So as I was cooking yesterday morning in preparation for last night’s congregational hymn sing and December (near Christmas) pot providence supper, I had NPR on with Diane Rehm leading a group of men through a discussion of the Senate’s report on CIA torture. And I’m thinking, first Ferguson, then Ray Rice, then Eric Garner. How do I manage my outrage?
Well, in the world of grief followed by getting on with life, the way Diane decided to ease her listeners back from a view of the CIA far too close to Homeland was by devoting the second hour to Mr. Rogers? Imagine how African-American listeners might have felt if Diane had decided to follow an hour-long discussion of Ferguson with a segment on holiday weight-gain. Would that topic trivialize the injustice?
Maybe you devote two hours to U.S. intelligence and its abuses.
Or perhaps, if you have a job to do and you put together roughly 250 programs a year, you don’t feature outrageous events all the time. After all, with all the sin, misery, and injustice in the world, we could be outraged most of the time (as the missus suspects I am). The fact that we are not more outraged more of the time may be an indication of how relatively good life is this side of glory. As anyone who grieves the loss of a loved one knows, the world doesn’t stop and you don’t get a day off from adult responsibilities just because dad died. Maybe even the day after you observe the burial of your father you clean the bathrooms. Does that trivialize the grief? Or is it possible to live a life based on intense grief (or outrage)? Experimental Calvinists please don’t answer.
Upon further reflection, though, with help from Ross Douthat, John McWhorter, and Diane Rehm, I have come to wonder whether the extensive discussions of race relations and police brutality disguise a much bigger problem — the use of force by people whose self-interest coincides with justifications for it.
Ross Douthat, for instance, thinks that Ferguson does not make the case for improved policing policy that many do:
Ferguson is turning into a poor exhibit for the policy causes that it’s being used to elevate. We will never know exactly what happened in the shooting of Michael Brown, but at this point the preponderance of the available evidence suggests that this case is at the very least too ambiguous, and quite possibly too exculpatory of the officer involved, to effectively illustrate a systemic indictment of police conduct. Meanwhile, while I continue to believe that the looting and vandalism in Ferguson do not, by their mere existence, prove that a full-metal-jacket police response to the protests was wise or productive — quite the reverse; I still think it contributed to a dynamic of escalation — the fact remains that if you’re trying to make a case to anyone on the center-right (or the non-ideological public, for that matter) that American police forces have become too aggressive, too armored-up, too bullying, a story in which they ended up failing to prevent the destruction of businesses and property is not necessarily the ideal exhibit to introduce.
Douthat points to John McWhorter, always a good read, who thinks the Brown and Garner incidents point to a problem about police-community relations:
The right-wing take on Brown, that he was simply a “thug,” is a know-nothing position. The question we must ask is: What is the situation that makes two young black men comfortable dismissing a police officer’s request to step aside?
These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt. What America owes communities like Ferguson — and black America in general — is a sincere grappling with that take on law enforcement that is so endemic in black communities nationwide. As Northwestern philosopher Charles Mills has put it, “Black citizens are still differentially vulnerable to police violence, thereby illustrating their second class citizenship.”
This is true. It is most of what makes so many black people of all classes sense racism as a key element of black life, and even identity. Now, some suppose that the reason for what Mills refers to is black people’s fault, that black people are just too dumb, lazy, and immoral to understand what it is to be decent citizens. Most would disagree, however, which logically implies that something has gone terribly wrong from the other end — from law enforcement itself. The President’s statement on the verdict got at this point: what we must get past is larger than the specifics of what happened between Wilson and Brown.
And in that vein, as someone who has written in ardent sympathy with the Ferguson protests, I find this hard to write, but I have decided that it would be dishonest of me to hold back. As I have written endlessly, America will never get past race without a profound change in how police forces relate to black men.
The one point of disagreement I have with McWhorter stems from the reality that today U.S. police forces include many African-American men and women. This is not like the televised incidents of white police beating up protesting blacks in urban neighborhoods on fire. African-Americans are now — can you say President Obama? — on both sides of the law. In which case the issue of race may actually cloud the matter of privilege. Do Bill Cosby or Jesse Jackon’s children face the same relations with people who enforce the law as do Michael Brown and Eric Garner? And do the poor white residents of Hillsdale, Michigan fare better with the local police than the children of African-American University of Michigan professors do with Ann Arbor’s finest? Of course, in some parts of urban America, African-Americans are disproportionately situated in communities that police treat differently. But is that merely a function of race or is it much more a case of wealth?
Irrespective of the incidents in New York and Ferguson, the United States faces a much bigger problem — perhaps the granddaddy of them all — a branch of the federal government that has almost unlimited power (in the name of national interest) to brutalize people. But before we let ourselves off the hook as innocent bystanders to these incidents, Noah Millman has a useful reminder that many of us asked for this after 9/11:
I’ve written before about the overwhelming fear that afflicted the country in the wake of 9-11, and how, perversely, exaggerating the severity of the threat from al Qaeda helped address that fear, because it made it acceptable to contemplate more extreme actions in response. If al Qaeda was really just a band of lunatics who got lucky, then 3,000 died because, well, because that’s the kind of thing that can happen. If al Qaeda was the leading edge of a worldwide Islamo-fascist movement with the real potential to destroy the West, then we would be justified in nuking Mecca in response. Next to that kind of response, torture seems moderate.
Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.
You can probably make a similar point about the police and community relations. Lots of Americans, black and white, vote for candidates who will be tough on crime. When that toughness becomes something from which we would prefer to avert our eyes, do we side with candidates who say, “let’s treat criminals charitably”? I don’t think so.
And maybe that is why Diane Rehm has a nationally syndicated radio show and I don’t. You program both outrage and sunny-side up sentimentality. That’s how we get through the g-d day.
Old Life 
you program 😡 and 😛 so you can be like totally 😎
yes
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Reminds me of an experience with a certain Michigan State Representative of a neo-calvinist orientation who decades ago who introduced a Bill to allow inmates conjugal visits.
That was then… this is now.
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As a former law enforcement officer I can tell you it is not race, privilege or wealth. It is crime and “thug culture”. The missing part of this whole discussion is that both Brown and Garner violated the law and in both cases the police were responding to citizen’s complaints. Both resisted arrest which always puts everyone at risk and both men were NFL size. Not many who make there living in “ivory towers” have ever had to face an enraged 6’4” 250lb+ man bent on your destruction.I have seen what happens to both law enforcement officers and citizens when the criminal succeeds in his attack and it is not something you will soon forget. Bottom line, If both had complied then both would be alive today.
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Darryl,
Have you read Stuntz’s book on the criminal justice system? I’m not an expert, but I found his case that there are serious racial inequities compelling. Three items that popped out for me are that 1/3 of black men spend time in jail, only 5% of people in jail had a jury trial, and when cases with similar facts are compared blacks get harsher penalties. It may be that that thug culture is an (albeit unhealthy) response to unjust system.
I found his solutions less compelling. Maybe there just isn’t one. Maybe the OPC can commission a study group to come up with recommendations for congress…
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The Report of The Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Committee Regarding Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System, August 2013 stated that “1 in 3 black males born today will spend time in jail if current trends continue.” That is compared to 1 in 6 Hispanics and 1 in 17 white males.
The FBI has data on all different kinds of arrests and they break it down in scores of tables, including by race. http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/crimestats
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sdb, have not read the book. Any stats on middle class and wealthy blacks compared to poor blacks? I find it hard to believe that 1/3 of all black men across all income groups spend time in jail.
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The whole resisting arrest thing bothers me. If these guys had responded, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” I doubt that they’d be dead. Nothing is accomplished by arguing with the police. Exercise your right to remain silent, and let your court-appointed lawyer do the talking.
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Listening to NPR is not a good way to keep your brain cells happy.
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Bobby, and there are plenty of white Presbyterians who have trouble saying yes sir to Mr. President.
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from above: ” I have come to wonder whether the extensive discussions of race relations and police brutality disguise a much bigger problem — the use of force by people whose self-interest coincides with justifications for it.”
Isn’t this the basic power construction of identity politics–the story that is in nauseating repeat for race, gender, class, disability? In my house we would WWFS? (what would Foucault say?)
And: “Do Bill Cosby or Jesse Jackon’s children face the same relations with people who enforce the law as do Michael Brown and Eric Garner?”
Actually I would say that they do. If their celebrity status were not a known in a particular situation, I think they would be as every bit as vulnerable.
Also:
did you see this piece: http://aattp.org/tim-wise-pens-brilliant-editorial-on-ferguson-most-white-americans-are-completely-oblivious/
“These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.”
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DGH,
That is painting with a pretty broad brush and what I would expect out of an NPR commentator. Those few white Presbyterians (even though I know some black Presbyterians that have a problem with POTUS) that would have a problem with saying, “Mr. President sir”. I would have to say most of them would say “yes sir” to one of his Secret Service detail if directed to do something. If not you can believe escalation in force would be swift whether you were black or white. Baptist or Presbyterian.
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@dgh
to be sure arrest rates are not constant across income, but still much higher than whites after holding income and education constant. Dont have exact numbers handy though.
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Be careful Darryl, ex-Officer John might be a plant by the Bayly’s, Rabbi Bret, or Mark Jones. Only an idiot would believe that all arrests are done by the book and that abuses only rarely occur. It betrays a lack of understanding of human nature to suppose that all police officers are on the up and up- especially when they are trained to kill, if necessary, and carry guns. There should be strict requirement in how they perform there duties. I think most good cops would agree with that. John is exuding a bit too much testosterone, in my humble opinion.
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Jeannette:
I hope that Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke connects to your link. Maybe the author could finally get through to him.
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Jeanette, I do believe the experience of a middle-class black man is different from an inner city fellow who doesn’t live in a gentrified neighborhood. Not that The Wire reveals all truth, but Bunk is different from Omar.
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John, my only point was that whites are not always respectful of authority — dgh included.
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sdb, I don’t deny racism. I do deny that all blacks have the same experience.
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John Y,
Since I appear to be the only idiot here that has been on the frontline I just offered my first hand experience to this august conversation. Also since you don’t know me I’ll let you know I spent time on the frontline during the civil rights movement, in the 60’s and 70’s, on the receiving end of the beatings. In my time in law enforcement I did not see anything that came close to those days. May I ask, where were you?
This idiot has learned by hard knocks and not by watching cable TV shows or reading elitist books. However, I have enjoyed a number of DGH’s tomes.
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D.G. – Not that The Wire reveals all truth, but Bunk is different from Omar.
Erik – Pretty much everyone is different than Omar.
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The world changed dramatically for police in the 80’s and 90’s when the drug lords moved in heavy to the US. The level of threat to and fear in the police ranks grew a great deal, I believe. The six-shooters went away and in came the 12-17 round semi-auto pistols. The margin for error of judgement went way down — in how much damage a cop could do and (much more so) how much damage could be done to him. A simple traffic stop or routine encounter (Michael Brown) is now crazy dangerous thanks to the drugs being used and the value of the drugs being moved. We may not like the drug war but the cops have to play the hand they’re dealt. And they’ve been dealt a hard and dangerous one.
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John,
I appreciate the response back. I was not referring to you as the idiot but those who thought that abuses don’t occur in the line of duty. I am not advocating that the law should not be harshly administered when necessary. The lines are just undefined, or is that just my cable tv watching and reading of elitist books (I don’t know what you consider an elitist book is)? Personally, I view myself as very non-elitist. How do you determine how much force to use in various environments?
What has changed in police department policy since the 60’s? I have witnessed some police beatings, in the last two years, on not so big guys without weapons that looked unnecessary from an outside observer. I also have talked to officers on numerous occasions who have explained to me what kind of training they get to protect themselves. It is never a wise thing to resist an officer and you guys know that. The ones I talked to told me that with a kind of gleam in their eyes. You know what to do to those who show any signs of resisting. On the flip side of the coin, I do realize you put your lives on the line while performing your duties. Isn’t it tempting to use what you’ve learned in an abusive way if you are not careful? How do you control that when dealing with those who are not acting rationally, etc? It seems that it would be easy to step over the line without a lot of pressure and constraint from possible consequences.
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John Y,
Thank you for your response, but where to start. First not everyone who wants to be a law enforcement officer can qualify. You have to pass a battery of tests; academic, psychological, and physical. If you make it through that you move on to a series of oral interviews with the finial one being with the department psychologist. If you make it past that you may get selected to attend the training academy. This is kind of like bootcamp where they put you through the ringer. Mental and physical stress everyday. Everything from how to deliver a baby along a highway if need be to rendering first aid to vehicle collision victims. However, to keep this short I will keep to the subject of defensive tactics. Police officers are taught and trained on a force continuum (maybe slightly different depending on department) it starts with a verbal command, to pepper spray/mace, to tasers, to putting your hands on someone, to empty hand tactics, to batons/flashlights, to finally deadly force. Deadly force in most cases requires that your life or someone else’s life is in grave danger of death or serious bodily harm (these have legal definitions you can look up if interested). Every use of force, even if you just raise your voice at someone must be justified.
You are correct when you say some bad apples get through and sometimes it’s just humans making mistakes. Doesn’t matter if you are having a bad day, if you go off on someone your career can come to an abrupt end. We trained and trained and trained because we knew under stress you revert to how you are trained. No day is routine, routine will get you killed. You may go from helping a lady change a flat tire along a dark highway to responding to a man with a gun that just kill his wife and children, to an Amber Alert and taking a young child away from a man who just molested him, to trying to give a homeless person a ride to a shelter on a freezing night. You could walk up to a car you stopped for speeding and get shot in the face by a meth addict who just got out of prison or you may respond to 20 false alarms and on the 21st take a shot to the chest from a 12 ga. shotgun (these are true incidents). But through it all we must remain professional. And no matter what, we must go home to our family after the shift and be husband and daddy.
What is different today then back in the 60’s and 70’s? DGH named one diversity. Departments are begging for qualified minority recruits. Better training and professionalism. Oh, and no police department in their right mind would attack people with dogs and fire hoses for simply wanting to sit and eat a hamburger at the corner drugstore or have their children go to school with white children. Into the 70’s I could not safely walk down the street with my black friends. So I would say a good many things have changed for the better. Perfect no. We live in a fallen world.
I was raised to protect the weak and not victimize them. That is why I wanted to be a cop in the first place.
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Darryl, you must be forgetting this 2009 NYT headline:
“CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Colleagues of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard’s most prominent scholar of African-American history, are accusing the police here of racism after he was arrested at his home last week by an officer investigating a report of a robbery in progress….”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/21gates.html?_r=0
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Great answer, John. You have my respect. I have run across police officers, like yourself, who can be very helpful when you are down and out. Unfortunately, the best ones often get fed up with a lot of what they have to deal with, both in regards to their duties and also what they have to deal with regarding the politics of the job. Can you inform us as to what you think the main issues in police work are today and what you think needs to be improved? You already mentioned more qualified minority recruits, better training and professionalism- how about the process of how officers get promoted to important leadership positions? How does one rise in the ranks and are there many pitfalls along the way?
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Jeanette, and what do you do with the Beer Summit or Gates appearing on Oprah?
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Another question I thought of for John,
What kind of ramifications occur in police departments when incidents like Ferguson and Eric Garner become hot topics of conversation and make headline news for days on end? I’m sure it makes your job a lot harder to perform and the higher ups probably put more pressure on the field grunts (I am not using that term derogatorily- they do most of the tough work). Plus you always hear of corruption in those who rise to important positions- is that really true or is it more a fabrication of watching to many TV shows and movie drama’s about the law enforcement industry?
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On further thought, my questions about the law enforcement industry are contrary to the social thought espoused at oldlife. Asking if something is radically wrong or what improvements need to made in police departments is like asking what is wrong with New York and what needs to be improved there. That betrays neo-Cal assumptions about every square inch. 2K is about preservation and order not about taking over or making improvements. There probably is wisdom in trusting in God’s providential overseeing of His creation. However, how do you handle the bad things that often happen in society by those who have authority and not much can be done about it? That is the point I am trying to make. A huge example that never gets talked about at oldlife is the slaughter of the Anabaptists with the agreement of the magisterial reformers Does’nt that bother anyone?
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JohnnY, sure it bothers me. But my list of bothersome historical episodes is about 5 pages long. Sometimes you put the list away and have a drink.
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JY, not to sound either Pollyanna or overly pious, but here’s one suggestion on how to handle authorities who abuse:
“Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.”
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Zrim,
You’re being a bit overly biblicist aren’t you? Have you read some of the things Calvin said about tyrant magistrates? On top of that, I am not sure if suffer and beaten mean the same thing in the context. I marvel at how Paul and the early Christians endured what they had to endure. The whole issue is a difficult one.
I can relate better to Dgh’s comment. I am still not convinced that non-violent resistance is never warranted.
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John, It’s Biblicist to post Bible verses?
Help, I’m lost.
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Andrew,
I was just giving Zrim a hard time because he likes to call others out when their comments smell of biblicism.
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Paul was a great one for stoking outrage, encouraging grievance, and exploiting victimhood, was he not?
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Thnx John.
Cw, will run away if that clown shows up. Appreciate the heads up, yo.
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JY, Peter said it, I believe it, that settles it.
Re Calvin, you mean this: ““But if we have respect to the Word of God, it will lead us farther, and make us subject not only to the authority of those princes who honestly and faithfully perform their duty toward us, but all princes, by whatever means they have so become, although there is nothing they less perform than the duty of princes…The only thing remaining for you,” Calvin adds shortly thereafter, “will be to receive their commands, and be obedient to their words.” [ICR 4.20.25-26].
Still, whatever he may have said about lesser magistrates to curb tyrants, it seems a long distance between that and the kind of thing modern Americans have in mind, i.e. “stoking outrage, encouraging grievance, and exploiting victimhood.” If it helps, this goes as much for white pro-lifers as it does black Fergusonians.
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There seems to be more than one side to this issue, Zrim:
“But hereof be assured, that all is not lawful nor just that is statute by civil laws; neither yet is everything sin before God, which ungodly persons allege to be treason.” -John Knox
“Let a thing here be noted, that the prophet of God sometimes may teach treason against kings, and yet neither he nor such as obey the word, spoken in the Lord’s name by him, offend God.” -John Knox
“For earthly princes lay aside their power when they rise up against God, and are unworthy to be reckoned among the number of mankind. We ought, rather, to spit upon their heads than to obey them.” -John Calvin (Commentary on Daniel, Lecture XXX Daniel 6:22)
“If they (government authorities) command anything against Him (God), let it go unesteemed. And here let us not be concerned about all the dignity which the magistrates possess.” -John Calvin (The Institution of the Christian Religion, written in 1536)
“If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, it is no doubt that they may be resisted even by power.” -John Knox (while being questioned by Queen Mary about his views which legitimized subjects resisting their princes)
“There is ever, and in all places, a mutual and reciprocal obligation between the people and the prince…If the prince fail in his promise, the people are exempt from obedience, the contract is made void, the rights of obligation of no force.” -Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos written in 1579, author unknown
“We ought to obey God rather than men.” -The Apostle Peter and other apostles, Holy Bible Acts 5:29 [read Acts 5:24-33]
“Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.” -The Midwives, Holy Bible Exodus 1:19 [read Exodus 1:8-21]
“We shall not find any charge against this Daniel unless we find it against him concerning the law of his God.” -Wicked government officials, Holy Bible Daniel 6:5
“Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went home. And in his upper room, with his windows open toward Jerusalem, he knelt down on his knees three times that day, and prayed and gave thanks to God, as was his custom since early days.” -Holy Bible Daniel 6:10 [read Daniel 6]
“You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee.” -Sitting Bull, these were his words to fellow tribesmen who went to the government indian agencies
“I wish to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle, and this day have given it to you.” -Sitting Bull, when he surrendered at Fort Buford in July of 1881
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JY, clearly there are. But both 1 Peter 2 and Acts 5 seem sufficient to navigate the complicated waters of obedience, civil and spiritual.
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The confessionalist (second London, sabbatarian WCF revised) baptist Tom Chantry has written an excellent post on racism and the status quo
https://chantrynotes.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/what-voddie-said-and-didnt/
We who citizens of a different kingdom long for anything other than this present age, be it the old school of Machen or the “not yet” sometimes called “the theology of the cross”
In Portugal of 1912, A. F. G Bell writes: “The saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.”
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John Y,
Hope you had a wonderful Lord’s Day. I wanted let you know you ask good questions. Law enforcement I believe has and will make improvements. Will it ever be perfect–no. At times it can be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. After visiting a large portion of the world I will take our of justice system over any of the rest.
May I suggest you request a ride along with your local police department. I think most departments still allow this and the officer you ride with can answer many of your questions.
I agree with DGH sometimes you just have put the list away and sit back and enjoy a good single malt.
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