Police problems

Despite the good intentions of white liberals

Jul 23, 2020

AS MANY have pointed out, the recent and significant momentum of Black Lives Matter has gotten a bit diverted. People are demanding that police stop killing them (for starters), and have largely gotten action so far on issues like statues, building names, mascots, under-representation in news media, blackface in pop culture, syrup rebrands, and a Golden Girls episode instead. These types of reckonings were long overdue too. But not in lieu of.

“White supremacy always finds a way to reorganize itself” is a sentiment I’ve heard from some skeptical that the current moment will result in an equitable outcome, even if it is largely successful in its goals. Doubt is rooted in the historical realities that emancipation became sharecropping, Reconstruction became Redemption, Fusion became disenfranchisement and Jim Crow, lynching became mass incarceration and executions, school integration became suburbs and private and charter schools, diversification became tokenism, and so on.

For the most part, the cosmetic change we’re seeing this summer isn’t even a reorganization. It’s just hanging a different sign out front.

Residents around Chapel Hill deal with four separate local police departments — with different leaderships, recruitment, training, and policies. A person living in the historically Black neighborhoods adjacent to downtown can practically see jurisdictions of three forces from their front doors: Chapel Hill PD, Carrboro PD, and UNC Police. Plus, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. That’s not counting State troopers, the numerous forces from all over North Carolina that have been deployed here in the last few years, and several federal forces.

Locally some policing steps have been taken this summer. It’s not the first time in recent years though, and past results recommend caution in optimism. Tinkering with nuts and bolts doesn’t tend to greatly alter the output of machines.

One encouraging reform is the Chapel Hill PD agreed to halt traffic stops for non-moving violations that don’t impact public safety. How that translates to practice remains to be seen. It’s also banning chokeholds, as is Carrboro. But the knee-on-neck restraint that ended George Floyd’s life and the chokehold that ended Eric Garner’s were already against the policies of the departments employing those men’s killers.

You can judge for yourself the recent steps taken by Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Despite a vigorous outpouring of concern over police funding by residents in June, the Town Council went ahead with a budget giving police the second-largest chunk.

But talk is happening. And a task force. And more talk is promised. That’s progress, right? Well, about that…

TWO WEEKS before the last presidential election, amid another sustained national conversation on policing rejuvenated by more high-profile killings that summer and fall — including in Charlotte — Chapel Hill gathered for a public discussion.

Forums on racist mistreatment under the law go back here at least to the 1960s. Public discussions, forums, committees, commissions, and task forces examining racism in Chapel Hill and at UNC have been happening on repeat for at least a half century. There’s been too many to count. More recently, here’s a report from a series of 2010 conversations on law enforcement. There were more in 2014 and 2015 after Michael Brown too.

Some folks view these events side-eyed with earned cynicism. Lots of talk, too little action. The title of that 2016 forum even tacitly acknowledged that deficit: “Policing, Race, and Community: From Conversations to Solutions.”

This one was moderated by a TV news anchor and held in a packed Town Hall council chamber. Some attendees had to watch on a monitor in an overflow room and pass questions into the auditorium.

Chapel Hill police chief Chris Blue readily acknowledged that marijuana arrests remained head-scratchingly higher for Black people in a town loaded with white college students. A UNC professor, Frank Baumgartner, had been conducting extensive studies of traffic stops in North Carolina, including in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and unsurprisingly the data showed significant racial disparities, especially in stops for minor reasons like extinguished tail lights or expired registrations, and in vehicle searches with no probable cause.

Such stops, as nationwide viral videos had shown, could result in death. They also lead to disproportionate citations and arrests for minor offenses, which lead to court dates and fines, which lead to jail and bail, which lead to job and housing insecurity, all of which strains families as well as mental and emotional health.

Blue was implementing some new policies, including de-emphasizing high-discretion stops and requiring written consent for searches without probable cause. Supervisors pulled camera footage to survey officers’ conduct. And officers were undergoing implicit bias training. But the results in the department’s ensuing quarterly reports were decidedly mixed.

Community representatives sat on the panel with the Chapel Hill and Carrboro chiefs and Orange County sheriff. All agreed that a problem existed. But it was tiptoed around for a while. When Jim Woodall, the long-time district attorney who is white, gave opening remarks, he did not say the words race, Black, or African American in four-and-a-half minutes except while stating the title of the forum and naming a sponsoring organization.

“Most of the things we’re going to talk about tonight, they’re not only important, they’re difficult. And sometimes they’re uncomfortable,” Woodall said. “But because they’re important, and they’re difficult, and they’re uncomfortable, maybe we’ll feel a little of that discomfort and we’ll work a little harder to have some solutions.”

He was correct about the necessity of confrontation. As James Baldwin once famously wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Euphemisms continued as the discussion got going. About 20 minutes in, panelist Michelle Johnson — a Carrboro alderwoman at the time and an anti-racism trainer who is Black — made plain what needed to be faced. She described how she trembled in fear reaching for her glovebox during a recent traffic stop. Then she went deeper.

“There’s a cultural norm around Black people being criminals, to be very clear. That’s the norm, we’re conditioned, and that’s all of us. White supremacy says that Black folks are criminals, that we’re dangerous. White supremacy says that Black boys actually look like Black men. So I just think we need to be very real about this being bigger.”

Black panelists and people in the audience continued sharing stories of routine police encounters that induced terror, of having cops called on them for being young and Black, for being stopped for walking while Black.

A man in his seventies followed a man in his twenties to say that it wasn’t just the young who were scared of police interactions. “All Black men are afraid,” he said. His voice began to shake. “Last year, a light came on me coming up [Highway] 70. Dark. I thought about…my driver’s license is in my back pocket, my registration is over here in my glove compartment. I said, I’m gonna go slow but I’m not gonna stop. And I kept going up the road until I got to a gas station.

“I pulled up to the gas station, all the way to the window, and I beeped my horn so that the person in the gas station would take a look, come out, and see the light coming on. The policeman wanted to know why I didn’t stop. I said, ‘Officer, I don’t mean no harm, but things go badly very quickly and I needed somebody to see you other than me.’”

A 40-year-old attorney who was the son of a cop spoke. “I also am legitimately scared to get stopped. I think twice about leaving my house to go for a run without my I.D., just in case, because I live in Lake Hogan Farms [subdivision], and there are not a lot of people of color who live in Lake Hogan Farms.”

The world assumed the worst about them, and they feared for their lives.

“Do not walk out of here, people in the audience, feeling like it’s okay in Chapel Hill. Because it’s not,” said panelist Delores Bailey, executive director of EmPOWERment, Inc. People clapped, and someone called back, “That’s right!”

The sheriff, Charles Blackwood, revealed that Black Lives Matter — specifically, learning that Black families so commonly feared police — had caught him off guard. He explained that he’d grown up in a law enforcement family, always around cops, so the idea that so many might be afraid of police was new to him. Yet he also rebutted the district attorney’s comment that the conversation might require some discomfort. “I don’t think that anyone in this room is going to be uncomfortable tonight,” Blackwood said.

The sheriff did get uncomfortable though. He seemed agitated by pushback to his assertion that nobody should be uncomfortable, and by some knowing laughs of affirmation from residents. When he spoke again several minutes later, he lectured the room. “We don’t know how to make this right,” he said. “But we’re committed to try. Everybody up here cares about this community. This is serious, serious stuff.” He closed by saying, “So let’s not snicker about this. This is serious stuff.”

Johnson was the next panelist to speak, and again she redirected toward facing truths. “I want to respond to this conversation being ‘comfortable,’” she said. “White folks have to be uncomfortable for stuff to change. So let’s be really uncomfortable.” Some people applauded.

Panelist Tye Hunter, a defense attorney who’s successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, delivered a pointed statement of his own, calling out his Chapel Hill neighbors.

“One of the problems — and I’ll just talk about my own group, white liberals — is that we have a lot more confidence in our good intentions than we should,” Hunter said. Knowing snickers again echoed from Black residents. “We’ve been having good intentions for a long time, and things haven’t gone so well for anybody except for white liberals.”

That was 2016. Here is a chart from the most recent CHPD report available online, for July-September, 2019. The town is 9.7% Black.

This is Part I of “Police Problems.” Part II will have a sampling of historical examples and incidents. Have one you’d like to pass along? Leave a comment or email me at stonewalls1793 at gmail.

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