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“Plaintiffs’ decedent’s injuries, losses, and damages complained of, were directly and proximately caused by the acts of Plaintiffs’ decedent, not this Defendant.” – from initial court filing by the Cleveland City Attorney rejecting responsibility for the fatal shooting by police officer Timothy Loehmann who shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child as he sat on a playground swing with a toy gun.
Since George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin two years ago, at least 600 Black people have been killed by police, security guards and vigilantes. An unknown number of the parents and other loved ones of those who died have had to endure legalistic contortions and media campaigns that blame the deceased for their own deaths.
This is the second of a three-part series to investigate the forces behind the unending war waged primarily by police against Black people. Here we focus on the ideological and political structures that perpetuate “Operation Ghetto Storm.”
RELATED: Update on 'Operation Ghetto Storm': The Enduring War on Black People in the US, Part 1
The sickening pattern of vicious violence and humiliation by police that is now on full display in social media leaves no doubt. Police personnel departments throughout the country attract, recruit and maintain men and women who hold Black people in utter contempt. Yet their white supremacist convictions are not the primary cause of the chronic epidemic of police killings. A panel of expert psychologists could screen out all police recruits who display white supremacist leanings and it would hardly improve the rates of police killing of Black people. The acquittal of Zimmerman and failure to charge all but 10 of the officers who killed hundreds of Black people in 2012 is a pattern that persists today with the exoneration of Darren Wilson and other high-profile killers.
This pattern is by design.
It is the product of a web of support for police and vigilante killing under the auspices of legislative, executive and judicial branches of the state from local to federal levels and reinforced by a hegemonic white supremacist narrative.
The Narrative on the Political Stage
Politicians from right to left pander to white supremacist ideology that assumes whiteness as the universal standard for all that’s good and blames Black peoples’ pathology, criminality and other personal failings for their own oppression. While right-wing extremist organizations and Republicans’ policies are overtly racist, Democrats are often not much different.
President Bill Clinton campaigned on a platform of “ending welfare as we know it.” That platform openly pandered to those who agreed with far-right ideologues like Rick Santorum who, years later declared, “I don’t want to make Black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Clinton also sponsored various get-tough-on-crime policies that exploded the prison population. He deregulated the financial system and launched NAFTA and other globalization measures that resulted in financial ruin that disproportionately affected Black people. More recently major Democratic Party leaders, Harry Reid and Joe Biden, praised Obama’s electability on the grounds that he “had no Negro dialect” and was a “bright and clean and nice-looking guy.”
However, many have argued that as the first African-American President, Barack Obama has been the most disappointing politician to pander to white supremacy. He shrewdly strikes a “balanced” pose, in his speeches, and actions, like his 2013 address at Morehouse. Yet he invariably emphasizes a conservative, neo-liberal privatized approach that holds Black people responsible for overcoming centuries of entrenched white supremacy. In a press conference after the people of Baltimore took to the streets to express their outrage at the police breaking Freddie Gray’s spine, Obama joined the chorus of right-wing pundits and “objective” media who labeled the “rioters as criminals and thugs.”
Look at Dylann Roof’s rationalization for Charleston massacre that obsesses on “black-on-white crime” and on the righteousness of Zimmerman’s vigilantism. Then consider how Dylann’s thinking overlaps with the hegemonic narrative – even propagated by the first Black president – that demonizes, criminalizes and fears Black people. This narrative is manifest in the "justifications” police use for killing Black people, who are all labeled “suspects”. Some 47 percent of police report they shot a Black suspect because they (the police) “felt threatened.” No corroborating evidence was ever given or requested. Fourteen percent of suspects “gave the officer no choice but to fire” because they fled. Only 13 percent of suspects were actually killed in the course of firing a weapon.
Unfortunately, some in the movements against police impunity implicitly accept part of a white supremacist narrative. They dedicate their protests to those “innocent/unarmed” victims of police killings. It is tempting, even natural, that community outrage builds on the grounds that the victim was a child, heading to college, or only carrying skittles. But, the focus on unarmed victims implies that it might be acceptable for the police to kill an armed Black person. It undermines movements for justice and human rights by accepting the myth that cops are heroes who protect the community against criminals.
Operation Ghetto Storm (OGS) found that 44 percent of Black people had no weapon at all at the time they were executed. Given the many cases where the public learned that the police misrepresented wallets, lighters, cell phones or pointed fingers as guns, OGS recommended caution in accepting police reports without corroboration. Nevertheless, gun possession is legal in 41 states and even where it is not legal, possession alone is not a capital offense.
Policies that Institutionalize the Black “Criminal” Narrative
The Great Migration away from Southern sharecropping and terror formed the Black communities that the police now occupy. Legislation and regulations from federal to local levels, between 1934 and 1962, denied Black people home loans or even the right to settle anywhere outside ghettoes. In the 1960’s, police departments first created paramilitary units to repress Black rebellions that swept all major cities in the U.S.
In 1971, President Nixon declared the “War on Drugs,” which gave moralistic cover to a raft of laws that criminalized Black life and led to omnipresent policing, surveillance and mass incarceration. In the 1986, President Ronald Reagan issued a national directive that declared “illicit drugs a threat to national security.” And so began a domestic arms race among police departments and indoctrination of police in the win-at-all-costs mentality of a soldier (Radley Balko’s book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, and widely-circulated articles make an important contribution to this discussion).
Since 9/11, the Patriot Act and its various incarnations strip citizens of our basic rights that protect against all forms of police tyranny, give various agencies carte blanche to monitor citizens’ every move and utterance, justify racist profiling and provided infinite funds to maintain a system of mass incarceration. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed how the behemoth of mass surveillance has taken on a life of its own, multiplying without enabling legislation. Yet it is clear from the record, the main target of all this surveillance is black and brown. Somehow, all the cameras, phone data collection, drones, Fusion Centers and spy networks haven’t been able to detect white faces or prevent amateur attacks, like the one Dylann Roof, announced six months in advance.
Funding Militarization and Political Clout of the Police
The National Rifle Association, Monsanto and organizations controlled by the Koch brothers effectively pressure state and federal legislatures for law-and-order legislation and funding. The same defense contractors whose lobbyists have successfully gorged the military industrial complex and promoted war abroad have expanded their realm to feed the militarization of domestic police.
Lobbyists representing police officers keep a relatively lower profile, but they come out in force to expand their budgets, various “Bills of Police Officers’ Rights,” warrantless wiretaps, use of drones and to oppose drug reform and any encroachment on their authority or impunity. In addition to the millions they may spend, the combination of the public respect that they command in the media and their “expertise” that lawmakers depend upon, give police outsized influence.
The National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) lists 126 member organizations. The powerful New York City Police Benevolent Association and a number of others do not appear on the list. The International Union of Police Associations (which is a member of the AFL-CIO), the National Fraternal Order of Police, the National Police Benevolent Association – three other national confederations each with their own local and state affiliates – also join the lobby. Their websites feature several themes that are echoed in corporate media: (1) Police are heroic public servants who never stray from their duty to protect citizens from criminals and terrorists and uphold law and order; and (2) Police work is extremely dangerous and requires unconditional public, political and financial support.
Generally their message has prevailed. After a barrage of negative publicity in the progressive press exposing the police use of lethal excessive force in scores of cities, New York, Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Santa Rosa, Oakland and scores of other cities, a national Gallup Poll released June 19 found that only 18 percent of people in the U.S. expressed “little or no confidence” in the police. Even the 34,500 member New York City Police Department – which former Mayor Bloomberg bragged was the 7th largest army in the world – maintained public support after they staged a coup-like work refusal and openly expressed contempt for the people of New York and their Mayor. A June 25 editorial in the New York Times praised Mayor DeBlasio after he caved into the demands of the Police Benevolent Association by hiring 1,300 more officers for “community policing and to fight terrorism.”
Their budgets both reflect and reinforce the political power of police. Law enforcement budgets receive money from a multiplicity of sources which hides the magnitude of their resources.
A former Congressional aid estimated that when federal agencies are combined with state and local agencies, the annual total comes to US$266.8 billion or US$850 per person per year in the United States. This excludes billions more for Homeland Security
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and an additional US$72.2 billion a year for national and military intelligence. Then there’s the unaccounted billions more that the Department of Defense, Justice Department, and others distribute to law enforcement agencies in the name of homeland security. In 2012 Stephan Salisbury wrote that the money spent on armoring and arming local law-enforcement since 9/11 could have rebuilt post-Katrina New Orleans five times over with more than enough money left to provide job training and housing for every one of the 41,000-plus homeless people in New York City, 15,000 homeless in Philadelphia and additional tens of thousands of homeless in Detroit, Newark, and Camden. “Throw in some crumbling bridges and roads, too,” he suggested.
In May, with typical fanfare, President Obama announced an executive order which, he claimed, would improve public safety and restore trust in police in places like Ferguson. Executive Order 13688 would, he promised, restrict police departments’ use of tank-like armored vehicles that move on tracks and other military-style gear that “can sometimes give people a feeling like there's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them." As if it were the gear, and not the police mission that, for decades, have occupied Black communities and killed Black citizens. However, even given Obama’s logic, the details of his Order reveal that it leaves the billions of dollars worth of military hardware that have already been distributed in place and that future “restrictions” are full of loopholes. Moreover, there is no serious provision for funding, monitoring or enforcing the program.
Meanwhile, military contractors continue to invent and peddle high tech equipment to police departments to more efficiently terrorize those who police are charged with containing. For example, a popular item advertised in Police One magazine, along with arms and other military accoutrements, are handcuffs that enable police to deliver an 80,000-volt shock to a detainee. Each set of cuffs cost US$1,500, plus an additional US$400 for each transmitter.
The mythology of police heroism in the face of Black criminality protects the police from scandal when their own white supremacist rants are exposed. For example, in “liberal” San Francisco, investigators discovered repeated exchanges of racist and homophobic text messages among 14 cops. They included salutes to “white power”, and declared, “All n- must f-hang.” Yet thanks to a gentrified public indifference, vigorous defense by the Police Officers’ Association, bungling and bureaucratic complacency that apparently didn’t see the urgency in holding such white supremacist behavior accountable, the offending cops are likely to retain their jobs.
Similar exposures of white supremacist rants by cops in New York, Illinois, St Louis, Cleveland, Ferguson, Fort Lauderdale suggest that the culture is endemic in most departments. Police unions’ protection also extends to the officers after they’ve been fired for “unjustified” extrajudicial killings and physical abuse. A recent exposé in The Atlantic, detailed how around the country, 70 percent of officers’ terminations and suspensions are overturned.
In Part 3, we will focus on the ways that the courts and Department of Justice perpetuate the war on Black people and on the revolving door that funnels right-wing extremists and military veterans into police departments and back again. Finally, we will look at the implications of this investigation for building resistance and solidarity.
Arlene Eisen is the author of the study called “Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards and Vigilantes” (Also known as the #every28hours Report) originally published by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The revised edition is available at www.operationghettostorm.org. She can be reached at arlene_eisen@sbcglobal.net
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