Breaking Rank:
A Top Cop's Expose of the
Dark Side of American Policing
WHY WHITE COPS KILL BLACK MEN
CHAPTER 8
<blockquote>
Momma and Daddy were lucky, they had girls. I had boys. My boys are eleven and nine now, and I'm scared to death for them. It's not that I'm afraid they're gonna get jumped into a gang, or wind up doing or dealing drugs. No sir. My big fear is they're gonna run into one of you people one night and they won't be coming home. It's like open season on young black men in our community, like they're walking around with targets on their backs. I have a recurring nightmare, Chief: I get this call in the middle of the night, "Come on down to the morgue, Mrs. Johnson. We got one of your boys here. Police shot him when he tried to run."
—An African-American mother at a community forum
It's open season on us in The Heights, Chief. If you're working the blacks you're wearing a target, plain and simple. For me it comes down to this: kill or be killed. I got a wife and two boys. My sons need their father. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to make it home at the end of shift.
—A white cop, and member of an officer-safety task force, two weeks later
ANXIOUS ABOUT THE FUTURES of four young boys, a black mom and a white dad used identical metaphors in April 1985 to describe the "killing ground" that was, in their respective minds, the black community. There is no better case study of this issue than the Amadou Diallo incident in New York City.
Mr. Diallo was approached by four NYPD officers one night in February 1999. The cops thought he might be a rape suspect. Frightened, not understanding what was going on, Diallo reached for his wallet to show the officers his ID. One of the cops yelled, "Gun!" and in less time than it takes to read this sentence, forty-one shots were fired, nineteen of them striking Mr. Diallo. Diallo was not a rapist. In fact, he had no criminal record.
NYPD ruled it a "clean" shooting, meaning the killing of the twenty- two-year-old, non-English-speaking, unarmed immigrant was legally jus¬tified and within department policy. The Department of Justice found no civil rights violations. A state criminal trial ended in four acquittals.
But an innocent man was shot dead. Why? Because Mr. Diallo was black. I believe the cops were afraid of him for that reason, and that reason alone. So frightened they couldn't see straight, think straight, shoot straight. (If they'd been at their PD firearms range in the Bronx all forty- one of those shots, fired as they were at point blank range, would have found their target.)
But why were they so frightened?
President Clinton said at the time, "If it had been a young white man in a young all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn't have happened." To determine whether the Diallo killing (or any other police action) was racially motivated you have to ask, Would the cops have behaved the same way if the man had been white?
No. Diallo was killed because of his dark skin. A white man reaching for his wallet, under identical circumstances, including a language barrier would have been given the benefit of the doubt.
Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don't talk about it, we pretend it doesn't exist, we claim "color blindness," we say white offi¬cers treat black men the same way they treat white men. But that's a lie. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man the greater the fear. The African- American community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it's a central, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won't admit it to themselves, or to others.
I've studied fear for years. I've learned how it affects our bodies, our perception, judgment, and actions. Recently, I tried to dig up empirical evidence to support my particular theory that white cops are afraid of black men.
I researched the voluminous library of the National Institute of Justice (Bureau of Justice Statistics), scoured the reams of publications put out by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, consulted LexisNexis. I Googled till I was goggle-eyed. It's just not there.
You can find all kinds of evidence of citizen fears of the police. There are studies on officer stress, some of which focus on cops' fears of being fired for doing the wrong thing (or not doing the right thing). There are studies showing that whites, in general, are likely to view blacks as more violent than whites. (One of those studies, recently completed by Dr. Anthony Greenwald and published in the July 2003 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, actually went so far as to put computer "guns" in the hands of 106 undergraduate, mostly white, non-cop students. In 208 scenarios the students wrongly shot black "suspects" 35 percent of the time versus 26 percent wrongful shootings of whites.) But not until some brave soul conducts a valid, reliable study that focuses on actual white cops' actual fears of actual black men will we have actual scientific proof of my assertion.
So, why am I so certain that white cops are afraid of black men? Because I was a white cop In a world of white cops. For thirty-four years.
At first I was afraid of everyone, white, black, old, young. I got over most of these fears pretty quickly (which is to say I sublimated or repressed them). But not, however, my fear of black men. Not for a long, long time.
As a rookie, I felt a peculiar and particular fear every time I stopped or ticketed or arrested a black man, a fear I did not feel when confronting white men under similar circumstances.
From the earliest days of academy training it was made clear that black men and white cops don't mix, that of all the people we'd encounter on the streets, those most dangerous to our safety, to our survival, were black men.
One instructor began his presentation with: "Gentlemen, what you are about to learn may save your life." He was there to talk to us about a particular problem he said we would encounter with a particular slice of the black male population in Logan Heights. He directed us to his chapter in the academy manual:
This information is designed to acquaint you with the NATION OF ISLAM OR THE "MUSLIM CULT." It should be noted at this time that your Police Department has always maintained a detachment from political, racial, and religious involvements. This policy has not changed as this is a sketch of a pseudo-religious organization whose creed is the annihilation [sic] of the white man ...
We learned that this "pseudo-religious organization" was composed of twenty- to thirty-year-old men called the "fruit of Islam." That these men were "selected for their physical prowess and are adept at aggressive tactics and judo. " That they were "almost psychotic in their hatred of Caucasians and are comparable to the Mau Mau or Kamikaze in their dedication and fanaticism. " That "locally, members of this cult will kill any police officer when the opportunity presents itself, regardless of the circumstances or outcome."
Black men? "Almost psychotic " in their hatred of me? On the streets of my city. Dedicated to "annihilating" me? I wondered, but never asked, what the four African-American cops in that classroom thought of all this.
We soon learned it wasn't just the "Muslim Cult" we needed to worry about. It was all black men, something we were taught tacitly if not explicitly by other instructors who kept returning in their "real-world" tales to the streets of Logan Heights, to accounts of gunfights, fistfights, knife- fights—with black men. It got to the point where all they had to say was "The Heights" and you'd envision legions of black males who couldn't wait for the chance to kill a cop.
I was working The Heights one night as a rookie when my senior officer ordered me to pull up to the curb in front of a bar, aptly nicknamed the "Bucket o' Blood." "Get out of the vehicle," he said. "Take your ******- knocker with you." I stepped out of the car, slipped my baton into its ring, and peered through the passenger window, awaiting instructions. "Go on inside," he said. "Pick out the biggest, blackest, meanest motherfucking ****** in the place and pinch him." I was halfway to the door of the tavern when he called me back to the car. It had been a test, a jest. He laughed his ass off. It took me five minutes to stop shaking.
What if he'd said, in front of the Kensington Inn, a white bar in a white neighborhood, "Go on inside. Pick out the biggest, whitest, meanest motherfucking honky in the place and pinch him"? I probably would have thought something like, Dang, this guy's off his rocker. Why does he want me to go in there and bust some big white guy? But I wouldn't have been afraid. I wasn't taught to fear white people.
A couple of nights later I rode The Heights with another white cop. This guy was different. Jack Pearson had grown up in an African-American neighborhood, had attended Lincoln High, a predominantly black school. We stopped a lot of black men that night, even put a couple of them in jail. Pearson's respectful, transparently fearless approach to them stood in contrast to the panicky, impulsive white cops I'd worked with. Watching him talk to black men (and women) and observing how he listened to them helped me recognize that I was a member of the panicky white-cop category.
This knowledge ultimately forced me to confront and to work (for years) on my own fears and racism. And to recognize that it was fear of black men (and no small amount of peer pressure) that, in part, drove me to behave during my rookie year as a thug, a brutal, overbearing, menace of a cop.
Good cops experience fear, to be sure. But they perform effectively by working through their fear. Ambrose Redmoon wrote, "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." For fearless cops, that "something else" is getting a dangerous and delicate job done—properly, humanely and safely.
Fearless cops perceive their surroundings more accurately, and they make more informed judgments when the work does turn tense or dangerous. It's not that they don't register hues of black or white or brown, they just don't impute anything to skin color. They size up Diallo-type situations— which happen all the time in police work—and recognize in the moment the inherent innocence of such persons.
Because these cops are alert, not alarmed or paranoid, and because they assess behavior not pigmentation, they tend to produce routine rather than tragic outcomes. Cops like these, who make up maybe twenty to thirty percent of the force, are inspiring to watch in action.
Legitimate "kill or be killed" events do happen—far more often today than when I was a beat cop. A police officer would be a fool not to be ever vigilant. But I'm afraid this reality has licensed panicky white cops to shoot unarmed black men when they should be talking, or fighting, their way out of a sticky situation.
What to do about white cops who are afraid of black men? First, each "corner pocket" must understand the scope and the nature of racism within its own department. This means investigating the problem. My bosses in San Diego in the mid-seventies ordered the most exhaustive study of police racism in the history of the institution. Although the reports were never published, they produced for at least one agency a clear indication of needed reforms.
Academy and continuing education, focused on "undoing" racism, must be provided. Likewise, practical, theoretically sound courses on fear and how to manage it.
Psychological "trauma treatment" and debriefings should be mandatory for all officers involved in shootings or other harrowing incidents.
Most important, chiefs and other police leaders must set and communicate, systematically and regularly, nonnegotiable standards of nondiscriminatory performance and conduct. They must, themselves, model the same fearless and respectful behavior they expect from their cops. And they must fire any police officer who can't or won't refrain from "unprofessional" conduct, which includes those frightened, trigger-happy cops who are a special danger to unarmed black men. These kinds of cops can be located and removed from the force before they kill someone.
Over the years I observed that cops who are the most calm, the most courageous are invariably the most empathetic, and compassionate. Jack Pearson didn't act like he had a target on his back. He didn't live in mortal fear that he wouldn't make it home at the end of shift. He didn't view his work in the black community as a "kill or be killed" proposition. Pearson would have understood in a heartbeat that black mother's fears for her two boys—even as he would have been among the least likely to rob her of them.
Finally, let me pass along some advice from Johnnie Cochran. The prominent attorney joined me one Saturday morning in the auditorium of Seattle's First AME Church to address a joint session of beat cops and hundreds of black youths from the community. "Listen up, young people!" he said. The din and murmur of the youthful audience ceased. "Hear and heed what I'm about to tell you. If you get stopped by the police do exactly as they say. If they tell you to put your hands on the dash, do it. If they tell you to get out of the car, do it. If they order you to step over to the sidewalk, or to spread-eagle yourself in the middle of the street, do it. If they ask for your ID, give it to them. Do not give them lip. Police officers have a hard enough job as it is. So, respect your city's police officers. Treat them the way you want to be treated. Got that?"
The din and murmur returned, the kids glaring back at Cochran, wondering if this was the real Johnnie—or some cop in disguise. "Now, if they don't have the right to stop you in the first place, if they disrespect you or violate your constitutional rights or mistreat you in any way, take a good look at their nametags. Get their car and badge numbers. Wait till they're gone, write it all down, along with the date, time, and location. Then give me a call." Words to live by.
http://normstamper.com/reviews.php
A Top Cop's Expose of the
Dark Side of American Policing
WHY WHITE COPS KILL BLACK MEN
CHAPTER 8
<blockquote>
Momma and Daddy were lucky, they had girls. I had boys. My boys are eleven and nine now, and I'm scared to death for them. It's not that I'm afraid they're gonna get jumped into a gang, or wind up doing or dealing drugs. No sir. My big fear is they're gonna run into one of you people one night and they won't be coming home. It's like open season on young black men in our community, like they're walking around with targets on their backs. I have a recurring nightmare, Chief: I get this call in the middle of the night, "Come on down to the morgue, Mrs. Johnson. We got one of your boys here. Police shot him when he tried to run."
—An African-American mother at a community forum
It's open season on us in The Heights, Chief. If you're working the blacks you're wearing a target, plain and simple. For me it comes down to this: kill or be killed. I got a wife and two boys. My sons need their father. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to make it home at the end of shift.
—A white cop, and member of an officer-safety task force, two weeks later
ANXIOUS ABOUT THE FUTURES of four young boys, a black mom and a white dad used identical metaphors in April 1985 to describe the "killing ground" that was, in their respective minds, the black community. There is no better case study of this issue than the Amadou Diallo incident in New York City.
Mr. Diallo was approached by four NYPD officers one night in February 1999. The cops thought he might be a rape suspect. Frightened, not understanding what was going on, Diallo reached for his wallet to show the officers his ID. One of the cops yelled, "Gun!" and in less time than it takes to read this sentence, forty-one shots were fired, nineteen of them striking Mr. Diallo. Diallo was not a rapist. In fact, he had no criminal record.
NYPD ruled it a "clean" shooting, meaning the killing of the twenty- two-year-old, non-English-speaking, unarmed immigrant was legally jus¬tified and within department policy. The Department of Justice found no civil rights violations. A state criminal trial ended in four acquittals.
But an innocent man was shot dead. Why? Because Mr. Diallo was black. I believe the cops were afraid of him for that reason, and that reason alone. So frightened they couldn't see straight, think straight, shoot straight. (If they'd been at their PD firearms range in the Bronx all forty- one of those shots, fired as they were at point blank range, would have found their target.)
But why were they so frightened?
President Clinton said at the time, "If it had been a young white man in a young all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn't have happened." To determine whether the Diallo killing (or any other police action) was racially motivated you have to ask, Would the cops have behaved the same way if the man had been white?
No. Diallo was killed because of his dark skin. A white man reaching for his wallet, under identical circumstances, including a language barrier would have been given the benefit of the doubt.
Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don't talk about it, we pretend it doesn't exist, we claim "color blindness," we say white offi¬cers treat black men the same way they treat white men. But that's a lie. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man the greater the fear. The African- American community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it's a central, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won't admit it to themselves, or to others.
I've studied fear for years. I've learned how it affects our bodies, our perception, judgment, and actions. Recently, I tried to dig up empirical evidence to support my particular theory that white cops are afraid of black men.
I researched the voluminous library of the National Institute of Justice (Bureau of Justice Statistics), scoured the reams of publications put out by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, consulted LexisNexis. I Googled till I was goggle-eyed. It's just not there.
You can find all kinds of evidence of citizen fears of the police. There are studies on officer stress, some of which focus on cops' fears of being fired for doing the wrong thing (or not doing the right thing). There are studies showing that whites, in general, are likely to view blacks as more violent than whites. (One of those studies, recently completed by Dr. Anthony Greenwald and published in the July 2003 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, actually went so far as to put computer "guns" in the hands of 106 undergraduate, mostly white, non-cop students. In 208 scenarios the students wrongly shot black "suspects" 35 percent of the time versus 26 percent wrongful shootings of whites.) But not until some brave soul conducts a valid, reliable study that focuses on actual white cops' actual fears of actual black men will we have actual scientific proof of my assertion.
So, why am I so certain that white cops are afraid of black men? Because I was a white cop In a world of white cops. For thirty-four years.
At first I was afraid of everyone, white, black, old, young. I got over most of these fears pretty quickly (which is to say I sublimated or repressed them). But not, however, my fear of black men. Not for a long, long time.
As a rookie, I felt a peculiar and particular fear every time I stopped or ticketed or arrested a black man, a fear I did not feel when confronting white men under similar circumstances.
From the earliest days of academy training it was made clear that black men and white cops don't mix, that of all the people we'd encounter on the streets, those most dangerous to our safety, to our survival, were black men.
One instructor began his presentation with: "Gentlemen, what you are about to learn may save your life." He was there to talk to us about a particular problem he said we would encounter with a particular slice of the black male population in Logan Heights. He directed us to his chapter in the academy manual:
This information is designed to acquaint you with the NATION OF ISLAM OR THE "MUSLIM CULT." It should be noted at this time that your Police Department has always maintained a detachment from political, racial, and religious involvements. This policy has not changed as this is a sketch of a pseudo-religious organization whose creed is the annihilation [sic] of the white man ...
We learned that this "pseudo-religious organization" was composed of twenty- to thirty-year-old men called the "fruit of Islam." That these men were "selected for their physical prowess and are adept at aggressive tactics and judo. " That they were "almost psychotic in their hatred of Caucasians and are comparable to the Mau Mau or Kamikaze in their dedication and fanaticism. " That "locally, members of this cult will kill any police officer when the opportunity presents itself, regardless of the circumstances or outcome."
Black men? "Almost psychotic " in their hatred of me? On the streets of my city. Dedicated to "annihilating" me? I wondered, but never asked, what the four African-American cops in that classroom thought of all this.
We soon learned it wasn't just the "Muslim Cult" we needed to worry about. It was all black men, something we were taught tacitly if not explicitly by other instructors who kept returning in their "real-world" tales to the streets of Logan Heights, to accounts of gunfights, fistfights, knife- fights—with black men. It got to the point where all they had to say was "The Heights" and you'd envision legions of black males who couldn't wait for the chance to kill a cop.
I was working The Heights one night as a rookie when my senior officer ordered me to pull up to the curb in front of a bar, aptly nicknamed the "Bucket o' Blood." "Get out of the vehicle," he said. "Take your ******- knocker with you." I stepped out of the car, slipped my baton into its ring, and peered through the passenger window, awaiting instructions. "Go on inside," he said. "Pick out the biggest, blackest, meanest motherfucking ****** in the place and pinch him." I was halfway to the door of the tavern when he called me back to the car. It had been a test, a jest. He laughed his ass off. It took me five minutes to stop shaking.
What if he'd said, in front of the Kensington Inn, a white bar in a white neighborhood, "Go on inside. Pick out the biggest, whitest, meanest motherfucking honky in the place and pinch him"? I probably would have thought something like, Dang, this guy's off his rocker. Why does he want me to go in there and bust some big white guy? But I wouldn't have been afraid. I wasn't taught to fear white people.
A couple of nights later I rode The Heights with another white cop. This guy was different. Jack Pearson had grown up in an African-American neighborhood, had attended Lincoln High, a predominantly black school. We stopped a lot of black men that night, even put a couple of them in jail. Pearson's respectful, transparently fearless approach to them stood in contrast to the panicky, impulsive white cops I'd worked with. Watching him talk to black men (and women) and observing how he listened to them helped me recognize that I was a member of the panicky white-cop category.
This knowledge ultimately forced me to confront and to work (for years) on my own fears and racism. And to recognize that it was fear of black men (and no small amount of peer pressure) that, in part, drove me to behave during my rookie year as a thug, a brutal, overbearing, menace of a cop.
Good cops experience fear, to be sure. But they perform effectively by working through their fear. Ambrose Redmoon wrote, "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." For fearless cops, that "something else" is getting a dangerous and delicate job done—properly, humanely and safely.
Fearless cops perceive their surroundings more accurately, and they make more informed judgments when the work does turn tense or dangerous. It's not that they don't register hues of black or white or brown, they just don't impute anything to skin color. They size up Diallo-type situations— which happen all the time in police work—and recognize in the moment the inherent innocence of such persons.
Because these cops are alert, not alarmed or paranoid, and because they assess behavior not pigmentation, they tend to produce routine rather than tragic outcomes. Cops like these, who make up maybe twenty to thirty percent of the force, are inspiring to watch in action.
Legitimate "kill or be killed" events do happen—far more often today than when I was a beat cop. A police officer would be a fool not to be ever vigilant. But I'm afraid this reality has licensed panicky white cops to shoot unarmed black men when they should be talking, or fighting, their way out of a sticky situation.
What to do about white cops who are afraid of black men? First, each "corner pocket" must understand the scope and the nature of racism within its own department. This means investigating the problem. My bosses in San Diego in the mid-seventies ordered the most exhaustive study of police racism in the history of the institution. Although the reports were never published, they produced for at least one agency a clear indication of needed reforms.
Academy and continuing education, focused on "undoing" racism, must be provided. Likewise, practical, theoretically sound courses on fear and how to manage it.
Psychological "trauma treatment" and debriefings should be mandatory for all officers involved in shootings or other harrowing incidents.
Most important, chiefs and other police leaders must set and communicate, systematically and regularly, nonnegotiable standards of nondiscriminatory performance and conduct. They must, themselves, model the same fearless and respectful behavior they expect from their cops. And they must fire any police officer who can't or won't refrain from "unprofessional" conduct, which includes those frightened, trigger-happy cops who are a special danger to unarmed black men. These kinds of cops can be located and removed from the force before they kill someone.
Over the years I observed that cops who are the most calm, the most courageous are invariably the most empathetic, and compassionate. Jack Pearson didn't act like he had a target on his back. He didn't live in mortal fear that he wouldn't make it home at the end of shift. He didn't view his work in the black community as a "kill or be killed" proposition. Pearson would have understood in a heartbeat that black mother's fears for her two boys—even as he would have been among the least likely to rob her of them.
Finally, let me pass along some advice from Johnnie Cochran. The prominent attorney joined me one Saturday morning in the auditorium of Seattle's First AME Church to address a joint session of beat cops and hundreds of black youths from the community. "Listen up, young people!" he said. The din and murmur of the youthful audience ceased. "Hear and heed what I'm about to tell you. If you get stopped by the police do exactly as they say. If they tell you to put your hands on the dash, do it. If they tell you to get out of the car, do it. If they order you to step over to the sidewalk, or to spread-eagle yourself in the middle of the street, do it. If they ask for your ID, give it to them. Do not give them lip. Police officers have a hard enough job as it is. So, respect your city's police officers. Treat them the way you want to be treated. Got that?"
The din and murmur returned, the kids glaring back at Cochran, wondering if this was the real Johnnie—or some cop in disguise. "Now, if they don't have the right to stop you in the first place, if they disrespect you or violate your constitutional rights or mistreat you in any way, take a good look at their nametags. Get their car and badge numbers. Wait till they're gone, write it all down, along with the date, time, and location. Then give me a call." Words to live by.
http://normstamper.com/reviews.php
