Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“Well, we don’t understand why
he called in the National Guard/
When Uncle Sam is the one who
belongs in the exercise yard.”
—
Kevin Godley, Graham Gouldman and Lol Creme,
“Robber
Bullets,” song by British rock band 10 c.c., 1973
Who would have
thought that the Big Story that would drive the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic from the
lead slots on TV news and the front pages of whatever newspapers are left would
be a rerun of a story that’s been told too often already? An unarmed
African-American is killed by a white police officer after either showing signs
of mental illness, being suspected of a nonviolent crime or just being out and
Living While Black. People protest in the streets, mostly calmly, respectfully
and nonviolently. But a few demonstrators smash windows and spray-paint
storefronts, somehow thinking they’re striking a blow for the Revolution, and
apolitical looters take advantage of the police being distracted to steal and
enrich themselves.
Not all those
elements appear in every version of this tiresome script. The murder — I don’t
think that’s too strong a word — of 46-year-old African-American Minneapolis
resident George Floyd on Monday, May 25 (by ironic coincidence, also the day
the U.S. celebrated Memorial Day) wasn’t committed with a gun. Instead,
44-year-old police officer Derek Chauvin (who shares a last name with a
particularly hyper-patriotic official in 18th century France, after
whom the term “chauvinism” was coined) put his knee against Floyd’s neck while
Floyd was already on the ground, doing nothing to resist Chauvin and the three
other officers on the scene, and held it there for nearly nine minutes while Floyd protested, “I can’t breathe … I can’t
breathe,” until Floyd stopped being able to breathe permanently.
The Floyd murder
is also unusual in the sheer scope and extent of the protests it engendered.
Not since the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014,
which spawned the “Black Lives Matter” movement, had there been so many
protests of such large size in so many cities. And not all the protests were in
the United States, either; late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert showed
footage of one in Berlin and made a joke about how bizarre it is that Germany,
of all countries, should need to lecture us
about racism.
And yet the
Floyd murder is also playing out in ways that reinforce my perception that
America in the era of Donald Trump’s Presidency is taking a giant Rorschach
test. There are two huge political camps in the U.S. that seem almost
permanently divided not only on how they judge every issue but even on what the
facts are. The late Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not
to their own set of facts.” That sort of thinking is outdated; people who get
their news from Right-wing outlets like Fox News and talk radio have a very
different perception of what the news is and what events are important than people who read major newspapers or
watch broadcast networks or CNN.
The usual way
these issues work out is the police and the protesters pretty quickly line up
on opposite sides. That hasn’t always
happened here — there’ve been reports of police officials actually talking to
protesters and, in some cases, taking off their caps, badges and guns and
joining the lines. There apparently are a number of police officers who don’t
automatically assume that what Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd was appropriate or the kind of police work they want to
encourage. Then there are the police departments like Los Angeles’s who are
reacting according to their usual playbook, instituting strict curfews and arresting
people on the streets after the cops said they can be.
Trump Is a Racist
One person who
acted utterly predictably and counterproductively has been President Donald
Trump. Nobody should have looked to this lifelong racist — whose father was one
of seven Ku Klux Klan members arrested, ironically, at a Klan-sponsored protest
in New York City in 1927 — for sympathy with the protesters or the
long-standing grievances African-Americans have over how they’ve been policed
in the 411 years since they were first brought to the U.S. as slaves to work
the tobacco plantations of Virginia.
The Trump family
has been racist ever since Donald’s father, Fred Trump, got into the
real-estate business in the first place. The Trump Organization has
systematically discriminated against African-Americans and other people of
color at least since 1950, when folksinger Woody Guthrie moved into a Fred
Trump-owned building and then felt forced to move out again when he found the
Trumps wouldn’t let Black tenants into their buildings (when racial
discrimination in housing was still legal). He responded by adding a new verse
to his song “I Ain’t Got No Home,” explaining why he’d had to move and calling
out Fred Trump as a racist by name. After racial discrimination in housing was
made illegal in 1966, the Trump Organization was sued at least twice by the
federal government for breaking that law — once when Fred Trump was still
alive, and again in the 1980’s after he’d died and Donald had taken over.
In 1989 Donald
Trump took out a full-page ad in all four major New York newspapers, at a
reported cost of $85,000, demanding the execution of the so-called “Central
Park Five,” five young African-American men who were convicted of raping and
assaulting a 26-year-old white woman who was jogging in Central Park. Headlined
“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!,” Trump’s ad began, “What
has happened to our City over the last ten years? What has happened to law and
order, to the neighborhood cop we all trusted to safeguard our homes and
families, the cop who had the power under the law to help us in times of
danger, keep us safe from those who would prey on innocent lives to fulfill
some distorted inner need?” He called on legislators to “unshackle” the police
“from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls
immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save
another’s.”
And in the most
ominous part of the ad, especially in explaining Trump’s mind-set on
police-community relations in 2020 as well as in 1989, he wrote, “Criminals
must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY
BEGINS!” [Emphasis in original.] Ultimately DNA tests revealed that the
“Central Park Five” were actually innocent, and in 2001 another man confessed
to the crime, but Yusef Salaam, one of the Five, later called Trump “the fire
starter” whose pressure campaign led to their wrongful convictions. Salaam said
that thanks to Trump’s ad, “common citizens were being manipulated and swayed
into believing that we were guilty.” He said his family received death threats
after Trump’s ads ran.
Trump’s racism
has manifested itself in innumerable ways his entire adult life, especially
during his political career. When Barack Obama first ran for President in 2008
Trump became the leading public spokesperson for the so-called “Birther
movement,” which argued that Obama was born in Kenya and was therefore
ineligible to be President. Throughout the campaign Obama was forced to respond
to Trump and the other “Birthers” by producing document after document proving
he’d been born exactly where he’d said he was — Honolulu, Hawai’i. The
“Birther” allegation was obvious dog-whistle racism, with Trump and Obama’s
other political enemies saying essentially, “He’s not one of us” — highlighting the physical difference between him
and the 43 previous Presidents.
Trump has
continued his war on Obama even after he succeeded him to the Presidency. He
has methodically sought to undo every major accomplishment of Obama’s Presidency
— the Affordable Care Act, the Paris agreement on climate change, the nuclear
arms deal with Iran and the protection of so-called “Dreamers” (children of
undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents, many of whom know no
other culture than ours and no other language but English) from deportation.
Most recently he refused to participate in the official unveiling of Obama’s
portrait in the White House — one more coded message that Trump considers
Obama’s presidency to be illegitimate because of Obama’s race.
Not all of
Trump’s racist actions have been veiled in code. He began his Presidential
campaign in 2015 with a slashing attack on immigrants from Mexico, calling them
“murderers,” “rapists” and “drug dealers.” When white supremacists rioted in
Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12, 2017 and one counter-protester
was deliberately run over by a car driven by a white supremacist, Trump caused
nationwide controversy by saying there were “very fine people on both sides —
on both sides.” A day later Trump backed away from that statement and insisted
he condemned violence, but the day after that he held an angry press conference
outside Trump Tower in New York City in which he lashed out at the media (one
of his favorite targets) and said, ““What about the alt-left that came charging
at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of
guilt? Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging with
clubs in their hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they
do.”
So it wasn’t
surprising that on June 1, one week after Floyd’s murder, Trump announced that
he was “the president of law and order,” called on
state governors to call out the National Guard to suppress protests, and said
he would order the U.S. military — “thousands and thousands of heavily armed
soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” — to cities where
protests were going on. Though Trump paid lip service to the idea that people
had the right to protest Floyd’s murder and police abuses in general, he said
the actual actions were “not acts of peaceful protest. These are acts of
domestic terror.” He initially blamed both the protests and the looting that
accompanied some of them on “anarchists” and then attributed them to the loosely
organized Left-wing coalition Antifa (short for “anti-fascist”), most of whose
members (to the extent it has any) are white college students whose main
objectives are blocking Right-wing speakers from appearing on campuses and
disrupting their events if they do.
While Trump was making his June 1 speech officials from the
U.S. military and the Department of Justice were clearing peaceful
demonstrators out of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. so Trump and an
entourage — including attorney general William Barr, acting defense secretary
Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — could
walk over to St. John’s Episcopal Church for a photo-op in which Trump stood in
front of the church and held up a Bible. He picked the church because during an
earlier protest, someone had set a fire in its basement.
The church’s pastor, Bishop Mariann Budde, was upset that
Trump used her church for his action, especially without so much as a courtesy
call in advance. “Let me be clear, the president just used a Bible, the
most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of
my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the
teachings of Jesus,” she told CNN.
“We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless
others. And I just can’t believe what my eyes have seen.”
Various
commentators have compared Trump’s campaign for re-election to Richard Nixon’s
Presidential campaign in 1968. As part of his and Senator Strom Thurmond’s
(R-SC) “Southern Strategy” to neutralize the threat of George Wallace’s Right-wing
third-party candidacy, Nixon essentially promised racist voters throughout the
country that he would be as hard on African-American rioters and demonstrators
as Wallace — so racists should vote for him because he, unlike Wallace, could
actually be elected. Like Trump, Nixon declared himself the candidate of “law
and order” and claimed that he could restore domestic peace after the riots
following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and
the tumult in the streets during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
“It’s a
decades-long Republican strategy,” Matt Dallek, a political historian at George
Washington University, told Los Angeles Times reporter Chris Megerian in a June 3 article (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-02/trump-ran-against-america-carnage-happening-on-his-watch).
“Trump is drawing on this tradition. But he’s also making it his own, because
he’s the most divisive and inflammatory president we’ve had.” Dallek pointed
out that unlike Nixon, who veiled his racist appeals with coded terms like “law
and order” and “states’ rights,” Trump is “more willing to say the racist and nativist
pieces out loud.” While all the
Republicans who’ve won Presidential elections since 1968 — Nixon, Ronald Reagan
and both George Bushes — have appealed to racist voters as part of that
“decades-long strategy,” there was always reason to doubt whether they were
personally racist themselves. With Trump, there is no doubt: Donald
Trump is a racist and a white supremacist.
What Happened to George
Floyd?
One of the
oddest things about the coverage of the George Floyd murder and the response to
it by ordinary citizens, police and politicians is so few people have published
the details of just how Floyd attracted the attention of the Minneapolis police
in the first place. The initial reports were that Floyd had been apprehended on
a charge of “forgery” — a crime that usually isn’t committed on the sort of
street corner where he was confronted and ultimately killed — which made me
wonder if he had tried to pass a bad check at the convenience store in front of
which he was killed. The truth, as revealed in a June 5 Los Angeles Times op-ed by Nancy Gertner and Paul Butler (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-05/george-floyd-arrest-police-killing),
was both fascinating in its own right and indicative of how differently white
and Black Americans are policed.
The incident
began on May 25, when a clerk at the convenience store called police to report
that Floyd had bought a pack of cigarettes and paid for it with a $20 bill the
clerk thought looked counterfeit. The store’s owner later acknowledged, “Most
of the times when patrons give us a counterfeit bill, they don’t even know it’s
fake.” Had George Floyd been white, the officers who took the call would first
have asked the store clerk how he knew the bill was counterfeit, and then would
have taken Floyd aside and asked him where he got that particular piece of
cash.
“Instead,”
Gertner and Butler wrote, “within minutes of the police officers’ arrival,
Floyd was face down on the street, hands tied behind his back, with Derek
Chauvin pressing his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes, while two
other cops restrained Floyd by pressing down on his back and legs, and the
fourth officer kept distressed passers-by from intervening. Floyd begged for
his life, telling them that he couldn’t breathe. Soon, his body went limp and
silent. He was declared dead at the hospital.”
George Floyd was
yet another victim of a culture of racism that seems to be inbred in every U.S.
police department. It is, I suspect, a product of years of social conditioning
within the police community that holds that an action which would be considered
innocuous if a white person did it — like reaching into one’s pocket to pull
out a cell phone — is considered highly dangerous and even life-threatening if
done by a Black person, especially a Black male. As Gertner and Butler point
out, “African-American men such as George Floyd suffer from a presumption of
guilt from the moment they encounter a police officer. Almost 50% of Black men
have been arrested by
age 23, most often in connection with minor
offenses that they don’t commit more frequently than white men.
This arrest gap ultimately results in Black men having a one in three chance of
going to prison, compared with one in six for Latino men, and one in 17 for
white men.”
This social
conditioning seems to be a constant in police culture regardless of how much
any given police department tries to “reform.” It seems to exist in police
officers whether or not they are consciously racist in other aspects of their lives. One could readily imagine a
white officer saying, “I’m not a racist! I coach a Black team in the Police
Athletic League!” — and still pulling a gun on a Black man who was reaching for
a cell phone because his police-community conditioning led him to assume the
Black man was reaching for a gun.
It also seems to
be impervious to the race of the officials in charge of police departments, or
the color of politicians who supposedly control them. George Floyd was murdered
by an officer in a police department whose chief at the time was an
African-American. Michael Brown, whose killing by a white police officer in
Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 sparked the Black Lives matter movement in the first
place, was killed at a time when the President of the United States was an
African-American. It’s tragic to go back and re-read some of the anti-racist
literature of the 1970’s and note the hopeful — and overly optimistic —
assumption a lot of those writers made that African-Americans and Latino-Americans
would be policed fairly once things were run by people who looked like them.
Defund the Police! And
End the “War on Drugs”!
When I first
heard the demand “Defund the Police!” expressed on protest signs and by
African-American commentators on news outlets like MS-NBC, I got scared. It
seemed to me that demanding defunding of police would be a sure way to
galvanize scared white suburban voters into re-electing Donald Trump, expanding
the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate and giving the House of
Representatives back to the GOP. “Hey!” I could envision Republican
propagandists and Fox News personalities saying. “The Democrats want to get rid
of the police so their Black buddies can riot, loot, rape and kill to their
hearts’ content!” Visions of a 50-state landslide for Trump were doing the
devil’s dance in my head.
Then, the more I
thought about it, the idea of defunding existing police departments and
radically rethinking just how we
maintain social order in this country started to make a lot more sense. Granted
that we need some type of police
and justice system to keep people from committing crimes against each other’s
persons or property, do we really need the kind of police we have? Do we really need a police
department consciously modeled on the military, with army-style ranks and
chains of command, and equipped not only with guns but, increasingly, with
tactical battlefield weapons developed to fight wars and applied on the streets
of our communities?
I’ll never
forget how shocked I was when I first heard of a SWAT team (the acronym stands
for “Special Weapons and Tactics”): in 1974, when the SWAT unit of the Los
Angeles Police Department staged a raid on the Los Angeles redoubt of what was
left of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped heiress Patty
Hearst and then brainwashed her into joining them. Since then SWAT actions have
become routine and virtually all big-city police departments have SWAT units.
SWAT teams are a vivid display of how “special weapons and tactics” originally
developed for fighting wars abroad have been brought home — and how American
police operating in communities of color see their role more as to dominate and
occupy than to “protect and serve.”
The
militarization of U.S. police departments really began in 1969, when Richard
Nixon took office on a “law and order” platform and immediately announced he
was starting a “War on Drugs.” There had been intimations before that America’s
drug policy would get tougher — in 1966 New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller
got his state to pass what he called “a tough new law that can get addicts off
the streets for 15 years” — but things really got nasty when Nixon announced
“Operation Intercept” on September 21, 1969. “Operation Intercept” was an
attempt to stop all smuggling of marijuana from Mexico to the U.S. According to
the Wikipedia page on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Intercept),
it “ involved increased surveillance of the border from both air and sea,
but the major part of the policy was the individual inspection, mandated to
last three minutes, of every vehicle crossing into the United States from
Mexico.”
“Operation
Intercept” actually worked — the flow of marijuana from Mexico to the U.S.
virtually ceased — but it also had two unforeseen consequences. First, it
stimulated the formation of a major U.S. marijuana industry, as people involved
in selling it realized that with the border effectively closed to Mexican pot,
they would have to grow their own. Second, it left a lot of drug smugglers
potentially unemployed — a problem they solved by switching from marijuana to
cocaine. Because cocaine is more compact, it was easier to get past the border
guards — and because, as you learn in Economics 101, increasing the supply of
something lowers its price, cocaine, previously so expensive it was a rich
person’s drug, became democratized and accessible to anyone.
Cocaine became
even more readily accessible after 1981, when someone figured out how to change
cocaine powder into “rocks” that could easily be smoked in a glass pipe. The
resulting substance came to be known as “crack,” and as the Los Angeles
Times editorial board noted in a
sense-of-the-paper editorial June 10, “it wormed its way into the popular
imagination as a fearful substance that threatened to destroy the nation. The
anti-crack frenzy preceded the real epidemic, which took off in the middle of
the decade when Congress made
penalties for possessing the substance 100 times greater than
for similar amounts of powder cocaine.” (The bill that did that was,
ironically, introduced by an African-American Congressmember, Charles Rangel of
New York.)
“Two companion
public health disasters followed in quick succession,” the Times editorial explained. “The first was violent crime,
as crack profits lured street entrepreneurs and gangs. Competition became
deadly. The murder rate
for young Black men doubled. The second was the law enforcement
response and what later became widely known as mass incarceration. Black
communities that for decades had suffered from official neglect suddenly saw astounding
investment of public resources — in the form of violent policing.”
As cities,
states and the federal government all swelled their police budgets to maintain
that violent, coercive response to crack, budgets for other interventions were
cut. Public-health programs and outreach efforts to target mentally ill
individuals were among the chief victims. Police and prison-guard unions made
common cause to lobby legislatures to pass more anti-crime laws and lengthen
the sentences for laws already on the books — and they got huge financial
support from investors who saw opportunities for building private, for-profit
prisons to handle the vast increase in incarcerated people. The result was the
U.S. now has the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation in the world — higher than China,
North Korea or any other dictatorship.
A widely cited
definition of “insanity” is “doing the same thing over and over again, and
expecting a different result.” Unlike other countries — especially in Europe —
the United States has always defined
drug use as primarily a criminal-justice issue instead of a public-health
issue. The most egregious example is America’s 14-year ignoble experiment with
Prohibition, in which the Constitution was actually amended to ban the sale or
possession of alcoholic beverages. The result was, among other things, a vast
expansion of organized crime in general and the Mafia (which until then had
been a relatively minor threat; its main source of income was extortion and its
main victims were law-abiding Italian-Americans) in particular. That history
repeated itself with the viciously violent drug cartels formed first in
Colombia and then in Mexico to provide U.S. “gangstas” with the raw material to
make and sell crack.
One way to
“defund the police” is to shift resources from highly violent, militarized
policing into public-health outreaches and intervention. Another is to remake
the police themselves, to strip police departments of their militaristic
command-and-control structures and make them more oriented towards community
service. But a third element of defunding the police — and I would argue the
most important one — is simply to make fewer things illegal.
I would argue
that, unless a behavior directly harms another human being besides the doer —
unless it poses a direct threat to another person’s life, liberty or property —
it should not be a crime. By that token,
simple possession of all drugs
should be decriminalized. A number of people have compiled statistics of what
percentage of U.S. guilty pleas or convictions are for violating the drug laws
— but those numbers underestimate
how many U.S. criminal cases are drug-related. I learned that when I covered
sentencing hearings at the San Diego County Courthouse in the 1990’s and
noticed that virtually everyone who was not being sentenced for a drug-law violation was being
sentenced for a robbery or burglary they had committed to raise the money to
buy drugs.
It’s true that
U.S. police abuses against communities of color — particularly African-Americans
— pre-date the “War on Drugs” and even the first moves to make drugs illegal in
the late 19th century. A number of “Defund the Police” advocates
have argued that the roots of America’s police forces and the quasi-military
way they’re organized is in the so-called “slave patrols” that hunted down
fugitive slaves. Certainly after the Civil War the former Confederate states
seized on the loophole in the 13th Amendment which banned slavery or
involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted,” and enacted so-called “Black Codes” that created new
“crimes” for which only Black people were prosecuted and allowed white people
to force them into servitude by paying their “fines” for committing these
offenses.
But it’s been
the various phases of the “War on Drugs” — the initial laws against opiates and
cocaine in the 1890’s, Prohibition, the push for laws against marijuana in the
1930’s largely to keep the former Prohibition agents employed, and then the
vast expansions in anti-drug laws and the sentences for drug crimes in the
1970’s and 1980’s — that have created what’s been called the “prison-industrial
complex” and made the U.S. the world’s number one nation in incarcerating its
own citizens. These laws have, not surprisingly, been enforced with especially
intense ferocity and venom against African-Americans and other people of color.
In an otherwise
reasonable column in the June 10 Los Angeles Times, “Bad Apples? Yes, but It’s the System that Keeps
Them on Police Forces” (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-10/black-lives-matter-minneapolis-derek-chauvin-defund-police),
Harry Litman opposes “defunding the police” campaign with arguments like this:
“Shifting some responsibilities away from police to other specialists is
logical and appropriate. … But the experience of the best and most engaged
community policing programs suggests that what well-trained officers bring to
situations — including the prospect of force — can help keep the peace.
Defunding proposals also cut directly against policies that underlie some of
the biggest success stories in contemporary policing,
where more involved and broadly skilled officers aim to become
partners rather than occupying forces in the communities they work in.”
But, as the old
saying goes, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If
your response to mentally ill individuals “acting out” or instances of domestic
violence is to send out people with guns, all too often those guns are going to
be used. The quasi-militaristic police culture of today is not an appropriate instrument to deal with issues like
drug abuse, domestic violence, mental illness or the experience of being
human-trafficked. (There is a
police role in going after people who traffic humans or sell drugs — and that
include the major opiate pushers like Purdue or Mallinkrodt, who have probably
killed more people with their products than the illegal cartels.)
Long-term reform
of American policing and an end to the death toll among people of color,
especially African-Americans, will, I believe, require fundamental rethinking
not only of what we want and expect from our police departments but of how much
behavior we define as “criminal.” It will require the immediate end of the “War
on Drugs” and the repeal of all laws
against the simple possession (as opposed to the sale or distribution) of
intoxicating substances. And it will require fundamental retraining and a
large-scale purge of existing police officers to get rid of the people — even
ones who aren’t openly racist and are otherwise “good cops” — who have been
conditioned by the police culture to regard people of color in general, and
Black people in particular, as more “threatening” and violence-prone than
whites.
