Video recordings of police officers battering or even murdering unarmed black citizens have validated longstanding complaints by African-Americans and changed the way the country views the issue of police brutality. Police officers who might once have felt free to arrest or assault black citizens for no cause and explain it away later have been put on notice that the truth could be revealed by a cellphone video posted on the Internet.
This kind of public scrutiny is all to the good, given the damage police brutality has done to African-American communities for generations and the corrosive effect it has on the broader society. Yet the peeling away of secrecy on these indisputably unconstitutional practices is now being challenged by politicians who want to soft-pedal or even ignore police misconduct while attacking the people who expose it or raise their voices in protest against it. This trend is like something straight out of Orwell.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — the increasingly desperate presidential candidate who is going nowhere fast — took this posture on Sunday when he accused President Obama of encouraging “lawlessness” and violence against police officers by acknowledging that the country needed to take both police brutality and the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement seriously.
The president is absolutely right. This movement focuses on the irrefutable fact that black citizens are far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police. The more the country ignores that truth, the greater the civic discord that will flow from it.
The recent remarks of James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were not as racially poisonous as Mr. Christie’s, but they were no less incendiary. In a speech at the University of Chicago Law School on Friday, Mr. Comey said that heightened scrutiny of police behavior — and fear of appearing in “viral videos” — was leading officers to avoid confrontations with suspects. This, he said, may have contributed to an increase in crime.
There is no data suggesting such an effect, and certainly Mr. Comey has none. But his suggestion plays into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the public. Justice Department officials who have made a top priority of prosecuting police departments for civil rights violations — and who dispute that heightened scrutiny of the police drives up crime — were understandably angry at Mr. Comey’s speculations.
His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive. It also implies that the public would be safer if Americans with cellphones never started circulating videos of officers battering suspects in the first place.
A day after Mr. Comey made his remarks, The Times published a lengthy investigation into racial profiling and abusive police behavior in Greensboro, N.C., the third-largest city in the state. After reviewing tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest data, Times reporters found that the police pulled over African-American drivers at a rate far out of proportion to their share of the local driving population. The police searched black motorists or their cars twice as often as whites — even though whites where significantly more likely to be caught with drugs and weapons.
Greensboro police officers were more likely to pull black drivers over for no reason and more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when the driver offered no physical resistance. A black Greensboro man who nearly lost his job as a result of asking an officer why he was being ordered out of his car during a nightmarish encounter said: “Every time I see a police officer, I get a cold chill. Even if I needed one, I wouldn’t call one.”
This is the kind of treatment that some Americans routinely face at the hands of their police departments. Mr. Comey’s speculations about alleged pressure on officers to stand down shows that he hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.
Political Lies About Police Brutality - The New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment