When It Comes to Police Brutality, Fear is Also a Factor
A civil rights attorney who helped fix the LAPD says painting killer cops as racist misses the point.
NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton says black men in New York shouldn't fear the police.
As nationwide protests continue in the wake of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown brutality cases, President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the administration are grappling with race and justice in African American communities – probably something Obama hadn't envisioned taking on when a multi-racial coalition of voters swept him into office as the first African American president.
In a remarkable interview broadcast on NPR, however, civil rights attorney Constance Rice – founder of the Washington-based Advancement Project who successfully challenged the Los Angeles police over abuse in black neighborhoods – takes the conversation in a different direction. She linked the fates of Eric Garner and Michael Brown (and perhaps Obama’s struggles with the GOP) not to blatant racism but to society’s not-so-latent fear of black men:
Cops can get into a state of mind where they're scared to death. When they're in that really, really frightened place they panic and they act out on that panic. I have known cops who haven't had a racist bone in their bodies and in fact had adopted black children, they went to black churches on the weekend, and these are the white cops. But you know what they had in their minds that made them act out and beat a black suspect unwarrentedly? They had fear. They were afraid of black men. I know a lot of white cops who have told me. And I interviewed over 900 police officers in 18 months and they started talking to me. It was almost like a therapy session for them.
They would say things like, "Ms. Rice I'm scared of black men. Black men terrify me. I'm really scared of them. Ms. Rice, you know black men who come out of prison, they've got great hulk strength and I'm afraid they're going to kill me. Ms. Rice, can you teach me how not to be afraid of black men." I mean these [are] cops who are 6'4". You know, the cop in Ferguson was 6'4" talking about he was terrified. But when cops are scared, they kill and they do things that don't make sense to you and me.
You can listen to the full interview here.
Now take a look at the the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop who shot and killed Brown after a confrontation. Wilson says he fought briefly with Brown – who was 6-foot-5 and weighed about 290 pounds – and felt like a child grappling with “Hulk Hogan,” even though Wilson himself was 6-foot-4 and weighed about 210 pounds. Wilson said Brown looked like “a demon” and charged, even though Wilson had drawn his .40 caliber Sig Sauer handgun and threatened to shoot:
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Perhaps indirectly validating both points, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told CBS News' Scott Pelley that black men in his city shouldn't fear the cops, Eric Garner's death notwithstanding:
Dr. Ellen Scrivner, a police relations consultant, says she’s worked with several police departments through the years but never heard anything like what Rice describes. Yet she believes the problem is mutual: “People don’t trust the police, and the police don’t trust the people.”
“I’m not sure most people fully understand what police encounter on a day to day basis,” Scrivner, an executive fellow for the Police Foundation and former Justice Department official, told Whispers. "In contrast in most other jobs, where there is a predictability and almost habitual responses, a police officer is generally exposed to the unexpected. While there’s some routine in it, that routine can be interrupted by a crisis and an emergency."
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Body cameras and enhanced training – two proposals the White House has endorsed – will help. But the real answer, Scrivner insists, is in community policing – building trust where there is none – and both sides have to work hard at it.
“It’s a little more complex than, ‘People expect too much,’” she says.
Rice concurs. The way to get rid of the black male fear factor, she said, is to help police and communities get to know one another:
