Black Police, White Society

Conclusions

CONCLUSIONS In this book I have attempted to report on the accomplishments and failures of black policemen during a period of massive social change by drawing upon material found in journals, newspapers, books, and department documents. But mostly I have relied upon a long series of interviews with 46 black New York City policemen who, by and large, were quite willing to tell me how they are treated by their superiors, how they get along with white officers, and how they view their role in the black community. This work seems incomplete, however, without offering my own views on the issues discussed by my respondel1ts. As a member of the NYPD since 1966, and one who has served in a variety of investigative, patrol, and supervisory capacities in predominantly black areas of the city, I have become increasingly sensitized to a number of these issues and to the problems facing blacks and other minorities who have had to deal with a "white-dominated" department. While my assessment of these aspects of the black policeman's working world has undoubtedly been influenced by what my respondents have told me, it has also been shaped by what I have read and by what I have observed in the streets and station houses and have generally experienced as a member of the department. It is to these views largely that the remaining pages of this book are devoted. Discrimination on the Job In the foreword to a recent book depicting the history of blacks in the NYPD, Robert J. Magnum, a black New York State judge and former member of the police department between 1941 and 1958, summed up the conditions under which black police worked in those days: 244 CONCLUSIONS C=onditions. . . were almost unbearable, and we, in the third generation , were informed that they were even worse before 1931 and during the 1930s. . . . The assignment of Black police officers had been confined almost exclusively to three precincts throughout the city-the 28th and 32nd Precincts in Central Harlem and the 79th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Blacks at the time were almost never assigned to special assignments , such as the Detective Division, Plainclothes, Radio Motor Patrol and were completely excluded from elite special squads, e.g., Missing Persons, Burglary, Forgery, Safe and Loft and Truck, Pickpocket , Emergency Service, and so on. . . . Black superior officers were almost non-existent; Black officers received the most undesirable assignments; disciplinary actions against Blacks and against Whites were Wleven at the expense of Blacks and racial slurs by White patrolmen and superior officers against Black officers and Black citizens were commonplace.1 Is racial discrimination still rooted in the system-wide operation of the police department as Judge Magnum implied? Are black police still confined to black precincts and districts? Are they still arbitrarily denied access to promotions and to specialized assignments , positions and duties? In short, how far have black cops come in recent years toward achieving full equality and acceptance in the New York City police department? I think it is safe to say that the type of institutional discrimination outlined by Judge Magnum above has been all bllt eliminated in the department. Today, blacks are not only actively encouraged to join the police service but, once hired, they are assigned the same basic duties as whites, promoted through civil service without regard to race, occupy in many instances command positions over whites (a situation that rarely obtained prior to the 1950s) and have available for the first time avenues ofgrievance redress both within and outside the organization.2 While the data collected for this study generally support the contentions expressed above, they also clearly indicate that black accomplishments did not occur in a vacuum, but were linked to and shaped by an interconnecting series of legal, social, and political events that were taking place in larger society. In a great number of major cities, for example, legislation had been enacted in the seventies to insure that local government agencies were in compliance with earlier Federal rulings aimed at eliminating dis- Conclusions 245 crimination in hiring, promotion, and assignment. Yet, as I have attempted to show, neither the enactment of antidiscrimination laws nor the creation of city agencies to oversee departmental practices regarding racial minorities were, by themselves, responsible for the entry of blacks into the police service in substantially greater numbers or for the movement of many of these officers out of...