Five-O shades of blue
23rd February 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
When it comes to violence, barbarity and a general lack of respect for others’ dignity and human rights, there is no shade like blue shade.
The blue shade that emanates from trigger-happy, baton-swinging cops who routinely trample upon the constitutional rights of innocent civilians and show very little in the way of respect for the laws they are trained and sworn to enforce. The blue shade that comes from law enforcement officers who don’t only think they are above the law — they believe they are the law.
The crooked variety of cops are a throwback to antebellum days when paddy rollers felt empowered to chase, harass and terrorize both free and enslaved Blacks. They gave white mobs across the U.S. full access to unleash hell on imprisoned Black, white, brown, red and yellow civil rights protesters and have historically had no qualms about planting evidence on Black suspects or taking the lives of unarmed Black, men, women and children.
It is telling that cops’ collective psyche has taken a major hit after scathing reports of rampant abuse, corruption and ineptitude in the nation’s police departments. While they have felt the sting of public scrutiny and criticism, few of those police departments have been motivated to implement substantive change.
Until these bad apples in police departments are ready to change their mindset and improve the way they feel about themselves, all the education and police training in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans. They will either make a conscious effort to change the way they view themselves and treat civilians or continue to harass, disrespect, demean and terrorize civilians for no reason other than the fact that they wear badges that they believe give them the power to do whatever they want to to whomever for as long as they choose to.
Most of the Black men, women and children who live in the United States have learned this lesson over and over. As a people, we have been reminded for centuries that there are no U.S. laws protecting communities of color that white individuals or entities are bound by law to respect.
Black folks know all too well what it feels like to be treated like third-class citizens or worse by those sworn to protect and serve the public. We also know what it feels like to repeatedly be denied equal protection under the law.
Even on those extremely rare occasions when efforts are made to bring charges against cops who violate our constitutional and human rights, those charges are either dropped or undermined by lily-white grand juries, judges and the federal government, making it crystal clear that justice in America, like democracy, is a cruel hoax.
Ironically, that is a bitter pill that a small number of white civilians have been forced to swallow in recent history.
While the scales of justice still tip toward whites, white people in this city have sometimes found themselves being roughed up by cops for attending Mardi Gras Indian events and harassed for participating in protests like Occupy NOLA and several marches in the wake of grand-jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo., and NYC last year. When the City of New Orleans had had enough of Occupy NOLA, it instructed cops to forcibly remove the protesters from Duncan Plaza, and the NOPD used social media to keep a close eye on the “Blacks Lives Matter” marches and block marchers from taking over an Interstate 10 ramp and Canal Place. While the “Black Lives Matter” protesters were closely monitored and controlled, they were not treated like they were, ahem, Black because many of them were recent transplants to the city and/or Tulane University students from well-to-do families.
Other whites were not so lucky.
Like Brady Becker, the 17-year-old from St. Charles Parish who was videotaped as he was being pummeled repeatedly by an undercover Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy after a Metairie parade. The accused cop is allegedly a martial arts champion.
Becker said he and his friends had no idea that the undercover deputy was a law enforcement officer and would have never challenged the deputy’s authority if they had known he was a cop. He said the encounter left him feeling violated. His parents have filed a complaint with the JPSO and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Jefferson Parish officials said the teen and his friends were overheard using profanity against the cops.
The incident brought to mind the ordeal of Sidney Newman and Ferdinand Hunt, who were assaulted by undercover police in the French Quarter while waiting for Hunt’s mother after a 2013 Carnival parade. The entire incident was caught on video surveillance and only ended when NOPD Officer Verna Hunt, Ferdinand’s mother, brought the two teens some food and confronted the officers. While most of those involved were reportedly state troopers, extended video of the incident shows a white female NOPD officer who was involved in another incident instructing the plainclothes officers to confront the teens before the incident. Both families have filed formal complaints.
After agreeing to attend a public meeting on racial profiling, the mayor decided to hold his own meeting on the same day and at the she time as the racial profiling meeting to promote the merits of his NOLA for Life program.
A college told me several years ago about an incident involving an Asian-American teen from New York who spent a year in New Orleans and was wrongfully arrested and thrown into a NOPD paddy wagon along with several white teens from upperclass families. Their crime? Walking through Tremé to get to the French Quarter. They were reportedly thrown in the holding truck where they nearly passed out from the unbearable heat and later taken to a filthy OPP holding cell with an overrun toilet and older, menacing defendants.
The teens joined a growing list of white males who are more likely to be roughed up by the cops than previous generations of white men and boys. While some may view that as a disturbing trend, others may see it as a teachable moment, a chance for young America to better grasp what it means to be Black in America.
For the most part, that kind of abuse has been reserved for young Black males like the Destrehan High School athletes who were roughed up by Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputies several years ago for daring to enjoy themselves along a mostly white parade route in Metairie. One of those young men was Ricky Jefferson, the younger brother of former LSU quarterback Jordan Jefferson.
The only way the nation’s police departments are going to change is with a broad-based movement that appeals to both the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Justice to take steps to protect the human rights of every resident of the U.S. Before that can happen, more whites need to know what it feels like to be mishandled, abused and disrespected by the men and women in blue.
Despite PR efforts aimed at glamorizing the job, crime-fighting is still widely viewed as a career choice near the bottom of the list, somewhere between military service and garbage collection. With no disrespect to this country’s brave soldiers or trash collectors, some say law enforcement merges the skill-sets associated with these two professions.
It’s important to remember that there is nothing wrong with earning an honest salary for an honest day of work. It’s also important to remember that it would not be wise to give those with very little education the power of life and death over civilians.
It is important to note that while many cities and police departments offer cops a chance to earn a college degree, many of those opportunities to pursue a college education are wasted.
It isn’t that cops are incapable of excelling in the classroom— it may very well be that some cops saw law enforcement as a viable alternative to going to college, one that would prove to be less taxing on their noggins.
When you consider how many career criminals and cops barely graduated from high school or earned GEDs, one gets the impression that the last thing we should be doing as a society is lowering academic standards and expectations for anyone.
Why not raise the bar so that we will have fewer school dropouts and need fewer cops to chase them down on America’s streets?
Why not give everyone the tools and opportunities needed to be all they can be so that there would be less frustration, discontentment, rage and violence among would-be criminals and cops?
Did the undercover deputy who socked Brady Becker in the eye have a college degree? Would Brady have been shot and killed if his name had been Michael Brown, Adolph Grimes III or Wendell Allen?
We may never know.
So many questions, so few answers.
This article originally published in the February 23, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
