The Thread of Racial Bias In Policing Runs Through Memphis, Louisville, Minneapolis, Ferguson, and Probably Your City Too
As a White mom of two bi-racial sons, I’ve invested a lot of energy in improving interactions between law enforcement and marginalized communities, from conducting Bridging Cultures learning sessions with officers to helping people navigate the process of filing a complaint against a police officer to previously serving on the police review board in Dallas. There is still so much work to do.
The Louisville Police Department is the latest in a long list of police departments confirmed to engage in patterns and practices of racial discrimination in policing. Other departments recently added to the list include Minneapolis, Aurora, CO, Chicago, and Ferguson, MO.
Yet in the wake of the death of Tyre Nichols, a young, unarmed African American Memphis man, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced it will focus its investigation of the Memphis Police Department on police training, policies, de-escalation efforts, and specialized units. The Memphis City Council recently adopted measures restricting traffic stops and increasing the power of civilian oversight. In attempting to explain how the beating death happened, the Memphis Chief of Police and others have pointed to insufficient officer supervision.
Whatever police policy and procedure weaknesses the death of Tyre Nichols reveals, I believe they are superimposed over a documented, systemic disregard for the dignity of Black people across our nation that absolutely must be rectified. While there are plenty of facts and data that support this belief, I’ll begin with a difficult but necessary question. How many of us can say definitively, throughout our lives, that we have treated African American people with the same level of dignity and respect as we’ve treated White people? As a White woman, I know this question requires not a quick answer, but honest introspection.
My parents sent me to desegregated schools and taught me to be nice to everyone, and I was. Yet, like many White children who grew up in 1980s Dallas, I nevertheless unconsciously and unintentionally absorbed a subtle sense of racial superiority. For example, when I worked several summers at my downtown church, I remember there was an unspoken message that the Black and Latino children we served were victims of poor parenting and needed our White middle-class intervention. Even though our intentions were good, we looked down on the families we served from a self-appointed position above them. When I became conscious of this thinking in my 20s, I worked to unlearn it so that I could work alongside and collaborate with people of color to improve our community. I’m not about condemning or blaming myself or anyone else. I’m about learning and healing.
The practice of treating African American people with less dignity — in other words, racism — is not restricted to law enforcement. Law enforcement is one of many systems in our country operating under the same historic premise that White people are of higher value than Black people. Consider the well documented pattern of appraising homes at higher values when all evidence of Black ownership has been removed, or the over-representation in the media of White women who are missing compared to missing women of color. Yet racism in law enforcement deserves immediate, heightened attention because officers have the authority to use force, restrain freedom, and even take life. By most accounts, Tyre Nichols was a beautiful soul who brought joy to those who loved him. And now, whatever more he had to give to the world is lost.
In 2001–02, I served on the Dallas Police Citizens Review Board, and in the 90s, I worked with fellow citizens who filed complaints of police abuse of authority. I believe anyone who claims that race is not an issue in the case of Tyre Nichols because the officers who beat him to death are Black is sidestepping the deeper, more difficult truth. Peer-reviewed medical studies show that police kill unarmed Black people at 310% the rate they kill unarmed White people. Most police officers across the country are committed to constitutional policing, and yet our nation has a history of police violence, largely perpetrated against people of color, sanctioned by systemic lack of accountability, that is fueling efforts to abolish policing.
More than 70% of law enforcement officers told Pew Research recently that officers who do a poor job are not held accountable. In the same poll, a majority of African American officers said high profile fatal encounters between police and Black people are evidence of a broader problem. If the goal is for communities of color to work with and support law enforcement, racial bias in policing cannot be ignored.
Many ask whether the Memphis officers would have beaten a White man to death. I wonder what they would have done if a White man had stepped up to stand beside Tyre. A month after his fatal beating, White neighbors of a young, unarmed Black man in Seattle stepped between their Black neighbor and police officers who were pointing guns and shouting orders. Instantly, the situation deescalated, and the officers left the scene.
This story, along with the studies and polls, bear out the difficult truth that our nation has not recovered from its atrocious tradition of devaluing people of African heritage — originally devised to justify slavery and handed down more and more subtly from each generation of White families to the next ever since. Many scholars of color going back at least to W.E.B. DuBois have shown this practice is so pervasive and insidious that it can cause Black people to unconsciously internalize societal biases against their own group.
Even so, violence against African Americans by African American officers is not nearly as common as violence by White officers. In fact, relative to White officers, African American and Latino officers make far fewer stops and arrests, and they use force less often, especially against Black civilians, and especially in large majority-Black areas. Yes, Black and Latino police officers want to go home after work each day, and yet most seem to be able to do so while valuing the lives of people who look like them.
If the DOJ were to conduct a patterns and practices investigation in Memphis, no doubt they would find the same racial pattern seen nationally. In the past seven years, Black residents across Memphis were three times as likely as White residents to be subjected to physical force by police officers, according to department data. News outlets now are reporting the stories of other African American residents of Memphis who say they have been treated violently by members of the SCORPION unit. Yet these complaints seem to have been overshadowed by accolades for the SCORPION unit’s results.
These complaints beg the question, if Tyre Nichols had not died, would we even be having this conversation? Would these officers have been charged with a crime or even disciplined? Not likely. Historically, law enforcement officers rarely have been disciplined for beating up people who survive. Why? It appears the Memphis officers issued their barrage of commands for their body camera microphones while obscuring the camera lens to support the false reports they planned in advance to file. A former officer who admits having coached officers how to write false reports says this practice is systemic in policing. The officers apparently didn’t consider there could be other cameras recording.
With African Americans representing just 14% and Latinos representing 19% of the U.S. population, some try to obscure the documented racialized pattern by disingenuously comparing raw numbers. Others argue that the disparities make sense because there are higher crime rates in Black neighborhoods. Yet research shows African American men and women are more likely to be arrested, charged, and convicted of crimes than White people who commit the same crimes.
Even those who are not moved by the racial patterns, lost human potential, and grief suffered by families might be interested in the financial costs. At least $1.5 billion has been spent by municipalities across the nation to settle claims of police misconduct involving thousands of officers repeatedly accused of wrongdoing.
Proposed federal legislation and municipal code revisions are only part of the solution. Because human behavior is informed by thoughts, our broken system will only be rectified when leadership doesn’t just pay lip service to the equal value of all lives, but prioritizes the personal examination of blind spots, the recognition of unconscious thoughts that devalue people because of their racial or other identities, and the intentional replacement of those thoughts with high value for those lives. When leadership consistently models and teaches these practices, hires people committed to engaging in these practices, and holds employees accountable for these practices, supervisors won’t have to repeatedly remind officers, as a University of Memphis student said recently, that they “can’t snatch a man out of a car and beat him brutally.”
What would change in policing and in our world if law enforcement culture held every public servant accountable for demonstrably valuing the lives of Black, Latino, Native American, and Asian people as highly as we expect them to value the lives of White people? How many more crimes could we solve? How much more collaboration could there be between law enforcement and communities? How much more of the police budget could go to officer pay? How many more children would still have their parents? How many more parents would still have their children? And how many more people could fulfill their potential and offer their brilliant ideas, talents, and services to our communities? I hope, by focusing on all we can gain, we will find the motivation to invest in rectifying our system.
As CEO of WordSmooth, Patty Bates-Ballard consults with school districts, police departments, non-profit organizations, and corporations to help their teams communicate effectively across differences and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A trained mediator, Patty is the author of ACE-ing Conflict: Three Steps for Resolving Conflict Across Differences. She honed the ACE-ing Conflict process over her 25+ years of leading Harvest Respect learning sessions, community dialogues, mediations, and a series of court-ordered learning sessions for a member of the Aryan Nations. As a community organizer in the 1990s, Patty worked with Dallasites who filed complaints of police abuse of authority. In 2000, she served on the Dallas Police Citizens Review Board. Her understanding of racism has been informed by many mentors, colleagues, and friends of color, including David Ballard, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, Elizabeth Flores-Velasquez, Marvin Crenshaw, Liu Yuan, Louise Kirby, Joyce Lockley, Gregory Smith, Ramiro Lopez, Peggy Larney, Diane Ragsdale, Travis Wortham, Gregory Jones, Levi Williams, Khaleef Hasan, Darryl Brown, Tomi Fatunde, Julius Awafong, Martin Burrell, Domingo Garcia, and Roy Williams. A mother of two bi-racial sons, she volunteers with the African American Museum of Dallas.
