Five things I wish people understood about bias in American police departments.
On any given day, in any police department in the nation,
15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening.
Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity.
The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working
with.
That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has
trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what
I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for
five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for
all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities
better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class,
who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included
the statement, "I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er
lovers!!!!!!!!" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black
communities with the authority to act under the color of law.
That
remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a
given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department
cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or
allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their
department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.
It is
not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional
racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in
the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown.
That is what is allowed.
And
no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always
cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is
available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty.
Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting
deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed.
Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded
at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final
15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that
point) and, "fearing for his life," he jumped onto the hood of
the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.
Please continue this article here: http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer
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