Black and blue
Black lives matter. Today, this stands for opposition to aggressive policing and punitive criminal sentencing. But in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as a violent drug trade snuffed out or ruined countless black lives, more assertive policing in black communities was considered a civil rights imperative. Does racial justice require sympathy for criminal suspects who are disproportionately people of color or a crackdown on the criminals who victimize the residents of poor neighborhoods? Yale Law School professor and former public defender James Forman Jr. addresses this question in his poignant and insightful new book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.”
Were tough-on-crime policies foisted on black communities by racist white politicians and police? “Locking Up Our Own” tells a more complicated story. Black communities desperate for relief from a plague of drugs and drug-related crime did not foresee the
downsides of aggressive law enforcement and demanded law and order: “Mass incarceration,” Forman writes, “is the result of small, distinct steps, each of whose significance becomes more apparent over time, and only when considered in light of later events.”
At first, the so-called War on Drugs had the support of civil rights leaders and black politicians desperate to stop the flow of drugs — first heroin, later PCP and finally crack cocaine — into minority communities. During the drug crises of the 1970s and 1980s, the inner-city drug dealer was considered not only a dangerous criminal but also a traitor to his race. In the early 1980s, black newspapers such as the Los Angeles Sentinel called for drug dealers to be “tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, castrated.”
Forman’s book includes the story of Washington, D.C., vigilante librarian Tony Hillary, pictured with a determined scowl and a pistol in each hand, reminding the reader that African Americans living in crimeridden neighborhoods were as likely to condone Dirty Harrystyle justice as suburban whites. Indeed, under zerotolerance policies embraced by many black political leaders, casual drug users were condemned along with drug kingpins: For instance, in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry threatened the confiscation of assets and long prison terms for anyone “caught with half a gram of cocaine [or] one marijuana joint.”
Forman deftly moves between such examples of black community support for a lawand-order crackdown and the dire present-day consequences of our increasingly punitive and aggressive war on crime. He reminds us that the United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. He shows the human costs of mandatory minimum criminal sentences and zero-tolerance law enforcement through the stories of his clients in Washington, D.C., such as a sensitive young man who joined a gang for protection; a diligent working woman who lost her job after being caught with a small amount of marijuana; a talented but delinquent high school student raised by a drug-addicted single mother. Caught up in a merciless criminal justice system that refuses to distinguish between hardened criminals and recreational drug users or between youthful indiscretions and remorseless predation, these men and women suffered life-altering punishments for offenses that are often overlooked or forgiven in wealthier communities.
Aggressive law enforcement tactics were a predictable reaction to heavily armed criminals who routinely outgunned police. Indeed, even as support for the War on Drugs waned in the black community, zero tolerance for gun-related crimes remained popular. Forman notes that in the early 1990s, Eric Holder, then U.S attorney for the District of Columbia, advocated the use of pretextual traffic stops and searches to uncover concealed weapons — a version of the now-infamous “driving while black” policing. Holder acknowledged that black drivers would be stopped disproportionately, but noted that “94% of black homicide victims were slain by black assailants.” African American politicians and their constituents accepted increasingly punitive and indiscriminate law enforcement as the only available response to pervasive violent crime.
As UC Berkeley Law Professor Franklin E. Zimring writes in his meticulously researched book, “When Police Kill,” African Americans today are 2.3 times more likely to be killed by police than are whites. What’s worse, American police officers kill far more often than do police in other countries because of the risks of American policing: “[T]he threat of lethal attack is a palpable part of being a police officer in the United States,” Zimring writes.
American police are 25 times more likely to be killed in the line of duty than police in the United Kingdom and 40 times more likely than police in Germany — a difference explained almost entirely by the availability of firearms. Guns are used in between 90 and 97 percent of all fatal attacks on police, and police respond to this risk with preemptive lethal force: Almost 60 percent of the roughly 1,000 civilians killed by American police every year were armed with a gun or something that looked like a gun. The easy availability of guns is a crisis for both police and the communities they patrol most assertively.
Discriminatory policing is an ongoing scandal that deserves forceful condemnation, but, as these timely and important books suggest, prejudice alone does not account for the manifest injustices in contemporary law enforcement and criminal justice. Although racism undoubtedly plays a role in support for mass incarceration, zero-tolerance criminal sentencing and aggressive policing, tragically these deeply flawed practices are understandable overreactions — by both police and citizens of all races — to reasonable fears.
Richard Thompson Ford teaches at Stanford Law School and is the author of several books, including “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse” and “Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com