Happy Juneteenth to everyone. It’s wild that we seem to have just discovered this “holiday”, but in any event, I strongly support replacing Columbus Day – or our “Evacuation Day”, heh – with this day. Today is real.
In other news … I recently attended my first Arlington Town Meeting as a member. It was highly unusual: Outside, on the high school football field; chairs distanced from each other. And the agenda was truncated: Focused on must-pass budget items; tabling everything else. Nonetheless it’s been intriguing (in a very dull and dorky way) to have the chance to look through the town’s finances. (Now I know how much a dump truck with a sander costs.)
In these constrained circumstances, there was an abortive attempt to chisel away at the $8.3M police budget, on pay raise bumps and vehicle spending. And that may be partly inspired by the broad “defund the police” movement; but also because of very local factors that nonetheless are probably quite common.
The Arlington Police Department is a contradiction: On one hand it’s known for progressive, community-policing reforms and instilling a “guardian mentality” vs. a “warrior mentality”. On the other hand we had a police lieutenant proposing in print to “fight violence with violence and get the job done” a mere two years ago.
So to say the least, it’s fair to ask if the “guardian mentality” has taken root in the hearts and minds of the rank and file. And as a broader question, it’s fair to ask what kinds of duties we’ve been assigning to police that would better be taken by someone else — someone working without the implicit threat of violence and coercion. How many public-safety-related situations actually require officers with guns? Do we need a “school resource officer”? Does the PD need a social worker?
Does spending lead to excellence? Look at this report of the top earners in the Town from 2017. The third-highest earner in the entire town was Lt. Pedrini (of “fight violence with violence” fame), due to $79,000 in traffic details and overtime. Bad policing is expensive policing — again, see the top salaries in the City of Boston. We all know that police traffic details are an infamous, expensive boondoggle; but beyond that, how much overtime do cops really need to do? Overtime could well correlate to shoddy police work:
As a public defender, whenever I got a case that was just especially, stupidly made-up (think someone arrested for dealing drugs who was at home with no drugs, money, scales, paraphernalia, or baggies on them) the first thing I checked was the cop’s schedule. Inevitably–seriously, ask, like, any defense attorney about this–when you got a really stupid arrest, it would be within an hour or so of the end of the cop’s scheduled shift. Shift ends at 6pm? This really bad arrest would be at, like, 5:30.
Twitter thread, Emily Galvin-Almanza, public defender, Bronx NY
Why? Well, because processing an arrest takes time, but it’s also really easy. So you can make time-and-a-half for sitting in the precinct typing up some papers and waiting to talk to a DA.
This REALLY adds up.
I don’t know to what extent this happens, or doesn’t, in Arlington. But surely it’s a perverse incentive.
So, it’s awkward these days: Even if you completely bought into the “guardian mentality” of your local PD (and you should be skeptical), is this the best way to spend money? Additional scrutiny; a willingness to reconsider roles; and to take on politically-protected sacred cows; all are in order.
I remember a similar feeling of revelation when I first got active in Billerica town politics in the early 1980s.
This question of what the 351 Massachusetts cities and towns can and should do about PD spending is fascinating in its complexity. As I suspect you’re learning, police and firefighters have been successfully resisting calls to reduce PD and FD spending for decades and for all sorts of reasons.
It will take much more than just embracing the current “defund” movement, no matter how enthusiastic the embrace.
A micro-example is the absurd requirement prohibiting civilian flaggers. Another is the requirement that the PD respond to each and every medical emergency. A third is the Quinn bill that we’ve talked about here earlier this month.
Most cities and towns have very little ability to manage how their local PD allocates resources. The result is that the annual budget — a VERY blunt instrument — is the only effective tool left for many.
I promise that EVERY attempt to cut police funding will result in big black headlines that read, in effect, “City council endangers public by removing cops from the beat”.
I see this as an excellent example where the tension between those who advocate a particular position out of passion and those who seek actual constructive change will play out in full view of anyone paying attention.
Call me cynical, but many or most of those sacred cows that involve the PD ultimately boil down to putting money in the pockets of PD members. I suspect you’re in for a fun ride.
I have a different set of questions.
Why are police departments and police organizations, in the nation and the Commonwealth, bastions of white supremacy? Because they are.
if we can understand this, and I do not (besides some historical momentum), we can talk about fixing it.
I continue to ask, do police departments attract white supremacists or do they create them? Answering that will inform what reforms need to be made.
My understanding, from asking this question for most of my life, is that police departments are bastions of white supremacy because nearly every American demands that.
We don’t admit it, of course. We dress it up in all sorts of pretty costumes and hide it beneath all sorts of complex disguises. The underlying dynamic is, however, that most taxpayers, most political contributors, and most of the men and women in America who have power are white and demand that police departments keep them “safe”.
The euphemisms that we use sound innocuous enough — “law and order”, “safety”, “zero tolerance”, and so on. We have known for generations that crime is closely correlated with economic distress, and economic distress falls VERY disproportionately on blacks. Our “get tough on crime” postures are therefore, by construction, racist.
Contributing to that demand for white supremacy is a raft of TV shows that reinforce it. Cop shows, for example, portray cops and police as embattled protectors who must frequently do violent battle with vicious bad guys who are frequently black. “Reality” TV shows invariably feature big bad black men who are apprehended, hand-cuffed, and perp-walked away by the end of the show.
Media news loves to feature crimes. Crime is often driven by economics and thus many of the perpetrators are black. Media studies and research has shown for decades that white audiences overestimate their risk of crime — the more news they watch, the more they overestimate their actual risk. They similarly overestimate the number of blacks who are criminals.
I suggest that the pervasive systemic racism of American culture drives police departments — and to a lesser extent, the military — towards white supremacy
The “enemy” literally IS ourselves.
Then why does that not match my experience at all? Of course I want police to keep us safe as that is their job after all. I’m fortunate to not constantly be worried about whether I will be a victim of a crime, but if I ever am I would want the police to apprehend the perpetrator regardless of his skin color. I think I already mentioned recently that I know Walker, Texas Ranger is entertainment and should not be a guide to how law enforcement should conduct themselves. I also see plenty of white perps on episodes of the Law & Order franchise. Even the news isn’t sticking out to me as covering disproportionately black suspects. In fact most of the worst criminals I can think of from real life have been white.
I think we will all need to be vigilant in demanding that our city councils, town meetings, and state legislators hold the line against sweetheart contracts that lack credible channels for public accountability.
Road detail work has to stop. Overtime should be the exception and not the rule. Police should have to undergo years off training and education before they are given a badge and a gun. I question the need for small, low crime communities to have armed police forces to begin with. Seems like Jon Stewart suggested they act like a border patrol.
My father told me a story about driving on the end of night shift from a job in Lynn back to Salem through Swampscott and Marblehead, in the mid 80’s, and he got pulled over in both communities and when he asked what was going on the cop said “we always patrol the border to keep the s***s and n*****s out”. When I lived in Salem and took the same route, I still saw those patrol cars. Things haven’t changed much around here.
This wasn’t down south in the 60’s, this was self identified liberal communities the year before I was born. He had a black female supervisor at the same job who had a BMW that she gave up because she was tired of getting pulled over every night. I had a black co worker with an Audi who did the same thing. Even when it’s not deadly violence it’s a pervasive psychological violence that reminds black Americans no matter how educated or materially successful the they are not worthy of the same rights and privileges as other Americans. It has to stop.
And it stops in our own towns and communities. Love seeing white majority towns gather for BLM protests and vigils on their town commons, but they need to back up their words with deeds. It is time to defund many police functions and transfer them to civilian authorities, and ensure all remaining functions are under strict civilian oversight.
Who is Jon Stewart? I assume from context you are not referring to the former host of the Daily Show.
Also, I have long thought that municipal budgets should not include predicted revenue from things like traffic tickets. IMO that is asking for incentive and pressure to collect that way. Anything that is collected that way should go into a rainy day fund.
Same Jon Stewart. He gave a very candid interview to the Times with this observation:
The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that.
“Then why does that not match my experience at all?“
I think we both know the answer to that, and it’s why my experience with the police, even when I’ve been in the wrong, has always been cordial and civil.
Without putting too fine a point on it, a black man in Atlanta was gunned down last week for doing something that I definitely have done (passing out in a car). I’m not proud of it, but it’s not a crime to begin with and certainly not something to apply an on the spot death penalty too. When they pulled me over I asked them to call my (understandably irate) wife and she drove me home. I was mortified and never put myself in that situation again, but I got to wake up the next morning alive in my own home. Rayshard Brooks did not have that privilege.
Another time back in Cambridge as a teen, I was walking home drunk from a friends Harvard party in a dark grey hoodie when I got pulled over, terrified I’d be busted for underage drinking and public drunkenness. The first cop shone a light in my face and said “he isn’t white, move on” and the second cop said almost apologetically “we are looking for a black male suspect you’re height in a similar hoodie, keep us posted, sorry to bother you”. I didn’t even say a word! So this is the reality we need to dismantle.
Tom was referring to something he assumed was collective experience of those of us who watch TV, for both entertainment and news purposes. I can certainly see physical descriptions informing police action when looking for a particular suspect.
So 150 kids in my graduating class fit the description of “young black male”. I’m not sure how many owned grey hoodies, but should they all be stopped and frisked randomly at night by cops? My point is that the interaction would have been different had I met their description and I might have been taken into custody.
My mixed cousin lived on the same street I was walking on, he was 6 then and 16 today. Now his white mom works for the cops, but is that fair? Is it fair for my black nephew who just graduated Wakefield high to be pulled over? When does it stop?
If any of them were in the area at the time and fit the description the cops had I can see them being questioned, but my emphasis was on knowing that as a white person they definitely weren’t looking for you for this crime. If the cops understood they were looking for a white perp then of course the roles would be reversed. I do not of course condone harassing everyone of a particular race just cuz.
@Why does that not match my experience at all?
Because you are WHITE, my friend. Your experience is the experience of a white man. The far more relevant aspect is the experience of black men (and women).
@ I know Walker, Texas Ranger is entertainment:
The pervasive influence of media stereotypes happens whether or not we are aware of it. Viewers of a certain age were well aware that Mr. Whipple was a media creation intended to sell a product. That character was created to be offensive, and was. Audiences of the time overwhelmingly disliked that character, and the commercials ran with that character for years.
Why? Because advertisers of that time — and ever since — knew from detailed research that strong hostile reactions to an advertising character caused strong implantation of brand awareness, and that brand awareness lasted far longer than the hostility. Viewers remembered “Charmin” and forgot “Mr. Whipple”. The result was a strikingly successful advertising campaign — a case study in using cognitive research to manipulate market behavior.
@Even the news isn’t sticking out to me as covering disproportionately black suspects:
Unlike print media, television unavoidably identifies the race of a suspect when that suspect is featured in a broadcast piece. It has long been understood that such identifications reinforce stereotypes of the viewer.
Whites literally do not notice the race of other whites who are featured in a broadcast news piece. Those same whites DO notice the race of blacks. This is an aspect of the myth of “objective” reporting that is too often unrecognized and absent from discussion.
Humans see what we expect to see. White viewers with unconscious racial biases notice black criminals in news broadcasts and do not notice white criminals. The result is to reinforce those unconscious racial biases.
This issue requires that we listen rather less to our own experiences and rather more to the lived experience of our black brothers, sisters, and children.
I know I have seen perps of all shades in both TV drama and on the news, and I’m sorry, but you do not accurately describe how my mind works in your comment. Why should that be? We don’t get a distorted view of what a suspect “should” look like based on height, which is also an easily observable physical trait, so why should we when it comes to skin color? The concept of implicit or unconscious bias, especially when it only seems to apply to some things and not others, has never been logical to me.
When cops start killing tall people at a disproportionate rate, I’ll be the first to protest. Race and color matter because society makes them matter. Implicit biases matter because they exist and have real world consequences. There is. It a human being alive who “cannot see color”, so we should be very critical of systems and people that claim
they do not while letting some folks live and other folks die. Not just the police, who literally end black lives with impunity and qualified immunity, but also schools which discipline and fail non-white kids at higher Rates, or Covid which has killed far more people of color as a proportion of population than whites.
As W Kamu Bell put it in a recent tweet:
When black people have equal access to health care, education, and criminal justice we can then and only then say all lives matter. Until then, we can’t say that because it’s a false statement right now.
Cops don’t shoot tall people at disproportionate rates so they obviously don’t take that into account. Why can’t they react to skin color the same way? This is why I preach the gospel of colorblindness. Maybe if more cops were colorblind we wouldn’t be in this mess and more black people would still be alive!
There’s no such thing as a colorblind cop or color blind policing. The very role of police has been since the dawn of this country to enforce white supremacy. Either overtly through the Black Codes and Fugitive Slave Act or covertly through policing red lined suburbs as I discussed in my own post. I think we really need to rebuild policing from the ground up and change its mentality.
Color blind isn’t good enough. At its worse it pretends race is no longer a factor as Justice Roberts did in his cases hitting the voting rights act and the Seattle school integration scheme. At its best it is race neutral, an relatively anemic at stopping structural racism which still persists.
Maybe decades from now if we do the hard work of anti-racism today and dismantle systems of oppression and build up systems of inclusion we can create that beloved kingdom. Until then, we have to recognize that black mistrust of the police as a tool of white supremacy prevents it from ever acting in a color blind fashion. We want cops to affirm black lives matter. That’s anti racism. Color blind is something ignorant like all lives matter. It’s just not a helpful framing, and in many cases, blinds us to lived injustice.
Your first sentence describes what is; I am describing what should be. IMO the way you get there is just do it. Quit racism cold turkey, and yes, white people have to take the lead on this because white people caused the problem to begin with.
@you do not accurately describe…:
I’m sorry, but you are very much mistaken. Your mind works the same way as the rest of us. Your unconscious remains unconscious.
Unconscious bias may not be “logical” to you, but that is irrelevant. Very little of our biology or physiology is “logical”. Science has long understood that empirical data always trumps “logic” and “common sense”.
I invite you to peruse pretty much any of the enormous body of scholarly research published about unconscious racial bias. You may find https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/meet-psychologist-exploring-unconscious-bias-and-its-tragic-consequences-society, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/02/unconscious-bias-what-is-it-and-can-it-be-eliminated. or https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscious-bias accessible.
It really is unconscionable for you to deny well-established science, especially as an educator regarding a topic that is so central to the lived experience of all your students — of all races.
We are not lab rats and we are discussing social rather than hard sciences. Studies can only go so far in determining and predicting human behavior.
I’m talking about science that is every bit as “hard” as actuarial tables. Whatever the limits of science are, the phenomenon we’re discussing is well within them.
You do yourself and your students a disservice by so steadfastly denying this objective reality.
I’m a little confused as to why you keep referring to my students. The closest I have to that are the kids who I encounter substitute teaching, but I don’t see the relevance. As to the studies, we are all individuals, which is how I see people rather than as identified by groups. Unless they have studied ME they have no way of knowing what is going on in MY mind.
@why you keep referring to my students:
You self-identify as an educator. By construction, each time you practice your profession you have a profound influence on your students.
I believe that every educator has an obligation to advocate for, rather than deny, the primacy of scientific evidence over personal belief, “logic”, “common sense”, or other expressions of personal bias.
Your peculiar view of how science should operate is your own. The attitudes you implicitly convey about science are as important, or even more so, then the specific areas in question.
The reality of evolution is established fact, as is the reality of climate change. The age of the earth is measured in billions, not thousands, of years. All these are examples of scientific fact that hundreds or thousands of educators across America deny as we speak — to the extreme detriment of their pupils.
Your denial of the very existence of systemic racism and of unconscious racial bias — in the face of published evidence to the contrary — is no different.
I promise you that the teachers in Mississippi, Alabama, or Louisiana who deny the reality of evolution are just as intelligent, just as sincere, and just as mistaken as you in your denial of the reality of unconscious racial bias.
That’s why I keep referring to your students.
Evolution and climate change are hard sciences that can be and have been repeatedly tested and confirmed. I’m not denying bias exists, just that we all have it. It would be like saying that because MA generally votes Dem in presidential elections, every MA resident is guaranteed to vote for the Dem. As for teaching, I occasionally get a chance to expand on history using my own knowledge, but mostly it’s let’s open to this page and read this lesson or complete this exercise. I do have some statistic experience after all as part of my education in POLITICAL Science, which uses some scientific methods, but should not be confused with the hard sciences that never change.
The methods of this research are the same. There is no “hard” vs “soft” science, there is only science.
If you think that hard sciences “never change”, then I encourage you to learn more about hard science. It changes all the time, so much so that it awards prizes such as the Nobel to practitioners who lead the charge.
I’m not going to argue with you, it will only cause you to dig in your heels. I can only show you the evidence.
Our understanding of hard sciences certainly changes over time, but there are just too many variables when it comes to human behavior and attitudes. Yes, some of the methods are the same but I assure you I am not making up the distinctions between hard sciences (e. g. biology, chemistry, physics, geology) and soft sciences (e. g. sociology, psychology, philosophy, and to some extent even history). Most living things exist to exist. They eat, sleep, breathe, seek shelter, reproduce (rinse, repeat). Humans are much more complex than that. You absolutely cannot guarantee and predict human behavior the way you would say, knowing with absolutely certainty that any object I hold aloft and let go of is going to fall.
The “Implicit Association Test” (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html) is a recognized and objective way to measure unconscious racial bias. It takes about 15 minutes and provides immediate results.
The same site (Harvard) offers many other IATs as well.
Unconscious bias is a very real thing.
I actually did take that test not too long ago. I was a bit skeptical because I feel like it tries to trick your mind into associations you would not otherwise make, but nevertheless my own results came back as “no automatic preference for either race”.
That’s great for you Christopher, nobody is accusing you of racism. We are saying sitting on the sidelines in a race neutral way is no longer sufficient for white allyship. We need to call out racist systems and our own biases and work on them.
I’m all for calling out racism where it exists and never intended to suggest otherwise.