More of the same

11th July 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor

Anyone who knows anything about the history and culture of the New Orleans Police Department should not have been surprised by last week’s incident involving a member of the NOPD’s top brass who instructed subordinates to target young Black men in the French Quarter over the Fourth of July weekend.

As he prepared for the challenges of the Essence Music Festival, a much-needed economic boom to the city of New Orleans, Special Operations Division Commander Eddie Selby, a 36-year NOPD veteran, reportedly told those under his command to single out young Black males who dared to venture into the French Quarter looking to enjoy the sights and sounds of the city.

On his cable access show OurStory Wednesday night, W.C. Johnson, a member of Community United for Change, reflected the sentiments of many New Orleans residents when he said that even though he was aware of racial problems in the NOPD, he was caught off-guard by Selby’s blatantly racist remarks.

It’s one thing to know that cops target young Black men for harassment, abuse and arrest, but it’s quite another to actually hear them go to the lengths Selby went in order to make it clear to those who served under him what they were expected to do in an open meeting, Johnson said.

That suggested that despite the recent Department of Justice report on widespread abuse and corruption in the NOPD and Police Supt. Ronal Serpas’ vow to reform the department, Selby felt no pressure to tone down or alter his instructions to his troops. “Let’s go get ‘em,” he basically told them.

While someone who heard that message objected to it and leaked it to others, there were obviously some officers who saw nothing wrong with a NOPD policy that encouraged them to target innocent Black people.

One of my fraternity brothers told me about an encounter he had over the Essence Fest weekend with a Black cop posted near the Astor Crowne Plaza Hotel in the CBD. As he approached the officer and told him that he was having difficulty driving two out-of-town friends to the hotel because of a police barricade, the police cussed him out and told him that he works for the NOPD and not the Astor Crowne Plaza Hotel. Knowing that to say anything else could lead to him being arrested or suffering bodily harm, my fraternity brother walked away and told his guests that they would have to make several trips with their luggage more than a block to get to the hotel. They did just that and the officer seemed quite pleased with himself for flexing his muscle and displaying his problem-solving abilities, I was told.

“The deficiencies in the way NOPD polices the city are not simply individual, but structural as well,” the DOJ report said. “For too long, the Department has been largely indifferent to widespread violations of law and policy by its officers.”

Dealing with discriminatory policing practices, the DOJ evaluators explained, “NOPD has failed to take sufficient steps to detect, prevent, or address bias-based profiling and other forms of discriminatory policing on the basis of race, ethnicity, or LGBT status, despite widespread concern and troubling racial disparities in arrest rates and other data.”

The Selby incident comes just three months after the scathing Department of Justice report that found systemic racism, ineptitude and inefficiency in the New Orleans Police Department. It’s clear that not much has been done to change the hearts, minds and practices of the department’s top leaders, which explains why the foot soldiers feel so comfortable disrespecting and pushing around residents with little fear of retribution.

If you recall, some longtime officers vowed that the DOJ’s severe indictment of the NOPD would only make some in the department fight even harder to resist efforts to implement reforms. The fact that some officers felt comfortable publicly saying so says a lot about the department’s culture.

New Orleans attorney and activist Bill Quigley, a Loyola University law professor, explained to The Huffington Post in March why whites in New Orleans are not as appalled by stories of police brutality as Blacks are.

“In the white community the whole thing is sort of puzzling. They knew that the police were bad but they didn’t think it was that bad,” Quigley explained. “The truth is, I honestly don’t think the white community is all that disappointed in what the police were doing, they really see them as trying to take control of the African-American and poor community. They see it as, if they had to bend the law and break the law, well, sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.”

Comments to The Huffington Post in March made by Larry Preston Williams Sr., a former NOPD officer in the 1960s and 1970s who is a founder of the Black Organization of Police, reveal the depth and profundity of the challenge facing those who are seeking to bring change to the NOPD.

Williams said that many of the issues detailed in the March 2011 DOJ report have been around since he was a cop and that there has always been an “unofficial practice” of officers looking the other way when fellow cops used excessive force, participated in unjustified shootings or broke the rules.

“I think as a matter of custom, there are some incidents that go back years and years that police have abused citizens, Black citizens,” he told The Huffington Post. “It has been a practice that has been tolerated for a long time.”

Williams added that while NOPD recruits receive instruction about solid policing practices and the use of deadly force as a last resort while in the academy, once they enter the police force much of what they utilize in the real world comes from veterans with less ideal approaches to doing their job.

“The higher ups who have gone through the ranks, captains, lieutenants and sergeants, they understand that excessive force and unnecessary force is going on, and they don’t necessarily discipline officers because they are part of that fraternity,” said Williams. “It would be unpopular for a supervisor to come down on an officer.”

Looking back, Williams says that he doesn’t know if a 1973 lawsuit the BOP filed against the city to force the NOPD to hire more Black officers and make other changes under a consent decree did much good to turn the department around.

“I don’t know if that worked at all,” Williams said of the effort to increase the number of Black officers and to use them to address issues of racism in the NOPD. “Apparently it didn’t.”

“To say simply that it is an issue of black and white is superficial. It goes beyond race. It’s a failure of a command structure to deal with the behaviors that lead to brutality,” Williams told The Huffington Post.

“It’s more complicated than black and white, it’s a mentality that you have when you become a police officer and you suddenly have power over an entire group of people.”

This latest black eye on the NOPD involving Selby opens up a Pandora’s box of questions about the department and its treatment of Black men in New Orleans.

For example, if cops were instructed to target Black men during the 2011 Essence Music Festival, how many other times during the previous 16 Essence Music Festivals were Black men targeted by cops for PWB (Partying While Black) or SBB (Simply Being Black)? And how many Black people who were arrested during past Bayou Classics, Sugar Bowls and Carnival seasons were wrongfully targeted, abused and arrested for simply being Black in the French Quarter, Garden District or the CBD?

If New Orleans cops had not been racially profiling young Black men during major events in New Orleans, would Georgia college student Levon Jones be alive today? For those who don’t remember, Levon Jones was the Black college student who was choked to death by four white bouncers at Razzoo Bar & Patio on New Year’s eve 2004 as several cops stood by and did absolutely nothing.

If the NOPD had not been treating all Black men like the enemy, would they have felt compelled to harass and wrestle retired educator Robert Davis to the ground for committing the unpardonable sin of going out after dark to buy a pack of cigarettes in the French Quarter in 2006?

After more than year in office, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu hasn’t even come close to even beginning to transform the New Orleans Police Department. That may be in part because he appears to be more interested in looking like the great, mistake-free reformer than doing what is necessary to turn things around.

He continues to turn deaf ears to public calls for the resignation or termination of Police Supt. Ronal Serpas despite increasing evidence that Serpas has proven to be a liability to his administration and one of the reasons many in the community don’t trust the NOPD or the Landrieu administration.

Selby’s remarks and what they represent underscore the importance of residents supporting the efforts of Community United for Change to make sure that the federally mandated consent decree leads to the kinds of substantive changes desperately needed in the NOPD. Now is not the time to sit back and depend on a handful of people to carry out this very important work. Everyone in the community has a role to play and something to contribute to this struggle for justice.

Meanwhile, Commander Selby has stepped down amid the racial flap over his remarks.

Selby’s exit is no cause for major celebration because the culture that makes many of the NOPD’s top brass and officers think it is normal for cops to target, humiliate, vilify and abuse people of color and the poor is still in place.

Selby’s departure, while it may be satisfying to some who were offended by his inflammatory remarks, may be a bit like treating cancer with aspirin. The patient known as the NOPD is still on life support with very little hope of recovering without some sort of radical treatment of the problem.

Simply put, when it comes to myopic vision, outdated ideas and unimaginative leadership, there’s a lot more where Commander Eddie Selby comes from.
All power to the people.

This article was originally published in the July 11, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper