Hot Topic: Pepper Spray, Race, and the Police
So pepper spray is in the news again—this time because two police officers, whose M.O. can only be described as “overreacting,” took it upon themselves to squirt streams of the fiery stuff straight at a group of students seated on the U.C. Davis quad.
Watch the video on YouTube. It’s a troubling image—young people huddled in a row, clinging to each other for support, as if steeling themselves for the attack they know is coming. But there is no warning, really, just an odd sense of intuition, as the first officer emerges from the phalanx of waiting riot police with his spray can cocked down towards the ground. The officer sprays the kids’ eyes so assiduously, it looks like he’s watering the lawn. The students are writhing in pain and the crowd is chanting “Shame on you,” when you start to see the cell phone cameras reflecting the sunlight as they are held aloft like candles at a vigil.
This video is not only disturbing because of what the cameras have captured. It is also because of the disjunctions that the scene implies. What suggests youth, education, and convivial spirit more than the quintessential image of students gathering on the college quad—that image which adorns the front of so many college application materials that it’s almost become a parody of itself—particularly if the sunlight is golden, flowers are blooming, and the students seated in the circle happen to represent every major racial and ethnic group in the United States. This is called “the diversity shot” and it is intended to market the college experience as open and inviting to anyone who might apply.
Yet, this past week, the message broadcast out of U.C. Davis, seems to be: “Yes, yes, it’s fine for students to come together so long as they’re not getting all political about it. If you hang out in the quad with the intention of discussing inequality rather than playing ultimate frisbee, then god help you all.”
But the pepper video is also disturbing because of what it does not show. I’m talking about the kind of oppression that doesn’t make it into the news. That kind of injustice does not fit into any trend piece or news story. It does not even appear in the news because it doesn’t surprise anyone, and it doesn’t surprise anyone because it is happens all the time. The truth is that you can’t capture systemic inequality with a cell phone camera, or even with one hundred cell phone cameras. You have to look beyond the surface. You have to examine the underlying structure of society. Often, in order to spot it, you have to have experienced it yourself.
A few years ago, I worked as an investigator of police misconduct in New York City. It was my job to take complaints from people who felt they had been harassed, beaten, or unjustly apprehended by police officers. I’d talk with witnesses, analyze police documents and records, interview the police officers in question, and based on the legal precedents, write up a report indicating whether or not the evidence proved that police misconduct had occurred. When I started the job, I assumed it would be hard to be unbiased. I’d probably have a hard time coolly analyzing the evidence, I figured, when every situation involved so much emotion. Surprisingly, I found it was pretty simple to keep myself from taking sides, because fifty percent of people were usually lying. Interested friends asked me if cops were generally good or bad people, and I found I couldn’t answer the question. I told them what I knew, “A lot of cops do not seem properly trained and do not understand proper police procedure. Some cops, however, are really smart, brave, and good at the job.” Friends would ask me who lied more, and I again found it difficult to answer. “About half of the cops are telling the truth and half of them are not,” I said. Then I added, “The same goes for the civilians.” The rule of half and half seemed to hold true, the more people I interviewed. Over time, it became easier and easier just not to make assumptions about anyone until I’d seen the evidence. As I got better at my job, it became less and less productive to respond to anyone based on my biases and emotional judgments.
What I found was that it was far more difficult to remain emotionally detached when it came to issues of race. I remember the first time I took a look at my caseload—about thirty cases—and realized that every single person whose case I was investigating was Black or Hispanic. It was an uncomfortable realization for me, but nonetheless, it was a necessary one.
Of course, I’d heard that Black and Hispanic people are more likely to be stopped by the police, but it’s one thing to hear about it in the abstract. It’s another to sit down and talk with people who feel disrespected, alienated, and treated like outsiders in their own neighborhoods. You figure it out pretty quickly: Police violence and abuse of authority is not just something that’s legally wrong. It hurts people psychologically. It makes people feel unsafe in the very place they grew up, or in the place where they have lived for over forty years.
I talked with a sixty year old man who had been stopped and questioned by the police while he was waiting for his friend in front of Starbucks. He was not angry about the incident as much as he was disheartened and sad. He just wanted a chance to tell the police that he had done nothing wrong, that he was a good guy, and that he deserved as much as anyone else to be able to stand on the street. I talked to a pizza delivery guy who had been stopped by the police while he was carrying an order out of the restaurant. The detective asked the delivery guy if he had a gun on him—as if any black guy in the neighborhood was likely to be carrying a gun—even a guy who was clearly carrying a pizza.
I visited a young gang member in Riker’s Island who had alleged that the police had broken his leg. When I met him, his leg was in a cast. After thinking about it for a few minutes, he decided to withdraw his complaint. “What’s the point?” he said. “It won’t change anything.” I tried to reason with him, saying that it was a good idea to report police violence, even if he was already in prison. He said, “You don’t get it. Where I come from, it’s like a war. I guess this time the cops won.”
I didn’t try to argue with him after that. I realized he was exactly the same age as I was, I didn’t have authority over him, and didn’t have any idea what it was like to grow up feeling like you can’t trust the police. It’s a feeling that many Occupy protestors are having—some for the first time in their lives. But if you’re someone whose having this feeling for the first time, you have to recognize that there are people who have always felt this way, and for good reason.
When you walk into a room filled with people who are patiently waiting to make complaints against police officers, and realize that you’re the only white person in the room, you start to realize that police misconduct is not an issue that affects everyone equally. When you meet kids from low-income neighborhoods who have been arrested for possessing tiny quantities of marijuana, while you yourself have friends from suburbia who got caught smoking weed and released with only a summons or a short, stern lecture, you realize that the same law does not affect everyone equally.
The issue of the relationship between the police and the communities they serve and protect is a whole lot bigger than a single protest, and if you are white, you have to recognize that the issue is a whole lot bigger than you. Police violence happens all the time in the parts of American cities where news reporters don’t hang out. The only reason why it’s in the news right now is that it’s happening to white people and in the downtown.
Here’s a particularly egregious example of how things are different when police suspect a white person of a crime. In Alabama this past week, a German citizen was stopped by the police and found to be driving without a license. In any other state, he would have been released with a summons. But since this is Alabama, which has recently tightened its immigration policies to a level that some argue is unconstitutional, the police had a right to ask the German man for identification papers proving he was residing in the country legally. The German man only had a German I.D. card on him, so he was arrested and brought down to the stationhouse. There, police discovered he was a top-ranking executive at Mercedes-Benz. Immediately, the apologies poured in—from Alabama state officials, who appeared shocked that the immigration policies they’d set in place could have led to such a humiliating episode for a world-class company that had done so much for Alabama’s economy. After the incident, the state government of Alabama stated it was time to reconsider its immigration laws. The irony here is that countless Latin@s have already been arrested in Alabama under the state’s new policies. I heard a Mexican immigrant, who works as a waitress, speaking on NPR on condition of anonymity, say that she was afraid to leave the house, except to go to work, because so many people in her neighborhood had been stopped by the police. How sad that racial profiling and repeated arrests of working class immigrants didn’t seem to bother Alabama’s state government. Only the arrest of wealthy, white executive could make the state reconsider the amount of power it had given to the police.
If we are upset about the pepper spraying of students and protestors in the Occupy movement, we should also be angry about what is happening in Alabama. We should remember what happened to Pedro Oregon and Sean Bell. We should take a look at the following statistics: In 2009, 84 percent of people stopped, questioned, and frisked by the NYPD were Black or Latino, although these groups make up only 26 and 27 percent of the city’s population, respectively. Last year, a Columbia University report found that when a suspect is Black or Latino, police officers are far more likely to use physical force against a suspect. If you are upset about the pepper spray, you should check out http://stopmassincarceration.tumblr.com/ and attend the march to 1 Police Plaza this coming Friday in protest of against the NYPD’s stop and frisk policies.
If the concept of the 99 percent means anything at all, it means that Americans should see all ourselves as connected. What affects me does not only affect me. What affects you is not just your problem. We have to make connections to people outside ourselves because living in this country means that our lives are interconnected, whether we like it or not. The struggle against inequality and injustice based on race, gender, and class is something we should all be in together. Now that’s an idea that should go viral.
