There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.
An example of this rhetoric of heat without light is the point of contention between Jim Jordan during the confirmation hearing of Kristen Clark to be head of the Civil Rights division in the Justice Department. When Jordan asked what “systemic racism” meant, Clark said that everyone had a bias to some degree against Black people, even if it was a small degree and demurred to say whether she herself was also biased. It would have been so easy to avoid postulating a metaphysical view that white people all have at least one drop of racism in them but that seemed to her the party line off of which she wouldn’t budge. It would have been easy enough to say that Black birth weights are lower than white ones, that there is higher mortality among Black mothers, that many black neighborhoods had cultural and supermarket deserts, and what Mr. Jordan is going to do about it rather than just lament the woes of these long term results of institutional racism. Forget about racial prejudice, which is always about blaming people, whether the bad whites or the bad blacks who some of them just distrust white people in general and move instead to objective questions of social conditions without blaming anyone, just as we don’t need to blame poor people for needing more garbage deliveries because apartment buildings in better neighborhoods have doormen to collect garbage. Moreover, there seem to be every few days another Black man is shot by the police for a minor infraction, and so why was Representative Jordan opposing the George Floyd Bill to provide very sensible and modest police reforms? Instead, Black advocates offer platitudes that seem to me overly practiced and a bit smug and self righteous. There was a time when advocates were eloquent, but that is not now.
Don’t just verbally joust between the two opposing sides. Consider instead the complexity of the situation of police violence by looking at the choreography of the protests in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota after Dante Wright was shot. There were respectable protesters who sat down on the street and prayed, while on the fringes there were people, the ones I call hoodlums and gangsters, who rioted and looted and sent missiles against the police, that then requiring a police response, which thereby prove to the rioters that the police are malicious while television viewers might become convinced that rioters are uncontrollable and that violence is ever available in Black communities, the police having to work in these environments and therefore understandably trigger happy. That is not to excuse cops but to look at police procedures, which can be altered more quickly than the malice which people feel when they are in the defensive. Whose bright idea was it to place tasers in one holster and pistols in the other and so rely only on muscle memory to determine which one will be used? That is what happened which resulted in the death of Dante Wright. Is there any data on how often this kind of mistake is made, or whether other arrangements could be used to deploy both guns so as to require a second or so to think it through? Most of these confrontations seem to be about petty matters whereby the procedure should be to give summonses about disinfectant devices by tossing them into cars rather than taking people out of their cars. The police know what are the license plates and so could trace these people down if they disregarded summonses. Sure, there is a split second to decide whether to fire on a suspect who might be holding a gun, but again ask Mr. Jordan how he stands on gun control, given the fact that police associations are generally in favor of gun control but legislators are not.
The general issue of how to analyze race relations today is this: advocates for each side know which way to call it when an atrocity takes place. Conservatives will jump on rioting and on the necessary use of police violence while advocates or the Black and brown communities will say that there were peaceful protests and that there was no need to engage in police violence. The two sides differ on who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. Ever so has been the case. Leftists thought that Hiss was innocent and anti-communists thought that the Rosenbergs were guilty. Judgment is prior to the examination of the particular cases and so people thought Michael Brown was either a street hustler or a victim and fashioned events that suited them, and so on with the numerous other cases of police violence that have taken place in recent years.
Let’s avoid the particulars and consult instead the circumstances that seem to apply to similar situations in a number of instances. Consider the teenager shot in Chicago by a policeman in seconds after the black youth had dropped his gun. Advocates point out that a quick thinking policeman would have had enough time to realize that the young man was now unarmed and so there was no need to shoot him. How much time is enough to decide that? Is acting beyond a period of seconds make it murder? Ask instead the question of what the young black man was doing having a gun in the first place in a neighborhood where shots were heard while the patrolman was walking through the neighborhood. That makes South Chicago like the Wild West and all the gunslingers are out to take out the marshall, just as in “High Noon”. Young Black men will be safer if fewer of them have guns, and yet activists go on about the details or the barest facts about the resultant shooting rather than the conditions of shootings. What we need in addition to an investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department to investigate, quite properly, whether there are police practices to be altered, so that a minor crime of passing a counterfeit twenty (if that is what happened) precipitated getting George Floyd killed, rather than tossing a summons to him through his car, and so avoiding the confrontation, also set up a commission to deal with Black on Black violence that sets the scene for police-citizen encounters.
That would be much more difficult to do because it is not clear how to get guns out of the hands of teenage boys and how to change the attitudes of those boys so that they don’t carry firearms. Are they doing so because they like the gangster strut? Is it self protection? Is it that there are no other pastimes or other activities, like rebuilding old cars, to keep them engaged in a harmless pursuit much less a more positive one, like getting some education? I know that this is the old Conservative canard, “get a job”, but remember that this is the old Liberal plea to give jobs to young people so that they can become productive citizens. Despite the heat of blaming victims or perpetrators, which is what most people do, the two sides are in agreement with the solution and might move towards legislatively achieving it if legislators on both sides stopped looking for blame but instead looked at situations. Political advocacy is mainly about blame and so will not address the problem however sympathetic I am to eliminating bad cops and bad police practices.
Here is why a fanciful prospect of democratic politics is not the way to change the current situation. Imagine that various communities could vote on what level and kind of police they want. Middle class communities would vote for policing as it is because it may be an annoyance for the police to provide traffic tickets, but the police in my old neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan helped my eight month pregnant wife to move her car, or to look over an area to see if police could find the hoodlum who had threatened my teenage son. Other neighborhoods, however, might decide otherwise, some opting that its police department have no guns or that the members of the police are staffed by local residents. Such results would probably prove unworkable and so local communities would abandon the effort to defund city wide police forces. But that is to misunderstand the whole nature of policing which was instituted in the early Nineteenth Century in London to provide controlling the riff raff without resorting to bringing out the military that had been used to quell large scale rioting. Police were there to quell everyday unrest, and that remains the case, a way Upper West Siders could see to it that daily unrest elsewhere did not spread to it. Communities in control of their own policing would not guarantee that. Instead, there are two alternatives. There is a transformation of policing so that it relies less on pistols than on procedure. Police would convey papers rather than, except in extreme situations, use guns, or even need to carry them. Social workers have for generations gotten through bad neighborhoods by carrying the briefcases that indicate that they provide assistance rather than danger. A deescalated police force would also discourage the violence prone from joining the force. Moreover, let us abolish the inner city culture by providing the jobs, housing, guaranteed incomes, and health services which are needed so young people don’t carry around pistols. That is the long term Liberal agenda that Biden wants to enact. It is a worthy set of programs even if Liberals have advocated it for a very long time and even if Progressive advocates seem committed instead to modifying the police rather than modifying the social environment.