When Black Cops Go Bad

It's not the color of the skin of cops, it's the job. Power given
over other people's lives is to freely given.
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http://www.blacknews.com/pr/blackcops101.html

When Black Cops Go Bad

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, BlackNews.com Columnist

There is tragedy and irony in the nationally aired videotaped shooting
of Air Force policeman Elio Carrion in an area east of Los Angeles and
the subsequent indictment of San Bernardino County Sheriff's deputy
Ivory Webb, Jr. The tragedy is that the shooting even took place.
Carrion apparently complied with Webb's commands, was unarmed, and
posed no threat to the officer. Webb has been charged with attempted
involuntary manslaughter.

The irony is that Webb is black and Carrion is Latino. Black leaders
and community activists have long clamored for more black cops. They
say that they would be less likely to brutalize other blacks and
minorities than white cops. In the past decade, most big city police
departments have implemented aggressive minority outreach and
recruitment programs. Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati have had
ugly racially tinged deadly encounters involving police shootings of
unarmed blacks. They have been slapped with Justice Department consent
decrees and forced to hire and promote more women and minority
officers. But a black cop shooting an unarmed black or Latino under
highly questionable circumstances is no longer an oddity. In the past
two years, black cops have gunned down unarmed blacks in Chicago,
Cincinnati, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Gary,
Indiana, Inglewood, California and Los Angeles.

A Justice Department report in 2000 found that a majority of white
cops did not think that police were more prone to treat blacks more
harshly than whites. A sizable number of black cops agreed. Despite
massive public attention and outrage over the blue code of silence,
the Justice Department survey found that eighty percent of police
officers either believed the code of silence was necessary to do good
police work or feared retaliation from other officers or even the
brass if they squealed on bad cops.

Black cops were no more anxious to come forth to report misconduct by
other officers than white cops out of fear of not being seen as a team
player and that protesting abuse will damage their career. Many Black
cops are also infected with the "us versus them" police siege
mentality and will commit and then attempt to cover-up their
misconduct or brutal acts. The problem of blacks using deadly force
against other blacks will probably get worse. The number of black
officers on big city police departments has soared since the 1970s.
Many of them are young, inexperienced, recent recruits. They are often
assigned to work in low income, black and Latino neighborhoods. And
since black and Latino males commit more crimes than whites, many
police are convinced that black communities are a dangerous, and risky
place where violent thugs abound and every encounter is potentially
life threatening. Webb, for instance, claimed that he thought Carrion
was reaching for a gun. Criminal justice experts agree that no matter
how much training officers get, how they react in a situation on the
streets depends on their own apprehensions and prejudices and that
police work tends to aggravate whatever prejudices they have. Many
black officers have those same prejudices as whites. They do not live
in or grew up in impoverished black neighbors and see them as hostile
and alien places. Many of them are just as jittery as white cops at
the prospect of an armed encounter with other blacks.

It's not only dubious shootings by black cops of other minorities
that's a growing problem. It's also the blind spot many black police
officials have toward these shootings. That was evident in the killing
of Margaret Laverne Mitchell, a black middle aged, emotionally
disturbed, homeless woman who was slain in an altercation over a
shopping cart in May 1999 by an LAPD officer. After demonstrations,
marches, and angry protests, then LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, an
African-American, ruled that the officer used bad tactics. The L.A.
Police Commission ruled the shooting out of policy. Yet the officer
was never punished. In every case, black police officials promise a
vigorous investigation but in most of the cases the officers are not
punished, or receive a mild hand slap reprimand.

Black police chiefs also know that while a shooting such as that of
Mitchell shooting will almost always trigger rage and protest, they
will not be the target of that rage and protest. Black leaders are
loath to criticize black officials directly or to blame them for
police misconduct. The feeling is that an attack on black officials
will publicly embarrass them and reinforce the perception among whites
that blacks are incompetent. This is seen as tantamount to racial
betrayal. Airman Carrion did not know that he would be the victim of a
wrongful shooting at the hands of a fellow officer, let alone a black
officer. But he was. That just proved that some black cops can and do
take the law into their own hands as readily and easily as some white
officers
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von
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There is no conversation that I can have that threatens my reality and I
don't see how anyone can live with such a precarious state of mind.
---
God isn't the problem, religion is. Something that doesn't exist
can't really be a problem. Worshiping something that doesn't exist
is an entirely different subect.
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