Trust and Policing Communities of Color

I attended a 4-hour workshop called “Policing at the Speed of Trust” that was designed to strengthen trusting relationships between the local police department and members of the community; with a focus on Black people and non-Black people of color.  Participants consisted of community members and police, and those who attended and completed the 4-hour workshop would then be partnered with an officer and commit to speaking weekly with that officer for at least 10 minutes. One of the assumptions was that the sustained contact would improve the relationship. A few notes, with most being critiques:

The desire from the initiative was or members of the community and members of the police department to enter the room and “see each other as people”; a premise that did not acknowledge the palpably inherent power imbalance. Although it wasn’t explicitly mentioned, the trust that the department was trying to improve has been eroded in large part because of the historical and current impact of white supremacy; including the origins of policing in the American context and the role of policing in maintaining the institution of slavery, and terrorizing freed Black people. What we have been seeing and surviving with police brutality, mass incarceration and other disparities in the justice system are directly connected to that history. Entering into the conversation without that explicit understanding fails to interrogate the root cause, and it also made me question the true goals of the initiative. (Speaking of trust.)

Fundamental differences in perspectives and explanations of why the trust is broken were evident. During a large group conversation, some officers thought that a major issue was that members of the community did not “respect authority”, and that “the community was not taking responsibility for their end of the deal when it comes to trust building.” Other officers thought that “respect needs to come from both sides” (which reminded me a lot of Trumps “both sides” statement in response to the white supremacist march in Charlottesville) and that some people are actually “raising their kids to be disrespectful of police.”

Black women are revolutionary. At one point, a Black woman shared:

“I don’t know anyone who is raising their Black children to be disrespectful to police. I don’t know anyone who tells their kids “When you get pulled over, tell the officer to F-off and drive away.”

In a world where Black kids are taught rules of survival when stopped by police; where Black parents have to have conversations with their children that white folks may only hear about, encounters with police can mean life or death. To hear the officers’ deeply held perception was both informative and frightening, considering the implications of them carrying that worldview with them when they hit the streets.

The conversation presented an opportunity to really interrogate what the officers meant by “respect”. In communities of color “respect” of law enforcement is read as fear. That “respect” is established more out of fear than anything else. With that being said I’d say that the respect as I was hearing it from the exchange wasn’t really respect at all. Even in the way the workshop was structured; for me, there is an element of coercion present when officers and community members are brought together and expected to talk on equal terms, yet the officers are armed. Not excluding my own experiences with being treated as a problem to be solved when it comes to law enforcement, I struggled with knowing how honest to actually be when the people directly in front of me were armed and in uniform.

Some of the officers present also seemed united in believing that the media was the main culprit that added to mistrust between police and communities of color. The consensus seemed to be that if the media would stop covering the stories of police brutality and inflating racial tensions (where there were none), then we would see some improvement. I expressed my own struggles with how that aspect of the conversation was going, because the message I heard was that the officers were more upset that the stories got covered, and the offending officers were caught, than they were with their colleagues’ behavior.

As a missing piece, one person highlighted that in addition to having police and community members spend some intentional time together, the program would also benefit from having representation from  judges, attorneys, and others in the justice system, saying:

“Police are the gateway to the criminal justice system. The people don’t see that the laws are enforced equitably, and that also contributes to the mistrust in the entire system. Police are implicated in that dynamic.”

At its core, I can say that I appreciate what the initiative may be trying to accomplish. However, a framework of officers and community members “seeing each other as people” that doesn’t acknowledge the inherent power imbalance isn’t solid enough to sustain real change. There’s not equal blame on both sides. The onus of weight and responsibility lies with the criminal in/justice system, and police officers, who are tools of that system to do the heavy lifting and make the changes necessary to repair the damage that has been done.

https://twitter.com/prisonculture/status/1014560488582246401

Ubuntu,

From Aspiring Humanitarian, Relando Thompkins-Jones

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