The end of the year is always a time for reflection about yourself, your loved ones, and your community. That’s why we get to enjoy the flashback articles from Bill in Portland Maine and also endure the crap lists described in this article.
I am a white resident of Cleveland proper. I came home yesterday to the sights of flashing lights and proud marchers standing up for their beliefs. That was not the first time that I had seen those sights in my adopted hometown. After all, along with Ferguson, Baltimore, and Chicago, we have become one of the ground zeros in the Black Lives Matter movement.
Because of that, my yearly reflection on community revolves around issues of race and criminal justice. Please join me over the jump for three of these reflections.
Police Do Not Enforce Laws Equally in White and Minority Communities.
For three years, I have proudly owned an American and UAW-made car. But, there is one problem with that car: it was not built with a factory-installed front license plate holder. As a result, I have been driving around Cleveland without a front license plate for three years now. In Ohio, that’s illegal and should subject me to a traffic stop and citation. Luckily for me, though, I have successfully avoided detection from authorities and have never been pulled over for my illegality.
That is not the case for others. As a former prosecutor, I had two African-American defendants come into my courtroom after bench warrants were issued for their arrests. After the judge asked how they were apprehended, both responded that a police officer pulled them over for failure to display a front license plate. Once stopped, their names were run through the background check system, which revealed their outstanding warrants. It isn’t just criminal defendants who face this type of enforcement. I confessed my lack of a front license plate to an African-American colleague of mine and she told me to fix it as soon as possible since she had just been pulled over in Columbus for the same thing.
What’s the difference between my former colleague, those two criminal defendants, and me? I’m white and I travel through parts of Cleveland that are not obliquely deemed to be “high crime” areas, which in American jurisprudence has become the sanitized way of describing an area with a lot of minority residents.
It isn’t just a missing front license plate. I have never smoked, let alone inhaled, marijuana, but many of my white friends used it on a weekly basis during college and during the beginnings of their professional lives. As you would expect, none of my friends were ever cited for their marijuana possession. The only person that I knew to receive such a citation was an African-American classmate from high school.
These personal experiences confirm what the statistics already show: enforcement against unlawful behavior occurs extensively and disproportionately in minority communities. Of course, the Rudy Giulianis of the world want to defend the current law enforcement system as merely cracking down where the crime is occurring. But, that is not the case — minorities do not commit crime at a higher rate than whites, as my experience has reflected. Instead, the laws are enforced differently against minorities than they are against whites.
Racial Injustice Occurs Everywhere, not Just the South.
I come from a small rural town below the Mason-Dixon line. One of my criticisms of my hometown (which, despite its warts, I still love) was that there was still residual racism that fell along the fault lines of a war that was waged 150 years ago. While I was not thrilled to leave home, I was excited to live in a part of the country that seemed to have more tolerance and acceptance than my hometown. After all, Ohio was a key part of the Union! I wouldn’t have to see any more Confederate flags flying or hear stories about when the black folks in town had to sit upstairs at the movie theater.
But, I decided to live in Cleveland, with its own sordid racial history. A town where the East/West division of the city relates not just to geography, but skin color. There is systemic racism here just like my hometown and it infuses much of how local residents think and feel toward each other. For all who want to give the South a singular focus in terms of racist domination, I can assure you that by doing so, you are forgetting a large swath of the North, Midwest, and West that have the same problems.
We Can Implement Some Concrete Solutions.
One of my biggest problems with protest movements is the lack of simple, easily-defined solutions to the problems that they address. To a degree, I understand that that occurs due to the wide spectrum of people involved in the movements, etc. But, to me, anger means nothing unless you have something in mind on how to address the cause of that anger. Here’s what I can come up with.
First, we need to push for an end to broken windows policing period. Police effectiveness should not be determined on the basis of citations issued or arrests made. Quota-based policing needs to stop as well. That means adequately funding local municipalities, including local courts, so that they do not rely on fees and the outrageous imposition of court costs to fund themselves. It also means that police officers need to be trained that not every interaction with the community should result in a citation. Indeed, only rare cases should be referred to further criminal prosecution.
Second, we need to push for funding of community policing. Get the police officers out of the cruiser. Have them walk beats and meet members of the community. Have unarmed police officers. If engagement with police entails peaceful resolution of problems, as opposed to harsh interaction resulting in a citation, then many of our policing problems will go away.
Third, we need to ask that courts keep track of demographic statistics. We need to know when judges are giving lenient sentences or not guilty findings in bench trials to white defendants and not doing the same to minority defendants. And, since every state has a judicial ethics canon that requires equal treatment of parties regardless of race, those judges who have disproportionate treatment of defendants will have to face discipline.
Fourth, we need to make prudent decisions in local races. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the ballot often contains pages and pages of judicial candidates, yet many voters, particularly minority voters, drop off after the presidential and other top of the ballot races. That needs to change and that begins with more engagement with minority voters in such races.
Fifth, we should look into creating a presumption of probation for low-level felonies to match the existing presumption that exists for misdemeanors. While I hope that an end to broken windows policing would greatly reduce the amount of charges filed to begin with, I still believe that this change is necessary. Here, in Ohio, we often say that our state budget “educates, medicates, and incarcerates.” I’m sick of having that third part of it — incarceration should not be a drain on our society’s resources like it is now. Incarceration does not help the drug addicted who commit less serious offenses, especially non-violent ones.
And, finally, we need to push for true liberal judges in the vein of Thurgood Marshall and William Douglas who will reexamine the legal basis for much of our current criminal justice system: Terry v. Ohio, which allowed police to perform investigatory searches so long as they have a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. Although in the ivory tower that is America’s appellate court system such a doctrine may make sense, it has failed to operate effectively in the real world. For further reading, I recommend this article by one of my former law professors.
Happy New Year’s to all of you. May God bring us a better and more equal 2016.