Policing Ourselves
I was born in the early sixties and my first decade of life was quintessential; my days were filled with peaceful play. My parents were immigrants from Jamaica and worked hard to be successful in this new country of theirs; it is what America is most proud of, new blood to keep the country’s engine churning forward. For me, it was simply the backdrop to a blissful life of toys and playgrounds and even music lessons. All was good. One day a news bulletin interrupted my TV cartoon program: Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I was eight and curiously strolled into the kitchen to simply pass the news on to my mom the way any innocent child would, rendering the harsh brutality of humanity in the delicate voice of a child. My mom cried. I stood there perplexed at what I’d done. What should have been a “How nice dear, thank you for sharing,” had instead, revealed a horrid truth that I was still too young to fathom.
In my later years I looked back at the sixties with the misperception that that was the turning point in America, that its inflection point on the arc of world history would portend a new future for people like me, a person of color. How lucky I was, I thought, to be born in the sixties. I fully expected to take advantage of the new world order. I could drink from any fountain, go to any school, have anyone as a friend. Most importantly, my parents could buy a house anywhere.
The last few years in this country have told a different story, one that challenges the Kumbaya of my youth. We have seen evidence of a sharp rise in police brutality that has been caught on tape and shared with the world. We have seen a social polarization that easily accepts a division of societal values along racial color lines and we have seen politicians pandering to those very base instincts, simply to remain in power. And so, the discussion in these times, summer of 2020, has been all about police reform. How do we change the behavior of an embedded culture that is apparently resistant to criticism and intent on maintaining the status quo? The solutions seem to be much like the solutions touted in the sixties to abolish segregation and improve voting and educational disparities. Only, we’ve now learned that while those efforts of legally imposed solutions tinkered with society on the periphery, they didn’t change the hearts and souls of many. So how do we change the police practices of abuse and coverups that have long been hidden under a blue shroud of secrecy?
After many years of hard work and saving every penny, my family integrated an all-white community in the late sixties, and I grew up engaging the police, albeit rarely, for the things a community might call the police to address: a car accident or bicycle theft, or an occasional traffic ticket as a teenager. In all these experiences I never once feared the police, nor did they ever give me reason to doubt their dedication to fairness. They behaved professionally and I was left with the popular perception that they were my guardians of right and wrong. I still believe that, even though I know the experience was not the same for everyone back then, or even now. I look back on my childhood years and wonder if the experiences I had with police were in part because I was in an integrated neighborhood. The police are people like everyone else and they follow the same behavioral conditioning that we all do. I believe the police behave differently when they can identify with you in some way, if they can see you as being one of them, or them as one of you, be it financially, socially, or culturally. The implication of this reality means a real lasting solution to police reform is not simply the imposition of civilian review boards and the like but changing the elements of our society that keep our diversity siloed.
The police are not an isolated culture unto themselves, perpetuating an alternate social paradigm of their own making. We, collectively, are complicit in their policing practices. The police are guardians of a social order we impose by how we live our lives: where we live, who we marry, what our schools look like, who we hire, bank lending practices, etc. The police enforce a social order that we have chosen. This is very apparent when police live in one community with very oppressive standards of racial segregation, yet police an entirely different community that is either more integrated or completely opposite in racial values. Officers will often transfer their myopic racist leanings from home onto a community that does not share those values.
What’s the solution? Encouraging officers to live closer to the communities they police, may diminish the unprofessional incidents that have become alarmingly common in many police departments around the country. But I believe the long-term solution is changing ourselves, since the police simply reflect how we’ve chosen to live. It is heartening that in this summer of 2020, many white protestors were as incensed about police brutality as people of color have been for years. One can only hope that further integration will continue to change social alignments, corporate hiring’s, real estate fairness and educational opportunities that are at the heart of unifying a community.
It is no surprise that when a child grows up knowing people of color, how they police people of color, changes. And, it is this kind of granular solution that will bring about a lasting change that doesn’t rely on legislative action but rather, social bonding. The policing review boards may be a necessary bridge, but a permanent change will be one that we all partake in: the daily choices we make about who we choose to let in our lives.
© Eric Clark 09/15/2020
Photo: houstonchronical.com
