Several years ago, I took a Psychology 101 class where the students fit three basic categories. There were Psychology majors, Social Work majors, and Criminal Justice majors. While us Psych students had a large variety of opinions on the subject—and often less passion behind those opinions for how often they changed—the SW and CJ students varied distinctly in their views of people. The trend for Social Work was to see people as neither good nor bad but products of their circumstances. If the circumstances were changed through better role models, education, food, housing, then the moral direction of a person’s life would change alongside that. Criminal Justice, however, tended to see people as either good or bad, with a much more definite line of demarkation between the two.
Some philosophers might argue that we need these different sets of people to hold such opinions, one more fluid and the other more rigid, in order for society to work at its best. The problem is that while the one group may argue about how to shape a better world, they often get overwhelmed by the day to day work of managing the lives of broken people and fixing immediate problems. This leaves room for the work of actually shaping the world to those with simpler goals. This keeps those in power who can only see the world in black and white. And we give them lethal weapons which they use to kill off any gray.
While I lived on Boston’s South Shore, I observed the discriminatory treatment of lower income and homeless people by the police and other city officials including as the Occupy Wall Street movement made its way onto Boston’s Dewey Square. This systematic enforcement of class inequality became especially apparent when I first moved back to Nashville in the Summer of 2012. For the first few months, I spent most nights sleeping in my car or couch surfing with local friends. In looking for places to park for the night, I awoke on at least three or four occasions to an officer tapping on my window with his hand on his firearm or with it drawn. On around five or six of those nights, the bright spotlight from a squad car woke me and I was able to come up with some excuse before the officer reached my window. Though, in retrospect, these situations were not immediately hostile, the assumption in the officer’s words and attitude was first and foremost to put distance between himself and myself through either verbal or insinuated threat, such as the show of weapon.
Later, in conversations with others who’d had such experiences, I realized how fortunate I was to be young, relatively clean looking, male, cis-gendered, and especially white.
Before I found a job and later a more fixed place of residence, I experienced some subtleties and not-so-subtleties of poverty-based discrimination in cities like Nashville. I learned to wash my face and clothes, try to smell nice, shave, and only carry as much as I absolutely had to not as general rules of polity but rather from seeing how those without access to a car, friends’ showers, or basic hygienic products were treated by both police and the staff or restaurants and stores. I began to see city planning very differently as the bars in the middle of public benches came no longer to mean an arm-rest but a device to keep the exhausted from being able to lie down off the dirty ground. Especially post-Occupy, signs against tents and a crackdown on all forms of makeshift shelters has become more commonplace, especially anywhere public where the vocal middle and upper classes may interact with the poor and displaced.
Further proof is the response by the citizens of Brentwood to the presence of salespeople from the Contributor, the Nashville area’s homeless-employing newspaper. On at least four occasions I can recall during my year living in Tennessee, there were calls by the wealthy electorate of Brentwood, Franklin, and Nashville to curtail the ability of the Contributor to provide jobs for the poor and displaced. Sighting the safety of drivers and pedestrians as a cover for class and racial prejudice, at least two of these calls were brought before local government as rules against street vendors. With a bubble of protection by the generality of that category, their intentions were still clear as the only major source of street vendors in regular circulation is by the Contributor. Of course all this prejudicial behavior is only a cursory inspection, highlighting a few of the many mechanisms of class discrimination.
Every act of discrimination, whether legally promoted or inspired by personal grievances, is punctuated within the context of law enforcement. Loitering, while an innocuous enough term for those who have places to go, acts as justification for police discrimination and brutality against those who do not. The monitoring of public spaces is severe and unrelenting. Looking at police action, it is not only illegal to exist in areas which are closed to the public, but anyone can be treated as criminal for simply being in a public space for too long. Other unspoken infractions include existing in a public space while looking unkempt, while falling asleep, while having a mental illness, while going through drug or alcohol withdrawal, while having a conversation or interacting in any way with someone who looks like a “good, upstanding citizen” no matter how that person feels about the interaction, or for countless other reasons. Most often, it’s simply up to the discretion of the officer, who has the unquestioned authority to take out their bad day, inner prejudices, and/or pressure from City Hall to “clean up the streets” on anyone they deem unworthy of existing in a particular space.
Sadly, this is not simply rhetoric, but a circumstance I’ve seen personally occur in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, and California. That’s, of course, not counting the thousands stories from advocacy groups, independent news organizations, civil defense sites, friends, fellow artists, and people I’ve met on the street, in bars, at the library, or at the park.
While the will of rich citizens influences City Hall and City Hall pressures developers who are similarly pressed by companies aiming to make a profit off pushing out the poor from a community, it is ultimately the enforcers of the law who interpret and bend that law to the detriment of real lives and families. During my time working at a Hotel in eastern Nashville, there were over ten situations wherein it became necessary for me to call 911. Most of those cases were specifically related to the health and well-being of guests under my care, and at least four of them were because I or someone else were in immediate physical danger. No matter the case, the first to eventually show up were the police. Their relation with me was at all times uncaring, mocking, disrespectful, and often openly hostile.
Violent drunk men running around the hotel threatening myself and several rooms worth of guests? Police never found him, so after fifteen minutes they just left without telling me anything.
Robbed at gunpoint? Police joke about the thief and it being just one guy. They prefer to yell at and condescend to me and my assistant manager (who didn’t have to come but woke up and came over especially so she’d be there to help me when the manager and owner arrived) about why she didn’t retrieve the security footage fast enough.
Traumatized young woman covered in blood and bruises having trouble staying conscious in the lobby? Police take an hour to show, yell at her, rip her purse away and throw everything out of it onto the floor, all while loudly joking about how she’s most likely a hooker, how she deserved it by wearing that dress, how it was just some drunk dates gone bad, how this is a shitty neighborhood so what do you expect, how I probably see more violence in my job then they do in theirs, or how I just shouldn’t have let her in the hotel in the first place. At the time of this last incident, there were around fifteen officers just milling about the lobby, joking with eachother, not helping the young woman her with her still bleeding wounds, and asking me why there wasn’t any coffee out at 4am.
Considering all of this from a personal standpoint, I feel I have a right to be a little wary. However, in the two years since I left Tennessee, I’ve begun to follow more blogs, activists, news stories, and fact-sharing sites centered around the incidents which became and have been a part of the Black Lives Matter initiative. At this point in American History, it is abundantly clear that the systematic discriminatory actions of local police forces are not simply local phenomena, nor do I feel are they a generally representative product of our national collective prejudices. While a consistent thread of hateful bigotry based in classism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and sexism is at the core of what drives our national permissiveness toward such militarism, there can be no doubt that the particular foundations of our criminal justice system amplify these vices beyond the control of any individual police officer.
While each individual is responsible for their own actions, the judicial system upon which our society relies for some semblance of moral order continues to fail us by dismissing calls for indictment, ruling against any penalty for unlawful deaths, and presiding under the delusion that a trained officer is within their rights to claim self defense after beating, choking, shooting, and/or otherwise murdering unarmed civilians. This includes children, and especially people of color. Such a continually egregious affront to legality is one of the most injurious paradigms of injustice in the post civil rights era United States.
Perhaps one thing that allows such an obscene cycle to continue is the commonly held belief that the civil rights era distinctly resolved with equality under the law for every citizen. My personal experiences and those I’ve read, heard, or seen from others paint a very stark picture of just the opposite.
Injustice reigns in an era where civil liberties are unilaterally denied by federal agencies and ignored as a matter of policy by local law enforcement.
Maybe I’m generalizing too much. Maybe it’s not my place to speak up. Maybe writing some rambling blog post is just another shout into the void to serve as a balm for my white guilt or make me feel like I’ve done my part for justice. In fact, I’ll say not only maybe, but probably.
Still, every single time I get to thinking that I should STFU and go write a love song or some shit, another story hits my screen...my twitter feed...my tumblr dash...some news front page...my email inbox... Another unarmed civilian shot down by the cops. Another child brutalized and killed by the cops. Another family torn apart by the cops. Another future ruined by the cops. Another transgendered teen beat and molested by the cops. Another black man or woman around my age treated like a lethal threat just for walking down the street. Another cop who broke the law and gets a paid vacation for it. Another long list of white Christians raising money for a man who shot a hand-cuffed child in the back. Another day. Another killer cop.
Most of those stories will never be told and the ones that are fade all too fast. While we live in a world where I can know almost anything in a few seconds if I know where to look, these stories of brutality are laid out plain and yet killer cops continue to walk free and even come out richer or promoted for the trouble.
But what about the good cops, doing their job and protecting us from harm? Well, what about the good men, not raping women or sending them death threats online? The difference is I didn’t choose to be a man in a society that oppresses women. Even so, I have a responsibility as a member of the human race to disrupt patterns of misogyny, to call out other men on their sexist behavior, and to always be vigilant against the internal prejudices within my own thoughts and behavior.
If a police officer—an adult who made the choice to be a part of such a plainly corrupt institution—cannot at the very least find a way to bring order to a situation as they were trained to do without first firing their weapon at an unarmed child, then that person should either be considered an outlier and fired from their job at the very least or counted as one more amongst the orgy of damning evidence.
The American criminal justice system is a castle built on crooked deals, gang and mob ties, racist and otherwise prejudicial indoctrination, and the idea that there are only two types of people—those with the guns and those who must bow to those with the guns or get shot. Stand up even just to mourn a murdered family member, and the whole town is in wartime. Tanks roll down the street. Community-wide curfews are strictly enforced. Tear gas, tasers, rubber bullets, smoke grenades, and water hoses are just safer enough than guns that if you're lucky they won't kill you right away and only maim you or make you fatally ill.
To ignore the severe injustices going on would be an horrendous, if not uncommon misstep in judgement.
One misstep is all it takes to fall into a hole.
How much deeper might we fall offering excuses and ignoring the lives deemed illegal and thus dispensable by those sworn to serve and protect?
Sincerely,
Odist Abettor
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