What’s the point of knowing your Rights if Police don’t respect them?
My job decided to hire two white women from an external similar organization to come do a “Know Your Rights” training with the Direct Service Team. The idea was that if we knew our hypothetical rights, we would be able to pass the information along to our clients, who needed the knowledge a lot more than we did, being young, black, male and marginalized.
Yes, there is a distinction between “young black male” and “young, black, male, marginalized”, in my opinion. The handful of young black males at my nonprofit have tertiary education, are well-traveled, well-dressed, and command salaries above average for their demographic. While they may have had similar backgrounds or upbringings from the young men who participate in our alternative to incarceration program, their education or their association with us affords them a degree of upward mobility that their counterparts do not have access to. This means that even though the possibility of them being harassed by police still exists by virtue of their brown skin, the frequency of its occurrence or even the likelihood of it escalating is not as high as it would be for the type of man that the system can more easily devour.
Yet instead of doing this training directly with our clients, it was being given to staff, with the assumption that staff would understand and remember enough of it to then convey to their charges later on. The information was a bit complex, spanning from what to do during a police encounter, to tricks that police use to entrap people, to how to get a certificate of rehabilitation. Some of it was straightforward, like the idea that you should respond calmly in a bid to ensure that they do not escalate the situation to violence,or say you won’t speak unless an attorney is present to ensure that they don’t twist your statements into something else entirely, or ask if you are free to leave when they walk up to you, to supposedly eliminate the interaction altogether.
I realized that in theory, these were all good ideas. But the problem, which the presenter acknowledged, was that none of it is guaranteed to work. Police descend on their targets in packs of at least two, and they employ tactics that are designed to disregard or bypass any attempt to invoke the person’s rights, particularly if the person fits the bill of their easiest target. The overarching problem is that police do not play by the rules with certain people, in fact they are intentional about ignoring the rules, and they are largely protected in doing so. If we connected the dots we would realize that this is why cases of police brutality sparked a black lives matter movement; they do not respect the rights of black lives. Therefore, if our main approach is to teach the police’s targets their rights, it is still unlikely to achieve the desired outcome. A young black man from the hood can follow our advice to a T, and still come out brutalized, manipulated, or with a bogus case on his back because police, the ones with social power and authority, can literally do as they please. It may not render our efforts to equip young black men with knowledge of their rights entirely useless, but it simply would not drastically or even significantly change the actual problem in society.
Alluding to this, I asked the presenters whether there was any data or statistical evidence on how well the know your rights measures are implemented by the target population, and whether it works. She responded that it was a great question, and that she only had anecdotal evidence that in certain cases the youth was better off in some way. Anecdotal evidence is simply not enough if we are pouring our time, energy and resources into a solution to an issue that is currently plaguing and traumatizing a very specific cross-section of the community. We were neither presenting to them directly to get real feedback in real time, nor collecting data on whether and how often these tactics result in favorable outcomes when put into practice. Perhaps the question is not whether underprivileged black youth know their rights, but whether the police face enough pressure to respect them.
The presenter went on to mention that of course the best possible thing would be “abolition”, meaning the abolition of police altogether. It is a trending topic in social justice spaces, and an obviously controversial concept that the average citizen who does not work in our field would likely be horrified by. And therein lies the problem. While a majority of people consider police to be a norm and a necessity, an institution that serves and protects us, the debate rages on Twitter about whether abolition is a viable path forward. Folks claim to believe in abolition because it seems progressive and popular, but there is no clear plan or timeline on how we move from police being a founding pillar of society, to them being nonexistent.
The result is that nonprofits and other organizations still operate from a standpoint of trying to help the marginalized to be slightly better off in a justice system designed to consume them, rather than seeking practical ways of dismantling the system itself. On the surface, the know your rights approach seems pro-active, but it may in fact be reactive. It says “Hey, we know the police are out to get you, so here’s what you can do to maybe avoid being screwed over. Good luck!” Then if you prod them a little, it’s “Of course abolition is probably the best thing, but that’s not our actual mandate, and who the heck even knows how to get there, it could take another hundred years if it’s even possible. So this is what we do in the meantime.”
We need to start being honest with ourselves about how much we are and are not willing to truly effect change in the policing system in America. Why are we not measuring the efficacy of our current solutions? Why are nonprofits and thought leaders not devising ways to hold the police accountable and make them change their oppressive ways now, rather than waiting for the next Dr. King to rise up and lead us all to the other side of abolition?
Both my nonprofit and the organization who presented to us should be surveying these young men on how their attempts to invoke their rights with police have panned out. There should be plans to plant cameras in the boroughs to test whether the know your rights rhetoric works. And when that comes back with less than favorable findings, there should be a massive push to focus less on advising the prey and more on disempowering the predator. Until we as an industry with power, influence and resources are willing to do that, the system will continue operating as is and we will continue to be handsomely paid for doing what is in essence the bare minimum.
