Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City

10. An Interview with Derrick Bell: Reflections on Race, Crime, and Legal Activism

10 An Interview with Derrick Bell Reflections on Race, Crime, and Legal Activism Andrea McArdle ON AUGUST 3, 1999, lawyer-scholar-author-activist Derrick Bell joined me for a long, wide-ranging conversation about race, crime, law, direct action, and a pedagogy for a new generation of lawyer-activists. Reflecting on his forty years of advocacy and activism, he encourages us to think about police brutality in a broader economic and political context, keeping the focus on how police violence is connected to, and a symptom of, the racism that persists in our political and social structures. He does not romanticize his years of protest and challenge ; neither has he become a defeatist. In the end, it is a question of doing “what you think you can do.” We have included here highlights from that conversation. AM: Derrick, one of the points we want to bring to light in this anthology is that the police are part of a larger picture, serving larger economic and political forces. DB: Absolutely. And whatever problems there are in having authority, and having to deal with that authority in a measured way, a political and economic climate that encourages excessive responses exacerbates the problem that already exists. So you know, in that sense the economic and political problems that you identified are directly linked up with the way the police are being encouraged to behave. It seems clear to me that the police respond not only to direct instructions as to how to do the job, but also to silently conveyed instructions, which blend with what many of them have 243 known and believed most of their lives about the dangerous character of black people, particularly black men. If the public has this deep sense that blacks are basically dangerous, and if elected officials see it’s politically advantageous to focus on black street crime, they will do it. If the whole prison industry sees an advantage in filling prisons with blacks and Hispanics to bring in employment to local communities, and if the police are a part of that complex, they are contributing to the perpetuation of racism even when they are not actively abusing people. Even when they are doing the job according to the book. When they are not pulling out guns and shooting folk, when they are not beating them up and torturing them. It’s not only those brutality incidents, but the whole function of the system has been twisted. AM: Yet, when people do step back and acknowledge racism and become critical, what seems to exercise them, or at least the media, the most, are instances of abuse by the police. Why the focus on abusive policing as opposed to other ways in which racism manifests itself in the administration of criminal law? DB: I think there is an unconscious willingness to let abuse go on unless it is beyond the pale. Look what it took before Governor Whitman finally conceded that there was a problem with racial profiling by the New Jersey state police. The evidence indicated that profiling was not only happening but was being encouraged, that it was ongoing for several years, that if you wanted to be promoted, you had to bring in any number of blacks. I notice now some officers in New York’s Street Crime Unit are going back to plainclothes operations after six months in uniform, because they haven’t picked up as many guns. Now we have to take it for granted that the police are telling us the truth about the reduced number of guns that have been taken. But it’s clear, if they did that in the white community, if they stopped everybody coming down the street, they would pick up a whole lot of white folks for guns and drugs. I guess I’m saying that I don’t know that it is a cause for either praise or potential for improvement that the major incidents of brutality get a lot of media attention for awhile. As far as the media goes, you know the word is that “if it bleeds it leads.” Now usually that’s blacks committing crime and particularly blacks committing crimes against whites. That gets plenty of attention, but serious in244 ANDREA McARDLE cidents of police brutality do also, people turn on the television and they talk about it and debate it one way...