Police Brutality is Not Always White-on-Black

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Feb 2, 2023

I heard similar sentiments from Black South Africans when I was reporting on the country’s apartheid regime in 1976. Black police resented their second-class status under the white-minority regime so much, I was advised by Black township residents near Johannesburg, that I would be better off, even as a Black American, if I were arrested by a white officer.

What went wrong in Memphis? Attention immediately turned to SCORPION — Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods — a specialized crime-fighting unit formed by Cerelyn Davis shortly after she became the city’s first Black and female police chief in 2021.

Although various cities scored some impressive records of arrests and gun confiscations with these units, which operate with more leeway and less oversight than regular officers, “those statistics don’t always correlate with a decrease in crime,” Radley Balko writes in a guest essay for The New York Times. Balko is a former Washington Post columnist and author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.”

It is generally agreed that policing is more effective when there is mutual trust and respect between police and the communities they serve. But Balko and various independent academic studies have found a strong correlation between high rates of violent crime and high rates of reported police abuses, which tend to undermine trust and bring down rates of solving crimes and closing cases.

Still, New York Mayor Eric Adams, a retired police captain, cautioned in a CNN interview that “units don’t create abuse. Abusive behavior creates abuse.”

He referred to his own city’s revived anti-crime units, now called Neighborhood Safety Teams, which he reinstated less than two years after the units were disbanded because they were implicated in such notorious deaths as Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Kimani Gray. But he also noted that he is making improvements on the old version of the plainclothes anti-crime units, which he agreed had used overly “aggressive” tactics.

Indeed, according to a 2018 investigation by the nonprofit news outlet The Intercept, these units accounted for just 6% of the city’s police officers but were involved in more than 30% of fatal shootings by police officers.

So I wish Adams and all other similarly situated city leaders good luck. No one has a one-size-fits-all solution to the complexities of big-city crime. But, put simply, it begins with trust between police and the communities they are sworn to protect and serve.

Citizens shouldn’t have to live in fear of crime or the police, no matter what color they may be.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)