On Tuesday, February 3 there was another fatal police shooting involving a young black male and white police officer in St. Louis. The deceased, Ledarius Donte Williams, was exactly the kind of person targeted in hot-spot policing. He served five years of a 14-year sentence for pointing a gun at two police officers and (according to police) was carrying a stolen gun, a violation of his parole. Police said they followed him because he was “acting suspiciously,” pulling at his waistband as he ran, which always suggests to cops that someone is concealing a gun.
Protestors, on the other hand, said he was targeted, hunted down and executed. Police would respond that targeting and hunting down armed and dangerous people is part of their job, and this routine proactive investigation ended in a killing because the suspect would not surrender his weapon, which he was carrying illegally, and then pointed it at the cops.
This strategy of pursuing people already “known to law enforcement” who are “acting suspiciously” – which is basic to police work, though it always sounds fishy and vague as an explanation for pursuit – is what St. Louis police threaten to abandon if civilian review with teeth is passed. Others might say that itself is an argument in favor of civilian review, since proactive policing is getting young black men killed. If Darren Wilson had been in slowdown mode on August 9, he would have driven right past Michael Brown Jr.
Any effective strategy is always focused or targeted, never random. So the police are justified in using this approach to contain and control criminal activity. However, the perspective on policing in the black community is rooted in an historical experience rampant with occupation and persecution, from enforcing fugitive slave laws to maintaining Jim Crow. Remember that it was the police, not the Klan, mustered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
This cognitive dissonance is foundational to every encounter between young black men and white police officers. So how do you provide security for a community that desperately needs it when the agency charged with providing that security is severely alienated from that community?
The breakdown between the black community and the police is all about trust. The white culture of policing does not trust the black community, and the black community does not trust the police. Two parties can overcome a lack of mutual trust, but only when there is parity in the power between them.
Here, then, is the essence of our dilemma: It’s the unequal distribution of power between the black community and the criminal justice system, of which the police are the tip of the spear. For trust to be built between unequal parties, the party with the most power has to make the first move to be vulnerable. If the weakest party is required to move first or simultaneously, that’s coercion.
In the Gospel of John, John is asked why he loves God. His answer is because God first loved him. The power differential explains why God had to first love John.
There is a way to address alienation between the black community and police, but it requires a triumph of hope over experience. Winston Churchill observed that Americans will always do the right thing – after all else has failed. What is the right thing in this case? You have to have police training begin with different historical assumptions about policing in the black community.
We must remember that hereditary African-American slavery was government-sanctioned. The American criminal justice system enforced the maintenance of the “peculiar” institution. Whether it was the Jim Crow South or the more informal Northern racism, it’s the police that ensured black people knew and stayed in their “place.” So policing in America historically means something completely different for black Americans than white Americans.
If you want to police a community, rather than occupy and subdue a people, you must first understand the context of that community’s historical reality. So you have to begin by putting police officers inside the African-American narrative. If the Ferguson Commission could do only one thing, it should be to change the assumptions of reality in the training that police officers receive.
Mike Jones is a former senior staffer in St. Louis city and county government, current vice president of the Missouri State Board of Education, and member of The St. Louis American editorial board.
