Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – VI

This is the seventh in this series, if you count the Discussion post. I recommend that you read or re-read the earlier posts.

Part I is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, the Discussion is here, Part IV is here and Part V is here.

I have not had the time to prepare continuation of this series since I published Part V on February 9^th.

Rather then allow this series to remain fallow I thought I would share with you some articles on the subject that I have come across. I reproduce them without comment.

From Amnesty International:

In the early morning of November 2, 1983, Darrell Cannon was taken from his home by a battery of now notorious white Chicago police detectives to a remote area on the far southside of Chicago where he was interrogated about the murder of a drug dealer… When Cannon persisted in denials, the detectives forced him into the back seat of their car, pulled down his pants, and repeatedly shocked him on his genitals with an electric cattle prod.

 The physical and mental scars that the victims like Darrell Cannon carry will never be healed, but with this reparations ordinance, at least they will finally begin the path to closure. Instead, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and several other Chicago Alderpeople will not support the reparations efforts.

Again from Amnesty International: 

Between 1972 and 1991, Chicago police under the direction of former Commander Jon Burge systematically tortured more than 100 people of color on Chicago’s South Side. During Burge’s reign of terror, over 110 African American and Latino men and women were subjected to electrical shocks on their genitalia or other body parts with a handmade shock box or cattle prod, suffocation with plastic bags, beatings with rubber objects or telephone books, and mock executions. The vast majority of the torture survivors were also subjected to verbal abuse where they were repeatedly called racist slurs and epithets throughout their interrogations.

 These heinous acts of torture were committed in order to extract confessions; confessions that were used to wrongfully convict scores of people. Eleven survivors of Chicago police torture were sent to Illinois’ infamous death row. This history of brutality is why Chicago has been dubbed by some as the Abu-Ghraib of the Midwest.

 Today, many of Burge’s torture survivors and their families continue to suffer from the psychological effects of the torture they endured. They have never received adequate compensation or assistance. Because of the statute of limitations, survivors have no legal recourse to obtain any redress, whatsoever. Moreover, there are approximately 19 survivors of torture under Jon Burge who continue to languish behind bars. They have never received evidentiary hearings to present evidence that substantiates their claims that they were tortured into confessing.

From the ACLU Civil Liberties Reporter: 

When I was 14, my grandfather sat me down for “the talk” – not the birds and the bees, but “the billy clubs and the bullets.” I brushed him off. I thought that in my majority-black hometown of Newark, racism would not reach me. Little did I realize that a healthy fear of the police would become a survival skill for a young black man.

My wake-up call came at 16.

As I noticed former friends slipping into the traps of my South Ward neighborhood, I was determined to be different. I joined debate club and the law academy, and played on the baseball team at University High School, and I never had run-ins with the police. 

But walking home one evening down Hawthorne Avenue my junior year, I spotted a Crown Victoria with tinted windows creeping up behind me. Unsettled, I sped up, hoping to reach the safety of my house. Instead, my quickened pace prompted the car to cut in front of me. Two Newark Police Department officers emerged. One was black. The other was not. He had his gun drawn.

“Get on the wall,” one yelled.

Terrified, with my arms up against the metal grate of Bragman’s deli, I asked, “What have I done, sir?”

“Where are you coming from?” an officer growled.

“Baseball practice,” I answered as an officer looked through my book bag.

One officer chastised me for presenting a school ID instead of an “authentic” one, which I didn’t have at 16. Finally, the cops told me to take a seat on the curb while they ran a check on my ID. For what seemed like an eternity, drivers passed and stared until the police finally let me go. Those slow moments were some of the most embarrassing, humiliating, and terrifying of my life.

Even with my grandparents’ lessons in the unwritten rules of conduct awaiting me because of my inherited blackness, I was shocked to be subjected to unprovoked harassment by minority police officers. I now felt unsafe in my neighborhood, and not because of the killings, carjackings and crime festering in my part of Newark. I felt scared because, for the first time in my life, I knew police abuse could happen to me and I realized that I was lucky my encounter with police only robbed me of my dignity.

It’s one thing to be scared of criminals. It’s another thing entirely to be scared of the people who are supposed to protect you. My appearance branded me a menace, even though I hadn’t done anything illegal. After being treated like a second-class citizen by the police, you start to believe you are one.

While I didn’t have strong feelings about the police before I was wrongly stopped and frisked, being abused the way I was made me want to avoid any contact with cops. Why would a Newarker who suspects illegal activity go to the police when he lives in fear of those same officers every day? A community that doesn’t trust the police is one where criminals can run amok, safe in knowing that the citizenry and police are at odds.

Abusive stop-and-frisk policies have no place in a democracy. As a kid, I faithfully believed that routine racial profiling would not happen to me the way it had to my grandfather. Now, seeing “the talk” through the lens of personal experience, I know better. I hope that one day, if I tell my own grandchildren about the dangers of interacting with police, they will be able to brush off my warnings because police abuse will have truly become a thing of the past.
My story is not an anomaly. The more of us who come forward to share what we’ve been through, the closer we’ll get to having a powerful voice in shaping the Newark Police into a department that respects everyone’s human rights, no matter what they look like.

Michael Hobbs is a lifelong Newarker who works at the Brick City Development Corporation. He shared his story at the launch of Newark Communities for Accountable Policing (N-CAP) on Sept. 25, 2014.

I share these stories with you without comment at this time.

When I find the time I will continue with the analysis of the American Justice System. I regret to say that the more research I do, the more disturbed I get. Please keep reading, and if you can find the time let me have your comments.

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office.