18.12.2014

The cauldron boils over

Racial repression has provoked mass protest. Jim Creegan responds to the two high-profile killings by the US police

The protests that have erupted in cities from coast to coast over the refusal of grand juries to indict the policemen who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner are spontaneous and, perhaps more significantly, interracial.

Both unarmed black men were shot dead after refusing to comply immediately with police attempts to halt what were at most minor infractions: Brown, 18, for initially resisting orders to stop walking down the middle of a street with a friend in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri; Garner, 43, for making a verbal protest against the announced intention of the men in blue to arrest him for allegedly selling single, untaxed cigarettes on a street in Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City. Brown, who ran away from officer Darren Wilson after having already been shot in a scuffle at the window of the police car, then stopped and turned toward Wilson - to attack him, in the policeman’s version of events; to surrender, according to over a dozen witnesses, most of whom also said that Brown had his hands half or all the way up when riddled with 12 bullets. His body was left in the street for four hours before it was taken away.

Garner, remonstrating that he had committed no crime and was tired of being harassed, was placed in a chokehold from behind by officer Daniel Pantaleo, and brought to the ground. Lying on his stomach with the policeman’s arm still around his neck, and other cops kneeling on his back, the asthmatic, 350-pound Garner complained, “I can’t breathe!” at least 11 times, as medics stood by without attempting to interfere. He died on the way to hospital. In contrast to the Ferguson incident, the events surrounding Garner’s death left little room for conflicting eyewitness accounts. A bystander captured it all on a mobile-phone camera. The city medical examiner ruled the death a homicide due to blockage of the windpipe and compression of the chest.

When grand juries in both cases - the two decisions came a week and a half apart - refused to indict the policemen involved for murder, or even on lesser charges of manslaughter or assault, first hundreds, then thousands, poured into the streets of major and medium-sized cities and towns. In Ferguson enraged crowds, after months of ongoing street protests, hurled missiles at police, attacked and looted local businesses, and staged sit-ins at big chain stores on the main Christmas-season shopping day. Then, after the second decision on December 3, demonstrators in New York, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area, moving briskly through the streets of different neighbourhoods, knocked down police barriers, staged ‘die-ins’ in downtown squares, and blocked major traffic arteries. They raised their hands in the air, chanting “Don’t shoot”, and “I can’t breathe!” The protests were made up of a combination of black, brown and white youth never seen before on America’s streets.

Police immunity

Grand juries are not charged with establishing guilt or innocence - only with determining if there is sufficient evidence to proceed with a criminal trial. Because the evidentiary bar is very low, these panels typically function as a prosecutor’s rubber stamp. One New York judge famously remarked that a district attorney (public prosecutor) could convince a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich”. Of 162,000 cases brought before federal grand juries in 2010, only 11 did not result in indictments. Although the Brown and Garner cases were heard in state rather than federal courts, failure to indict is also rare on this level.

The above generalisations do not seem to apply, however, when deliberations concern possible charges against members of the police force. Of five cases against police heard by grand juries during the tenure of the St Louis County prosecutor in charge of the Ferguson investigation, a Democrat named Bob McCullough, no indictments resulted. This may have had something to do with the fact that McCullough’s father, brother, nephew and cousin were all cops, and that his father was killed by a fleeing suspect. In an attempt to discredit the victim, Ferguson police, shortly after the shooting, released a security video of Michael Brown and his friend stealing a packet of cigars from the shelf of a local grocery, and pushing aside a shop clerk trying to stop them. This incident took place immediately before Brown’s fatal encounter with police.

Subsequently released transcripts have revealed that, as in most cases that depend upon eyewitness testimony, there were conflicting accounts of the Brown shooting, and forensic evidence to support officer Darren Wilson’s claim that Brown had tried to grab his gun through the window of the police car. (Brown’s blood was on the gun). A few witnesses favourable to Brown retracted their initial testimony in the course of the hearing. Most did not. But the entire procedure was a clear departure from the norm. The prosecutor usually presents to the grand jury only a few items of evidence deemed sufficient to obtain an indictment, and leaves it to the trial jury to sort out the rest. In this case, McCullough declared his intention to set “all the facts” before the panel. And, although potential defendants rarely testify before grand juries, the cop in question, Darren Wilson, was presented as the lead witness. He gave his account over the course of several hours without being cross-examined, thus being permitted to frame the entire narrative of what happened on the fatal afternoon of August 9. Wilson played to white fears by portraying Brown as having a demonic facial expression and grabbing his arm with the strength of professional heavyweight wrestler, Hulk Hogan. In short, since the case was presented less like an attempt to get an indictment than a brief for the defence, the result was hardly surprising.

But, many naively thought, the case of Eric Garner, being completely unambiguous, was bound to turn out differently The video of Garner being strangled and crushed by half a dozen of ‘New York’s finest’ despite repeated cries of distress would guarantee the filing of at least some criminal charge against officer Pantaleo, who performed the lethal chokehold. They were wrong. Nor could Pantaleo’s total exoneration be chalked up to the persistent southern racism in a state like Missouri. New York City has always been viewed as a north-eastern liberal bastion. However, Staten Island - where Garner was done to death, and where the case was heard - is the most solidly white of the city’s five boroughs. It is also the preferred residence of a large number of New York cops.

But, despite local differences, the simple fact is that prosecutors and police - north, south, east or west - are part of the same repressive state apparatus; they routinely work hand in glove to obtain evidence and bring charges leading to convictions. Prosecutors cannot therefore go after the police without undermining their own work. It was for this reason that black and liberal organisations called for the naming of special prosecutors to handle both cases - something the governors of Missouri and New York declined to do.

The Brown shooting was less a political threat for top elected officials in Missouri who, despite local black rage and a national outcry, rely on a white voting base that tends to support the police. The governor of Missouri, a ‘law-and-order’ Democrat named Jay Nixon, did not hesitate to mobilise the National Guard in advance of the grand jury decision to deal with any disturbances. Garner’s death did, however, present an acute dilemma for New York mayor Bill de Blasio. A standard-bearer for the left wing of the Democratic Party, de Blasio was elected in 2012 as a result of a campaign that emphasised income inequality - he called contemporary New York “a tale of two cities”, rich and poor. His interracial marriage - his wife and two children are black - was a key factor in cementing the combined liberal-minority support that put him in office.

However, de Blasio understands that alienating the police and being perceived as ‘soft on crime’ could solidify rightwing white opinion against him, as well as cause a falling-off of white liberal support. To guard his right flank, de Blasio appointed as police commissioner Bill Bratton, who, in the same capacity under an earlier Republican mayor, Rudi Giuliani, pioneered the currently favoured policies of ‘zero tolerance’ for petty street offences implicated in Garner’s death.

On the other hand, de Blasio is in no position to ignore the torrents of black, Hispanic and white-youth indignation now coursing through the streets. He is attempting to walk this tightrope by posing the whole question on the level of ‘feelings’ and ‘perceptions’ of different communities; he laments the “perception” amongst minorities that they are being treated unequally rather than the objective realities of racism; he talks about the need to re-establish “trust” between police and “communities of colour”. To this end, he intends to make the police wear cameras and undergo sensitivity training. For these anodyne pronouncements, and for these cosmetic measures, the head of the policemen’s union has denounced de Blasio for throwing his people “under the bus”.

De Blasio has also relied heavily on the advice and support of Al Sharpton, whose Harlem-headquartered National Action Network provides a platform for victims of police brutality. Although the victims speak from that platform in far blunter terms than the mayor, and Sharpton presents himself as a militant crusader against police abuse, his ultimate loyalty is to the Democratic Party . Sharpton led a march of 10,000 on Washington on December 13 to demand federal intervention in cases of police misconduct. Few words of criticism concerning president Barack Obama were heard from the speakers’ platform.

Obama faces a similar dilemma. The recent Republican sweep of the Senate was due, among other things, to low black voter turnout. Yet, fearful of alienating white Democrats, he has also counselled respect for the legal process and the grand jury decisions. He advocates more or less the same measures as de Blasio, also talking about the need to rebuild ‘trust’ in law enforcement, and allocating federal funds for police cameras. His outgoing attorney general, Eric Holder, has announced federal investigations into the Brown and Garner cases. Similar probes have dragged on for many months in the past, with few palpable results.

Why now?

Anyone familiar with the history of relations between ‘law enforcement’ and America’s black and brown neighbourhoods is aware that abuse, brutality and the murder of unarmed civilians - often accompanied by simmering black and brown rage - did not begin last summer. Yet not since the 1960s, when riots triggered by high-handed police tactics broke out in most major urban ghettos, have local flash floods converged in a rising tide of national anger. Why now?

Many social and political events are due not to a single cause, but a gradual accretion of several tendencies militating in the same direction. This seems to be the case with Brown/Garner. Certainly, the wide use of mobile-phone cameras, as well as social media, have played a part, providing instant visual refutations of many phoney police alibis. More important has been the attention focused on black vulnerability and white impunity, since Trayvon Martina, a black teenager walking through a Florida housing development, was shot and killed in 2012 by a trigger-happy racist vigilante, George Zimmerman, who was subsequently acquitted.

Stoking the anger are also the multiple cases of police abuse that have received widespread publicity in the interval between the Garner killing in July and the decisions not to indict.

l August 5 (a few days before the Brown shooting): a 22-year-old black man, John Crawford, was shot dead by police in the aisle of a Wal-Mart store in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. The police were responding to an emergency call from a store clerk who said that Crawford was brandishing a rife. As it turned out, the weapon was an air rifle, displayed on the shelves, that Crawford was examining. The police said they warned Crawford, who was pointing the rifle at them. The Wal-Mart security video showed that Crawford was shot seconds after the arrival of the police, and never pointed the toy gun at them.

l November 20: Akai Gurley, a black man of 26, was killed when the drawn gun of a policeman went off, supposedly by accident, while two officers were patrolling the stairwell of one of Brooklyn’s most crime-ridden and dilapidated housing projects. Gurley and his girlfriend had just entered the landing below to walk down the stairs. Upon becoming aware that Gurley had been shot, the cops called not an ambulance, but the police union, presumably to enquire as to the extent of their liability.

l November 22: Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, was riddled with bullets by police in a city park in Cleveland, Ohio. Rice, whom police described in their report as a “young black male” was playing with a toy pistol. The cops said that he had reached for his waistband, but their own video showed no such motion, and also revealed that Rice was shot two seconds after their arrival.

l December 2: Rumain Brisbon, 34, was shot and killed in Phoenix, Arizona. Brisbon apparently became involved in a scuffle with police after they had chased him into the block of flats where he lived, in the belief he was involved in a drug deal. Actually, Brisbon was bringing a McDonald’s-bought meal home to his young daughter. The police said they had felt an object in his pocket that they believed to be a gun. It turned out to be a bottle containing pain medication.

It is unclear whether this rash of killings represents a greater aggressiveness on the part of police or increased attention to such incidents as a result of the Trayvon Martin case. But there can be no doubt that the economic crisis that began in 2008 - and remains a reality for the majority of working and poor people, despite all official talk of recovery - has increased the black unemployment rate, so that now it is more than double that of whites, and added an even greater measure of tension and bitterness to the cauldron of American race relations, which is now boiling over.

Effects for causes

The remedies thus far prescribed for the casual police killing of young black males - sensitivity training, police cameras, more minority police, and enhanced prosecution - are premised on the assumption that the problem to be addressed is individual police misconduct or some kind of misunderstanding between communities.

Such proposed measures, while perhaps useful in the short term, are borne of the liberal myopia that takes effects for causes. The cops who harass, arrest, strangle and gun down unarmed blacks are not rogue elements, though some are no doubt more violence-prone and/or racist than others in an occupation that attracts violence-prone and racist individuals. Rather, they are carrying out the kinds of repressive policies this country has employed to cope with the ‘race problem’ since the end of slavery, and whose current instantiation has taken shape in the decades since the 1960s.

The four million dark-skinned men and women who were emancipated at the end of the American Civil War became the legal equals of whites, but they bore an enormous economic, educational and cultural deficit that made equality in any but the most formal sense impossible without a major social effort. For 250 years they had been held in bondage, driven under the lash, prevented from forming stable families, acquiring property and skills or learning how to read and write. In a profit-driven society, where reform efforts never remain at the top of the agenda very long, this deficit has never been fully made up. Only during two brief periods in American history - a hundred years apart - were there any serious attempts to overcome the yawning gap that separates black from white, and both were quickly abandoned.

The reconstruction regime in the south - introduced by radical Republicans in Congress in the years following the Civil War, and enforced by the federal troops who occupied the south - was ended in the 1870s. Under reconstruction, serious efforts were made at land reform and the education of the black population; the franchise was expanded, and black officials were elected for the first time in the country’s history, not only to local and state legislatures, but even to the US Senate and House of Representatives. However, the onset of a depression and heightened class struggle in the north made reconstruction both too expensive and too radical in its political implications for the industrial capitalists who dominated northern politics after the war. As federal troops withdrew from the south, former slaves and their descendants were left to the tender mercies of the Ku Klux Klan, which had arisen to fight all efforts to enforce black equality. The Jim Crow regime of racial segregation and lynch-mob terror that prevailed for the next hundred years ended only as a result of the civil rights struggles of the early 60s.

More violent in some ways than even slavery, the Jim Crow regime did give southern blacks one crucial advantage denied them as slaves: they could vote against segregation with their feet. And flee the south they did, in their hundreds of thousands, then millions - lured by the prospect of newly opened industrial jobs in the country’s non-southern cities during and after the two world wars. It was the pressure of this population, partly in the form of massive rioting, which convulsed urban ghettos beginning in 1964, that led to the second major reform attempt - less ambitious than the first, but by no means trivial. Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programmes included Medicare, Medicaid, Aid to Mothers with Dependent Children (popularly known as welfare), job training, aid to higher education and a special educational initiative, Project Head Start, providing free pre-school programmes for minority children.

But, like the first, this second effort to balance the racial scales proved short-lived. The earliest social programmes to be curtailed fell victim to the burgeoning costs of the Vietnam war. Richard Nixon drastically reduced funding for many social programmes, and Jimmy Carter followed suit. As the country sunk into the economic doldrums of the mid-70s, support for Great Society schemes among most whites began to wane. A rightward-moving ruling class, aided by opportunistic politicians, increasingly pitted whites against blacks in a fight for shrinking incomes and government benefits. The white ‘tax revolt’ of the late 70s was premised on the view that whites were being forced to pay for schemes aimed at supporting an idle and parasitic black underclass. As the ‘white backlash’ gained momentum, federal programmes were drastically curtailed - first under Ronald Reagan, but also under Bill Clinton, who abolished welfare payments for single mothers in favour of ‘workfare’. It was in this atmosphere that the government reverted once again to the country’s default solution to the ‘race problem’: repression. The new national regime of intimidation, incrimination and incarceration that is in place today began to take shape in these years.

Two worlds

Although the black middle class has greatly expanded over the past half century, perhaps more than a fifth of the black population - in addition to millions of immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Mexico - remain mired in urban ghettos, isolated from the rest of society, materially and culturally deprived, and with little in the way of future prospects.

There are points of contact among black, brown and white, mainly in the workplace, among the more affluent, and the many community colleges that serve the working class. But those lucky enough to have a job or be enrolled at university go home at the end of the day to two separate worlds that view one another with suspicion and sometimes loathing. The life of the ghetto is dominated by the daily struggle for existence and fear of criminal gangs, the most powerful of which is seen as the cops. To many middle and working class whites, on the other hand, minority neighbourhoods are a source of street crime and urban blight, a realm in which the ‘family values’, civic responsibility and methodical upward striving they claim to prize are dissolved in a sea of wantonness and violence. Police are the ‘thin blue line’ standing between them and social entropy.

The existence of these two worlds is a principal barrier to working class consciousness in the United States, just as the massive influx of immigrants is throwing up a similar barrier in Europe. And, while notions of racial superiority/inferiority, and active discrimination, are alive and well in certain places, especially the south, they are no longer acceptable in most quarters of white society. Differences are spoken of as ‘cultural’ rather than biological. Yet, sight being the dominant human sense, the fact that the inhabitants of these two worlds are of a different colour reinforces the impression of separateness on both sides of the divide.

The people who count in the increasingly bourgeoisified urban core - business people, big medium and small, yuppies in flight from the boring suburban existence of their parents, and the politicians who pander to them - may not have an intrinsic interest in persecuting black and brown folk. Many have liberal social values. But they desire a sanitary and smoothly functioning city life, with safe streets and good schools. Minority-group members, although they do perform most of the low-level service industry jobs, have come to be regarded less as a reserve army of labour than as a surplus population, for which there is no place in the modern, globalised economy. As such, they figure mainly as an impediment to the ‘quality of life’. Particularly troubling in this regard are black and Hispanic males between the ages of 15 and 30, viewed as more rambunctious and crime-prone than other age groups.

Thus, in a period when reformist answers are a distant memory, the only viable option seems to be to intimidate and contain this demographic, but to do so without resort to overt racism. This is the essence of the policies to which Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others have fallen victim. And this is why it makes so little sense to speak, as establishment politicians and liberals do, of individual police bias and misconduct. The object of this kind of policing is not to apprehend individual criminals, but, with the use of slender legal pretexts, to maintain unrelenting pressure upon an entire segment of the population. The methods for achieving this purpose have been developed and perfected in recent decades.

A second article will examine contours of the current police/prison regime, and the potential of the movement against it.