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Promising New Partnership Seeks To Reduce Incarceration

Promising New Partnership Seeks To Reduce Incarceration

Eric Garner. John Crawford III. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Harris. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray.

You know their names; you’ve heard them countless times in newscasts and read them in newspaper headlines. They make up a police dishonor roll: unarmed black men who’ve been killed by law enforcement officials or who’ve died in their custody.

Yet, the controversy that has attended those deaths owes more to a quiet and slow-running civic revolution than to the attention of journalists, the passions of activists, or the decisions of higher authorities.

If crime rates were still high, if the numbers of murders, armed robberies, and violent assaults were still vaulting to new records, many people wouldn’t care what happened to Rice or Garner or Gray. They’d believe they deserved what they got. Such is the power of police officers when crime seems out of control.

But crime rates have fallen sharply over the last few decades — down, in 2013, to 1978’s levels. Let’s hope the relative safety of our streets allows us to reconsider not only police brutality but also the prison-industrial complex.

The United States locks up a larger proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world. While we have about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, we house about 22 percent of its prisoners, according to researchers. That’s simply, well, criminal.

And mass incarceration has exacted a terrible cost — on state budgets, on black neighborhoods, on economic and social justice. According to federal statistics, one in three black men can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetimes.

The misnamed War on Drugs has probably done more to exacerbate black poverty and destroy black families than any other force of the last 50 years. Countless black men have been incarcerated for nonviolent, drug-related offenses. They leave prison burdened by felony records that make them unemployable.

Some conservative criminologists continue to insist that crime rates have fallen because we lock up so many of the bad guys. They’re likely wrong.

To be fair, no one knows for sure why crime is down and keeps falling. But it’s happening throughout the developed world — including in countries, such as Canada, where authorities don’t lock up nearly as many citizens.

Leading politicians — including one or two brave Republicans — have already called for criminal justice reform. Last month, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton gave a major address in which she outlined proposals that included alternatives to mass incarceration.

“There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes. And an estimated 1.5 million black men are ‘missing’ from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death,” she noted.

Among Republicans, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, has joined with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to author a bill that would help nonviolent offenders seal their records. And Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has reached across the aisle to co-author a bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to help eligible prisoners reduce their time.

But the truth is that any substantial progress will have to come through governors and state legislatures; federal authorities have jurisdiction over only about 6 percent of prison inmates. The vast majority of criminal activity is governed by state and local courts.

That’s why a new partnership between ultra-conservative groups and liberal activists who want to reduce the incarceration rate, the Coalition for Public Safety, is so promising. Its backers include the Koch brothers and the American Civil Liberties Union. That sort of alliance ought to prove powerful.

And it will need to be. Most statehouses are controlled by Republicans, who still reflexively play to a conservative base easily whipped up by fear of crime. Few politicians want to face an opponent who accuses them of being soft on murderers or rapists.

But the drop in crime is real, and it provides an opportunity for any thinking legislator to reconsider mass incarceration. We are locking up too many of our citizens and paying too high a price.

(Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.) 

Photo: Neon Tammy via Flickr

‘What Can I Do?’ Let’s Find Out

‘What Can I Do?’ Let’s Find Out

“There comes a time when people get tired.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., Dec. 5, 1955

Tracy is tired. She was tired even before Baltimore burned this week.

I received an email from her on April 12. She wanted me to know she is a 55-year-old white lady from Austin, Texas, who is tired unto tears by incident after incident of police violence against unarmed African-American men — including a 2013 shooting in her own hometown. “What can be done?” she asked. “What can I do? I’m sincere in this question. I want to DO something. What can that be? I’m embarrassed to have to ask; I feel like I should KNOW what to do, but I don’t.”

There comes a time when people get tired. And then what?

In Baltimore, the answer some people gave was to break windows, smash cars, set fires, and loot stores. In so doing, they gave aid and comfort to every enemy of justice who would just as soon not look too closely at what happened in that city. Meaning, of course, the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who mysteriously suffered fatal injuries — on April 12, no less — while in police custody.

As Martin Luther King noted after young people in Memphis broke windows and looted stores during the last march he ever led, violence has a way of changing the subject. He lamented that he was now forced to talk about the vandalism rather than the exploitation of dirt-poor working men that had brought him to Memphis in the first place.

Similarly, we are now required to take time out from demanding justice for Freddie Gray to discuss the sacking and looting of Baltimore and to say the obvious: The road to better policing does not go through a burned-out CVS pharmacy. So the rioting — whether motivated by genuine anger or craven opportunism — was not just thuggish, shortsighted, and self-defeating. It was also tactically stupid, ceding the moral high ground and giving media, politicians, and pundits permission to ignore the very real issues here.

Not that they ever need much of an excuse, particularly over at Fox “News” and other citadels of conservative denialism. Indeed, on Monday night even as Baltimore burned, Fox’s Lou Dobbs was, predictably enough, blaming the violence on President Obama.

Apparently, the death of Gray, whose spine was partially severed in some still unexplained way, had nothing to do with it. Repeated incidents of police violence against men and boys who somehow always happen to be black and unarmed, had nothing to do with it. No, it was Obama’s fault.

Amazing.

It has reached a point where you can’t keep the atrocities straight without a scorecard. Besides Gray, we’ve got Eric Harris, an unarmed black man shot in Tulsa who cried that he was losing his breath, to which a cop responded “F*ck your breath.” We’ve got Levar Jones, a black man shot by a state trooper in South Carolina while complying with the trooper’s commands. We’ve got Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Eric Garner. We’ve got video of a black man named Walter Scott, wanted for a traffic violation and back child support, running from a police officer and being shot to death. We’ve got video of a white man named Michael Wilcox, wanted for murder, running toward a police officer, threatening him, daring him to shoot, refusing to remove his hands from his pockets, yet somehow not being shot.

We’ve got all this plus statistical proof. Yet the same people who cry “War on Christmas!” every time some city hall in Podunk erects a menorah on the lawn can discern no racial disparity in police violence against unarmed men.

So if there comes a time when people get tired, who can blame them?

Reading Tracy’s email I was reminded of how a white college student once confronted Malcolm X at a Harlem restaurant and asked him the same question Tracy did: What can I do? To which Malcolm replied: “Nothing.” I’ve always thought the student deserved better than he gave her. After all, the fight for human rights is not a black thing. Human rights are a human thing.

Here, then, begins a series of columns — “What Can I Do?” — aimed at finding answers to Tracy’s question. It will be open-ended and run irregularly. I will be interviewing people who can provide Tracy — and by extension, the rest of us — concrete strategies for making change. Some of those I talk to, you will likely know; some may be new to you.

If you have a serious answer for Tracy — or think there’s someone I should talk to — send me an email: lpitts(at)miamiherald.com. Maybe I’ll write about it. Put “What Can I Do?” in the subject line. Keep it short — 1,000-word treatises will go unread.

Tracy asked something we all should be asking. Assuming the news does not intervene, our search for answers begins with my next column.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.) 

A Maryland Transit Authority patrol car burns at North and Pennsylvania Avenues on Monday, April 27, 2015, in Baltimore. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun/TNS)

Video Shows Arizona Police Intentionally Ran Over Suspect

Video Shows Arizona Police Intentionally Ran Over Suspect

Washington (AFP) — Arizona police released video showing an officer using his cruiser to intentionally run over a suspect, triggering new questions about what critics call excessive use of force by officers in the U.S.

In the dashcam video released Tuesday, a gunshot is heard before suspect Mario Valencia is seen walking down a street in the town of Marana on February 19 with a rifle.

He is seen firing a shot in the air and then proceeding down the street as police slowly trail him in their vehicles.

Then a police car driven by officer Michael Rapiejko is caught on the dashcam rushing past and slamming into Valencia from the back before plowing into a cinderblock wall.

Valencia survived the collision.

Marana police chief Terry Rozema defended the action, saying Valencia had refused to obey officers’ commands to put down the rifle and was approaching an office building.

“We can’t allow him to get to the point where he enters the office complex. We can’t allow him the opportunity to take somebody in the parking lot hostage to do a carjacking.”

“It’s graphic, it’s violent, but at the same token it warranted deadly force given all of the circumstances,” he said, adding that the police officer “would have been completely justified in shooting this individual.”

The dramatic incident capped a crosstown crime spree, according to police, which say Valencia was fleeing from a Walmart store where he had stolen the rifle.

An investigation is underway to see whether he is also linked to earlier crimes in Tucson.

But the violent encounter was only the latest in a series of incidents that critics say demonstrates a pattern of police brutality and racism across the United States.

Hundreds of people in two dozen cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, on Tuesday protested fresh police killings of unarmed black men.

Rally organizers say U.S. police have shot more than 90 unarmed people since January.

On Monday, a white volunteer deputy sheriff in Oklahoma was charged with second-degree manslaughter for shooting dead Eric Harris, 44, a suspect in an undercover gun-sale operation. He is now free on bail.

Last week, a South Carolina police officer was charged with murder after being filmed on video killing Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, as he fled a routine traffic stop on April 4.

The cellphone video shows the officer firing eight times as Scott was running away.

A series of killings last year of unarmed black men by mainly white police officers have sparked nationwide protests and raised charges of racism, reviving a national debate about the excessive use of police force.

The demonstrations were galvanized by the August 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in bitterly disputed circumstances. The officer involved in that case was not charged.

Photo: Elvert Barnes via Flickr