Guilty by Definition: The FBI’s Enabling of Genocide
Martha K. Huggins (mhuggins@tulane.edu)
@mdkhuggins (Twitter)
Bureaucratic
Death. While we
wait for the St Louis County’s grand jury decision on indicting Ferguson
policeman Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, we might consider how the FBI
is likely to designate Michael Brown’s death for its annual statistics. Will Officer Wilson beat the rap for killing
Michael Brown and see this killing logged by the FBI as “justifiable”? Such justifiable law enforcement killings occur,
according to the FBI--the US’ premier law enforcement agency whose own killings
of civilians are almost never questioned—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….” Reading this
definition I would say to my Tulane University students in 2012 just after
Michael Brown’s death, “think, does the Bureau’s definition promote justice or
enable injustice?”
If national and international media attention and
relentless protests in Ferguson had not derailed police business as usual, Michael
Brown’s slaying would have automatically been designated “justifiable” and sent,
or not, to the FBI. Michael Brown, a
high school graduate about to enter community college, was killed for walking
in the street rather than on the sidewalk--how many of the rest of us regularly do that, I asked? Given the proliferation of cracked sidewalks,
I do and yes I am angry when I have to do this. I can still hear one of my students say, ‘But you
are not a big angry black kid with pants hanging below his butt. When he walks
in the street he does it to be threatening.’
So the Ferguson police would apparently be justified in responding
forcefully to such a Black youth’s sartorial faux pas?
Matter
out of place. Michael
Brown was killed in 2014 along with countless other Black youth, before and
since, not because he had committed a felony but because young Black men are seen
as ‘matter out of place,’ as British anthropologist Mary Douglas might put it. Whether
outside their usually segregated neighborhoods or when they are on public
sidewalks, even those inside their own neighborhoods—as when stopped-and-frisked
in Harlem or Bed-Stuy—Black youth are managed by law enforcement and
rent-a-cops to keep them from ‘polluting’ others. Being ‘matter out of place’ US blacks join such
other negatively-branded social categories as India’s ‘undesirables,’ Japan’s
burakumin, medieval European ‘lepers,’ people in the US with HIV/AIDS, in being
defined and treated as dangerous to the ‘unpolluted’ more powerful groups whose
domination is fortified by keeping such groups in their “place.” Through a combination of cultural rituals, administrative
regulation, and the law itself, those considered ‘matter out of place’ are
managed inside and out of te spaces reserved for ‘good’ people.
For youthful Blacks—since Black is associated with criminality and criminality with
being Black[1]--“control”
includes circumscribing their movements—from residential segregation to being followed
by a department store’s security; limiting
choices—from informally segregating school districts to ‘tracking’ them into
non-college preparatory classes; social and physical ‘branding’--from ‘stop-and-frisk’
operations to police militarized assaults on their neighborhoods; Elimination—from arrest and mass incarceration,
to lethal-force killings.
US Blacks are victimized by unstated and unrecognized, yet vigorously
defended, geographies of exclusion. Reinforced
by corporate real estate ‘redlining’ and other forms of de facto segregation,[2] these
geographies provide employment for those who ‘protect’ the rest of us from those
who are said to be violating the social and physical boundaries that keep especially
poor young Blacks from threatening just about everyone else. The ready-made label—“dangerous felon”—with
its foundation in law and police practice disguises the disproportionate racial
exclusion of young Blacks. Why then does
the FBI publish only US law enforcement’s “justifiable” killings of civilians,
not the “unjustifiable” ones? Is it to send
the message that our law enforcers only kill when absolutely necessary and
justified? Has the Bureau has chosen not
to know whether US law enforcement violates some civilians’ civil rights more
than other ones?
FBI definition enables lethal outcomes. The most fundamental problem with the Bureau’s
research methods is that for over sixty years it has employed a circular
definition of a “justifiable” law enforcement killing. Its self-serving nomenclature helps protect
killer cops from serious investigation for murder, in part, because a law
enforcer is presumed to have targeted someone who is by definition a “felon.” This
outcome is assured by the Bureau’s failing to place the qualifier alleged before the word felon in its description of the victim ‘justifiably’
killed and by not identifying which felony
can excusably trigger a “peace officer’s” use of lethal force. In most cases the
killer cop claims that a Black youth with a gun, knife, or razor threatened his[3] life. Worse yet, the Bureau assigns to the blue brotherhood
the power to come up with whatever ‘felony’ most excusably prompted the law
enforcement-involved killing.[4] Whether
the person killed was already a felon or defined post-facto as one, the
deceased civilian’s fate is sealed when a cop’s shooting is investigated by a state
or local law enforcement organization.
Scholarly investigations going
back at least 67 years[5]
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 research finds that “thinking of crime
can trigger thoughts of Black people.” [6]
Putting these findings together suggests the unsettling conclusion that if you
are Black you’re criminal and dangerous and if you are criminal you’re Black
and threatening. Such an imagined ante-facto social danger easily renders
Blacks hazardous ‘matter out of place’ with lethal consequences for many, even
though this information cannot be derived from FBI statistics on “justifiable”
killings by law enforcement—except by the extraordinarily high proportion of
Blacks “justifiably” killed by law enforcement.
FBI protocol shapes research conclusions. How the most elite US law enforcement
organization defines a “justifiable” killing shapes what state, county, and
municipal law enforcement agencies send to it quarterly-- or not--for the
Bureau’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). In
fact, most US law enforcement organizations do not send any data at all to the Bureau on “justifiable”
law enforcement killings in their jurisdiction-- “fewer
than five percent of the nation’s 17,000 law enforcement agencies currently
send [the Bureau this] information.”[7] Just the same, what ends up in the Bureau’s Uniform
Crime Report statistics on “justifiable” killings by cops has to shape the conclusions
available analyzing this information. (FYI US Government: police and sheriff organizations receiving federal
aid of any kind—and most do--could be
required to submit all crime data in their jurisdictions to the DOJ/FBI or lose
federal assistance)
The respected
investigative journalism organization ProPublica—full disclosure, I have 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….”
But 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. I propose the alternative more narrow 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. This is old-style kangaroo court ‘justice’ for US Blacks.
Black
genocide. Of course, there is in fact every reason to
believe that in the United States Black male youth--especially poor ones
between their teens and late 20s--are killed at higher rates than comparable
White youth. Yet FBI statistics make it
impossible to explore this. Suffice it
to say that Black youth are in serious peril of being killed by law enforcement
in their own homes and every time they step outside them. That their slayings by cops are disproportionately likely to be deemed
“justifiable” by a law enforcement organization merely underlines the danger to
their lives from police agencies.
Public policy researchers Guy Adams
and Danny Balfour--drawing on the work of Holocaust scholar Zygmunt Bauman[8]--remind
us 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 repercussion. These facts are as troublingly true for Blacks
in the US today as for Jews in Nazi Germany
[1]
See discussion p. 4 and footnotes 5 and 6.
[2]
For Florida’s Key West
(Monroe County) see The Blue Paper,
9/26/2014, “MONROE
COUNTY’S SECRET ROADMAP TO RESEGREGATION,”Arnaud and Naja Girard
[3] An impressive study by Lonsway (n.d,
c. 2003) showed not only that male LAPD cops carried out more violence on-duty than
female cops, but also that “the average male officer cost over five and a half
times more than the average female officer in terms of excessive force payouts.
When payouts for just assault and battery are examined, the ratio increases to
32:1. If only killings are considered, it skyrockets to 43:1.” (“Men, Women, and Excessive Force: A Tale of
Two Genders.” Kimberly A. Lonsway, http://www.pennyharrington.com/excessiveforce.htm)
[4] Examples of this can be seen in
Ferguson, Mo. today (DailyKos. 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. “Danziger
Bridge shootings cover-up was brazen, former NOPD detective testifies.”
Times-Picayune, 7/20/2012 (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/07/danziger_bridge_shootings_cove.html)
[5] Allport, G. W. and Postman, L.
J. (1947). The psychology of rumor. New York: Russell & Russell.
[6]
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.
[7] 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/)
Guy
B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour.
2004. Unmasking Administrative Evil. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, p. 52
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