police officers who killed these two men, they were clearly afraid of them — irrationally, pathetically, frustratingly afraid of them.
In the case of Toronto, the police are predominantly well-paid men from affluent suburbs who come into the city to police people different from them. The police are no less the other to impoverished black people, however more rational their fear of the police might be.
A society cannot long survive being divided into others like this. It certainly will not thrive as it should and provide its members with a sense of real wellbeing and security. It will be ceaselessly in tension.
What, then, must be done to alleviate this tension? More sensitivity training?
Some of the most culturally sensitive and compassionate people I have encountered are police officers, judges and Crown attorneys and yet, inevitably, they all have had to do things to impoverished black people they never wanted to do because of the system they work in.
The reality is the system treats the affluent differently, even affluent black people. They are policed more gently and respectfully and constitutionally. The same thing is repeated in the court process.
For the criminal justice system to achieve its goal of being one means of achieving social justice and less about social control, there will simply have to be greater income equality, and almost certainly through an income redistribution vehicle such as a universal basic income program.
And the justice system will have to work to constantly remind itself that its role in a democracy is predominantly social justice; the social control role belongs to a pre-democratic time, and a horribly nonegalitarian one.
Reid Rusonik is a Toronto criminal defence lawyer and managing partner of Rusonik, O’ Connor, Robbins, Ross, Gorham & Angelini, LLP.