The US is a free country . . . but it's more free for some of its citizens than others.
There is a tremendous discrepency in the way law enforcement officers are perceived and the way law enforcement officers treat its citizens based on race. For instance, most white people in the United States have a generally positive attitude towards police officers. In sharp contrast, most blacks and hispanics have a negative attitude towards the police.
There was an incident in my town about a police officer who shot a black kid in the back. Supposedly, the kid was in an area of town that is known as being not so nice, and the police officer was looking for someone who this kid was known to hang out with. The officer told the kid he wanted to talk to him and the kid took off running. A chase ensued and it ended with the officer (who is white) saying that he thought he saw the kid pull a gun from his belt so he shot him (non-fatally). The officer was put on leave and an investigation is pending.
This shows us several revealing things about the way the law and (some of) its citizens interact. First of all, we see that blacks (in general) don't like to even talk to the police. This kid didn't know whether the police were after him or not, but didn't wait to see what they wanted before running. Second, it shows us that the police believe that folks are armed. I know a lot of police officers and I also know that the one thing they hate to do on their jobs is to be given cause to draw their weapon, because that means that either they or someone else are in danger. I don't know this particular officer, but since I know several officers in town, I am inclined to believe that he's not some trigger-happy Sergeant Riggs out to gun down anyone and everyone who gets in his way. Third, I believe that had this kid been white and taken off, the cop might have just chased him and not ended up shooting him.
There is a statistic from some years back (it may still be true) which said that 25% of black men age 18-25 were somehow "in process" in the criminal justice system; they are either incarcerated for committing a crime, on probation or the subject of an investigation or criminal prosecution.
It is also true that blacks are overrepresented in the prison population and on death row. That is, according to the
CIA World Factbook, blacks make up 12.4% of the general population, but according to the group
Human Rights Watch, blacks make up 30% of the prison population. In addition, according to the
ACLU, 36% of death row inmates are black (it also happens that 82% of victims in crimes that result in a death sentence are white).
From these data, we can reach several possible conclusions. It appears that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of the crime in this country. However, these data could also be the result of disproportionate prosecution of crime. It could also mean that blacks are given harsher sentences for similar crimes.
Since criminal sociology is a very complex subject, I would argue that these results are the result of all of the above. There is a large disparity between blacks and white in terms of economic prosperity, and there is also a direct correlation between poverty and crime. It is logical to conclude that since poor people are more likely to commit crimes, and a disproportionate number of poor people are black, a larger percentage of blacks are criminals than whites.
At the same time, I think it is also fair to say that blacks are prosecuted and convicted more severely than whites. I don't have any concrete evidence at my fingertips, but I believe that criminologists would agree. The excessive number of blacks on death row would also suggest that blacks are given steeper sentences for capital crimes than other racial groups.
Now, back to the Morse police brutality case. What do we actually
know about this case? We know that Morse picked the handcuffed kid up by the belt and the collar and slammed him down on the police cruiser. We know that Morse punched him at least twice while the kid was still on the back of the police car. We also know that this kid and his father were driving in a car with expired tags and that his father was driving with a suspended license.
We do
not know what may have been said before the kid was handcuffed. We do not know what went on before the tape started rolling. The officer claims that the kid was trying to grab his groin and and at one point had also grabbed his shirt and refused to let go. We do not see this, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
We also cannot hear what exchange went on between all of the parties involved. As I've said before, I know a few police officers and when people treat them with basic human respect, they're nice people. After all, they're working a very dangerous job at a pittance salary to "protect and serve" the public. Still there are some "magic words" that you can use around them that will get them hot and on your case (just like there are some "magic words" that will get a baseball player instantly ejected from a game). We don't know if this kid and his father were talking back to Morse. We don't know if they called him a "pig" or something that rhymes with "cough sufferer" that may have resulted in the kid getting handcuffed.
It is my opinion that if you don't do anything wrong, you've got nothing to worry about; you're probably not going to be the object of a massive manhunt or police beating. Still, it's been known to happen, but I don't think that the police are out to arrest people just for the sake of arresting them. However, my perception of law enforcement officers is markedly different from others; in my example, if a police officer says that he wants to talk to me, I'm going to talk to him. I've got nothing to hide and I believe that buy running, it shows guilt, even if there is none.
I also believe that in the Morse case, if the kid and his father had been white, it never would have resulted in an altercation and someone being handcuffed with accusations of police brutality flying around. Does that mean that Morse and his partner necessarily acted inappropriately? Not at all, because I also believe that if they had been white, the kid and his dad would have reacted differently to the police and whatever was said that ended with an arrest would not have come up had all parties involved been white.
However, I think that the problems that pervade our society, particularly in terms of race, run deeper than an incident at a gas station in Inglewood, CA. After all, I believe that the police chief in Inglewood is black, and a fair number of police officers are black. That's probably a good subject for a different thread, but suffice to say that I think that America is the most open and free society in the world. For all of the incidents of abuse by law enforcement officers that occur, we don't have Stalags, mass graves or holding pens filled with political prisoners and dissidents. Sure our system is not perfect, but it is far and away better from the next best alternative.
