The Ordinary Outrage of the Baltimore Police Report

By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker

14 August 16

t its most obvious, the Department of Justice report on the Baltimore Police Department added a hundred sixty-three pages to the great tower of foregone conclusions. In short, the Baltimore Police Department engaged in a pattern of stopping African-Americans without any real justification. Between 2010 and 2015, there were three hundred thousand police stops, of which less than four per cent resulted in a citation or arrest. Forty-four per cent of those stops occurred in two small, mostly black neighborhoods, and ninety-five per cent of people who were stopped ten times or more were African-American.

But the most striking part of the report on Baltimore is the extent to which it is interchangeable with the reports on race and policing that have come out of Chicago, Cleveland, Ferguson, and Newark in the past two years. The reports were most often the product of a particular outrage that had initially been met with official denials or understatements, and then with grudging acknowledgment of wrongdoing, followed by a federal examination of what went wrong. The Chicago report was commissioned by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the volatile days after a video of a seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald being shot sixteen times by a police officer was made public. The Cleveland report—the second such examination in twelve years—came in the wake of a series of incidents, most notably a car chase in which officers fired a hundred and thirty-seven bullets into a vehicle containing two unarmed people. Three weeks before the report was released, a Cleveland police officer, Timothy Loehmann, shot Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a public park. The Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri, came after Michael Brown, who was eighteen, was shot to death by the police officer Darren Wilson. The Department of Justice found Wilson’s use of force justifiable—at the same time that it found that the Ferguson Police Department was egregiously biased and mercenary.

Toss this damning collection into the air and it would be nearly impossible to determine which pages belong where. The death of Freddie Gray, while he was in the custody of the Baltimore police, didn’t outrage people because of its unique horror. It outraged people because he was recognizable, an everyman of the American city. African-Americans represent sixty per cent of Baltimore residents old enough to drive legally but eighty-two per cent of those who are stopped by police. In Ferguson, where African-Americans are sixty-seven per cent of the populace, they represent eighty-five per cent of automotive and pedestrian stops. In Chicago, which has roughly equal black, white, and Hispanic populations, blacks and Hispanics are four times more likely to be stopped by police.

The facile response is to see this as a product of the disproportionate number of violent crimes committed by African-Americans. But the number of times that blacks are stopped does not hold up to any examination. In Baltimore, whites who were stopped were twice as likely as blacks to be carrying contraband. In Chicago, police found contraband on white drivers twice as often as on black or Hispanic drivers. In Ferguson, blacks were twenty-six per cent less likely than whites to be carrying illegal or controlled substances. The reasons are straightforward: police tended to stop whites based on some particular indicator of illegal behavior, whereas for people of color the simple fact of their appearance could be cause for a police encounter. For whites, suspicion is an opt-in circumstance. For blacks, it’s nearly impossible to opt out.

Here is the Department of Justice on Newark, in 2014:

There is reasonable cause to believe that the NPD has engaged in a pattern or practice of effecting stops and arrests in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Approximately 75% of reports of pedestrian stops by NPD officers failed to articulate sufficient legal basis for the stop, despite the NPD policy requiring such justification. During the period reviewed, the NPD made thousands of stops of individuals who were described merely as “milling,” “loitering,” or “wandering,” without any indication of reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

Here is the D.O.J. on Baltimore, this week:

BPD officers arrest individuals standing lawfully on public sidewalks for “loitering,” “trespassing,” or other misdemeanor offenses without providing adequate notice that the individuals were engaged in unlawful activity. Indeed, officers frequently invert the constitutional notice requirement. While the Constitution requires individuals to receive pre-arrest notice of the specific conduct prohibited as loitering or trespassing, BPD officers approach individuals standing lawfully on sidewalks in front of public housing complexes or private businesses and arrest them unless the individuals are able to “justify” their presence to the officers’ satisfaction.

An extraordinary seventy per cent of African-Americans surveyed for the Chicago report said that they had been stopped by police in the previous twelve months—fifty-six per cent while on foot.

The problems in these departments are almost always facilitated by lax oversight. The D.O.J. report on Cleveland noted:

Discipline is so rare that no more than 51 officers out of a sworn force of 1,500 were disciplined in any fashion in connection with a use of force incident over a three-and-a half-year period. However, when we examined CDP’s discipline numbers further, it was apparent that in most of those 51 cases the actual discipline imposed was for procedural violations such as failing to file a report, charges were dismissed or deemed unfounded, or the disciplinary process was suspended due to pending civil claims.

The Newark report found that, in 2010, just thirty-eight of eight hundred and fourteen complaints against police were sustained. In Chicago, between 2011 and 2015, forty per cent of complaints went uninvestigated. Of the complaints for which an investigation was conducted, only seven per cent were sustained. Police tend to point to the low numbers of sustained complaints as evidence that they were specious charges filed in retaliation for lawful arrests. Yet the broader pattern of arrests established in the reports casts suspicion, to say the least, on such claims.

As it happens, the Newark and Chicago police departments were helmed by the same man, Garry McCarthy, during each of their periods of investigation. McCarthy resigned from the Chicago department in the wake of the McDonald video. The defensive reflex of bureaucracy is to treat these problems as the result of a handful of bad actors—this, for instance, is what the Christopher Commission found in its examination of the L.A.P.D. after the Rodney King riots.  But what the Baltimore report—and the anthology of investigations that have preceded it—establishes is that, even if violence toward black communities comes from a minority of officers, their wrongdoing may be corrupting a majority of institutions.

With Trump Certain to Lose, You Can Forget About a Progressive Clinton

By Thomas Frank, Guardian UK

14 August 16

Come November, Clinton will have won her great victory – not as a champion of working people’s concerns, but as the greatest moderate of them all

nd so ends the great populist uprising of our time, fizzling out pathetically in the mud and the bigotry stirred up by a third-rate would-be caudillo named Donald J Trump. So closes an era of populist outrage that began back in 2008, when the Davos dream of a world run by benevolent bankers first started to crack. The unrest has taken many forms in these eight years - from idealistic to cynical, from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party - but they all failed to change much of anything.

And now the last, ugliest, most fraudulent manifestation is failing so spectacularly that it may discredit populism itself for years to come.

Two weeks ago, I wrote in this space about how the Trump phenomenon had reconfigured the conventional geometry of the two-party system. Trump was riding high in the polls at that moment, and there was reason to believe that his criticism of trade deals - one of several Trumpian causes long associated with the populist left - might play havoc with the Democrats' happy centrist plans.

Now let us ponder the opposite scenario. In the intervening two weeks, Trump has destroyed himself more efficiently than any opposition campaign could ever have done. First, he heaped mounds of insults on the family of a US soldier killed in Iraq, then prominent journalists raised doubts about his mental state, and then (as if to confirm his doubters) he dropped a strong hint that gun enthusiasts might take action against Hillary Clinton should she appoint supreme court justices not to his liking.

His chances, as measured in the polls, went almost overnight from fairly decent to utter crap. For much of this year, populism had the gilded class really worried. There was Bernie Sanders and the unthinkable threat of a socialist president. There was the terrifying Brexit vote. Just a short while ago the American national newspapers were running page-one stories telling readers it was time to take seriously Trump's followers, if not Trump himself. And on 3 August, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman actually typed the following: "It scares me that people are so fed up with elites, so hate and mistrust [Hillary] Clinton and are so worried about the future - jobs, globalization and terrorism" that they might actually vote for Trump.

Yes, it scared Friedman that the American people didn't like their masters any longer. As it has no doubt scared many of his rich friends to learn over the past few years that the people formerly known as middle class are angry about losing their standard of living to the same forces that are making those rich people ever more comfortable.

Well, Friedman need be frightened no longer. Today it looks as though his elites are taking matters well in hand. "Jobs" don't really matter now in this election, nor does the debacle of "globalization", nor does anything else, really. Thanks to this imbecile Trump, all such issues have been momentarily swept off the table while Americans come together around Clinton, the wife of the man who envisaged the Davos dream in the first place.

As leading Republicans desert the sinking ship of Trump's GOP, America's two-party system itself has temporarily become a one-party system. And within that one party, the political process bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession. Party office-holders selected Clinton as their candidate long ago, apparently determined to elevate her despite every possible objection, every potential legal problem. The Democratic National Committee helped out, too, as WikiLeaks tells us. So did President Barack Obama, that former paladin for openness, who in the past several years did nearly everything in his power to suppress challenges to Clinton and thus ensure she would continue his legacy of tepid, bank-friendly neoliberalism.

My leftist friends persuaded themselves that this stuff didn't really matter, that Clinton's many concessions to Sanders' supporters were permanent concessions. But with the convention over and the struggle with Sanders behind her, headlines show Clinton triangulating to the right, scooping up the dollars and the endorsement, and the elites shaken loose in the great Republican wreck.

She is reaching out to the foreign policy establishment and the neocons. She is reaching out to Republican office-holders. She is reaching out to Silicon Valley. And, of course, she is reaching out to Wall Street. In her big speech in Michigan on Thursday she cast herself as the candidate who could bring bickering groups together and win policy victories through really comprehensive convenings.

Things will change between now and November, of course. But what seems most plausible from the current standpoint is a landslide for Clinton, and with it the triumph of complacent neoliberal orthodoxy. She will have won her great victory, not as a champion of working people's concerns, but as the greatest moderate of them all, as the leader of a stately campaign of sanity and national unity. The populist challenge of the past eight years, whether led by Trump or by Sanders, will have been beaten back resoundingly. Centrism will reign triumphant over the Democratic party for years to come. This will be her great accomplishment. The bells will ring all over Washington DC.

In this ironic and roundabout way, Trump may prove to be a disaster for the reform politics he has never really believed in. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a leader who could discredit populism more thoroughly than this compassion-free billionaire. For Friedman's beloved "elites", I predict that Trump will come to serve an important symbolic purpose. Trump loves to boast that he is immune to the scourge of money in politics, that he's nobody's puppet, and from his coming ruin and disgrace we will no doubt be told to draw many lessons about how money in politics actually helps prevent the rise of people like Trump and makes the system more stable.

For decades, the Davos set have told us that doubt about "globalization" was a species of racism, and soon Trump, as a landslide loser, will confirm this for them in overwhelming terms.

My friends and I like to wonder about who will be the "next Bernie Sanders", but what I am suggesting here is that whoever emerges to lead the populist left will simply be depicted as the next Trump. The billionaire's scowling country-club face will become the image of populist reform, whether genuine populists had anything to do with him or not. This is the real potential disaster of 2016: That legitimate economic discontent is going to be dismissed as bigotry and xenophobia for years to come.