For a White person to call police when they see a Black person, simply because the Black person is present, is an act of racist aggression, an act of social dominance and privilege that often leads to unwarranted arrest, incarceration, assault and death for the Black person.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, writing for Pacific Standard, exposes the terrifying reality that Black people face when a White person beckons police assistance, and the awful history of the role law enforcement has played in maintaining regimes of racism and discrimination:
- For black Americans, policing is "the most enduring aspect of the struggle for civil rights," because it has always been a mechanism for racial control.
- Historically, in both the South and the North, the police have defended and enforced racism and segregation—attacking civil rights protesters and disrupting strikes of black workers seeking to integrate workplaces and neighborhoods.
- Stories of police harassment and violence in black communities are common. Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men. They are more likely to face ongoing everyday slights and indignities at the hands of police. The underlying causes run deep: Black people often see police as the face of larger systems of inequality in the justice system, employment, education, and housing.
- Black communities often face higher rates of crime and thus want good relationships with law enforcement. But that is not likely until the U.S. finds a way to address its history of using the police as a tool to reinforce systems of racial inequity.
That it is the racist attitudes held by law enforcement officials themselves (as with the rest of American society) that create this reality, should no longer be subject to dispute:
In the months since Ferguson, many pundits have asserted that black Americans deserve this type of policing, that it is a consequence of their being more likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of violent crime. "White police officers wouldn't be there if you weren't killing each other," former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani argued on Meet the Press as the nation awaited the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown shooting. It should be noted that Giuliani oversaw the New York Police Department during two of the most notorious cases of police brutality in recent memory, the sodomy of Abner Louima and the death of Amadou Diallo, who was unarmed, in a hail of 41 bullets. Both were black men.
What Giuliani was saying, in essence, is that law-abiding citizens deserve to be treated with suspicion because they share racial traits with the tiny number among them who commit crimes.
The racist perceptions held by Whites generally of African-Americans , and in this context, most importantly by police officers, prompt Whites to frivolously call 911, and police to respond in a way that Blacks cannot but view as threatening— they never know when an encounter with Police prompted by a White person’s anxieties, might end in their death.
Providing a pointed and concise description of the phenomenon of White people who call the police when Black people engage in the offense of Being Black While Black Around White People [BBWBAWP], Dkos member Crashing Vor, in a comment to my previous diary on this subject, included the views Professor Jason Johnson:
“Jason Johnson (Root editor and professor of politics at Morgan State) was interviewed on All Things Considered yesterday on this issue and introduced a phrase that I long to hear more.”:
These people are calling the police first because they think that blacks are inherently dangerous. And they feel that the police are there to work as their personal racism valets and remove black people from the situation.
What happens when police are called by White people who call the police when Black people engage in the offense of Being Black While Black Around White People [BBWBAWP]?
Researchers at Stanford University measured the decision making process of police officers when making traffic stops:
“In nearly every one of the 100 departments we consider, we find that black and Hispanic drivers are subjected to a lower search threshold than whites, suggestive of widespread discrimination against these groups.”
Specifically, the study found that police decided to search black drivers based on a 7 percent certainty that they might be hiding something illegal. If an African American driver looks nervous, for example, police might interpret the nervousness as a sign of possible guilt and insist on a search.
For Hispanics, the search threshold was 6 percent certainty. But police in these 100 North Carolina cities wanted a 15 percent certainty before searching the vehicles of white drivers. The threshold for searching Asians was about the same as for whites…
Had North Carolina’s police applied the same standard of suspicion to blacks as whites, the researchers estimate that they would have searched 30 percent fewer black drivers – about 30,000 people over the six years they study. Hispanics would have experienced a 50 percent reduction in searches affecting 8,000 drivers.
A USA Today report on disparities in police arrest rates quantifies what we already know:
Police in Ferguson — which erupted into days of racially charged unrest after a white officer killed an unarmed black teen — arrest black people at a rate nearly three times higher than people of other races.
At least 1,581 other police departments across the USA arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson, a USA TODAY analysis of arrest records shows. That includes departments in cities as large and diverse as Chicago and San Francisco and in the suburbs that encircle St. Louis, New York and Detroit.
Of course, as a ‘mainstream’ media outlet, they can’t bring themselves to just name the manifest truth:
Those disparities are easier to measure than they are to explain. They could be a reflection of biased policing; they could just as easily be a byproduct of the vast economic and educational gaps that persist across much of the USA — factors closely tied to crime rates. In other words, experts said, the fact that such disparities exist does little to explain their causes.
"That does not mean police are discriminating. But it does mean it's worth looking at. It means you might have a problem, and you need to pay attention," said University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, a leading expert on racial profiling.
This attitude— ‘we’ve seen overwhelming evidence for decades, and the most obvious expressions of racism by police, and throughout the society, but we can’t be sure it’s racism that’s the cause of racial disparities in arrests’— is a fundamental reason this unacceptable reality persists. In an odd parallel (perhaps not coincidental) to the differences in certainty to suspect a White or Black person of criminal activity, Prof. Harris is propounding the view that ‘if we’re going to say White society is to blame for an egregious and pervasive problem, we need more than the mounds of patently clear evidence we keep finding, whenever we look’.
In other words, to acknowledge the presence and effects of racism throughout American society requires an extraordinary degree of evidence, a much higher standard than we would require to institute ‘stop and frisk’ policing of those with not-White skin tone.
Devon W. Carbado & Patrick Rock, in an article published in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review— What Exposes African Americans to Police Violence?— make plain that it is, inarguably, the race of a ‘suspect’ that accounts for increased rates of use of force, including deadly force:
...data on disparities in frisks and use of force with black men suggests that even when officers approach a black man and find no evidence of wrongdoing, officers often prolong or escalate the encounter rather than terminate it.17… (pg. 167)
… it easier for participants to perceive that a black person is armed than it is for them to perceive that a white person is armed,and easier for them to perceive that a white person is unarmed than it is for them to perceive that a black person is unarmed. Scholars suggest that stereotypes associating African Americans with violence provide at least a partial explanation for this difference.22
There is reason to believe that “shooter bias” might be even more pronounced among police officers. A body of research suggests that people are particularly prone to the kind of error “shooter bias” reflects when they are in mortality-salient circumstances — that is, circumstances in which they are made to think about their death.23 Because it is reasonable to frame everyday policing as a mortality-salient context, the higher rates of identification error associated with mortality-salient scenarios may be endemic to police officer life. (pg. 168)
Sophie Trawalter and colleagues found that, when both a black face and a white face were simultaneously and very quickly flashed in different positions on the screen, participants’ gaze was differentially attracted to the area where the black face had been.24 This sort of early attention to images is more typically seen in response to biologically threatening stimuli, like images of snakes and spiders.25 The researchers therefore interpreted their findings as evidence that blacks in America have become so associated with danger that even viewing them has come to trigger the same kind of heightened attention and awareness people manifest in the presence of biologically threatening stimuli. While this hyper-attentiveness has also been demonstrated in response to other social stimuli, such as angry faces,26 it is notable that black men attract attention even in the absence of any aggressive, angry, or threatening facial content. In other words, a black man who is providing literally no evidence of threat is nonetheless likely to attract the attention of police officers, so ingrained are the stereotypes linking him with threat.27 (pp. 168-9)
Finally, Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt have shown that receiving confirmation of the association between black men and crime — viewing or hearing about black criminals — has the potential to produce even more punitive policing.28 Roughly, their study suggests that the higher people’s perception of the incarceration rates of African Americans, the more concerned they were about crime, which in turn predicted greater support of policies like stop and frisk policing.29 In this way, the authors argued, perceptions of prisons as disproportionately black promote support for the very policies that created such disproportionality. The implications of this research for policing are profound: The repeat interactions that police officers have with African-American men could make officers more inclined to engage in, and legitimize, violent (or punitive) policing against them. (pg. 169)
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What should be done?
DKos member pelagicray kindly allowed me to incorporate their comments in full as part of this diary:
“Stacey Patton and Anthony Paul Farley write in [the May 16] Washington Post ... “There’s no cost to white people who call 911 about black people. There should be.” [pelagicray’s] comment [to the May 16] APR ends with this quote and comment:
It is a crime to file a false police report. When places of public accommodation enlist the police to remove people based on race, the owners and managers should be investigated and prosecuted for filing false police reports. At the Philly Starbucks, the Yale dorm, the golf course or the Oakland park, the police investigation should have focused on the frivolous and possibly criminal abuses of the 911 emergency system rather than on the people who were doing nothing wrong when someone called about them.
The authors are not advocating not calling for true emergencies of actually dangerous or blatantly illegal actions. They are calling for responding agencies to investigate and apply consequences for calls based on protecting “our” space and “You’re making me uncomfortable. I don’t feel safe around you. You’re an intruder. You need to leave, you need to get out” type calls. And that should include those calling for Islamophobia, Latinos and just poor people.”
As I stated in my previous diary from The Root: White Person sees Black person, calls police. But this time White privilege fails. (May 16, 2018):
We can hope that more officers will wake up to being used by White people like bouncers for a private club, seeking to expel all Blacks from ‘their’ communities. In the meantime, every instance of aggressive and dangerous White privilege must be documented, and we must intervene. Lives depend on it.
What’s the expression?
If you see something, say something.