President Obama met at the White House with law enforcement officials and civil rights leaders. President Obama hosted the meeting one week after the police—fatal police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and the killing of five police officers by a sniper in Dallas.
While the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile made national headlines, they were not isolated incidents. According to a count by The Guardian, at least 37 people have been killed by police in the United States so far this month. That’s more than the total number of people killed by police in Britain since the year 2000. Overall, police in the United States have killed a total of 585 people so far this year.
Norm Stamper talking:
the training of police officers is a very prominent theme in the conversation about police reform, and it’s, of course, very, very important. But there are much deeper and important issues, as far as I’m concerned, namely those associated with the institution itself, the structure of the organization, the culture that arises out of that structure. It’s paramilitary. It’s bureaucratic. It insulates and isolates police officers from the communities that they are here to serve.
paramilitary nature of the police forces
I think what accounts for it—there are several factors, one of which is that in 1971 Richard Nixon famously proclaimed drugs public enemy number one—drug abuse—and declared all-out war on drugs, which was really a declaration of war against his own people. And overwhelmingly, young people, poor people, people of color suffered, and have continued to suffer over the decades as a result of a decision to put America’s front-line police officers on the front lines of the drug war as foot soldiers. And then we wonder why there’s such a strain in the relationship between police and community, and particularly those communities that are entrenched in poverty and other economic disadvantage, communities that historically have been neglected or abused or oppressed by their own police departments. So we really intensified and escalated the country’s war against poor people with that drug war. And we have spent $1.3 trillion prosecuting that war since the 1970s, incarcerated literally tens of millions. Please hear that figure: tens of millions of disproportionately young people and poor people and people of color. What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s time for us to end that drug war. That began the militarization of policing, without a doubt.
9/11 is another milestone, for obvious reasons. The federal government began throwing military surplus at local law enforcement agencies, such that, in terms of how they look, in terms of how they’re equipped, in terms of how they are weaponized, America’s police forces look more like the military than domestic peacekeepers.
Our police officers do, in fact, come from the community. As Bill Bratton said, they don’t come from Mars. They are of us. They live among us. They are motivated by a variety of different interests in becoming a police officer. It’s not that—that the candidates that we’re selecting, necessarily, are poor candidates. It is what happens to them when they get acculturated by this law enforcement structure that makes it clear to them that they are on the front lines of a war against their own people. And so you get police officers heading out to put in a shift who are feeling that the people are the enemy.
A former King County executive, Ron Sims, African-American man, man of the cloth, spoke to a reporter recently and said, “I have been stopped eight times by the police. And invariably the question seems to be ‘What are you doing here?'” Do white members of our community get that kind of treatment? In blunt terms, it is racist. It’s a racist action on the part of an officer, if he or she does not have reasonable suspicion that a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime. That’s what the law says. And yet that law is systematically defied by police across this country in unlawful search-and-seizure, stop-and-frisk situations.
But there’s also systemic racism. It goes back as far as the institution. And I know President Obama made reference to the long history, the centuries-old history, of the relations between police and community, and particularly communities of color. Policing in this country has its origins in the slave patrols. And from decade to decade, generation to generation, there are still police officers in this country who act with superiority, who act in a very authoritarian, very dominant way. Part of that is their training, and only some of that, by the way, takes place in the academy. Most of it takes place in the locker room or in the front seat of a police car, when the senior officer tells the junior officer, “Forget what they taught you in the academy. You’re in the real world now.”
– Officer Nakia Jones speaking from Warrensville Heights, Ohio: “How dare you stand next to me in the same uniform and murder somebody! How dare you! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! So, why don’t we just keep it real. If you’re that officer, that know good and well you’ve got a god complex, you’re afraid of people that don’t look like you, you have no business in that uniform. Take it off! If you’re afraid to go and talk to an African-American female or a male, or a Mexican male or female, because they’re not white like you, take the uniform off! You have no business being a police officer, because there’s many of us that will give our life for anybody, and we took this oath, and we meant it! If you are that officer that’s prejudiced, take the uniform off and put the KKK hoodie on!”
Everybody’s talking about a conversation about race. I believe in dialogue. I believe it’s important for us to expose our true feelings in safe settings. I really do believe in all of that. But I also believe very firmly that white police officers, those who are so inclined to act on whatever prejudice they may have, need to listen to this woman. They need to hear every single word she said. She is expressing the rage of an entire people. She is expressing her truth about her fellow—her brothers and sisters in law enforcement. How dare they exhibit the kind of racism that suggests, among other things, their own internal prejudice and their own fear? If prejudice means anything, it means ignorance and fear. And if we don’t confront it forcefully, as she has done, I’m afraid we’re going to continue to have polite conversations that will get us nowhere.
-Why aren’t these police officers arrested?
I’ll speak for the state of Washington—we have laws on the books that require malice of intent to be established. The King County prosecutor, in which Seattle is one of the cities, has said these are awful, but lawful, instances. He would like to prosecute, for example, the police officer that shot and killed a man in 2010 in Seattle. It was a terrible shooting. It was an egregious shooting. In fact, the department called it that, I’m pleased to say. And as they were preparing to fire this individual, he quit, so he avoided dismissal from the force, although technically you can call that a constructive termination. But the satisfaction that comes from firing a cop who does something like this pales by comparison to the prosecution of a police officer who, if he was a—if he were a citizen in the African-American community, would be prosecuted. And people see this, and people wonder about it. How does justice apply to one group and not another group? That speaks, certainly, to the larger institutional issue, which does get to our laws. It also gets to the need for independent prosecution of these cases.
– the people who are filming these police attacks on civilians, the police killings. Yesterday on Democracy Now!, we had this extraordinary show. First we spoke to Abdullah Muflahi. He’s the man who owns the Triple S supermarket in Baton Rouge, who was a friend of Alton Sterling, who sold CDs outside. He came outside his store quickly. He saw what was happening to Alton. He took out his cellphone, started filming. Right afterwards, after the police killed Alton, they arrested the owner of the store, Abdullah Muflahi, and they went into his store without a warrant, and they took out not only the video that the store had, they took the entire video camera. And then we spoke to Chris LeDay. He had posted online the second video of the police killing of Alton Sterling. He’s a 12-year Air Force veteran. He works on a military base outside Atlanta. He comes to work, and he is surrounded by police. He is first handcuffed, then he is shackled. He is put in an orange jumpsuit. He is held for 26 hours. He kept saying, “What are you arresting me for?” And one police officer said, “You fit the profile.” And he said, “You have to finish the sentence. I fit the profile of what?” Ultimately, he was charged with not paying old traffic fines.
what happens to those who document these crimes is exactly what happened to those individuals in Baton Rouge.
This is a good time for me to insert a really important point, and that is, we have some wonderful police officers—sensitive, empathetic, compassionate—who, if they harbor racist or homophobic or sexist bones in their body, have learned to manage themselves, have learned to calm things down, to de-escalate, to defuse tense situations. They’re worth their weight in gold. And they need to be recognized. They need to be appreciated.
But we have altogether too many officers that police chiefs and sheriffs are fond of calling bad apples. Well, when you get as many bad apples as we seem to see in police work today, it’s time to examine the barrel. It is time to look at the entire orchard and to recognize that even a fresh apple placed into that toxic environment is going to turn bad.
So, as we look at, for example, a police officer being questioned about—a police officer questioning others, a police officer behaving very aggressively, if not unlawfully, toward individuals, a police officer shooting and killing someone unjustifiably, to see some—to see a fellow American filming that, snapping shots, filming it, audio, in some cases, is a—should be a source of comfort to many of us in the community. It is completely, 100 percent lawful for an American to do what those Americans did.
Now, here’s what I’m sure the police are saying: “We were evidence gathering. We had information that somebody captured this, so we’re to go after that evidence.” And there’s nothing wrong with gathering evidence. The question is: To what end are you going to put that evidence, and how did you gather it? It is unlawful, by definition, to engage in illegal searches and seizures. The Constitution of the United States, the secular Bible of the land, tells police officers what they can and cannot do. And right now, a whole bunch of them are doing things that, by law, they cannot do.
– last year, the large California-based affiliate of the United Auto Workers said they wanted the International Union of Police Associations kicked out of the union federation, claiming police have, quote, “utilized union resources to defend brutality and anti-Blackness.” The International Union of Police Associations is still in the AFL-CIO.
those who have read my first book understand that I’ve said I’m a labor guy through and through. I get goosebumps when I hear Joe Hill. My kin from Kentucky come out of coal mining. I am a pro-labor human being. But I draw the line at police unions. I think far too often they have shielded racist and brutal and trigger-happy police officers. I get their role to defend their fellow officers, but they do it in such a way that communicates to the community we’re going to circle the wagons, we’re going to do anything and everything we can to protect this lawbreaker.
I think it’s time for national standards, by the way. I think it’s essential that we recognize that policing is largely unsupervised in this country. There are no national standards—18,000 police departments, one Constitution. What does that tell you? It tells me that systematic violation of the Constitution is only rarely addressed in a Department of Justice investigation. Better to set national standards, certify all police officers and their agencies, and decertify those so they can’t go from Seattle, if they get fired, to NYPD the next day, which does happen. We need national standards.
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Norm Stamper
former chief of the Seattle Police Department and the author of the new book To Protect and to Serve: How to Fix America’s Police.
— source democracynow.org