2020 Honorable Mention: Critical Essay Scholastic Art and Writing Competition – Southwest Region
“Police Brutality”
Over the last few years, police brutality and the misuse of force by police officers in the U.S. has become a national topic of discussion, debate and outrage. The disproportionate amount of Black Americans killed or brutalized by police has brought up the issue of racism or racial bias in the police force and whether this is a systemic issue or just a series of unrelated anomalies. This discussion and the Black Lives Matter Movement which it inspired has been incorporated into a lot of art, literature and media such as Kendrick Lamar’s album Damn., Angie Thomas’ critically acclaimed book The Hate U Give, its movie adaptation, and much more. One piece of literature that uses the theme of police bias and police brutality is Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, the story of Charles “Tommy” Tester and his encounters with magic and the police in Harlem. The Ballad of Black Tom presents a helpful lens through which to explore the topic of police brutality and to ask the question: what can be done to fix it?
The issue of police brutality and bias is explored in The Ballad of Black Tom through protagonist Tommy’s encounters with police and the fatal shooting of his father Otis. Tommy has a fraught relationship with the police and specifically with the two cops involved in his father’s death, officers Malone and Howard (who grabbed Tommy by the neck for no reason the first time they met). One day, after having spent the night at the home of his employer Robert Suydam, Tommy comes home to Harlem to find a crowd gathered outside of his apartment building. Malone and Howard inform Tommy that his father is dead. After being disappointed by Tommy’s lack of external reaction to this news, Howard explains that it is because, “these people,” are, “like ants or bees,” and thus cannot have strong emotional connections (LaValle 62). Howard says that he shot Tommy’s father, “in fear for (his) life,” because he thought Tommy’s father had a rifle (LaValle 62). The “rifle” is actually a guitar. When asked how many times he shot Otis, Howard replies, “I felt in danger for my life, I emptied my revolver. Then I reloaded and did it again” (LaVelle 65). It is also revealed that Malone would be the one to write up the report on the shooting and that he, “vouched for Mr. Howard’s character, though, in fact, he thought very little of it,” (LaValle 81). This frames excusing unnecessary use of force by a fellow officer as an expected professional courtesy, not an illegal coverup.
It is also revealed that after the shooting, the officers sat in Tommy’s kitchen and shared stories of their time in the police force and that, “they had a good time. In the back room the body of the old Negro remained facedown on the floor where he had died” (LaValle 81-82). LaValle makes it clear that these officers are racist and that officer Howard doesn’t think twice before shooting a man multiple times without cause. The officers show no sympathy toward Tommy and have no respect for Otis’s body or his dignity because of his race, and because they know they won’t be held accountable for their actions.
To understand why this story is relevant one must understand just how widespread the problem of police brutality is. An analysis by Vox of available FBI data found some troubling patterns, such as the fact that, “Black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population,” and in 2015, “(racial minorities) made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police”(Lopez). The study also found that African Americans are, “much more likely to be arrested for drugs, even though they’re not more likely to use or sell them. And black inmates make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population” (Lopez). (This particular statistic is at the heart of the push to legalize recreational marijuana.) Clearly African Americans are being killed by police and imprisoned at a disproportionate rate, and while some of this gap can be explained by socioeconomic factors (such as higher rates of poverty and unemployment and the neglect of majority African American neighborhoods) the study concludes that, “up to 39 percent of the racially disparate rate of imprisonment is attributable to other factors” (Lopez). There is an indisputable and sometimes deadly problem with the way officers in the U.S. police African Americans.
Part of the reason that police brutality is so widespread is because officers are rarely held accountable for unnecessarily violent actions. Former St. Louis PD Officer Redditt Hudson paints a worrying picture of his time on the force. He says that, “too many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences” (Hudson). The issue of accountability is a widespread one because as Hudson says, “even when officers get caught, they know they’ll be investigated by their friends, and put on paid leave.” and convictions are rare because, “prosecutors are tight with law enforcement, and share the same values and ideas”(Hudson).
Another former police officer, Joe Crystal, faced harassment and eventually resigned after reporting one of his fellow officers, Sgt. Marinos Gialamas, for beating up a suspect. “Officers began addressing him with ‘Hey snitch’ or ‘Hey rat’,” and a sergeant told him, “you better pray to God you’re not the star witness against Gialamas, 'cause your career is already fucked, but if you are the star witness against him you should just resign’” (Samaha). These stories illustrate the culture of the police vs everyone else, including the law, and the fact that a system where officers are investigated and prosecuted by their colleagues is not functional.
One possible solution to stop brutality before it starts is to improve mental health services for officers and suspects, though that may be complicated because, “many officers also view seeking psychiatric help as a sign of weakness” (The AP). Even an officer who responded to the Columbine shooting said he thought that seeing a therapist, "would have been (his) own weakness" (The AP). However, some departments are taking steps to improve the ways police officers interact with mentally ill people, including the San Francisco PD, which announced that it would be, “working with mental health specialists in order to better de-escalate and negotiate situations encountered on the job, according to CBS News. The city’s Crisis Intervention Specialists team will also be on-call 24/7 to aid police in engaging with individuals with mental health issues” (Oh). This type of training and assistance will enable officers to navigate potentially dangerous situations without resorting to the use of deadly force.
Another potential solution to the problem of police brutality is more widespread use of body cameras, which have had incredible success in places like Rialto California where, “in the first year after the cameras were introduced there in February 2012, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percent compared with the previous 12 months,” and, “use of force by officers fell by almost 60 percent over the same period” (Lovett). Clearly, body cameras can be helpful in preventing officers from becoming violent, but they don’t always help with holding officers legally accountable after an incident. Context is crucial when presenting body camera footage to a jury, and jury members view footage through the lense of their own personal biases. If all a jury sees is a victim of a police shooting becoming violent or aggressive toward an officer, they may develop the opinion that the officer was justified in using force. However, if the tape is rewound by a minute and they see the officer stop the shooting victim for no reason, they may see the victim’s aggression as justified anger and see the use of a firearm as an unnecessary escalation. Because of this, body cameras are certainly part of the solution. They are not a magical quick fix, however, by any means.
Another part of the solution may be court-monitored consent decrees which, “lay out a reform plan negotiated by federal law enforcement officials and the local government,” to help areas with particularly high rates of police brutality (Sheckler). However, in one of his final actions before stepping down, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “sharply limited the Justice Department’s ability to use court-ordered agreements to address abuses by local police departments” (Sheckler).
Another part of the solution may be incorporating bias testing into the mental evaluations that officers have to undergo. However, these tests also come with their own complications. According to Psychologist David J Thomas, who works with police officers, “the issue with bias testing is that setting a threshold is subjective, and there are still questions around the validity of the test themselves. Things like that are hurdles to incorporating bias testing into screening” (Ramsey). If bias testing were to become more widely used, then someone would have to decide what degree of bias is disqualifying. In a society that is clearly still racist, could an argument be made that almost everyone has some level of internalized bias? And is a relatively small amount of bias enough to fire an officer if there is nothing to suggest that that officer would abuse their power or become overly forceful with a suspect? This is not to say that bias testing should not be implemented, but current understanding of that technology may not be advanced enough for it to be truly effective.
So how can Americans ensure that as few people as possible have to experience what the character Tommy Tester went through? The solution may lie within some combination of body cameras, mental health assistance for officers, bias testing and reforms of the ways in which officers are held accountable by their peers and by the courts. Another part of the solution is changing the way people in American society think about police officers. Citizens should not automatically see them as heroes, but as people working a difficult job for which not all of them may be fit. Those who feel discouraged by current statistics on police brutality should find hope in younger generations who are growing up in a world where the authority and the morality of police officers is being questioned (by White people, that is; Black people and other marginalized groups have questioned it since this country’s founding). Hopefully, when it is the younger generation’s turn to stand on juries, both in the literal courts, and in the courts of public opinion, they will be less likely than the generations before them to give a cop a false presumption of innocence. Until then, citizens must protest, make their voices heard, and lift up the voices of those who are on the receiving end of racial bias and violence every day. And when young people are able, they must vote for candidates (at every level) who will fight to end systems of violence, including police brutality.
Works Cited:
LaVelle, Victor, The Ballad of Black Tom, New York City: Tor, 2016, Print. Lopez, German, “There are huge racial disparities in how US police use force”, Vox https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938186/police-shootings-killings-racism-racial-disparities Accessed 4/18/19
Oh, Rebecca, “Stopping police violence starts long before the courtroom,” PBS, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/stop-police-violence-shooting Accessed 4/22/19