Arizona’s new immigration laws, which have been partially blocked, have drawn criticism for legalizing profiling of Latinos, but proponents of the bill point out that they mirror federal immigration laws. This neglects that police often enforce the law differently based on racial phenotypes. Historically, police have often been able to disregard the law entirely when dealing with minorities and little has been done to reform this problem.
The legacy of authority mistreating darker-skinned people in this country began with the massacre of Native Americans and continued with the enslavement of Africans and African Americans. Precedents set by these brutalities continued with CIA-sponsored COINTELPRO operations that served to infiltrate and use war-like counterintelligence tactics against groups such as the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers in the mid-20th century. Many of the members of these groups were murdered or imprisoned as a result of conflicts with police and informants.
Oftentimes, victims in these groups were portrayed as criminals, crazy or worse, not worth reporting. As recently as 2008, the Guinness Book of World Records had a 1985 incident with the black liberation group MOVE listed under mass suicides. In reality, Philadelphia police dropped C4 explosives on a house containing 12 MOVE members, five of which were children. The blast killed 11 people and burned down nearly three blocks because police were ordered to let it burn.
Last week, the family of Sean Bell, a black man, received $7 million in a lawsuit stemming from Bell being shot 41 times by undercover officers outside of a New York nightclub even though he was unarmed. This could signal a new era where minorities still get brutalized by the police but at least get paid for it.
This verdict comes just weeks after an Oakland, Calif., police officer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Oscar Grant, another unarmed black man, in the back while he was laying face down on a train platform. The officer claimed he meant to reach for his Taser and accidentally shot him with his gun. Involuntary manslaughter typically carries a prison term of only two to four years.
Incidents of curious brutality have even popped up on the University of Oregon campus. Last school year, a 19-year-old Chinese student was shocked with a Taser while he was resting in his own apartment. The officer involved thought the student had broken in.
It would be easy to dismiss all of these as isolated incidents, but that overlooks the double standard in both policing and media coverage of it. For example, Oregon news channels have been dominated for the last couple months with stories and updates containing no new information on the disappearance of Kyron Horman, an 8 year-old white child, since hours after he went missing. Contrarily, when the Memphis police received a 911 call from former 13-year NBA veteran Lorenzen Wright, a black man, containing muffled expletives followed by 12 gunshots, they didn’t alert officials at the station until eight days later, two days before he was found shot to death in the forest.
Police mistreatment isn’t just as dramatic as brutalizing or standing by and watching people get brutalized. When my mother, a principal, invited Portland police officers to her school to speak, she had a candid conversation with one who told her that stations all across the state set up numerous police to keep surveillance on their area’s youth.
Some may say this is good for preventing violence before it happens, but I found it was the police’s way of doing homework on future victims. I remember being followed around town on a regular basis as soon as I got my driver’s license and being stopped for an array of reasons, including suspicion of robbing a 7-Eleven because I “drove around the corner suspiciously.” My misadventures in the affluent, mostly white town of Lake Oswego turned into an informal study with a direct correlation between having a white “accomplice” and avoiding harassment, or at least getting reduced harassment while the white “accomplice” got away.
This taught me a hard lesson so many minorities in this country already knew ­­— no matter where you are or how much money you have, there is always reason to fear the police.
Neither the Oregon governor’s race nor mid-term election season has made this a prominent issue, perhaps because the solution isn’t easy. Institutions designed to protect and serve have historically enlisted people with bigoted backgrounds and have taken no initiative to address their mindsets. While police brutality is one manifestation of this, the military has also produced terrorist activity — Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad, for instance.
More comprehensive employment screening and full prosecution of police brutality criminals need to be enacted to curb this problem. It’s 2010 and you can still get away with murder if you kill a minority and have a badge on your side. That doesn’t sound like a
“post-racial” America to me.
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