Wednesday, November 12, 2014

FBI and Institutional Racism


US Law Enforcement Kills with Impunity,

 especially when the victim’s black:

Genocide of Black Youth

Martha K. Huggins (mhuggins@tulane.edu)

@mdkhuggins (Twitter)

(Not to be quoted without permission)


               Summary:  ProPublica[1] recently concluded using FBI statistics on “justifiable” civilian killings by law enforcement that between 2010 and 2012, “young black males…were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts—[in fact] 21 times greater….”  I argue based on these same statistics  that when US cops investigate another cop’s use of lethal force it is 21 times more likely that a Black youth’s slaying will be deemed “justifiable” than when law enforcers investigate their brethren’s a cop’s killing of a White youth.  ProPublica must have missed that the Bureau’s definition of a cop-involved “justifiable” killing designates that a law enforcement organization is to investigate a lethal force killing and determine its justifiability.  The Bureau’s statistics are about an outcome of cops judging cops rather than the relative rates of Black and White youth being killed.


              US Law Enforcement Kills with Impunity

Bureaucratic Death.  As we await the grand jury’s decision as to whether to indict Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, we might ponder the FBI’s likely designation of Michael Brown’s statistical resting place.  If officer Wilson is not indicted the FBI is likely to statistically inter Michael Brown’s killing as “justifiable.”   This occurs according to the Bureau when a “peace officer [kills] a felon…in the line of duty [and the killing is subsequently] determined through [a] law enforcement investigation to be justifiable….”  I am confident that if national and international media attention and relentless protests in Ferguson, St. Louis had not derailed police business as usual, Michael Brown’s slaying would have been immediately designated “justifiable,” no grand jury hearing to be sure.  Michael Brown--a high school graduate about to enter community college—killed for walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk, would have been ‘officialized as  a “thug” who had threatened a “peace officer’s”  life, a designation that is still far too likely.

          Recalling Trayvon Martin’s killing by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, I must assume that Trayvon’s slaying has already been assigned  by the FBI to its “justifiable” civilian-on-civilian” killings. The FBI’s definition of such a  slaying—“the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen” which is investigated and deemed “justifiable” by a police organization--suggests that, given the outcome of Zimmerman’s trial,  the Bureau must have logged his 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin as “justifiable.”  With the touch of  a key board all that was good about Trayvon Martin would then be coldly erased by the all-defining label, “felon,” when in fact the 17 year-old  African American student was killed while on his way to his father’s condo in a predominately white Florida suburb. 

          Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were killed along with countless other Black youth between 2012 and 2014, not because they had committed a felony but because their shooters considered young Black men ‘matter out of place.’ British anthropologist Mary Douglas proposes this concept to signal how a perceived culturally-polluting danger is socially protected against and the culturally-linked processes for doing so. Whether in the US or beyond, a social group that is considered ‘matter out of place’ is restricted in what its members  can and cannot do and how perceived violators are to be handled.  In the case of US Blacks--where being Black is associated with criminality and being a criminal is associated with being black[2]--the social rituals most often used involve structuring their movements and choices[3] and  total elimination for those who appear to violate such controls and place ‘good’ citizens in peril.

               US law and FBI-defined and implemented kangaroo-court process for excusing a killing as “justifiable,” protects killers whether cops or civilians.  The on-going genocide of Black youth in the US and beyond is therefore   not driven solely by the shooter’s personal hatred of Blacks, although many who kill bear such feelings.  Blacks are victims of America’s unstated, yet vigorously defended, geographies of exclusion.  A product of corporate real estate ‘redlining’ and other multiple forms of de facto segregation, these geographies of exclusion provide employment for some to ‘protect’ the rest of us from ‘criminals.’ The ready-made, race-linked label—“felon”—justifies lethal force against these threats to de-facto segregation. The cops and civilians who kill those seen as ‘matter out of place’ are immune most of the time from prosecution for their lethal actions disproportionately against poor youth of color.

 Government-linked killers.  One needs to take seriously even the civilian killings committed by other civilians since some portion of the “civilians” who kill have links to law enforcement.  The US National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA), which is the parent organization for US Watch[4] organizations, “work[s] intimately with police” who train and vet Sheriff Department-registered Neighborhood Watch organizations and their volunteers. George Zimmerman—who killed Trayvon Martin—is said by a National Sheriff’s association spokesperson not to have been “a member of any group recognized by [the US National Sheriff’s Association].”[5] Just the same, Zimmerman had close connections with Sanford’s police department.

                Some ‘civilians’ who kill are actually off-duty cops guarding businesses or non-profit organizations through a private-duty ‘detail’ usually arranged by the officer’s own police department.  This places moonlighting cops and their occupational loyalties in a legal no-man’s-land:  Are public cops  who moonlight still ‘public’ even when working off the clock?  The New Orleans’ police department’s ‘detail’ system, described in an investigation of  these paid private ‘details’ as “the aorta of [NOPD] corruption,”[6] adds an additional layer to off-duty cops serving private interests. When I shopped during almost ten years at a New Orleans Walgreens at the corner of Rampart and Esplanade,   an NOPD policeman sat on a stool just inside the front door wearing his NOPD uniform and his department-issued weapon strapped to his belt. The officer’s police vehicle sat outside in the Walgreen’s parking lot.  I wondered, if a uniformed NOPD cop kills someone while employed by Walgreens would he be investigated as a public servant or  as a Walgreen’s employee?  Would his own police organization assess the “justifiability” of his killing or would Walgreen’s lawyers do so?  What would be the defining role of the courts, if such a case were ever to go to court?

               US case law has expanded to address these and other gnarly problems associated with police moonlighting[7] but when push comes to shove, neither the state nor the local governments that pay law enforcers’ official government salaries, nor the private security companies that hire moonlighting police, nor the businesses and non-profits that hire them, want responsibility for investigating and assuming the economic and legal blow-back resulting from a seemingly off-duty killing.  Perhaps due to the problematic legal status of cops’ moonlighting in private security some US police departments have banned their officers[8] from doing this.  
     Government agents who kill.  For 40 years I have studied police killings in Brazil and during 20 of these I have been qualified in US immigration courts as an expert witness for Brazilian victims seeking US asylum from their government-linked police and death squad violence.   Knowing that the US State Department, Homeland Security, and immigration court judges take seriously the involvement of  another government’s police and related agents in the past persecution of an asylum seeker, it seemed my responsibility to do this for US law enforcement’s victims as well.  But because there is an absolute absence of US government statistics on all  lethal force killings by law enforcement—‘justifiable’ and ‘unjustifiable’--it is impossible to accurately monitor law enforcement killings of civilians, whether carried out by on-duty or moonlighting cops.   
       The FBI falls short.   By publishing only US law enforcement’s “justifiable” killings, the Bureau could be sending the message that ‘our law enforcers only kill when absolutely necessary.’  Unfortunately, the Bureau’s one-sided publication of law enforcement killings follows no recognized system of research analysis and presentation.  To do so the FBI would need to collect and publish statistics on “unjustifiable” civilian killings by law enforcement as well as the “justifiable” ones.  And the Bureau would need to include for each kind of a killing the numbers of victims, according to race, ethnicity, gender, and age,  that fall into each ‘justifiability’ category.  Such data would permit a better assessment of  the relative vulnerability of different population groups to being slain by law enforcement.
     When definitions promote outcomes.  But there is yet another problem with the Bureau’s research methods:  for over sixty years it  has employed a circular definition of a “justifiable” law enforcement killing.  Whether explicitly planned or not, by failing to place the qualifier alleged before the word felon in its description of the victim who is ‘justifiably’ killed, the Bureau lends its substantial power to the well-worn law enforcement practice of racially profiling groups considered dangerous. And by failing to identify which felony can excusably trigger a “peace officer’s” use of lethal force, the Bureau gives the blue brotherhood the power to come up with the ‘felony’ that most excusably prompts a cop-involved killing.[9] In most cases this involves the shooter’s claiming that a Black youth with a gun, knife, or razor threatened the cop’s life. 
              Increasing media reports of US law enforcement officers’ seemingly legitimate use of lethal force against Blacks, lead me to wonder whether the FBI, criminal prosecutors, and the courts remember important research from their ‘Psychology 101’ courses?  Scholarly investigations going back 67 years[10] have found that “merely thinking about Blacks can lead people to evaluate their…behavior as aggressive, [and] to miscategorize harmless objects as weapons, or to shoot quickly, and, at times, inappropriately.”  Recent scholarship finds that “thinking of crime can trigger thoughts of Black people.”  Putting the two sets of findings together suggests the unsettling conclusion that if you’re Black you’re criminal and dangerous and if you’re criminal you’re Black and threatening.[11] Such an ante-facto imagined social danger easily renders Blacks ‘matter out of place’ with lethal consequences for many.
     Definitions shape research conclusions.  The FBI’s definition of a “justifiable” killing by law enforcement influences what state, county, and municipal law enforcement agencies send--or not—to the FBI.  Although, frankly, not many law enforcement organizations actually send anything to the Bureau on the “justifiable” law enforcement killings.  Indeed, “fewer than 5 percent of the nation’s 17,000 law enforcement agencies currently send [the Bureau this] information.” [12]
              In any case, what ends up in the Bureau’s Uniform Crime Report statistics on “justifiable” civilian killings by cops structures the conclusions available to those analyzing these data.  The respected investigative journalism organization ProPublica—full disclosure, I have proudly donated to them--recently interpreted the FBI’s data on “justifiable” killings by law enforcement to say that between 2010 and 2012,  “young black males…were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts—[in fact] 21 times greater….”  Although ProPublica skillfully analyzed a great deal of FBI data on law enforcement-related “justifiable” killings, they likely forgot to look back at the Bureau’s definition of how such killings are determined. 
              ProPublica might recall that the FBI’s data only allow a researcher to generalize about what happens to black and white victims respectively when cops investigate another cop’s killing of  a civilian.  Saddled with the same insufficiency of FBI information as ProPublica faced—that we only know about “justifiable” civilian killings by law enforcement not also the “unjustifiable,” ones—I propose the alternative conclusion that when US cops investigate another cops’ use of lethal force, it is 21 times more likely that a Black youth’s slaying will be deemed “justifiable” than when cops investigate the killing of a White youth. 
     Black genocide.   There is every reason to believe that in the US, Black male youth--especially poor ones between their teens and late 20s--are killed at higher rates than comparable White youth. Yet US government statistics make it impossible to convincingly explore and propose this finding.  Suffice it to say that Black youth are in serious peril of being killed by law enforcement every time they leave their house.  Their slayings by cops, as I have noted, are also disproportionately likely to be deemed “justifiable” by a law enforcement organization.
               Public policy researchers Guy Adams and Danny Balfour--drawing on the work of Holocaust scholar Zygmunt Bauman[13]--remind that “legal procedures and accounting routines were essential to…removing Jews from German Society.”  Once Jews had “ceased to exist as members of a political community,” they could then be killed without repercussions.  These facts are as troublingly true for the Blacks in the US today, where those who kill them usually enjoy almost total impunity from prosecution in part due to America’s deep addiction to ‘risk-managing’ police brutality rather than eliminating it.   
      Underwriting Police Brutality. Managing Black youth within and out of US geographies of exclusion, especially given our country’s stated ethos of exercising fair and equal justice for all,  requires state and local governments to ‘risk-manage’ the possible social and political impacts of their law enforcers’ often very visibly carrying out this exclusion by violating victims’ civil rights. I argue that law enforcement impunity from prosecution for committing civil rights violations—with lethal force killings the most serious of these—is fostered outside public scrutiny through a symbiotic relationship between corporate liability insurers and state and local US governments.  This mutually-beneficial interdependence is the centerpiece of a ‘risk-management’ mind-set that shapes how US state and local governments protect themselves against their own state and local police and sheriffs. 
               “Risk-management” enables a government to hide cops’ civil rights violations such that its consequences most of the time will be obscured from local taxpayers and civil rights groups.  The mantra driving government ‘risk-management’--that ‘brutality is an expected  part of a cop’s job,’ so ‘settling police brutality lawsuits is just “god business,” not an admission of guilt—ends up enriching corporate insurers and sustaining a public belief  that government is of and for “the people.” Of course, the usual targets of law enforcement violence know full well that civil rights violations are borne disproportionately by them--America’s minority poor and lower middle-class. It is less known that America’s most disadvantaged tax payers pay a larger share of their family incomes toward funding the  risk-management that hides their twice-over victimization.



[1]  ProPublica. 2014. “Deadly force in Black and white.”   http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white
[2] See discussion p. 7 and footnotes 9 and 10
[3] KW on school segreg, NOLA for renting, etc, redlining, doug McAdam for,  new jim crow
[6] Laura Maggi. 2011.  NOPD corruption fueled by system of paid, private details, federal officials say.” Times-Picayune, March 18.  (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/03/system_of_paid_private_details.html).

[7] See Michael J Gilbert, David Schichor. 2001. Privatization of Criminal Justice: Past Present and Future. UAE: Mixed Media Publishing

[8]  Hong, Peter Y.   (2006). “Police Panel  Concerned Over Officers Moonlighting as Pis.”  Los Angeles Times, March 15.  (http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/15/local/me-private15)

 

[9] Examples of this can be seen in Ferguson, Mo. today (Daily Kos. 2014.  Earliest police report from Ferguson is released and conflicts with Darren Wilson's testimony leaks,” October, 29. (http://m.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/29/1340042/-Earliest-police-report-from-Ferguson-is-released-and-conflicts-with-Darren-Wilson-s-testimony-leaks?detail=facebook), and for New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge killings (Times Picayune Staff. 2011. “Danziger Bridge shootings cover-up was brazen, former NOPD detective testifies.” Times-Picayune, July 12.                        (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/07/danziger_bridge_shootings_cove.html)
[10] Allport, G. W. and Postman, L. J. (1947). The psychology of rumor. New York: Russell & Russell.
[11]   Eberhardt, Jenifer et al. (2004).  Seeing  Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, Vol. 87, No. 6, 876–893.
[12] Phillips, Victoria L.  2014. “What surgery and police have in common: Both kill a disproportionate number of black men.” The Washington Post, October 21. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/21/black-men-die-disproportionately-at-the-hands-of-surgeons-and-police-officers-heres-how-to-fix-both-professions/)
[13] Zygmunt Bauman, 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust.  Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press.
Guy B. Adams and  Danny L. Balfour. 2004.  Unmasking Administrative Evil. Armonk, NY:  M.E. Sharpe, p. 52

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