Roots of black mistrust for police forces run deep
Region unrest follows deaths, grave injuries at the hands of cops
In 1984, city police officers shot Jessie Davis to death in his Arbor Hill apartment, making him another casualty in a painful history dividing black communities and the police.
Over the decades, episodes like the killing of Davis have generated a hard crust of fear, distrust and anger in the urban centers of Albany, Schenectady and Troy, where for decades police investigations and grand juries have repeatedly exonerated officers of any wrongdoing in the killing or wounding of black civilians. The Capital Region, of course, is a microcosm of a national crisis that has inspired peaceful demonstrations as well as violence in the wake of the May 25 killing of 46-year-old George Floyd in Minneapolis. A wide swath of Americans, from activists to voices in law enforcement, are demanding reforms after viewing footage of a police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes as three officers watched.
Despite progress, the calls for change have stopped neither the deaths nor the resulting anger. Why are the solutions so elusive?
“The thing that gnaws at me all the time is we still have not gotten to the point where we really, honest and truly believe that black people are equal to white people,” said community activist Alice Green, founder of the Law and
Justice Center in Albany. “It’s just not there. We haven’t gotten there yet.”
Two generations after the peak of the civil rights movement, the public, police and politicians are watching the anger boil over. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last week announced a slate of reforms to address the problem. It was 35 years after his father, Gov. Mario Cuomo, appointed a commission to study police shootings of black civilians in New York.
The cases it examined included the killing of Davis on July 8, 1984.
The 35-year-old, who was mentally ill, had been causing a disturbance in his apartment when city officers rushed in and shot him, claiming he had lunged at them with a knife and fork. The officers were cleared. In 1987, the state commission found that police “generally evidence restraint” in using authorized deadly and physical force, and that race was not a significant factor in officers’ decisions to use such force.
In 1993, the Times Union reported that an attorney for Davis’ family had found a never-before-revealed photo of Davis at the scene holding a key case in one hand and a toy Matchbox truck in the other.
The protests in Minneapolis, New York, Atlanta and dozens of other cities are in many ways a repeat of the often violent unrest that swept through Los Angeles in 1992 after three police officers were cleared of the use of excessive force in the videotaped beating of Rodney King. Then-albany Police Chief John Dale, the city’s first black chief, and Schenectady Police Commissioner Charles Mills said at the time that they hoped the destruction in Los Angeles would not spread to other cities.
The Capital Region remained peaceful — but the problems that gave rise to the anger never fully abated.
Insufficient responses
More recently, the nation has observed the 2014 fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the chokehold death that same year of Eric Garner in Staten Island, and the 2015 case of Freddy Gray in Baltimore, who died of spinal injuries he received as police arrested him for allegedly possessing a knife. Locally, cases involving police use of force include Andrew Kearse, Edson Thevenin and Donald “Dontay” Ivy, all of whom lost their lives during encounters with police, and Ellazar Williams, who was paralyzed from the chest down after being shot in the back as he ran from officers.
Arrested for driving erratically and trying to run from police on May
11, 2017, Kearse begged Schenectady Police Officer Mark Weekes to roll down the window in the patrol car he was sitting in, saying, “I can’t breathe.” The officer, who is black, repeatedly refused Kearse’s requests for medical attention. He was pronounced dead at Ellis Hospital. The
state attorney general’s office presented the case to a grand jury, which cleared Weekes.
On April 17, 2016, Troy police Sgt. Randall French shot Thevenin, 37, after he drove away from a DWI stop near the entrance to the Collar City Bridge. French was cleared after then-rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove presented the case to a grand jury just days after the incident and allowed French to testify without a waiver of immunity, which meant the officer could never be charged with the shooting. French said he thought his life was at risk. The attorney general’s office investigated Abelove’s handling of the case and ultimately charged him with official misconduct and perjury after he testified before a subsequent grand jury examining the case.
An internal affairs investigation disputed French’s account of the shooting and recommended disciplinary charges that included unjustifiable use of deadly force and providing false testimony. But the department took no action against the 39-year-old officer, who died of COVID-19 in April. The city kept the report secret. It came to light only due to a tip passed to lawyers for Thevenin’s widow, who has brought a federal lawsuit over the killing.
While those episodes are recent, accusations of unequal justice and racism in police departments reach back decades.
Last year, Green’s nonprofit released a survey of 250 residents that showed many black and brown Albany citizens distrust the city’s police and prosecutors. Its recently released report, “Structural
Racism and Public Safety in Albany,” prescribes a government-community partnership to confront
“Unfortunately, we live in a society where there is systemic, structural racism and it goes back to how we treated blacks especially in this country.”
— Alice Green
the problem. A symposium in the fall will examine the need to return to more community policing.
“The problems continue to exist because the root is never dealt with,” said Pastor David F. Traynham of the New Horizons Christian Church in Albany, a past president of the Albany chapter of the NAACP. “What the events around our nation are doing is causing people to consider the root: a system of racism that has many layers that no one wants to peel. There are layers of racism in employment, housing, construction, government, sports, banking, finance, international trade, the pharmaceutical industry, policing — and the list is endless.”
Traynham said no government or group can eliminate racism on their own. It needs to be eradicated on a societal level or it will never go away, he said.
“It may stop for a season, but if you will notice, each time the anger in our African-american communities
“Law enforcement, people with badges, are those people that had to enforce those oppressive, racist laws. So the relationship between the African-american community and law enforcement doesn’t date back to Rodney King, it dates back to the arrival on these lands.”
— David Soares
is sparked, the generation it manifests in is more radical than the last,” Traynham said.
Building bridges
On Friday, Albany
County District Attorney David Soares held a news conference with Albany Police Chief Eric Hawkins on Clinton Avenue. In 2004, Soares became the county’s first black district attorney. Hawkins is only the second black police chief in the city.
Soares told reporters the relationship between police and the black community has never existed.
He highlighted landmark Supreme Court rulings that for decades denied rights to black Americans through mechanisms such as segregation.
“Law enforcement, people with badges, are those people that had to enforce those oppressive, racist laws,” Soares said. “So the relationship between the Africanamerican community and law enforcement doesn’t date back to Rodney King, it dates back to the arrival on these lands.”
Hawkins said he understands the issue as a cop and as a black man. The chief said if people believe the institution of law enforcement is systematically designed to oppose and oppress them, progress will be nearly impossible.
“You have a lot of young men across this country — I was one, at some point, that felt (law enforcement) was an institution that was just insensitive to my experiences – and ... that becomes the reality,” he said. “I’ve had those experiences. I’ve heard the stories when I was young that told me if you ever had an encounter with a police officer, if you want to sur
vive that encounter this is how you do it. My parents gave me that speech.”
Hawkins — who came to Albany from Southfield, Mich., in 2018 just after Ellazar Williams was shot — said he wanted to become a police officer because he believed he had a unique opportunity to “take some experiences that I had and help to build some bridges.”
In recent days, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has repeated his complaint that district attorneys and police work together on criminal cases, creating a conflict of interest that should preclude those prosecutors from handling cases involving alleged police misconduct.
That was the reason, Cuomo said, that he signed an executive order in 2015 giving the state attorney general the authority to investigate police killings of unarmed civilians. The order resulted in the state probes of the deaths of Kearse and Thevenin.
Many district attorneys chafed at the order.
Schenectady County District Attorney Robert Carney noted his office has prosecuted Schenectady police officers — a department that had a notorious reputation for corruption, exposed by a two-year U.S. Justice Department probe that began in 1999 and uncovered systemic civil rights abuses and led to the arrests and convictions of four officers.
Two of those officers, Michael Siler and Richard Barnett, pleaded guilty to federal charges and were sentenced to prison in
2002 for extorting drug dealers and selling narcotics. Siler also pleaded guilty to racketeering. The investigation also revealed that Siler and Barnett had once dragged a black man off a porch in Hamilton Hill and brought him to
Rector Road in Glenville, where they left him without his shoes and drove away in their patrol car.
A chance for change
Green said the horrifying video of Floyd’s death struck a chord with people of all races.
“I think there’s been some progress, even though it’s sometimes hard to tell,” she said. “But white people are starting to understand some of this, because there have been so many (incidents). When you saw George Floyd, it sort of said, ‘Wow, this is too much . ... We can’t take this anymore.’”
Green noted that black people once thought slavery would never end. Albany used to be more segregated. She said hope for a solution depends largely on the leadership of police departments. She praised the work of former Albany police chiefs Steve Krokoff and Brendan Cox, and was impressed by the recent words of former acting chief Robert Sears, whosaidlastweekina Times Union commentary that every department needs to examine its personnel and practices: “We are all judged by the actions of every police officer in the country,” Sears wrote.
In a sign of the difficulty in reaching consensus,
Green believes Hawkins has not been as strong as his predecessors on reinvigorating community policing. Her report found the chief has “displayed a decided lack of responsiveness, transparency, and candor in addressing residents’ concerns.”
Traynham, however, praised the work of the new chief, who he said “continues to build on the community engagement policies handed down by our prior three police chiefs . ... It’s not easy changing the mindset of hundreds of police officers, some who have been on the force for many years.”
Green and Traynham agree that Floyd’s death has created the possibility for real change.
“Right now, we have your attention. Right now, the leaders of our nation are ready to listen ... or at least most of them,” Traynham said. “The solution lies in their ability to listen, understand and act on new policies and procedures that will allow African-americans and other minority groups to live in a manner that’s equal to others. To be treated fairly, as our Constitution states we are to be treated, is really not asking too much.”