The Corner of Cross and Damon

May 28, 2008 by Marc Lamont Hill

The Culture of Policing Must Change
Matthew Birkhold

A little before midnight, Sunday I was awakened after hearing police scream, “Stand the fuck back.” After getting out of bed to see what was happening, I walked outside and saw a white police officer beating a black man before handcuffing him and carrying him into in the back of a squad car. My neighbor told me that the man was having a conversation with his girlfriend when police intervened and beat him. As the no less than twenty police officers walked away from the scene, we told them they didn’t care about the members of our community. As one young white officer left, he turned around and looked at us while we told him he didn’t care and that it was his presence, not ours, that made the neighborhood dangerous. When he and I made eye contact, I said to him, “All you can say is ‘fuck it’”? He smirked and walked away.

At that moment, I realized that there was very little human connection between this white police officer and the almost completely black neigborhood in which he walked the beat. My mind flashed back a few weeks to right after the acquittal of the officers who killed Sean Bell. In the days following the trial, I walked around my Crown Heights neighborhood and where I once lived in Bed-Stuy. As I walked past the mostly young, white, male beat cops on Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street, the looks on their faces said they were afraid. One of my black male coworkers who lives in the same neighborhood told me he felt the same way and saw the same thing. Police who are afraid of people are incapable of protecting them.

Because we live in a society where all people, black men included, are taught to be scared of black men, it shouldn’t be surprising that the police are scared of black men and black neighborhoods in general. However, just because it’s not surprising doesn’t mean it’s okay. We have to find a way to eliminate this fear.

If we are to live in a world where police brutality doesn’t exist, as a nation we have to begin to live and think about race in new ways. To begin doing this, we must acknowledge that our communities and families are sick and need healing. According to Assata Shakur, we must recognize that our families and communities are sick, and that “healing is needed in order for us to live in a society that where we’re not afraid to look somebody in the eye and say good morning.”

If we begin to heal our sick communities and families; our sick society, we will begin to walk down a path to building communities and relationships with one another that hasn’t been experienced in America since the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. This type of healing is akin to the transformational process of turning grief into hope. We currently live in spiritually damaged world where a great deal of grieving must take place. Fortunately, once human beings begin grieving, we also enter the path to healing.

In order to begin the healing that will end police brutality we must begin understand that cops are human and that they are merely symptoms of our spiritually sick world. We must begin to see the culture of policing like we see cancer, as a disease in need of a cure.

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based educator and writer. He is founder of Political Education Outreach Collective and can be reached at birkhold (at) gmail (dot) com.

Categories: MLH
|

9 Comments

1. Clifton Harrison wrote:

Exactly. How can someone do their job (correctly) if they are constantly in fear?

I think one fundamental change we can make is to one expand the problem outside of just white and black. This problem extends to all different ethnicities. And that’s not to say that the racial issues between black and white people aren’t important, but being more broad on the race problem might allow people to be more understanding and take away that defensiveness both white and black people in America can have when talking about racial issues.

Clif

May 28, 2008 @ 1:18 pm

2. matt wrote:

Thanks for reading Cliff. I think you make a very important point. Have you ever been a part of or seen any cross-race discussions on policing? If so, I’d love to hear about how they were structured and how they went. Thanks for your comments.

May 28, 2008 @ 2:30 pm

3. DCI74 wrote:

Good article Matt. About 2 years ago I was apart of a cross-race discussion on policing in the town where I used to live. The need for the discussion was raised do to an increase in new police officers that didn’t live in the city. It should be noted that these officers were black, brown, and white and the crux of the problem had less to do with their race and more to do with the fact that these cops knew nothing about the residents or the city they were hired to work in daily.

These discussions went on over a period of months and while many were quite heated some progress was made. Many of these new officers along with city residents helped re-launched the city’s Police Athletic League which allowed the cops a vehicle to better connect with the city residents and vice versa. However even after these and other efforts were launched anxiety was quelled only for a brief time.

May 28, 2008 @ 3:16 pm

4. Miss Martin wrote:

fuck da police

May 28, 2008 @ 4:25 pm

5. Clifton Harrison wrote:

unfortunately, no Matt i haven’t.

I truly believe in the saying “it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better” applies to America (in so many ways, but specifically with race). As it pertains to Police-community relations, I am very fearful of what might happen if we continue down this path. The movie “City of God” has a very extreme (but in my opinion quite possible) outcome for the urban communities in America if the fearful Police continue abusing and killing the the poor, oppressed, “frightening” people.

May 28, 2008 @ 5:10 pm

6. Clifton Harrison wrote:

Miss Martin,

Fuck the Police is an understandable expression, but what do you mean? fuck every police officer and official in America? By all means, FUCK the Justice system as it stands now, and Fuck corrupt, dishonest, evil police…but not every police officer is doing wrong…

May 28, 2008 @ 5:12 pm

7. matt wrote:

Thanks for sharing DC. I really like the way you’ve framed the relationships around communities and police. Before beginning the dialogue, was there a problem with brutality?

Clif, thanks for responding. Thank you for also framing the problem as one about the relationship between police and the community. I think that framing it that way gives us a more productive way to think about the problem than just saying ‘the police’ are the problem.

May 28, 2008 @ 5:59 pm

8. DCI74 wrote:

Yes Matt there was and still is a brutality issue when it comes to police that work in the main urban cities in Connecticut (New Haven, Bridgeport and the capital city Hartford).

Beyond that CT has had its fair share of police misconduct by state troopers and significant racial tensions in the state police ranks with very overt forms of racism via insensitive emails disguised as jokes, nooses, etc. Some troopers have been fired or have quit and numerous lawsuits are pending. So few talk about how these racial problems eventually impact the way troopers deal with motorists who share the same ethnicity as the targets of the racists jokes and attacks. The insane irony in all of this is the current recruitment efforts to get more troopers and cops of color on the force.

May 28, 2008 @ 9:35 pm

9. Gregory Salomon wrote:

Matt,
Good Article. You made a comment that I didnt agree with. I was not thought to be fearful of any man: black, white, brown etc. I think one of the main racial problems between blacks and whites in this country is that the mainstream wants people of color to forget that this country was built on the free labor of people of color. The Jewish people received the proper attributes for the their plight during Hitler’s rule whoever the blacks of this country must suffer being indirectly and directly treated as second class citizens by a system that was founded by individuals who viewed blacks as property and considered less than a quarter of a human being. Every 50 years the rights to vote of people of color has to be extended why is that how come the rights of blacks to vote has not become a permanent amendment to the constituion. Matt, the real issue is with-in the black community. We cannot get right with any other race until we as black people can pass the centuries of brainwashing that has kept blacks apart. My brothers and sisters were at their best when the struggle was clear and present. We have forgotten that because we have progressed that we need to still keep fighting and demanding better. We cannot do as individuals we need to do as a collective unit.

May 29, 2008 @ 8:36 pm

Now Reading

Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity by Marc Lamont Hill
Buy Now
The Classroom and The Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America by Mumia Abu-Jamal & Marc Lamont Hill
Buy Now
View More