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Racism in Police Departments Must Be on the National Agenda
By Keith Rushing I hope that the U.S. Department of Justice in the Barack Obama administration will do what none have done before: take serious measures to end the rampant racism and abuse of power in police departments across America. Of course, we can’t expect miracles in the span of four years, but hopefully, given Obama’s awareness and sensitivity to racial matters, a much greater effort will be made to expose and punish rogue departments by enforcing existing laws barring racial discrimination. The racism I’m writing about isn’t the typical bias that People of Color often deal with–being passed over for a job or a promotion, being eyed suspiciously while shopping, or paying more for a car than you should have to. I’m referring to ugly racial hatred that’s not only tolerated but sanctioned by police supervisors and ignored by prosecutors. Typically, those who speak up about racism or brutality in these departments are punished and nothing gets done because cops who want to keep their jobs know to be quiet and uphold the Blue Wall of Silence: see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Last week, Raymond Carnation, a former Philadelphia police officer wrote to this blog about the racism he witnessed first-hand among his fellow officers and the retribution he suffered for speaking up. He was one of those who violated the code of silence, and, as a result, supervisors in the department harassed, demeaned and intimidated him and two fellow officers, Michael and William McKenna. The three former officers won a total of $10 million in federal court in May. (They’re still waiting on a federal judge to rule on motions that have been filed so they can receive their award.) According to court documents filed in their case in a federal appellate court, the problems for Carnation and the McKenna brothers began in 1997 when they were transferred to the 7-Squad in the city’s 25th District–a high-crime area of Philly known as the Badlands. They officers, who are White, found an intense racial divide between Black and White Officers. Their friendly relationships with their African-American colleagues made them suspect. Carnation said he didn’t experience a big divide in the 2-squad, where he spent most of his career. But a few months after being transferred, he spoke to his supervisor Sgt. John Moroney—who has since been promoted–about what he’d been hearing about the racial divide. Continually speaking up about this divide would lead to his downfall and the end of his career. Moroney, was, in fact a big part of the problem. According to court documents, he would assign Black officers to walk the beat in bad weather, while White officers got to work inside. Moroney would use “nigger” and “critter” to describe the Black officers he supervised. Carnation would object to those words being used in his presence. The retribution that Carnation and the McKennas suffered included: not being given adequate backup in dangerous situations; the words, snitches and rats, being scrawled on bathroom walls; threats to exile them to the farthest police post from their homes; threats to ruin their lives; a physical assault and a wrongful arrest. When the harassment became intolerable and their complaints went unaddressed, they filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and civil lawsuits against the city of Philadelphia in federal court. Several Black officers who suffered the abuse joined them in the federal litigation. Michael McKenna, according to the suit, was attacked by an officer and suffered a broken wrist just minutes after being threatened by Moroney. One deputy police commissioner handcuffed Bill McKenna’s wife after she stopped by his house to complain about the abuse her husband was undergoing. She was charged with disorderly conduct and harassment, prosecuted, forced to pay a $100 fine, and sentenced to three months probation. It seems obvious that the district attorney engaged in malicious prosecution in this case, upholding the Code of Silence, by prosecuting the woman for harassment, even though that charge in Pennsylvania only applies to repeated acts and not a single occurrence of unwanted contact. Not surprisingly, the district attorney failed to prosecute the officer who attacked Michael McKenna. One reason institutionalized racism is allowed to persist in police departments, is because people who have the power to do something about it, keep silent, while those running these department conspire to keep it safe for the Good Ol’ Boys. The abuse that Carnation and the McKennas suffered provides further evidence of how broken this country’s justice system is because theirs wasn’t an isolated case but part of a systemic problem of injustice throughout the country. Neither Mayors, nor city councils, state legislatures, nor Congress has done anything about it. Far from blameless are newspapers, which prop up the code of silence by doing an inadequate job of reporting about such cases—if they report them at all. For instance, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a four-sentence long story after the jury awarded these men $10 million. I covered crime and police for about 12 years in Connecticut and Virginia and jumped at the chance to expose racist abuse in police departments unlike my colleagues. Unlike them, I was a Black man who grew up in New York City where so many unarmed Black males were killed by officers that I came to see officers as potential threats, not saviors. I angered cops more than a few times by digging for information when I received complaints of police brutality or a wrongful shooting. I reported those stories over the objections of the officers I dealt with, fought to get them adequate space in the paper, and pushed for continued follow-up stories. Thus reading through court documents about the abuse Carnation and McKenna faced came as no shock to me. This behavior goes on all over America. Just weeks after I started working in Bridgeport Connecticut, I met Dave Daniels, was then president of the Bridgeport Guardians, an organization of African-American police officers. Daniels was a drug awareness education officer and couldn’t work the street as a regular patrol officer because every time he attempted to use his radio, his communications would be interfered with by officers who wanted to prevent him from doing patrol work. Daniels came to the Connecticut Post one morning with a small noose in his pocket that had been place under the hood of his patrol car, a clear threat with allusions to lynching. The police force in Bridgeport operated with such an intense racial division that most Black and White officers had nothing to say to each other that wasn’t directly work related. The Black officers had successfully sued to bring Black, Latino officers into the department along with women. They had gone to court to expose racism in hiring and police brutality. In one case that still disturbs me, a veteran White police officer in Bridgeport was alleged to have said he was going to “get a spic” before he retired. Not long afterwards, he shot and killed a Latino teenager who was allegedly riding a stolen bike. The department immediately went into cover-up mode, a knife was thrown down at the scene to make it appear that the youth was armed, and a story manufactured with the assistance of police brass. This matter was exposed in court and, of course, deepened the racial divide in the department because some black officers testified about the wrongdoing, violating the code. A White officer, Michael Dubosz, who testified about seeing the throw-down weapon was a turncoat in the eyes of much of the department, like McKenna and Carnation. Dubosz had to handle parking tickets instead of patrolling and suffered psychological stress from the abuse he faced, which included gunshots being fired into his home and his lawn being trashed. Carnation and the McKennas lost their jobs and have suffered from depression because of what they went through. “I’m on SSD [disability]. I’m dealing with so much depression,” Carnation told me last week. “That was my calling, to be in the police department. I got on the job at [age] 20. I loved it.” Carnation lost his house and hasn’t recovered from the stress. “I’m still having dreams about it. I can’t work.” The United States cannot continue to speak out internationally about human rights abuses with any credibility when abuses in our own backyards are ignored. Fortunately, we have for the first time a president coming into the White house who seems to understand that America is not supposed to be a nation where police get to abuse and brutalize citizens and get away with it. I truly hope we see a major change in how police abuse is dealt with, so that four years from now, we can look back on cases like Carnation’s as part of this nation’s difficult history and not its current condition. As Carnation’s lawsuit showed numerous forces within the police department came together to mess up these men’s lives. Despite the jury award, which, in a sense, vindicates them, the racist supervisors were successful in getting rid of them and ruining their lives. In fact, the supervisors they suffered under now have higher ranking positions in the department. “It’s like the Mafia,” Carnation said of Philadelphia’s police department. “Once you go across these people, your career is dead.” He’s still trying to get the word out about what happened to him in the 7-Squad. “You’ve got to help these officers who try to set the record straight and get ex-communicated from their careers. They kicked us out to die and no one was backing us up.” Rushing, is the writer-editor for Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization that advocates for racial justice.
2 Responses to “Racism in Police Departments Must Be on the National Agenda”
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December 22nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
12/22/08
Black people here in Jacksonville,Fl.,have witnessed a tremendous increase in our people being murdered by police officers.This city’s Mayor , Sheriff ,Fire Chief and State Attorney are all Republicans.Therefore everytime the verdict against police officers killing a Black person is always justifiable homicide.Each time a throwdown gun is either put in the victims hand ,or dropped close to their body.To make matters worse Jacksonville does not have an independent Review Board made up of all citizens.
Andr’e X Neal
January 2nd, 2009 at 10:32 am
This morning around 2:30 a.m I watched “Secrets of New York” a troubling, but not at this point a surprising revelation.