On July 12, 1898 John Henry James’ body, riddled with bullets, hanged from a locust tree. The Virginia man had been in the custody of the Albemarle County sheriff, awaiting grand jury action on a rape allegation, when a mob of 150 people kidnapped and killed him.

James, the story went, sexually assaulted one Julia Hotopp. (I belabor here, in confirming your suspicion that James was Black and Hotopp white.) There were doubts surrounding Hotopp’s allegation. Still, a newspaper applauded the mob, noting that “the people of Charlottesville heartily approve the lynching.”  The grand jury, determined to have its say too, over a corpse no less, issued a posthumous indictment.

For more than a century, James was an accused rapist. He obtained a minuscule measure of justice on July 12, 2023—the 125th anniversary of his death—when Albemarle County prosecutor James Hingeley asked a circuit court to revisit the indictment, and judge Cheryl V. Higgins, at long last, dismissed it.

These officials are to be commended; criminal indictments do their best work in the universe of the living. James’ is an easy and instructive case, illustrating with blinding clarity the umbilical link between illegal lynching and state-sanctioned rape executions, two corporeal atrocities that were, infamously, pretty much reserved for Black males—boys, as well as men.

James’ exoneration is also a prophetic case. It demarcates a path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females, mostly in latter-day Confederate states, at the hands of a supremacist legal regime.

That John Henry James’ indictment came after his lynching may seem absurd—but in 1898, and for decades thereafter, such was the symbiotic common ground between the county courthouse and the lynching locale. Legal officials raced against the mob to confer upon these killings the stamp of validity, and lynching parties, enacting “lynch law,” adorned their proceedings with the rituals of the courtroom. Lynchings were extensions and expressions of the administration of justice, not estranged from it. A case in point: in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1917, a group of men known as the Shelby Avengers announced their intention to lynch a man charged with the sexual assault and murder of a white teenager, giving people ample time to reach the location where, they promised, justice would be dispensed. After the man was burned, decapitated, and dismembered, the Commercial Appeal reported, “throughout the entire proceedings there was perfect order …  and none offered violence not countenanced by the summary court.”  The newspaper also complimented the Avengers for having the forethought to appoint a treasurer to secure compensation for those participants who had absented themselves from work to search for and lynch the man. Jury duty.

This pattern persisted from the end of the Civil War until the early 20th century. Beginning around 1909, with the introduction of the electric chair, the numbers of legal executions rose, slowly replacing extralegal lynchings, at least in Virginia.  Some scholars of lynching—Fitzhugh Brundage, for example—have expressed skepticism that a rise in legal execution in the early 20th century correlated with a decline in extralegal lynching. But the historical record is replete with evidence that executions were understood to be a replacement for the mob, particularly in Virginia.

From 1880 to 1909, 27 Black men were lynched in Virginia for rape or attempted rape, while just seven were lynched in the four decades that followed. From 1908 to 1965, Virginia executed 56 men on non-lethal sexual assault charges. All of them were Black. These numbers are not anomalous: 19th-century versions of the state’s rape laws explicitly split white rape from Black rape. Before the Civil War, only “free negroes” charged with assault against white females were subject to the death penalty; the penalty for white males was limited to a 10- to 20-year prison term.  Over its entire 400-year history, the state killed just three white men for rape, all before 1868, and no white man was ever put to death for attempted rape while 36 Black men suffered that fate—one as late as 1940.

In 1921, the state’s highest court made the connection between the rise in executions and the decline in lynching explicit. In Hart v. Commonwealth, a case sanctioning the execution of a 21-year-old for attempted rape and rejecting his argument that the sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment, the Virginia court opined that “the likelihood of the resort to lynch law, unless there is a prompt conviction and a severe penalty imposed. . . is well known to exist.” (Indeed the state apparently deemed attempted rape more heinous than attempted murder—an offense for which no one in Virginia, Black or white, was executed after 1863.)

For decades to follow, Virginia’s Supreme Court—comprised entirely of white male jurists—aided and abetted what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun later described as a “machinery of death.” From 1908 to 1963, the court wrote opinions in 73 capital and non-capital cases of rape and related crimes; they reversed the sentences of approximately one-quarter of Black defendants compared to nearly two-thirds of white defendants.

Other states enforced similar laws. Louisiana also ran a two-tiered legal regime for rape prosecutions, effectively reserving its capital penalty for Black defendants charged with sexual assault on whites. Since 1900, the state has executed around 40 defendants for aggravated rape; all but two were Black. It has never executed a white man for the rape of a Black woman.  South Carolina has, since 1900, executed around 66 people for sexual crimes, of whom 61 were Black.  Florida has executed 48 men for rape and related crimes, of whom 44 were Black. And in Georgia, since 1900, 87 of the 93 men executed by the state for rape have been Black.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty for rape unconstitutional in 1977. But its decision in Coker v. Georgia hinged on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and never addressed the penalty’s longstanding racial intent and impact.  Had it done so, lower courts might have been on notice to protect against unconstitutional bias in the administration of rape laws by, for example, ensuring fair and deracialized jury selection, protecting against discriminatory prosecution, and guarding against the race tax in sentencing.

Instead, the execrable history of lynching and execution continued to infect rape prosecutions. Until DNA forensics became widely available about 20 years ago, countless innocent Black men were wrongly convicted for sexual assault.  Just 10 years ago, Black people were almost eight times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of rape. And just last year, the National Registry of Exonerations reported that Black prisoners incarcerated for sexual assault are over three times more likely to be innocent of the crime than white prisoners—and generally received far longer sentences than white exonerees.

This is not just a Virginia problem. But Virginians are grappling with this history head-on, and could lead the nation in a project of redress.  The state recently abolished the death penalty, in 2021. That year, then-governor Ralph Northam posthumously pardoned seven men who were executed after conviction on a 1951 rape charge that attracted international protest. Descendants of the Martinsville Seven, as the accused were known, had campaigned for the pardon. Northam was careful to specify that the pardon was not an exoneration; it was an acknowledgment that the men did not get a fair trial. “We all deserve a criminal justice system that is fair, equal, and gets it right,” he proclaimed.

This illustration was part of a 1951 Michigan petition mailed to then-Virginia Governor John S. Battle to save the “Martinsville Seven.” Their executions were carried out despite pleas for mercy from around the world. Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

By that measure—one none could quarrel with—there are, nationally, 1,073 rape executions that deserve posthumous redress. States could aim to correct these travesties by executive pardon, as with the Martinsville Seven, or by judicial action, as with John Henry James.  The U.S. courts might start admitting their own complicity in rushing Black men to their deaths. Localities might consider how prosecutors’ offices, like that of Albemarle County, can review historical cases to determine how many were rushed to judgment to avert mob violence, or otherwise shortchanged the process that was the defendant’s due.  They might also examine the actions of police, who often railroaded accused men by threatening to turn them over to the mob if they did not “confess.”

Manifestly, not every Black man executed for rape was innocent of the charge. But because none of these men got the due process or sentencing justice they deserved, perhaps all their cases must be re-examined. All of these men were hostages in the war for white supremacy. All of them were subjected to the meta-law of race. And all of them experienced law as a political weapon, rather than a set of neutral evidentiary rules.

State-endorsed redress and remedial measures, while inevitably insufficient, will help. They would also expiate slanders and stereotypes that, even in today’s courts and prosecutors’ offices, render the Black male “naturally” a potent threat to white females. When Dylann Roof shot down parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, his battle cry evinced the abiding nature of this group libel.  “Y’all are raping our white women, y’all are taking over the world,” he yelled, as he slaughtered.

The new sits solidly on top of the old here; race is the beginning and the end of this ongoing horror story. There is work to do, and Charlottesville prosecutors have sharpened their pencils and stretched their (and our) imaginations. The James case makes clear that the crimes of racialized justice must be lifted from the pages of books, criminology journals, and amicus briefs and placed in the public square. There, they can stimulate a community’s “ongoing commitment to . . . racial justice” and demonstrate the “importance of community remembrance projects,” as Hingeley, the prosecutor who helped clear James, observed.

The more of these historical travesties we tackle, the better off our legal system, and our nation, will be.

The post Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nonetheless, emerging adults are disproportionately arrested and incarcerated. Though they make up just 10 percent of the U.S. population, they make up around 1 in 5 adult prison admissions. This is a tragedy. Data show conclusively that prison has a uniquely negative and often lifelong effect on young people. Prison rips emerging adults away from the peers and social environments they rely upon to grow up in a healthy way. It causes isolation, illness, disruption of education, and permanent disadvantages in job seeking. It can make young people vulnerable to mental and physical illness for years to come. And they are not the only victims: Children of incarcerated adults face a host of health, economic, and educational risks.

In the aftermath of a pandemic that devastated their job and education prospects, emerging adults must become a policy and budget priority. The nation’s future depends on it.

Two hallmark characteristics of emerging adults—their love of taking risks and their intense need for social activity—too frequently put them in conflict with the law. These traits are by no means flaws, however. Risk-taking peaks during this period for a reason: to help young people to strike out on their own, create autonomy from their parents, explore new experiences, and maybe even start families. The pull toward peers allows young people to build a new network of support. Both are needed for healthy development; they lead to a path of mature independence.

Privileged emerging adults have always been more likely than their disadvantaged peers to live in a specific environment that has been tailored to their developmental stage: college. University life surrounds young people with peers who are likely to become a helpful network later in life. Campus disciplinary codes generally keep punishments for minor law breaking, such as drug- or alcohol-related offenses, out of the formal legal system.

But less wealthy Americans, including many Black and brown young people, don’t get such nurturing. Even minor offenses can land them in prison. Incarceration then throws a wrench into the work of entering fully into adulthood: Regimentation, rather than exploration, shapes the experience. Unable to bond with long-term friends or a partner while incarcerated, they also find more obstacles upon release, like parole restrictions on whom they may associate with or where they may live, that keep them from forming groups around common interests or goals.

When emerging adults are removed from places and people that encourage their development, they suffer. So do their communities, which lose the potential of the energy and passion of this group. During the pandemic, the emerging adults of Generation Z became catalysts for change, fueling an upsurge of support for Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist activism. Another way of saying “risk-taking” is “brave.” Another way of saying “susceptible to peer influence” is “eager to act in solidarity with others.”

It’s not easy growing up today. Milestones associated with “settling down,” like finding a life partner, having children, and committing to a profession are all happening at later ages than they once did. The process of establishing an independent life takes longer, and the path is not nearly as clear as it once was. Someone coming of age in the 1960s might spend their adult life working for a single employer, in the community where they were raised, with wages sufficient to support children and own a home. Today’s young people, facing more tenuous employment options and more expensive housing, typically struggle to find a foothold. Emerging adulthood is marked by higher unemployment than later life, and the number of adult children moving back to their parents’ homes has been rising throughout the 2000s as marriage declined and wages failed to keep pace with housing costs. 

And that was before COVID-19 exacerbated these trends and brought the problems of incarcerated emerging adults to peers everywhere. Much like prison, the pandemic imposed upheaval, scarcity, and stress. Students suffered and were cut off from the world when their schools and universities shut down or shifted awkwardly to online learning systems. They lost academic benefits and opportunities to build social and career networks. Research shows that emerging adults experienced increased anxiety and depression during the pandemic, both of which are barriers to healthy development.

COVID-19 upended normal business routines and hiring, too. Unemployment reached almost 15 percent during the pandemic, presenting first-time job seekers with dismaying odds, and forcing many young people to move in with relatives. By July 2020, 52 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. were living with one or both parents, according to the Pew Research Center. This development is problematic. Though some emerging adults may thrive, others struggle with returning to the nest at a stage when they were establishing independence. Their presence can also strain their already overwhelmed families, and at least one study has linked the return to the parental home with depressive symptoms.

It may be difficult for emerging adults to recover lost economic ground after COVID. Research shows that entering the job market during a recession is associated with lower earnings for a decade or more, and even higher divorce rates and earlier death. Furthermore, the economic uncertainty of the moment may inspire older workers to stay on the job longer, which will mean fewer openings for young people. More than ever, policy should adjust to support emerging adults through historic challenges. The harms that have befallen young people in prison have become the woes of young people everywhere.

In 2016, my colleagues and I started the Emerging Adult Justice Project, which aims to promote effective and fair justice policies for 18- to 25-year-olds in the criminal legal system that will allow them to grow into healthy, functional adults. We advocate for a variety of research-informed changes, including placing emerging adults in the juvenile justice system, which is more developmentally appropriate and has a much better track record of producing successes in the classroom, workplace, and family. We also work to change public perception about this life stage.

The post-COVID period is poised to be a difficult one for Generation Z. The coming hardships could threaten their development from impulsive-and-passionate teens to responsible-and-measured adults. No other cohort since World War II has faced such odds, and as such these young people deserve the functional equivalent of a GI Bill to ensure they get the education they need to be successful. Student loan forgiveness, national service, universal high-speed internet access, and extended paid internships that would allow people to simultaneously learn and earn should also be part of forthcoming legislation.

Most urgently, we can end the mass criminalization of emerging adults by including more of them in the juvenile justice system. We can and ought to afford a 19-year-old minimum wage earner as much grace and as much opportunity to recover from a mistake as we do a college student. And we should put policies in place that ensure no emerging adults are punished because they grew into adulthood during a time of scarcity and disruption. We should capitalize on their strengths—their passion for social justice, their technological acuity, their willingness to try new things—to ensure they fulfill their promise as stable and productive adults for decades to come.

The post Can We Reimagine Juvenile Justice for Gen Z? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the conclusion of a leading researcher on California prisons, UC Berkeley public policy professor Steven Raphael, at a Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event “Has California Ended Mass Incarceration?” co-presented with UC Center Sacramento.

“We can objectively say no, just by the numbers,” Raphael said when moderator Abbie VanSickle, the California reporter for The Marshall Project, directly posed the title question to him during the conversation. While the incarceration rate has fallen from 488 people per 100,000 in 2006 to 310 people per 100,000 today, Raphael said, that rate is still three times higher than the 100 per 100,000 rate the state saw in the 1970s. “We still have a lot of people incarcerated,” he added.

The event, which went far beyond statistics, dove into California’s history service of incarceration in service of understanding the major changes we’re seeing in the state’s prisons, jails, and parole and probation systems today.

Raphael noted that prison overcrowding has been a problem since the state’s founding in 1850, and the construction of San Quentin two years later. But the late 20th century stands out as an inflection point in that history. From about 24,000 people in state prisons before 1980, a wave of sentencing changes and tough-on-crime measures significantly increased the state’s incarcerated population. By 2006, when the state prison population peaked, there were about 175,000 people in prison Raphael said. (The number of people on parole, probation, and in county jails, which hold those awaiting trial or serving shorter sentences, also increased, he noted.)

In response to VanSickle’s question—whether this huge rise in incarceration was intentional—Raphael made two points.

First, he noted that sentencing reforms in the 1970s were motivated by concerns similar to those of today’s criminal justice reformers—that the system produced unequal, unfair, or racially discriminatory results. But that earlier wave of reform—replacing the “indeterminate” sentencing with the seemingly fairer rules of “determinate” sentencing—had unintended consequences, as the system lost the ability to treat individuals differently, based on their rehabilitation work. When tough-on-crime laws and ballot measures arrived in the 1980s, there was no way to slow the explosion of incarceration, and more people went to state prison for longer periods of time.

Raphael said that California made small reforms after 2006 to try to reduce the prison population, and improve the poor quality of medical and mental healthcare in the system. But it took a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision—which ordered California to reduce its prison population, then at nearly twice its capacity, to 137.5 percent of capacity—to begin the current era of reform.

That order, Raphael explained, led to a decade of criminal justice overhauls by legislators and voters.

A 2011 law, AB 109, commonly referred to as “realignment,” diverted non-serious, non-violent, and non-sexual offenders who previously went to state prisons into county jail, probation, or diversion programs. AB 109 produced a 30,000-person decline in the prison population in less than a year, and reduced weekly admission from 2,000 a week to 500 a week, Raphael said.

Further change, and further prison population reductions, were driven by voter-approved measures—2012’s Proposition 36, which changed the state’s “three strikes” law; 2014’s Proposition 47, which redefined as misdemeanors some offenses charged as felonies, leading to a drop in re-arrests of prisoners; and 2016’s Prop 57, which added more flexibility to sentencing. He said that 2017 and 2019 laws to eliminate some sentencing enhancements also made a difference.

Throughout the conversation, VanSickle pressed Raphael to talk about the impacts of these changes—such as the rise in county jail populations that coincided with the decrease in prison populations. One of the most intriguing impacts, Raphael argued, has been on racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Raphael said he and his research colleagues found that a narrowing in racial disparities among felony drug arrests occurred “almost instantly” after the enactment of Prop 47’s provisions turning some felonies into misdemeanors. In particular, the professor said, “you see this stunning shift in the felony drug arrest rates for African American men, to the point where it’s below the rate for white men before Prop 47 went into effect.”

“Most of these reforms were not enacted with racial disparities in mind—they were enacted to be fairer, to moderate, to not have such stiff sanctions, and under pressure of the federal court,” he said. But in looking at numbers on race and rates of incarceration, re-arrest for prisoners, and pre-trial detention of arrestees, “all these disparities narrowed.” That’s because “the criminal justice system generally has a disproportionate impact on the African American population, and to a much lesser degree, the Latino population … Moderating those sentencing practices certainly doesn’t eliminate, but tends to narrow, disparities in the outcomes we see,” he explained.

In response to questions both from VanSickle and audience members in the YouTube chat room, Raphael debunked claims, often aired in media or by politicians, that prison reform has produced a big rise in crime. There has been no measurable increase in violent crime tracked by the FBI, and research suggests only a small effect on auto theft, he said.

“Overall, we don’t see a big impact on reported crimes despite the fact that we have much fewer people incarcerated,” Raphael said.

Throughout the talk, Raphael emphasized how much is not understood about the full effects of specific reforms now being considered and discussed—from eliminating cash bail to restorative justice to alternative courts that focus on drugs, behavioral health, or charges involving veterans or young people.

He also cautioned that changes in incarceration aren’t driven just by changes in the law. He pointed to a “remarkable pattern being observed across the country”: a recent, sharp decline in the number of arrests of young people, ages 18 to 25, which is also reducing the flow of young people into jails and prisons.

What explains the decline? Research points to varied explanations, said Raphael, from higher education levels to young people spending more time online and playing more video games. “Young people for whatever reason are not getting into as much trouble today as they did in the past,” he said. “If that were to continue into the future, that alone would moderate prison populations in the United States.”

During an audience Q-and-A session, Raphael addressed questions about plans to close California prisons (any closures need to be preceded by more sentencing reforms), about the role of “progressive” prosecutors in reducing incarceration (look to the vast differences in incarceration rates among California’s 58 counties, each with its own district attorney), and about changes in terminology around prisons (some are now calling the “criminal justice system” the “criminal legal system”).

In response to multiple questions, VanSickle and Raphael also spoke about the impact of COVID on incarcerated individuals, including an outbreak at San Quentin last year. In March 2020, Raphael noted, there were about 124,000 people in the prison system. That number has now dropped to 94,000 because of the accelerated release of some vulnerable prisoners, and reductions in transfers to prisons from county jail. But Raphael said he suspects that drop is temporary and that the population will go back up when the pandemic recedes.

In closing, Raphael noted that while California has brought down its incarceration rate, it still incarcerates people at a significantly higher rate than other states—notably New York, Washington, and Massachusetts—and other nations.

“We’re not a European country yet,” he said.

The post Even After a Decade of Reforms, California’s Era of Mass Incarceration Is Far From Over appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“What Would Society Look Like Without Police?” was the title question for the discussion, which opened The World We Want—a series exploring today’s societal, political, and economic challenges, and how the world might emerge from the current moment.

The panel of scholars—experts in criminal justice, poverty, and social work—differed on how far to go in reducing police presence. But in response to questions from the program’s moderator, The Marshall Project staff writer Jamiles Lartey, they pointed to many ways that cities could “de-task” police, removing responsibilities for which officers aren’t well-suited. Such de-tasking would reduce the number and severity of dangerous police encounters that harm individuals, neighborhoods, and society.

Dexter Voisin, dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto, noted that he is the son of a cop, and that their jobs are stressful. One reason is that police are neither well-prepared nor well-trained to respond to homelessness, mental health crises, truancy, and domestic violence. Social workers and other personnel trained in these subjects are better equipped to respond to such issues. Furthermore, increased public investment into improving communities and reducing poverty would go a long way toward addressing these problems as well.

Such an approach, Voisin argued, would reduce the problems that cause crime, while also freeing up police departments to focus their time and resources on the core work of solving crimes.

“In poor black communities, what police are actually doing is policing poverty, not necessarily crime,” said Voisin, who added: “There isn’t less violent crime in affluent communities because there’s more police. There’s less crime in affluent communities because there’s less poverty.”

While Voisin said he found it hard to imagine a society without police, another panelist, Sandra Susan Smith, professor of criminal justice at Harvard, made a detailed case for the abolition of police.

For starters, she noted, very little of the work police do involves crime-fighting—only 2 to 3 percent of police activity in safer communities, and just 10 percent even in a high-crime city like Baltimore. Their non-crime duties can be performed more effectively and in a less costly manner by others—she referred to the CAHOOTS program, in Eugene, Oregon, which responded to 24,000 calls last year on mental health issues that would typically have gone to the police.

And even when police do address crime, they are not particularly effective at preventing or solving it. At the same time, police interactions with people produce all kinds of dangers, from violence against citizens (being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young Black men, she noted) to individual trauma and community mistrust that make crime-solving harder, and have “downstream” effects on everything from community health to educational performance.

“I suggest that police are not the answer,” said Smith. “There are a whole host of models emerging that allow people to resolve issues without the use of police, and we should take those very seriously.”

Smith also described a personal encounter with a white Bay Area police officer who was looking for an elderly Black couple, but still stopped her; at the time, she was 37 years old, and on her way to give a lecture on racial profiling. She said she responds to the call for police abolition personally as well as intellectually.

“I have colleagues who are really uncomfortable with the notion of abolishing police,” she said. “But when I think about abolition of police, I think about the low-income communities that I come from and that I also care deeply about … and what this might mean in terms of being released from the kind of occupation and terrorism that often exist when police are in those communities.”

A third panelist, Rachel Harmon, a former federal prosecutor who directs the Center for Criminal Justice at University of Virginia School of Law, said there were risks to eliminating police, or limiting policing to the fighting of crime. “I think we could reduce police a lot, but a society with no government organization to stop people from harming others could put a lot of violence in citizens’ hands,” she said. In particular, she pointed to “the risks of racial bias there, where citizens go out and start doing citizen’s arrests, that in their own ways are very dangerous.”

But even without abolition, she noted, many communities were already devising alternatives to policing, like training community mediators. She also suggested that police be removed from traffic enforcement—which they often use to catch criminals or find drugs—to increase trust and reduce the risks of police harming citizens. Using technology to police traffic also could reduce bias in traffic stops, she said.

In response to questions about police culture and leadership submitted by audience members in the YouTube chat, the panelists noted that changes are possible. Smith pointed to research showing that hiring women can change a department’s culture. Harmon noted that no major police department accurately represents its community in gender or race. Would greater representation make a difference?

Voisin also pointed out that with so many different local police departments, there is no standardized model for the screening, training, evaluation, and support of officers. But he reiterated that broader social investments—and limiting the role of police—are how we make ourselves safer.

“It’s hard for me to imagine U.S. society without some form of law enforcement,” he said. “But I’m very much in favor of reimagining law enforcement.”

Zócalo and the University of Toronto thank the Consulate General of Canada in Los Angeles for supporting The World We Want.

The post Law Enforcement Isn’t Going Away—That Doesn’t Mean It Can’t Be Reimagined appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Tuesday, BuzzFeed News West Coast investigations editor Jessica Garrison, author of The Devil’s Harvest: A Ruthless Killer, a Terrorized Community, and the Search for Justice in California’s Central Valley, visited Zócalo with KQED producer Judy Campbell to examine the American way of murder through the case of Jose Martinez, who killed three dozen people over three decades.

Over Twitter Live, the journalists explored how the lack of investigation and prosecution in Martinez’s case reflected larger disparities faced by communities who lack political and economic power, particularly when many residents are undocumented.

“The story really underscores that our justice system cares more about some deaths than others,” Garrison said, recounting that family members of Martinez’s victims all said the same thing to her in interviews: “They just didn’t feel like anybody cared.” She compared the lack of press coverage around Martinez’s victims to the mass of media coverage around the victims—many of whom were white women—who were raped and murdered by the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo. Garrison speculated one of the reasons Martinez’s victims got less media attention is because news outlets are more interested in “a situation where white women are perceived to be victims” as opposed to when the victims “are perceived to be undocumented men who may or may not be involved in the drug trade.”

Martinez’s case also reflects the larger issue of a systemic lack of services provided in small, unincorporated Central Valley communities, such as Earlimart, California, where Martinez lived, and in the other rural areas where he committed most of his crimes, said Garrison. She also pointed to other contributing factors that allowed Martinez to kill for more than three decades with near impunity, including the underpolicing and underprosecution of crimes that harm communities of color, and the historically troubled relationship Tulare County residents have with law enforcement. Californians, Garrison said, should work to better allocate resources to communities in the Central Valley, adding, “We should all care about this place.”

Quoted with Jessica Garrison:

“When these places also don’t have political power, the answer to ‘What do we do about this?’ is very different than if it were a rich unincorporated community that lacked these things. And the answer has often been, just, ‘Let’s ignore it and hope it goes away.’ But these are also wonderful communities, and they’re full of people who live there, and love it, and it’s their home. And so these communities have not gone away.”

Watch the full conversation below:

We’re live with author and Buzzfeed News editor @jvgarrison and @KQED’s @judyfcampbell to discuss “Why Is It So Easy To Get Away with Murder?” https://t.co/esvT1Ig9s1

— Zócalo Public Square (@ThePublicSquare) November 17, 2020

The post Why Is It so Easy to Get Away With Murder? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The death penalty in California is dead! Long live the death penalty!

That lede isn’t a joke. It isn’t even a contradiction. In California, the death penalty has long existed simultaneously as a grave moral problem and a necessary tool.

So, if Governor Gavin Newsom’s new moratorium on the death penalty becomes a permanent ban, we Californians should celebrate the end of a policy that magnified our society’s worst disparities, put us at odds with so many other countries, and created the risk of putting an innocent person to death.

But we—and I mean all of us, including death penalty proponents and opponents—also might pause to reflect upon and even mourn the demise of this miserable practice. For the death penalty has provided an essential public service—shining a bright light into the darkness of California’s prison system—that we may miss once it’s gone.

Let’s start with a stipulation: Since its revival in California in 1978, the death penalty has never really been about killing large numbers of people. Californians have executed 13 people in the past 40 years. More Californians than that die in traffic accidents over a holiday weekend.

California’s death penalty was, at its heart, a political and moral stance, a way of expressing frustration at violent crime, a desire to be tough with criminals, and a commitment to supporting crime victims and their families. The death penalty also was an enormous headache for the criminal justice system, since capital cases consumed legal resources, slowed the courts with endless appeals, and drew media scrutiny. These costs, both in money and reputation, are why so many within that system have long wanted to do away with the death penalty.

But these same costs are also why the death penalty had real value for the state.

California’s prison system has long been an embarrassment because it exists in the dark. The prison walls keep the public and even our elected representatives from understanding too much about what goes on there. And the system’s default condition is scandal.

A powerful prison guards’ union effectively runs the show, soaking up billions in state dollars for their compensation, money that should go to higher education or infrastructure. For decades, the system was unconstitutionally overcrowded, with health care that failed to meet basic standards. The state refused to fix these problems until the federal courts intervened.

In this context, the death penalty was vital because it provided one of the few sources of accountability, and attention, for the prison system. Californians may have been okay with locking up people with life sentences and forgetting all about them, but death penalty cases could not so easily be ignored.

The media is more likely to cover death penalty trials and appeals—given the dramatic stakes—and that provides the public with a glimpse of the social failures that produce the worst violent crimes. Celebrities love to bring their glamor to opposing the death penalty; you could cast 10 Oscar-winning films with just the actors advocating on behalf of Kevin Cooper, the most high-profile death penalty case in the state right now. And there may be no more star-studded event in California each year than the Beverly Hills gala for Death Penalty Focus, the anti-death penalty group associated with M.A.S.H actor Mike Farrell.

The death penalty also commands official attention. Governors can’t avoid reckoning with death penalty cases. Some of the state’s best attorneys work on death penalty appeals, many pro bono. And if you ever want to hear justices of the California Supreme Court whine, just ask them about the death penalty. They are required to review all death sentences, a burdensome chore.

Opponents of the death penalty have argued that all this extra attention is inefficient, and thus another reason to end capital punishment. They have a point, but such inefficiencies do have value. Forcing our state’s smartest and most powerful minds to examine the details of cases has brought to light any number of abuses of the system, and raised questions about the prisons themselves. And in the last few years, those questions have forced policymakers and voters to reconsider some criminal justice policies, particularly around sentencing. Would we now be reforming criminal justice without the spotlight provided by the machinery of death?

There is another group of people who appreciate the death penalty’s value: those 700-plus Californians who sit on death row at San Quentin State Prison. Twice in the past decade, ballot initiatives asked California voters to end the death penalty. And in both campaigns, a significant number of death row prisoners took an improbable stand against the initiatives that would end their own death sentences.

That’s not because they wanted to die. It’s because their death sentences conferred special resources that allowed them to fight their convictions. Only death row prisoners are guaranteed attorneys for appeals and federal court reviews of their trials. If the death penalty went away, death row inmates could become just 737 more forgotten lifers—with little hope of making it out of prison alive.

California hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, when the state Supreme Court questioned the constitutionality of lethal injections. Which brings me to my own capital confession.

This is not a popular opinion, but I would argue that for the last 13 years California has achieved the perfect death penalty equilibrium. Our state has capital punishment on the books, which provides the aforementioned accountability for the prisons and also represents the views of the millions of Californians who support the death penalty. But California no longer actually executes anyone, thus acknowledging the problems of state-sanctioned killing and eliminating the risk of murdering an innocent.

In other words, we have had it both ways.

Unfortunately, the governor’s moratorium, however well intentioned, disturbs that death penalty equilibrium. That has risks. Newsom’s effort could spark a legal and political backlash that forces the state to start executing people again. And even if the governor succeeds in creating a permanent ban, Californians will lose the scrutiny that the death penalty brings to criminal justice, and we seem unlikely to find some other mechanism to replace it.

RIP, California death penalty. And thank you for your service.

The post The Dark Side of Gavin Newsom’s Moratorium on the Death Penalty appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the “Miranda rights” routinely read to suspects as a result of the 1966 Supreme Court decision that overturned his conviction have their roots in a much earlier case: that of a young Chinese man accused of murdering three of his countrymen in Washington, D.C. in 1919.

The nation’s capital had never seen anything quite like it: a triple murder of foreign diplomats. The victims worked for the Chinese Educational Mission and were assassinated in the city’s tony Kalorama neighborhood. With no obvious motive or leads to go on, the Washington police were baffled. But once they zeroed in on a suspect, they marched into his Manhattan apartment, searched it without a warrant, and pressured him to return to Washington with them. There they held him incommunicado in a hotel room without formal arrest to browbeat him into a confession.

The young Chinese man, Ziang Sung Wan, a sometime student who had been seen at the death house on the day of the murders, was suffering from the aftereffects of the Spanish flu, and the police took advantage of his distress. He was questioned day and night, even when he was in severe pain and did not wish to speak. After nine days, he was brought back to the scene of the murder and subjected to harsh interrogation. Food and water were denied, as were bathroom breaks. Racial epithets were hurled. Finally, under extreme duress, he confessed and was immediately arrested.

At trial, Wan recanted his confession, which he claimed he had made only to stop the relentless grilling by the detectives. But the judge refused to exclude it, and he was convicted of first-degree murder, which carried the penalty of death by hanging. His attorneys made their objection to the confession the centerpiece of their appeal to a higher court. But the appellate court, citing an 1897 U.S. Supreme Court precedent, sustained the verdict, ruling that only promises or threats from the police would have given cause to exclude it.

When President Warren G. Harding refused to commute Wan’s sentence, his only hope lay with the Supreme Court, to which his attorneys immediately appealed. Under the leadership of Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the Court had been passive on civil liberties, if not hostile to them. So it was a surprise to many that it chose to consider the case.

As it happened, there was good reason to accept it. In the quarter-century since the 1897 ruling, the country had been embroiled in a robust national debate about the ethics and efficacy of what had come to be called the “third degree.” Creative detectives had come up with many methods of extracting confessions from unwilling suspects, some of which amounted to nothing short of torture. As techniques like quartering suspects in pitch-dark cells, turning up the heat to “sweat” confessions out of them, and even blowing red pepper or releasing red ants into their cells were exposed, the public reaction was strongly negative. The newspapers began decrying the practices as brutal and un-American.

At the same time, there was a fierce debate going on in the judiciary as to what kinds of interrogations and police conduct actually were prohibited under the law. All of this, on top of the staggering evidence that Wan’s confession had been coerced, provided ample justification for the Supreme Court to bring order to the chaos surrounding confessions.

After oral arguments were heard, the task of drafting the opinion fell to Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The Harvard-educated jurist—an unapologetic progressive and civil libertarian and a tireless fighter for social justice, freedom of speech, and the right to privacy—was the ideal choice. All the justices eventually united behind his ruling, the power and seminal nature of which can be found in its elegance and brevity. In throwing out Wan’s confession, the Court affirmed that the Fifth Amendment permitted only voluntary confessions to be admitted as evidence in federal proceedings and that voluntariness didn’t rest solely on whether a promise or threat had been made.

Wan was retried—twice, in fact—without his confession being admitted into evidence. But after two hung juries, both with majorities favoring acquittal, the Justice Department gave up prosecuting him. His case, however, lived on as a cause célèbre.

Two important challenges lay ahead before all of America’s accused could enjoy full protection under this new principle of law. First, because Wan had been tried in the District of Columbia, where the federal government was in charge of local affairs, the new standard applied only to cases before federal courts. The privileges promised to the accused in the Bill of Rights had not yet been determined to apply to the states and localities. This convoluted process, known as the “incorporation doctrine,” actually took decades. And second, the new standard lacked clarity. For all his eloquence, Brandeis hadn’t provided a satisfactory definition of what made a confession voluntary, or instructions as to what had to be done to ensure a confession was lawful.

As a result, the concept remained open to interpretation for decades, and as the Supreme Court heard case after case in which law enforcement ran roughshod over individual rights, and defendants—especially minorities—were mistreated between arrest and trial, it became palpably clear that in order to ensure voluntariness, police behavior would again have to be addressed explicitly. But this time the remedy would not involve outlawing nefarious police practices that might negate it so much as mandating constructive behavior that would ensure it.

In writing the opinion in the 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona, Chief Justice Earl Warren quoted liberally from Ziang Sung Wan v. United States. And he mandated safeguards that were ultimately condensed into the summary statement familiar to most Americans today as Miranda rights. They serve to inform suspects in clear and unequivocal terms that they have a right to remain silent, that anything they say may be used against them in a court of law, that they have the right to counsel and that if they are unable to afford one, an attorney will be appointed for them.

The post The 1919 Murder Case That Gave Americans the Right to Remain Silent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet when it comes to violent crime, especially murder, Americans are at much greater risk of falling victim to someone they know, perhaps someone they know intimately. And these kinds of murderers are less likely to commit their crimes with guns.

A homicide detective once told me, “Familiarity breeds attempt.” The fact is that most victims and their killers are at least passingly familiar with each other. Intimates interact often, and those interactions often lead to disputes and disagreements. Those disputes and disagreements can lead to violence. People who don’t see another way to resolve these disagreements often have a dispute resolution mechanism such as a gun, a knife, or a blunt object handy.

Typically, criminologists categorize victim-offender relationships as strangers (individuals who don’t know each other), acquaintances (individuals who are familiar with each other, have met, or are aware of each other, but are not close), and intimates (family, lovers, and the like). Most victims of property crime (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft) are strangers. But homicide, which is defined by the FBI as “the willful (non-negligent) killing of one human being by another,” is different. This antiseptic definition hides the emotion and will that need to be generated to shoot, stab, choke, or beat an intimate to death. Nineteen percent of all homicides involve intimates.

Motives for violent crime are generally broken into two categories: instrumental and expressive. Instrumental motives are ascribed to events that are designed to produce a material advantage for the offender. Robbery—such as the killing of a store owner for the cash in the till—is the perfect example of this.

Expressive violence is different; it is designed to make a statement or communicate a strong emotion like love, hate, or resentment. Domestic homicides, in which one intimate partner kills another, are the prototypical form of expressive homicide.

Instrumental violence typically occurs between strangers and involves the use of only enough force or violence to “get the job done.” In instances of expressive violence where individuals know each other, emotions run high, and the nature and level of violence is often exaggerated more than is necessary to “get the job done.” In these cases, the violence makes a statement that reflects the large emotional overlap between victims and offenders.

A majority of homicides involve offenders and victims who share a large number of characteristics. The most typical homicide involves a victim and offender who are similar in age, race/ethnicity, gender, and prior involvement in the criminal justice system. They also typically have other background characteristics in common: educational attainment, employment history, and poverty levels. The familiarity that breeds contempt is not an emotional familiarity based on association, but a familiar set of background and experiential characteristics, including involvement in crime, gangs, and urban gun culture.

It is important to note that firearms are involved in about two-thirds of homicides in the U.S. That said, murders between intimates are more likely to involve “hands-on” violence, such as choking, beatings, or violence where the perpetrator physically touches the victim. Guns are more likely to be involved between perpetrators and victims who are strangers, or who know each other only in passing, like rival gang members.

Most homicides also occur within relatively close proximity to the residences of victims and offenders. And most cities have highly concentrated patterns of crime, particularly violent crime and homicide. Criminologists have observed across the past several decades that “crime causes crime,” a hypothesis that works at two levels: the individual and the neighborhood.

When crime is committed at the individual level, individual offenders or victims create motives for their family members or friends to commit “reciprocated” crime. Many homicides are linked through patterns of revenge from a victim’s family or friends who become perpetrators in an effort to obtain justice for their slain family member.

When crime is committed at the neighborhood level—more often perpetrated by strangers and acquaintances—fear is spread within the community, breaking down social structure and impeding the ability of the police to make arrests and solve crime.

There is emerging evidence that the decades’ long “Great Crime Decline” has leveled off, and that homicide rates may be increasing. The initial evidence comes from cities that traditionally had high homicide rates, according to the National Institute of Justice. These cities are characterized by very high levels of concentrated poverty, particularly among minority residents.

Rising homicide rates in these parts of the country are of particular concern because they come at a time when law enforcement resources are stretched thin, thanks to recession cutbacks. The police make an arrest in about two-thirds of homicides. This leaves one-third of homicides unsolved, with offenders free in the community and the needs and desires of families and friends of victims unaddressed. Unsolved homicides often create their own “crime wave” as the families and associates of victims seek to exact justice on their own, putting the police under still more stress.

Recent increases in homicide are troubling. It remains to be seen if such increases signal the onset of a new wave of crime. Understanding the nature and patterns of homicide is key to formulating effective responses. To be successful, such responses must place more responsibility on communities for identifying disputes at an early stage in their development, before they turn fatal.

If the police are the only institution responsible for producing reductions in crime, we are in for a dangerous time.

The post Americans Mostly Kill the Ones We Know appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Irish prison service states one of its key missions is to protect human rights—the rights of the public and the rights of the offender. A tour of a temperature-controlled prison in the Irish city of Cork revealed prisoners had access to Wi-Fi, educational programs, drug treatment, and counseling. Clients interact with staff on a first-name basis. Prison food is high-quality and health care is equivalent to what is available to the general public. As you may know, none of this is true in American prison systems.

As a criminology professor and U.S. prison system researcher, I get a front row seat to the atrocious conditions that American prisoners live in, day in and day out, which include overcrowding, violence, rape, a program funding deficit, and a disappointing health care system.

As I toured through the Irish prison, I began to formulate a simple thought. In all common law countries—countries that are legally guided by judges—except the United States, going to prison is the punishment. Because that is the punishment, the prison does not have to “add to” the punishment.

In the Irish prison, workout rooms, in-cell TVs, and quality food were all present. As the prison staff discussed their jobs, they mentioned several concepts. All of their prisoners eventually return to society and the staff’s job is to keep them from returning to prison after their release.

Having studied prisons in the United States, I’ve found it is clear we do not share that ideology. In the United States, we view prison not only as the punishment, but also as the place for punishment, deliberately making prison more difficult in hopes of reducing recidivism. However, when comparing Ireland, which had a recidivism rate of 62 percent in 2007, and the United States, which had a recidivism rate of 67 percent in 2005, you quickly see that our “get tough” strategies have actually made return to prison rates higher.

Could this difference in the idea of punishment be related to some foundational ideology rooted in the religious history of these countries?

I started to reflect upon German sociologist Max Weber’s “A Protestant Ethic and a Spirit of Capitalism” during my time in Ireland. In it, Weber suggests that a major branch of Protestantism called Calvinistic Christianity laid the foundation for modern industrial capitalism by proposing beliefs and values that would lead adherents to adopt a “spirit of capitalism.”

Calvinistic Christianity is the belief that Calvinists took on as a reaction to the Lutheran movement and the Roman Catholic Church, with a theology that proposed a strict adherence to the Bible and “right” living. While other sects of Christianity preach right living, early Calvinists were known for their intolerance of others’ perspectives. In addition, they dropped the more sacramental notions of sin and forgiveness found in Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism and adopted a personal relationship of understanding between the penitent and God.

With Weber’s theory in mind, I began to consider the role of religion in the creation of the modern American criminal justice system. Of all the common law nations, only the United States had its origins rooted in a form of religious fundamentalism, known as Puritanism. Puritans believed that strict adherence to sacred scripture was the only real faith. A “pure” faith was a biblical faith, and that was generally rigid and unwavering in its adherence to their interpretation of scripture. Although the United States was and is a country without a dominant religion, many colonists incorporated beliefs rooted in Calvinistic Christianity into the new nation—and its laws.

Even though Pew Research Center data from 2015 shows 70 percent of the U.S. population practices Christianity, down from 78 percent in 2007, the religion—in particular, Calvinist Christianity—remains a cultural power in the country. Foundational ideologies of right and wrong, punishment and redemption, remain rooted in this religious tradition. These concepts are at the forefront of our in country’s attempt to deal with criminals. While it is certainly true that religion is weakening in the United Kingdom, with 46 percent of citizens identifying as Christian in 2012, down from 59 percent in 2011, the U.K. and all other common law countries do not house their cultural roots in Calvinist Christianity. This difference is a plausible explanation for some of the differences in punitive social policies between the United States and its common law cousins around the world.

The Church of England, like the Roman Catholic Church, recognizes the role of private and public confession for the forgiveness of sins. In these institutions, the penitent acknowledges his or her sin to a priest and is absolved, or washed clean, by the act of the Church. Once the sinner is forgiven, he or she is assured to be “right with God,” will never again need to confess that sin, and is free to go on with life, assured of salvation.

In Protestant sects, such as Calvinist Christians, Weber points out that the sinner has no such assurance of divine forgiveness or acceptance. In fact, Protestants who join a non-sacramental sect must trust that their confessions of guilt were heard by God, accepted as valid, and actually absolved. They are told that their confession to God is “heard,” but no human being is touching them, absolving them, or telling them that a sacramental change has occurred. The forgiveness for most Protestants happens not in the public arena of a church, but in the private recesses of the mind. This personal confession, according to Weber, creates a level of insecurity about whether or not one has actually received God’s forgiveness, which then forms a collective anxiety for Protestants who are not in sects that believe in a sacramental type of forgiveness.

Calvinists dealt with this anxiety by strict adherence to rules for “right living.” For example, Puritan punishment in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is to force a woman caught in adultery to wear a red letter “A” around her neck. Violations of the rules were dealt with authoritatively. Since Calvinist sects and their deviants dominated the American religious ideology for hundreds of years, could this be one reason for the differences in punishment ideologies that trickled into criminal justice systems?

What emerges in the United States is a penal system grounded in a Protestant fundamentalist religious history, with a strong sense of right and wrong and a penchant for justifying abuse of some, writing people off, and suggesting they are going to hell because they didn’t practice Christianity strictly enough.

The post Did Protestant Christianity Create the Dismal American Prison System? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By way of comparison, if everybody would express their opinions about how to improve the medical profession, we as the larger public would not be so accepting of everyone’s opinions. Many of us would vigorously challenge anecdotal accounts and “solutions” based on personal experience and videos seen on the Internet. Because we see medicine as a real profession, with nationally accepted professional standards, we tend to leave it to real experts to express their views on how the profession might be changed.

Treating policing as some sort of haphazard trade, about which everybody can have a valid opinion, is not helping policing or our current national conversation about it. Indeed, it aggravates the problems faced in policing. As a former police officer and somebody who has written many books and articles about the police profession over the decades, I resent the current rush-to-judgment environment and the ubiquitous pontification about the solutions. The overwhelming majority of police officers in this country mean well and take their jobs seriously, risking their lives to protect others, most of the time for meager pay. They certainly deserve better tools to hone their skills and much respect from the public they serve.

It is remarkable that very few academics who actually study policing and police-community relations are part of the discussion in public and in the media. We academics hear public officials quote out-of-context statistics, repeat catch phrases like “community-oriented policing,” and fuel the anger. For example, national and reputable media outlets often quote the number of people killed by police officers in a given year as an example of police use of force or brutality—an alarming figure, but one that would also include homicidal criminals like Micah Xavier Johnson, the Dallas sniper who killed five officers on duty at last week’s Black Lives Matter protest.

Almost 20 years ago I started teaching a course about police training, and the scarcity of available resources prompted me to write my first book, Critical Issues in Police Training. Published in 2002 and based on years of fieldwork and research, I identified five main areas that are extremely problematic for policing: recruitment, selection, training, supervision, and discipline. And I outlined four topics to address these problems: leadership, an approach to police-community relations called “Open Communication Policing,” multicultural policing, and stress management for law enforcement.

Fast forward almost 15 years, and we are now talking about all the same problems and topics—as if they were new and we still need to study them and create commissions to identify what needs to be done. This is wrong and a dangerous waste of time for both officers risking their lives and communities living in fear of their local precincts. Research is clear: we know quite a lot about what needs to be done—we need to transform the way police organizations operate. We just need to do it.

It’s gratifying to hear so much in the conversation about the need to change how we train police to reduce violent encounters with citizens. But I can’t help but stress that how we recruit and select officers should come first, before training.

For over two decades, research has shown a direct correlation between the emotional maturity of officers and their problem-solving capacity. Yet, as if deliberately ignoring the scientific research finding, most police departments in the United States continue to recruit and select their officers at the very young ages of 19 or 20.

In their late teens and early 20s, these men and women are expected to display wisdom, maturity, judgment, and social and emotional intelligence that most of us do not display until our late 20s and beyond. In some departments, some recruits are even exempt from the basic requirement of finishing high school if they possess some characteristics that would qualify them for special waivers. (Albuquerque, New Mexico is one such department).

Instead, we should be identifying the highest standards for recruitment and selection of officers. These standards must be expressed in something the U.S. has never had for its police: a standardized, mandatory curriculum of training for all our law enforcement agencies. This would cover not only the use of force but also other essential tools of effective and impartial policing like leadership, multiculturalism, stress management, and open communication. Each department would then be free to add as much or as little to this mandatory template, based on their needs.

This training must cover a minimum number of hours that will approximate, at the very least, a two-year college degree. Don’t we owe it to our communities to give the officers we charge with guarding our lives at least as many hours of training as beauticians and hairdressers?

We would not have to invent such standards. We already have the templates, primarily from other countries. Take, for example, Finland, which has the sort of comprehensive standardized training that makes experts like me envious. The Police College in Finland offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its police force. Completed in about three years, the bachelor’s degree is composed of 180 credits and qualifies the person for the position of police officer—or to act independently as an expert in police work. And the program is just the beginning of lifelong study that encourages police officers to seek new approaches and best practices in their profession.

While we have some police departments trying to transform recruitment, selection, and training (Dallas PD is one of them), we have close to 18,000 different law enforcement agencies in this country, most of them smaller than 50 sworn officers. The IACP (International Associations of Chiefs of Police) does much to further the culture of training but, unfortunately, it cannot mandate a standardized training. It can only recommend. And the time for recommendations has passed. We need mandates. Teaching de-escalation techniques at the NYPD or the Dallas PD academies did not change the behavior of officers in Louisiana or Minnesota. If we want change nationally, we need to institute a standardized mandate for all.

So, who and what are standing in the way of this change? The obstacles are federal and local. On a federal level, a transformational change would require revisiting the autonomy of the states to determine their own standards for police forces—the sort of changes politicians don’t want to touch. On a local level, sometimes unions oppose raising the standards. (Last year, I testified in front of the local council in Suffolk County, New York in favor of requiring a bachelor’s degree for its force, but was very strongly opposed by the union). Sometimes local politicians fear they will lose control over the hiring process. And many times, there are concerns about the lack of money; most of the police budget is allocated to salaries and there is very little left for recruitment and training.

Yes, many police departments around the country have gotten better at recruitment of ethnic and racial minorities, but diversity is not a stand-in for emotional maturity. Nor does having a department where members of minority communities are in the highest leadership ranks of the police, as in Dallas, change the perception that policing is a profession that is inherently racist and discriminatory in its application of the law.

It is impossible to convey here, in a short essay, the importance of perceptions about policing that are based, at one end, on centuries of oppression going back to the Southern Slave Patrols, and, at another end, a tsunami of social media visuals—of beatings, shootings, and victims’ dead bodies. Such visuals, with enough repetition, become etched in people’s minds not as a single event but rather as a series of events that represent a norm. Opinions are then derived from these perceptions, and actions from these opinions. In the absence of uniform policing standards based on scientific evidence, it is easy to misinterpret legitimate uses of force that from time to time accompany police officers’ day-to-day interactions with an error of judgment or actual abuse of the rights of their office.

It’s also easy to mistake the relative success of a few departments in training and recruitment with the nationwide sea change we need. I don’t know about you, but I cannot live with the notion of the authority to use coercive force against me being discharged by people who are not recruited, selected, and trained to the highest possible standard. The promise of this moment is that we can raise those standards, and reach the goal that any use of force must be necessary.

But to get there, we can’t rely on opinions. We need to start with the many things we actually know about policing. We need to let the real experts in this field drive the transformations of policing. And then we need to pray for the right leadership to enable these changes.

The post Not Everybody Is an Expert on Policing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.