To many of us, the July 7 Clayton Police encounter with the 10 black Washington university students looked like business as usual, except that Washington University’s officialdom was compelled to call out the city and its police. This unusual move on behalf of wrongly detained students forced apologies and pledges, as the city manager – not the police chief, not the elected mayor – promised to “do better.”
The university says it is making great efforts to recruit a diverse student body, but the kind of national attention to our region’s business-as-usual policing of young African Americans is not helpful. Washington University rightly put pressure on Clayton over this one incident, but the overall problem is ongoing and the university’s involvement on a day-to-day basis is not.
With the initial reluctance of the Clayton police chief to acknowledge the problem, giving an initial “apology” that only added insult to injury, how will we know when Clayton – or any municipal policing agency – is doing better? The problem deserves more than a deep examination of one high-profile incident. Do the remedies that Clayton promises address the problem? Do the city and its police really know they have a problem?
Instead of looking at their practices and results, will the police look to those, such as Bill McClellan of the Post-Dispatch, who found the Clayton Police blameless. How? By shifting blame to “black kids” and MetroLink, in McClellan’s column. If MetroLink had turnstiles and transit police gave tickets to fare jumpers, McClellan wrote, then “black kids” – criminals – would find it harder to make their way to the IHOP, the Galleria and other beleaguered businesses. If our memory of greatest hits in local racism serves, this is the same insight St. Charles voters showed in 1996 when they rejected a sales tax to bring MetroLink to their county.
This is tragic, in that the white-flight sensibility that fears the MetroLink only creates a vicious circle. The MetroLink is for many low-income residents a passport to a better economic future, when it is economic hardship – deeply concentrated for generations in the black community in the segregated St. Louis region – that deprives so many black youth of the opportunities and experiences that might groom them into Wash. U freshmen, rather than the juvenile delinquents that the Clayton cops and the repellant Bill McClellan see whenever they look at “black kids.”
What will the data from Clayton and other areas show a year from now, after Clayton Police try to “do better,” after the anti-bias training they are supposed to receive? Will police receive sensitivity training and will it make changes in behavior? To be specific, will the data show that police continue to presume that “black kids” are criminal suspects rather than, as in this and most other cases, paying customers? We urge Washington University to continue its inside game in forcing change in how Clayton – and St. Louis – polices its black students and all black people in the region.
