Columnist Jamala Rogers
Last week Police Chief Joe Mokwa sent a letter to City police officers, saying, “The rate of police slayings is disturbing, and I want to make sure that you are practicing sound safety strategies.” The letter outlines his concerns and suggestions in detail.
Click here to read the letter in its entirety.
Dear African-American Community,
My purpose in writing is two-fold. First, I want to alert you to a disturbing and escalating trend of police terror across the nation. Second, and more importantly, I am asking you to critically evaluate the safety strategies that you and your family personally practice and determine what you could do to better protect yourself.
Unfortunately, our community is experiencing a dramatic rise in the number of fatal civilian shootings by police across the nation, suggesting that an increasing number of cops are adopting a troubling pattern of disregard for the lives of black people.
African-Americans have been beaten, Tasered, suffocated, shot and drowned to death by officers in addition to dying as a result of medical neglect of the above and in car chases. Most of the car chases are in violation of department policy and seem to only occur in black neighborhoods where innocent black people become collateral damage.
Although the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department keeps precise accounts of their fallen, there are no official records of civilians who have died at the hands of police. Their deaths are justified in the name of crime-fighting. Never in the history of the SLPD has a cop been made criminally responsible for the death of a black citizen. This fact alone has created a historic and antagonistic wedge between police and our communities. The message has been decisive and deadly.
However, the real root of the sharpening tension is the criminalization and dehumanization of our communities.
This has been documented by independent research as well as racial profiling data collected annually since 2000. This is not just a racist attitude towards our neighborhoods but impacts policies, laws, procedures and allocation of resources by the police department and the court system.
An example of this is the crack and cocaine laws that disproportionately target blacks for longer sentences. Another example is that black drivers are nearly 50 percent more likely than whites to be stopped by police and twice as likely to be searched, even though police are more likely to find contraband with white drivers.
Meanwhile our community should be aware that rogue cops have re-written street law, causing young, black men to adjust their own behaviors for survival. When you get told regularly that your life can be taken by a “stroke of a pen” or by the bullet of an officer, you are in constant fear of your life.
If stopped by a police officer, you have a split second to make a decision about living for another day. You don’t know if the stop is going to be by a community-minded officer, such as Norvelle Brown, or the kind of rabid officers who responded to Gregory Bell locally or Sean Bell in New York City. St. Louis cops are being trained to assume that everyone in our community is armed because all African Americans have been criminalized. When and where will this end?
I am asking each of you to take time and evaluate your own safety strategies when confronted by the police.
Are you teaching them to let you know appropriate details about their comings and goings? Are you finding ways to handle your business and call the police as a last resort? Have you educated your children about their legal and human rights? Specifically, are you training your man-child about how to survive the streets, being young and black in America? Are you questioning the details of police-civilian combative events and negative media portrayals of our community? Are you working to make the neighborhood safer by promptly addressing anti-social and criminal activities? Are you actively working for more accountability by the police department so that our children see us banding together for their collective security?
These are just a few areas that I would like for you to think about to ensure you are being as security-conscious as possible. You owe it to your family and your community.
Sincerely,
Jamala Rogers
Servant of the People