The Black Police Experience: A case study of a Baltimore cop officer in a heinous and brutal encounter with a black man

Many cities in the U.S. can be traced back to the start of law enforcement in this country and the repetitive police tactics that torment and kill people who aren’t white. It is a history rooted in slave patrols and militias designed to protect white people’s lives and livelihoods from rebellion among enslaved Black people. The grief and oppressiveness of those systems is what makes the rap, soul, blues and rock n roll music this city has given the world.

A retired Montgomery County, Maryland police captain, she’s known by her maiden name. She founded The Black Police Experience to educate the community about the intersection of law enforcement and the community. She is also a professor of criminal justice at Howard University in Washington, DC, and at Montgomery College in Maryland. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion.

Black officers are embracing brutality and aligning themselves with a police culture that calls for loyalty to even the most heinous of police behaviors, like beating subjects who run from the police.

On January 7, after pulling over a black man for driving erratically, officers used pepper spray on him after he was kicked to the ground, shouting threats. The Memphis Police Chief said they had not been able to confirm that he was driving recklessly when he was stopped.

The officers then milled around, with no one rendering aid in the critical minutes following the beating. It took an ambulance more than 20 minutes to arrive on the scene, and Nichols, who suffered “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to preliminary results of an autopsy commissioned by attorneys for his family, died three days later.

It was clear to me, based on my 28 years of experience as a former police officer and captain, that the officers lacked supervision and showed little professional maturity, that the situation would end in a deadly encounter.

The Black community is in a state of shock since the five officers charged with murder are all black. People in the Black community expect police to be their leader.

The association’s current stance is not normal. It did not defend the officers or say that they were doing a difficult job that required them to make split-second decisions, which is usually a response police unions give when they are accused of malfeasance.

There were efforts to push for police reform after George Floyd died, but they have largely been abandoned due to the fear of rising crime. President joe Biden proposed funding for 100,000 new police officers in his Safer America Plan last year and an omnibus appropriations bill included $324M to hire more police officers.

However, I know from experience that crime prevention is achieved through trusting relationships between the police and the community it serves, rather than feeding a broken system more police officers. The SCORPION unit is a suppression unit that was formed to protect communities from overpolicing, so there can’t be trust in that. On Saturday, the Memphis Police Department said that they would dismantle their SCORPION unit.

The federal policing bill that bears George Floyd’s name failed to pass in the Senate and efforts to end qualified immunity, a judicial doctrine that protects police officers from being held personally liable for violating a person’s rights, have not succeeded in Congress.

Such deaths are preventable, but training or a patchwork of local policies will not be sufficient. Transformation will look like dedication to change through federal legislation that addresses the use of no-knock warrants, duty to intervene, use of excessive force, and other dangerous policing issues; the placement of strong political change-makers in office through voting and a commitment by the criminal “justice” system to hold corrupt police officers accountable for their actions through administrative and criminal charges.

The article has been changed to reflect the writer’s 28 years of combined experience in law enforcement, not just as a captain.

The 1619 Project: A Multimedia Project for Investigating Black Women, Black Men, and Black America’s Role in the Era of Reconstruction

The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy was created at the University of Texas at Austin, by Peniel E. Joseph, and he is a professor of history. He is the author of The Third Reconstruction, a book about the fight for racial justice in the 21st century. The views expressed here are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The first two episodes of “The 1619 Project,” a documentary series on H2o, brought to life the Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times multimedia project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The first and second episodes of The 1619 Project clearly show that Black people would make Wall Street and New York City the financial capital of the world.

By weaving interviews, graphics detailing data connected to race, slavery and history and incorporating recordings of voices of Americans with personal recollections of slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights and voting rights activism, the series offers an experience that is both intimate and expansive. It demonstrates how individual biographies of Black Americans tell a collective narrative of a struggle for Black citizenship and dignity that remains this nation’s defining story.

The documentary series provides additional flesh and texture to the original New York Times Sunday Magazine special issue, the multimedia educational social media supporting materials and bestselling anthology subsequently published.

“The 1619 Project” was introduced in 2019, and has been the basis for books, a podcast and school curricula. What this series’ newest interpretation of the work offers is a timely reminder and illustration that the fight to erase Black history from the public-school curriculum mirrors historic efforts to exclude Black people from American democratic institutions.

It is crucial to focus on democracy here. The 1619 Project has the most significant revelation about race and democracy being the relation between race and democracy.

This violence paralleled Reconstruction’s bright spots for decades, reaching a fever pitch in 1898 the Wilmington Massacre, the first successful political coup in American history – organized by vengeful White racists against Black political leaders who were slaughtered, humiliated and forced to flee the city.

The episode’s focus on both enslaved Black women and their modern contemporaries allows us an intimate glimpse into the racial and sexual reproductive realities Black women have confronted throughout American history. The enslavement of black women by White owners of a Georgia plantation resulted in more economic value for them and their families, as recounted in a detailed examination.

The racial identities listed on certificates of birth and death are more than just a sign. They serve as markers of destiny and signifiers of future wealth and prosperity for some and punishment and premature death for others.

As viewers we eavesdrop on recordings from the formerly enslaved conducted by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Laura Smalley, a formerly enslaved Black woman, recalls that plantation owners would “breed them like they was hogs or horses, something like that, I say.”

There is a need to confront this painful history in our own time. It may explain how Serena Williams, who was rich and famous, nearly died from a chronic condition after giving birth to her daughter.

In 1966, the Black Power pioneers established the principle that all Black lives deserve to matter. A veteran Black journalist, who was a student at San Francisco State where the push for Black Studies began, remembers that it meant Black empowerment. “It seems quaint when you look back at it, but the sense of inferiority that had been pushed down on people for generations was just not thought about until that moment…If you are a 20- or 25-year-old Black person today and you call yourself Black or African-American, it seems just like the most natural thing in the world to do. Black Power was able to make people feel good about themselves and to embrace who they were, which is a testament to their success.

In the summer of 1966, America’s top civil rights leaders had descended on Mississippi for what became known as the Meredith March. They were making their way from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to carry on a solo voting rights march begun by James Meredith, the Black activist who had integrated the University of Mississippi three years earlier. Meredith had been shot by a White supremacist and hospitalized with severe bullet wounds.

As Carmichael awaited bail that afternoon, he counted the number of times —27—that he had been imprisoned in the South since joining SNCC as a Howard University undergraduate. He was prepared to use a defiant new slogan that Willie Ricks, a colleague of his, had been testing in small churches along the route.

The media caricature of Black Power gradually became a self-fulfilling prophesy of the Black unrest and the White backlash. Carmichael grew more outrageous in his rhetoric, leading one New Yorker writer to wonder if he was just a “put-on” artist.

The next day, a short Associated Press story describing the scene was picked up by more than 200 newspapers across America. The Black Power movement was born overnight.

Yet for all their flaws and flame-outs, the Black Power generation proved to be prescient in their analysis of the flaws in urban policing and the limits of racial integration King preached. As children of the Great Migration, they knew all too well the heartbreak of Blacks who had left everything behind in the South in pursuit of a false promise of physical security, fair housing and job opportunities in the North.

After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Carmichael realized that it wouldn’t be enough to protect the poor Blacks in the Deep South from the Ku Klux Klan, and that they needed to register. A year ago, he organized blacks in Alabama to start an independent political party that would allow poor sharecroppers in the area to vote in sheriff and other local offices with a symbol that would be recognized by them.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was created in the fall of 1966 by two community college students in Oakland, California. Although Huey Newton and Bobby Seale drafted a sweeping list of demands they called the “Ten Point Program,” they also were focused primarily on the issue of police violence in Black communities.

The plan was to use California’s “open carry” gun laws to create armed civilian patrols to patrol the Oakland police department, but when they wore their famous leather jackets and berets, it was to advertise their plan.

As if to prove the Panthers’ point, however, the summer of 1966 brought a series of clashes between police and urban Blacks that set off riots in Chicago, Atlanta and the San Francisco neighborhood of Hunters Point. In the mind of the White public, those uprisings became conflated with the “Black Power” slogan and drove a sharp drop in White support for the entire civil rights agenda. In a Newsweek poll, Whites suddenly opposed even nonviolent Black protest by more than two-to-one.

An ultranationalist group within SNCC tried to expel all White members at a staff retreat, but the group’s leaders initially disagreed, but eventually relented and allowed the group to continue. A few months later, a spent Carmichael stepped down as SNCC’s chairman after only one year, giving way to a successor with even more inflammatory rhetoric and far less charm named H. Rap Brown.

The Black Panthers were consumed by another vicious cycle. Winning release from prison in late 1966 with the backing of authors who admired the jailhouse essays he would publish in the book “Soul on Ice,” Eldridge Cleaver teamed up with Newton and Seale—then pushed the Panthers to depart from their focus on local police and embrace talk of armed revolution.

A second lesson is to make sure that you are ready for a backlash when progress is fleeting. A student of 1966 would not have been surprised to see how swiftly the police reform movement ended in the year 2020, after a concerted campaign to demonize “wokeness” and call to “defund the police.”

There are no throwaway essays here and they all fit together in ways that give the collection a great sense of cohesion, but there are some standouts that merit a moment in the spotlight. “When I Was a Boy” is a heartfelt essay about growing up feeling like a “freak” that eventually morphs into a narrative about acceptance and a critique of the way young Black men are expected to perform a special brand of masculinity. Black always knew he was different, and different wasn’t good. He thought he was a poorer person than everyone else, even when he became obsessed with reading and writing. This essay in the second part of the book is a great introduction to what follows and it has an emotional and psychological scars that came from Black’s youth.