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Boston Cop Fired for Racial Slur in Email
Posted by: | CommentsBoston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said Officer Justin Barrett was fired yesterday for violating department rules when he sent the e-mail on July 22, 2009. In the email, Barrett called Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates a “jungle monkey.” The email was sent following the incident in Cambridge last summer when Prof. Gates was arrested in his own home on a disorderly conduct charge. “(Gates’) first priority should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a … jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance,” the e-mail said.
Barrett, for his part, said at the time, “I am not a racist.” Barrett sent the email to several individuals and to the Boston Globe. He went on to explain, saying, “It was a poor choice of words. I did not mean to offend anyone.”
No doubt some will argue that Barrett’s “right free speech” has been violated with this decision, but from my perspective it seems like an appropriate step on the part of the Boston Police Department, and a step in the right direction for those interested in equal protection under the law.
It Lives: The Image of Me Constructed by You
Posted by: | Comments[NOTE: I got two posts today from contributors, Terence and Danielle, on this key and troubling story. I am posting both over next 12 hours. Please add your comments.]
“Come on boy; you know the routine. Assume the position.”
Yes, unfortunately in these here United States of America, my skin is my sin. The luck of possessing a hue associated with Africa and the ownership of a Y chromosome carries a heavy burden. The burden was front and center this week within the story of Bonnie Sweeten of Feasterville, Pennsylvania . Ms. Sweeten made a frantic phone call to 911 from Philadelphia, on May 26th from the trunk of a car where she told authorities that she and her 9 year old daughter were, after being rear ended earlier. She went on to say that after the accident, after exiting her SUV, she and her daughter were then kidnapped. The story caught national attention from NBC to Fox news. The police, the amber alert system, and the FBI all pulled their efforts together to save them damsels in distress from the “evil doorers” (
photo credit: JLaw45 ).
You might ask yourself, who would commit such a disreputable deed? Well it was “two Black men” of course! And of course they were driving, of all cars, “a Cadillac.”
Well today, we found out it was all a disgusting hoax. In fact, the two were bound for Disney World. After taking out thousands of dollars from her family account and buying two tickets to Florida, mother, with her child, were later spotted boarding a plane in Tampa which led the local police to their hideout with Mickey at the Grand Floridian Hotel in Orlando. On Thursday, May 28th, the Today Show discussed the issue of Michelle Henry; District Attorney for Bucks County Pennsylvania, who was asked by the newscaster whether this was a case of racial profiling. Ms. Henry avoided the question raised .
My frustration observed in writing this entry is not without merit. For this country has a long history of feeding a stereotype of Black males as dangerous, oversexed, with out a moral compass [See the book, The Assassination of the Black Male Image by Earl Ofari Hutchinson]. Where again you might ask?
Within the 21st century there is an effort to still demonize the Black male and depict them as a threat to society. Black males have been historically and presently seen as a sexual, physical, and emotional threat to Whites. Some Blacks and other people of color have also helped to feed the stereotype. It is time for us all to bash this image when it is presented.
Police Brutality and the National Political Agenda
Posted by: | CommentsThe Root ( a 
very good source on racial issues) has a recent post by Sherrilyn Ifill, University of Maryland law professor and civil rights lawyer, on the continuing reality of police malpractice and brutality, most of it directed against men of color—most especially, black men ( photo credit: srqpix). She begins with the sad “talk”:
It’s one of the depressing ironies of black life that in the Obama era, black mothers and fathers must continue giving their teenage sons “the talk.” I’m not talking about the birds and the bees. I’m talking about the “how to act when the police stop you” talk. Rule 1. Don’t talk back to the officer. Rule 2. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t doing anything wrong. Rule 3. And this is critical, don’t reach for your wallet without asking the officer first. Supplemental rule. Carry a pink cell phone if you can. A black cell phone may look like a gun to a nervous cop.
She lists some of the many police killings in the last couple of years, such as brutal taser death of Baron Pikes in Winnfield in 2008:
Tasered nine times within 14 minutes by a 21-year-old white officer, Pikes may well have been dead – handcuffed and unresponsive in a police cruiser—when the last two 50,000-volt charges were delivered directly to his chest. The officer reportedly admitted that he began using his Taser on Pikes when the handcuffed black man responded too slowly to the officer’s demand that Pikes get up and walk to the police car.
Then mentions others like this one:
In Dallas, 23-year-old Robbie Tolan, a minor league baseball player and the son of former Major League Baseball player Bobbie Tolan, was shot in his own driveway in an affluent white suburb on New Year’s Eve. White police officers, purportedly believing that the SUV driven by Tolan and his cousin was stolen, approached the young black men and ordered them to lie down on the ground. The car belonged to Tolan’s parents, and the officers reportedly did not identify themselves. When Tolan’s parents came outside to find out what was happening, one of the officers allegedly shoved Mrs. Tolan against the garage. Robbie Tolan yelled to the officer to stop pushing his mother, and that, witnesses say, is when he was shot by one of the officers.
She notes a Youtube video of
The recent case involving the cell phone video of a drunk, white, off-duty police officer in Erie, Pa., making crude jokes about a black murder victim and ridiculing the victim’s grieving mother, illustrates part of the problem.
We have discussed some of these major instances of police brutality on this blog numerous times.
In conclusion, Ifill makes this on-target comment:
The results of these incidents are depressingly predictable. Outrage. Marches. Most often no indictment. Sometimes an indictment. Always an acquittal. More marches. Next incident. The stunning lack of change suggests that our protest-oriented approach to police brutality must focus less on punishment for individual officers, and more on systemic institutional changes within our police academies and departments.
Just how systemic the police harassment and brutality is can be seen in polls and in social science research. For example, one 2001 Gallup poll found 83 percent of black respondents had experienced racial profiling in the last year. In addition, in a 2007 Gallup poll a fifth of the black respondents reported that had suffered discrimination at the hands of police officers, a proportion that has increased in recent years.
Lest some think that we are ignoring lots of white victims of police brutality here, we might note that one social science study back in the 1990s analyzed 130 police-brutality accounts in several cities across the country. In that reviews of cases, criminologist Kim Lersch discovered that the targets of this type of police malpractice are almost always black or Latino. The latter made up 97 percent of the victims of police brutality, while the overwhelming majority (93 percent) of officers involved were white. Police brutality overwhelmingly involves white-on-black or other white-on-minority violence. (See discussion in Chapter 5 here.)
Racism and Urban “Unrest”
Posted by: | CommentsTeresa Nielsen Hayden has a terrific post over at “Making Light,” in which she dissects current reports that police are concerned about urban “unrest” if Obama loses the election (hat tip to Paul at Brainstorms). Nielsen Hayden (last name corrected, thanks to Tom W.) refers to this article at The HIll, the leading newspaper of Congress and Capitol Hill, and here’s the relevant bit from that article:
Some worry that if Barack Obama loses and there is suspicion of foul play in the election, violence could ensue in cities with large black populations. Others based the need for enhanced patrols on past riots in urban areas (following professional sports events) and also on Internet rumors.
Good grief. I study, read and write about racism all the time and yet sometimes, I’m still shocked by it, as I was by this nasty turn of events. Nielsen Hayden, for her part, is spot on and calls the report (and the police preparation) out for what it is:
This is setting up a fraudulent racist narrative: that any unrest on Election Day will consist of inner-city blacks rioting because the black candidate didn’t win. Some of the things that narrative fails to take into account:
—The most notable recent instance of rioting while an election was in progress did not involve a local urban black population. It was in Florida in 2000, and the rioters were known Republican campaign operatives brought into the state on the national Republican Party’s nickel.
She makes an excellent point. And, when I read about the police preparation for “urban unrest,” I don’t think it’s meant to conjure the image of all those RNC staffers in their causal-Friday-Gap-wear (erroneously dubbed the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” but they just weren’t that well dressed). Nielsen Hayden goes on in the rest of her post to detail other parts of this “fraudulent racist narrative,” and if you’re following the election closely I highly recommend reading her post in full.
This is Not Helping
Posted by: | CommentsOccasionally, someone will suggest that that the best way to address the persistence of racism is to begin adopting a “race-blind” analysis that abandons the use of racial categories. As it turns out, this doesn’t help eliminate racism and racial inequality, it merely obscures the reality of it. Here’s a case in point.
T
he NYPD recently collected and released a quite extensive dataset on police shootings over the past 11 years (image from Flickr Creative Commons). The data included such details as the number of shots fired, the reason for each shooting, and how many bullets hit their target. Yet, after 1997 there was no data on the race of people shot by police. Today, the New York Times published a partial explanation for this curious omission of data, which emerged as a result of a lawsuit filed against the NYPD by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Here’s the relevant bit:
“Testimony by a former police chief now offers an explanation. The former chief, Louis R. Anemone, said that while the data on people killed by officers were being compiled in 1998, the police commissioner, Howard Safir, ordered the department not to include the race of those killed by officers.
The testimony by Mr. Anemone, a former chief of department, did not say why Mr. Safir made his decision, but the shift appeared to have occurred during a public furor over race and the police’s use of deadly force in the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, in February 1999. Mr. Diallo was killed in a barrage of 41 police bullets in the Bronx.”
Here, the former police commissioner intuitively understands what many social commentators on race fail to grasp. Namely, that if you bury knowledge about racism and racist practices (such as the NYPD’s abysmal record), then you effectively subvert efforts to combat racism.
