History > 2015 > USA > Immigration > African-Americans (II)

Children in Watts are growing up in a changed neighborhood.

Photograph: Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Watts, 50 Years On, Stands in Contrast to Today’s Conflicts

NYT

AUG. 10, 2015

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/
us/50-years-after-watts-riots-a-recovery-is-in-progress.html

The Chicago Police Scandal

 

DEC. 1, 2015

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The cover-up that began 13 months ago when a Chicago police officer executed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on a busy street might well have included highly ranked officials who ordered subordinates to conceal information. But the conspiracy of concealment exposed last week when the city, under court order, finally released a video of the shooting could also be seen as a kind of autonomic response from a historically corrupt law enforcement agency that is well versed in the art of hiding misconduct, brutality — and even torture.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel demonstrated a willful ignorance when he talked about the murder charges against the police officer who shot Mr. McDonald, seeking to depict the cop as a rogue officer. He showed a complete lack of comprehension on Tuesday when he explained that he had decided to fire his increasingly unpopular police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, not because he failed in his leadership role, but because he had become “a distraction.”

Mr. Emanuel’s announcement that he had appointed a task force that will review the Police Department’s accountability procedures is too little, too late. The fact is, his administration, the Police Department and the prosecutor’s office have lost credibility on this case. Officials must have known what was on that video more than a year ago, and yet they saw no reason to seek a sweeping review of the police procedures until this week.

The Justice Department, which is already looking at the McDonald killing, needs to investigate every aspect of this case, determine how the cover-up happened and charge anyone found complicit. The investigation needs to begin with the Police Department’s news release of Oct. 21, 2014, which incorrectly states that Mr. McDonald was shot while approaching police officers with a knife. A dash cam video that was likely available within hours of the shooting on Oct. 20 shows Mr. McDonald veering away from the officer when he was shot 16 times, mainly while lying on the pavement. Why does the video completely contradict that press release?

The question of what pedestrians and motorists said about what they saw that night is also at issue. Lawyers for the McDonald family say that the police threatened motorists with arrest if they did not leave the scene and actually interviewed people whose versions of the events were consistent with the video, but did not take statements. Last week, a manager at a Burger King restaurant near the shooting scene told The Chicago Tribune that more than an hour of surveillance video disappeared from the restaurant’s surveillance system after police officers gained access to it.

The dash cam video might have been buried forever had lawyers and journalists not been tipped off to its existence. Mr. Emanuel, who was running for re-election at the time of the shooting, fought to keep it from becoming public, arguing that releasing it might taint a federal investigation.

Justice Department officials, however, said on Tuesday that the department did not ask the city to withhold the video from the public because of its investigation. That makes this whole episode look like an attempt by the city, the police and prosecutors to keep the video under wraps, knowing the political problems it would most likely create.

Fortunately, a journalist working the case sued for release of the video. When a county judge ordered the city to make it public last week, more than a year had passed since the shooting, and public confidence in the police, prosecutors and the mayor’s office had been exhausted.

All along, Mr. Emanuel’s response, either by design or because of negligence, was to do as little as possible — until the furor caused by the release of the video forced his hand. The residents of Chicago will have to decide whether that counts as taking responsibility.

A version of this editorial appears in print on December 2, 2015, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: The Chicago Police Scandal.

The Chicago Police Scandal,
NYT, DEC. 1, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/opinion/the-chicago-police-scandal.html

Horror Drove Her From South.

100 Years Later, She Returned.

SEPT. 19, 2015

The New York Times

This Land

Dan Barry

ELLISVILLE, Miss. — The dark S.U.V. rented for the occasion stopped outside the one-story City Hall. A wheelchair was rolled up to receive a petite passenger wearing a baseball cap dappled with sparkles, her hair gray-white, her skin mocha brown, her socks hot pink.

Settling into the chair, Mamie Lang Kirkland took a quick look around. It had been a while. About a century.

When she was 7, her family fled Ellisville amid talk of lynchings. On to Illinois, where white mobs rioted. To Ohio, where the Klan raised torches. To western New York, where she and her steelworker husband had nine children, and the one miscarriage she always includes in her account.

Now, after many decades of saying she didn’t even want to see Mississippi on a map, Ms. Kirkland was here for the first time since 1915. Here in Ellisville.

Behind her loomed the Jones County Courthouse, built in 1908, the year of her birth. A marble Confederate soldier facing north in defiance, erected when she was 4. And two identical drinking fountains, with plaques covering up the distinguishing inscriptions: “White” and “Colored.”

Ms. Kirkland kept her back to it all as her baby boy, 65-year-old Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, wheeled her into City Hall two weeks ago for a meeting with the mayor, who was running late. “He had you on his calendar for yesterday,” a clerk said.

Before long, the stocky white mayor, Tim Waldrup, arrived with coffee cup in hand to greet the Kirkland entourage, which included a daughter, a daughter-in-law and a family friend with a video camera. He apologized for his casual dress, saying he had worn a suit for her yesterday.

“How you doing?” he said softly, as he squatted beside Ms. Kirkland.

“I’m fine,” she answered. “And how are you?”

“Well, I’m doing good,” he said. “I’m doing good for an old man. You know how it is.”

“Well,” she said. “I guess I do.”

They began to converse in that way of strangers seeking some commonality. His Ellisville has 4,500 residents, access to Interstate 59, several industries, a racially diverse electorate and no public acknowledgment of its lynching past. Her Ellisville is a different place entirely.

But how could Ms. Kirkland possibly convey it all in this courtesy call? How the name of Ellisville conjures nightmarish flashbacks. How, from here, she had embarked on a century-long journey reflecting much of the African-American experience.

“You look so pretty, you really do,” the mayor said. “How old are you?”

“I’m one-oh-seven.”

Later, in the modest lobby of the nearby Best Western motel, Ms. Kirkland told her life story. It is a story in the oral-history tradition, with census records, a note tucked into a Bible and the confirming nods of family members — who have heard the same accounts since the age of comprehension — providing notarization of memory.

But its undercurrent of pain caused her repeatedly to turn to her son and ask, “Do I have to tell that?”

Yes, he answered gently. People should know.

Ms. Kirkland’s earliest memory is of being sick with typhomalarial fever in the family’s rented home in Ellisville. Where the house was she can’t remember, but it had wooden floors her mother kept neat, and a large peach tree in the back.

“I’m looking at it now,” she said. “You can’t see it, but I can.”

Family members gathered around her bed to sing and pray and weep, now that the doctor had done all he could. But her grandmother, a midwife and herbalist named Easter Moore, asked for one more chance, and made Mamie drink some mysterious concoction.

The fever broke, and the bedside dirges turned to songs of joy over a 5-year-old girl who would believe from then on that she had briefly died and gone to heaven.

A couple years later, her father, Edward Lang, a laborer and aspiring minister, roused the house at 12:30 in the morning. “Rochelle, I got to leave,” she remembered him saying to her mother. “Get the children together.”

Family lore has it that people wanted to lynch her father and a friend named John Hartfield, and that the two men fled that night. The rest of the Langs — a mother and five children, including baby Lucille, who was nursing — left by train in the morning. It was 1915.

“We were just shaking,” Ms. Kirkland said.

They settled in East St. Louis, Ill., where word later came that Mr. Hartfield had returned to Ellisville to be with his white girlfriend. This is undocumented family gospel. What is documented is that on June 26, 1919, white townspeople lynched him for allegedly raping a white woman.

The front page of The Jackson Daily News announced that Mr. Hartfield would be lynched at 5 p.m. “Governor Bilbo Says He Is Powerless to Prevent It,” the headline read. “Thousands of People Are Flocking Into Ellisville to Attend the Event.”

The Ellisville population of 1,700 instantly multiplied as crowds spilled out of the Hotel Alice and into the open space along the train tracks. A postcard depicting the scene bears the caption: “Waiting for the Show to Start.”

Mr. Hartfield was dragged to a big gum tree and strung up. A rain of bullets from the crowd seemed to reanimate the corpse, which finally fell to the ground and was burned to ashes. Some took body parts as souvenirs.

In the Ellisville of today, little recalls the moment, other than the Hotel Alice. In a mayoral portrait gallery at City Hall, for example, the officeholder in 1919 is absent. And at Jones County Junior College, Roll 539 of the microfilm for the local newspaper, The Laurel Daily Leader, jumps from May 27, 1919, to Aug. 22, 1919 — as if the June lynching of Mr. Hartfield had never happened.

But it remained seared in collective memory. “I never saw him in my life, but I remember his name,” Ms. Kirkland said, adding, “Could have been my father.”

By then, it appears, the family had already endured mayhem in East St. Louis, where thousands of Southern black men like her father found work in industrial plants. In 1917, when Ms. Kirkland was 9, rioting white men, incensed by the job competition and changing demographics, burned down black neighborhoods and shot at those who fled. Dozens of black residents, maybe many more, died, and thousands were left homeless.

She can see it now. The National Guard in the smoke-choked streets. The fires, the panic. That one deaf man shot for not hearing an order to halt.

“Killed him right there,” she said, eyes wide in horror. “I hate to talk about it, but it’s true.”

The family moved on to the small manufacturing city of Alliance, Ohio, still chasing employment and harmony. But in the early 1920s, you might open the local newspaper to find a by-the-way notice that the Ku Klux Klan would be rallying in the Alliance city park this evening, and that “a large attendance is expected.”

One night, Ms. Kirkland said, three Klan members came to the family’s door, holding torches and wearing those big white hoods. “There were only two of us on that street,” she said, meaning black families. “So they were going to” — her voice fell to a whisper — “burn us up.”

But their neighbor, a German, liked them. “ ‘Don’t worry, Reverend Lang,’ ” she remembered him saying. “ ‘If they start...’ ” And he pulled out a handgun. A Luger, in her mind’s eye.

Back then, African-American homes often took in itinerant railroad workers, and one of the Lang family’s boarders, Albert Kirkland, took a liking to Mamie.

“I didn’t give him no bother when I met him,” she recalled. “But at that time my dad was a minister, and he said, ‘This is a fine young man.’ Oh, well. And I looked at him — he was good-looking.”

They married in nearby Canton in 1923; she was 15, and he was 21. They continued north, where he found work as a grinder at the Pratt & Letchworth plant in Buffalo, far from Ellisville, Miss.

No more whispers of lynchings. No more torch-flame reflections dancing on the family’s windows. Just nine children, six of whom reached adulthood, most becoming college-educated professionals. One miscarriage. And a marriage that lasted 35 years, three months and 16 days.

Shortly before Albert Kirkland died, suddenly, in his mid-50s, he asked, “Have I made you happy?” The question stunned his wife, but she said, yes, Al, of course.

There was never another man. “Never looked at anybody in that respect,” she said. “Just the way my husband passed, that’s the way I am today. And I am so grateful.”

How do you say all this in a meet-and-greet with the mayor of Ellisville? At a time of Ferguson and Baltimore and Charleston? When even Atticus Finch isn’t quite who we thought he was?

You don’t.

But Ms. Kirkland’s son had strongly suggested that she return, for the sake of history, and she had agreed. Now, her meeting with the mayor was drawing to a close, and she and her entourage had appointments to keep.

For one thing, they planned to pause in the vicinity of an old gum tree no longer there. They would bow heads, hold hands and sanctify the weedy ground with a splash of water, in memory of those who have suffered from racial terror.

But now she was telling the mayor exactly why her family had fled this town so long ago. Her story seemed to touch him.

“Good gracious, that’s terrible,” the mayor said.

He assured her that things had changed. Better sewers, better plumbing, more job opportunities. Yes, everyone pretty much gets along, black and white.

As Mamie Kirkland, 107, prepared to leave, the mayor emphasized that she was always welcome in Ellisville. “You leave when you get ready,” he said. “And not with nobody telling you.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Horror Drove Her From South. 100 Years Later, She Returned.

Horror Drove Her From South. 100 Years Later, She Returned,
NYT, SEPT. 19, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/us/
horror-drove-her-from-south-100-years-later-she-returned.html

The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’

SEPT. 3, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Republican Party and its acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed African-Americans across the country. The intent of the campaign — evident in comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — is to cast the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as an inflammatory or even hateful anti-white expression that has no legitimate place in a civil rights campaign.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas crystallized this view when he said the other week that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would be “appalled” by the movement’s focus on the skin color of the unarmed people who are disproportionately killed in encounters with the police. This argument betrays a disturbing indifference to or at best a profound ignorance of history in general and of the civil rights movement in particular. From the very beginning, the movement focused unapologetically on bringing an end to state-sanctioned violence against African-Americans and to acts of racial terror very much like the one that took nine lives at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June.

The civil rights movement was intended to make Congress and Americans confront the fact that African-Americans were being killed with impunity for offenses like trying to vote, and had the right to life and to equal protection under the law. The movement sought a cross-racial appeal, but at every step of the way used expressly racial terms to describe the death and destruction that was visited upon black people because they were black.

Even in the early 20th century, civil rights groups documented cases in which African-Americans died horrible deaths after being turned away from hospitals reserved for whites, or were lynched — which meant being hanged, burned or dismembered — in front of enormous crowds that had gathered to enjoy the sight.

The Charleston church massacre has eerie parallels to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. — the most heinous act of that period — which occurred at the height of the early civil rights movement. Four black girls were murdered that Sunday. When Dr. King eulogized them, he did not shy away from the fact that the dead had been killed because they were black, by monstrous men whose leaders fed them “the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.” He said that the dead “have something to say” to a complacent federal government that cut back-room deals with Southern Dixiecrats, as well as to “every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice.” Shock over the bombing pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act the following year.

During this same period, freedom riders and voting rights activists led by the young John Lewis offered themselves up to be beaten nearly to death, week after week, day after day, in the South so that the country would witness Jim Crow brutality and meaningfully respond to it. This grisly method succeeded in Selma, Ala., in 1965 when scenes of troopers bludgeoning voting rights demonstrators compelled a previously hesitant Congress to acknowledge that black people deserved full citizenship, too, and to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Along the way, there was never a doubt as to what the struggle was about: securing citizenship rights for black people who had long been denied them.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement focuses on the fact that black citizens have long been far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police, and is of a piece with this history. Demonstrators who chant the phrase are making the same declaration that voting rights and civil rights activists made a half-century ago. They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an indisputable fact — that the lives of black citizens in this country historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued. People who are unacquainted with this history are understandably uncomfortable with the language of the movement. But politicians who know better and seek to strip this issue of its racial content and context are acting in bad faith. They are trying to cover up an unpleasant truth and asking the country to collude with them.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on September 4, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’.

The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’,
NYT, SEPT. 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/opinion/the-truth-of-black-lives-matter.html

Edward Thomas,

Policing Pioneer

Who Wore a Burden Stoically,

Dies at 95

 

AUG. 14, 2015

The New York Times

By MARGALIT FOX

When Edward Thomas joined the Houston Police Department in 1948, he could not report for work through the front door.

He could not drive a squad car, eat in the department cafeteria or arrest a white suspect.

Walking his beat, he was once disciplined for talking to a white meter maid.

Officer Thomas, who died on Monday at 95, was the first African-American to build an eminent career with the Houston Police Department, one that endured for 63 years. By the time he retired four years ago, two months shy of his 92nd birthday, he had experienced the full compass of 20th-century race relations.

His days were suffused with the pressure to perform perfectly, lest he give his white supervisors the slightest excuse to fire him — and he could be fired, he knew, for a transgression as small as not wearing a hat.

They were also suffused with the danger he faced in the field, knowing that white colleagues would not come to his aid.

In 2011, when Officer Thomas retired with the rank of senior police officer, he was “the most revered and respected officer within the Houston Police Department,” the organization said in announcing his death, at his home in Houston.

On July 27, two weeks before he died, the department renamed its headquarters in Officer Thomas’s honor.

“He was a pioneering figure, not just in the Houston Police Department but in Southern policing in general, representing an era bookended by Jim Crow and the modern period,” Mitchel P. Roth, the author, with Tom Kennedy, of “Houston Blue,” a 2012 history of the city’s police force, said in a telephone interview. “It’s very rare to find a person of color having as long a career and having had a career with as much respect.”

Officer Thomas, by necessity and temperament so taciturn as to seem enigmatic, never spoke to the news media about his work. But interviews with his associates make it plain that the respect he earned was hard won, over a very long time.

“We all know what America was like in 1948,” Charles A. McClelland Jr., Houston’s police chief, the fourth African-American to hold that post, said by telephone. “If you think about some of the milestones in the civil rights movement, when Rosa Parks would not give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, Mr. Thomas had undergone this disparaging treatment for seven years. When major civil rights legislation was passed in 1964 which made his treatment unlawful in the workplace, he’d been a cop for 16 years.”

On Jan. 12, 1948, the day Officer Thomas joined the force, and for years afterward, he could not attend roll call in the squad room: His attendance was taken in the hall.

He could arrest only black people. Apprehending white suspects, he could merely detain them until a white officer was dispatched to make the arrest.

He patrolled his beat — a half-dozen-mile-wide swath spanning largely black neighborhoods — twice a day, alone, on foot: The department long refused to issue him a squad car.

“He told me,” Chief McClelland said, “that the very first time he was given permission to drive a squad car, when the sergeant gave him the keys, his instructions were: ‘You better make sure that you don’t wreck it, but if you do’ — and he referred to him by the N-word — ‘you better pin your badge to the seat and don’t come back.’ ”

For years to come, to spare the car, and his job along with it, Officer Thomas drove it to his beat, parked it, locked it and, as he had before, pounded the pavement on foot.

For talking to the meter maid, who had asked him to accompany her past a line of wolf-whistling construction workers as she made her rounds, Officer Thomas was fined a day’s pay.

Edward Thomas was born on Sept. 23, 1919, in Keachi, La., near Shreveport. His father, Edward, was a local landowner; his mother, Dora, was a schoolteacher. When Edward was about 9, his father died, and he became the de facto man of the house.

As a young man, he attended what is now Southern University and A&M College, a historically black institution in Baton Rouge, but he was drafted by the Army before graduating. Serving in a segregated unit, he took part in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.

After his discharge, he returned home and embarked on a career as a postal worker. Then one day, while traveling by bus to visit family in California, he picked a stray piece of paper off the floor. The paper was an application for the Houston Police Department. He would graduate as a member of its first organized cadet class.

African-Americans had served with the department since Reconstruction, hired to patrol Houston’s black wards. In the 20th century, three are known to have preceded Officer Thomas on the force. But by the time he graduated from the police academy, he was the department’s only black member.

“The others were driven out of the organization: They were forced to quit,” C. O. Bradford, Houston’s second black police chief and now a member of its City Council, said. “He endured it.”

He endured vitriol not only from his fellow officers but also from the very community he wanted to serve.

“The police were not friendly to the black community during that era, and the black community did not welcome the police, for justifiable reasons,” Councilman Bradford said. “The black community did not want Mr. Thomas because he was the police, and the police did not want Mr. Thomas because he was black.”

Yet it was imperative that he win the trust of that community, not only for its well-being but also for his own.

“He had to depend on the relationship that he had with people in the community to help him if he got into a fight with a suspect or had to arrest a suspect,” Councilman Bradford explained. “He had no one to call: He could not put out an assist-the-officer call. Today, you press a button and all the help comes. But back then it wasn’t like that, and he was by himself.”

Little by little, through an approach that would now be called community policing, Officer Thomas won the residents over. Today, Chief McClelland said, many Houstonians in their 60s and 70s warmly recall his escorting them back to school when they played hooky, rather than arresting them — truancy was then an arrestable offense.

He also earned the esteem of his fellow officers. He did so, colleagues said, partly by keeping his head down and doing his job unimpeachably, precisely as he had in 1948 — including wearing his police hat every day of his working life, long after officers were no longer required to do so.

“At one point I asked him: ‘Why do you wear that hat all the time? We don’t wear hats anymore,’ ” Constable May Walker, a 24-year veteran of Houston’s police force and the author of the 1988 book “The History of Black Police Officers in the Houston Police Department, 1878-1988,” said on Wednesday.

“They told me to wear a hat,” she recalled his replying, “and I’m going to wear my hat.” Constable Walker added, “He never said who ‘they’ were.”

By the late 1960s, Chief McClelland said, Officer Thomas’s deep fealty to the past struck some younger, more politically minded black officers as accommodationist.

“I think that some may not fully appreciate that someone has to be first through the door,” said the chief, who knew Officer Thomas for almost 40 years. “He was the Jackie Robinson of the Houston Police Department.”

Today, 53 percent of the department’s 5,300 officers are members of minority groups. The proportion begins to approach the demographics of Houston as a whole, with a population of more than two million that is now about 70 percent minority, making it one of the most diverse cities in the United States.

“We all owe Mr. Thomas a debt of gratitude,” Chief McClelland said. “Not just black officers and Hispanic officers, but gays, lesbians. None of those things would have been possible if someone had not endured that harsh dramatic treatment.”

Officer Thomas’s marriage to Helen A. Thomas ended in divorce; a son, Edward, died before him. His survivors include a daughter, Edna Kay Thomas-Garner; a sister, Lillie Harrison; two grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

The Houston Police Department has no mandatory retirement age, and had he been physically able, Officer Thomas would gladly have worked there to the end of his life.

“Mr. Thomas, when are you going to retire and draw some of that pension money?” Councilman Bradford recalled hearing colleagues ask.

“This is what I want to do,” he replied.

To the end of his career, however, Officer Thomas did not eat in the department cafeteria. If in his early years he could not set foot there, in his later ones he would not — a small, telling act of free will.

Officer Thomas retired on July 23, 2011. Until then, in his 80s and 90s, he manned the security desk at the staff entrance of Police Headquarters, in downtown Houston.

His was the first face that his colleagues encountered as they passed through the back door — today the designated entrance for all officers — of the building that now bears his name.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Edward Thomas, 95, Policing Pioneer Who Wore a Burden Stoically, Dies.

Edward Thomas, Policing Pioneer Who Wore a Burden Stoically, Dies at 95,
NYT, AUGUST 14, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/us/
edward-thomas-policing-pioneer-who-wore-a-burden-stoically-dies-at-95.html

Police Abuse Is a Form of Terror

AUG. 12, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Writing about the wave of deadly encounters — many caught on video — between unarmed black people and police officers often draws a particular criticism from a particular subset of readers.

It is some variation of this:

“Why are you not writing about the real problem — black-on-black crime? Young black men are far more likely to be killed by another young black man than by the police. Why do people not seem to protest when those young people are killed? Where is the media coverage of those deaths?”

This to me has always felt like a deflection, a juxtaposition meant to use one problem to drown out another.

Statistically, the sentiment is correct: Black people are more likely to be killed by other black people. But white people are also more likely to be killed by other white people. The truth is that murders and other violent crimes are often crimes of intimacy and access. People tend to kill people they know.

The argument suggests that police killings are relatively rare and therefore exotic, and distract from more mundane and widespread community violence. I view it differently: as state violence versus community violence.

People are often able to understand and contextualize community violence and, therefore, better understand how to avoid it. A parent can say to a child: Don’t run with that crowd, or hang out on that corner or get involved with that set of activities.

A recent study by scholars at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale found that homicides cluster and overwhelmingly involve a tiny group of people who not only share social connections but are also already involved in the criminal justice system.

We as adults can decide whether or not to have guns in the home. According to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, having a gun may increase the chances of being the victim of homicide. We can report violent family members.

And people with the means and inclination can decide to move away from high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods.

These measures are not 100 percent effective, but they can produce some measure of protection and provide individual citizens with some degree of personal agency.

State violence, as epitomized in these cases by what people view as police abuses, conversely, has produced a specific feeling of terror, one that is inescapable and unavoidable.

The difference in people’s reactions to these different kinds of killings isn’t about an exaltation — or exploitation — of some deaths above others for political purposes, but rather a collective outrage that the people charged with protecting your life could become a threat to it. It is a reaction to the puncturing of an illusion, the implosion of an idea. How can I be safe in America if I can’t be safe in my body? It is a confrontation with a most discomforting concept: that there is no amount of righteous behavior, no neighborhood right enough, to produce sufficient security.

It produces a particular kind of terror, a feeling of nakedness and vulnerability, a fear that makes people furious at the very idea of having to be afraid.

The reaction to police killings is to my mind not completely dissimilar to people’s reaction to other forms of terrorism.

The very ubiquity of police officers and the power they possess means that the questionable killing in which they are involved creates a terror that rolls in like a fog, filling every low place. It produces ambient, radiant fear. It is the lurking unpredictability of it. It is the any- and everywhere-ness of it.

The black community’s response to this form of domestic terror has not been so different from America’s reaction to foreign terror.

The think tank New America found in June that 26 people were killed by jihadist attacks in the United States since 9/11 — compared with 48 deaths from “right wing attacks.” And yet, we have spent unending blood and treasure to combat Islamist terrorism in those years. Furthermore, according to Gallup, half of all Americans still feel somewhat or very worried that they or someone in their family will become a victim of terrorism.

In one of the two Republican debates last week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina seemed to be itching for yet another antiterrorism war, saying at one point: “I would take the fight to these guys, whatever it took, as long as it took.”

Whatever, however, long. This is not only Graham’s position, it’s the position of a large segment of the population.

Responding to New America’s tally, Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post in July:

“Americans have accepted an unprecedented expansion of government powers and invasions of their privacy to prevent such attacks. Since 9/11, 74 people have been killed in the United States by terrorists, according to the think tank New America. In that same period, more than 150,000 Americans have been killed in gun homicides, and we have done … nothing.”

And yet, we don’t ask “Why aren’t you, America, focusing on the real problem: Americans killing other Americans?”

Is the “real problem” question reserved only for the black people? Are black people not allowed to begin a righteous crusade?

One could argue that America’s overwhelming response to the terror threat is precisely what has kept the number of people killed in this country as a result of terror so low. But, if so, shouldn’t black Americans, similarly, have the right to exercise tremendous resistance to reduce the number of black people killed after interactions with the police?

How is it that we can understand an extreme reaction by Americans as a whole to a threat of terror but demonstrate a staggering lack of that understanding when black people in America do the same?

Police Abuse Is a Form of Terror,
NYT, AUGUST 12, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/opinion/police-abuse-is-a-form-of-terror.html

Watts, 50 Years On,

Stands in Contrast

to Today’s Conflicts

AUG. 10, 2015

The New York Times

By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — Donny Joubert watched the boy round the corner of the housing project holding what looked like a handgun. The barrel was pointed at him and the two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department. The boy was 10 or 11 years old, Mr. Joubert figured, and had more gleam than anger in his eyes. Mr. Joubert, a community activist who grew up in the project, shouted and lunged for the gun.

It was plastic. The police officers did not even reach for their holsters.

“Somewhere else, that kid would be dead,” Mr. Joubert said.

That interaction, Mr. Joubert said, is the best illustration of the way the community has changed significantly in the 50 years since the Watts riots broke out on the streets here for six days starting on Aug. 11, 1965.

Confrontations between African-Americans and the police are once again convulsing the country; in Ferguson, Mo., where protesters gathered over the weekend to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown and the riots that ensued, a gunman fired at the police on Sunday night and was shot, and other gunfire and skirmishes broke out. But Watts — once a symbol of urban strife and racial tensions — stands as a stark contrast. There were fewer than a dozen homicides in the neighborhood last year, compared with hundreds in 1965. Community leaders like Mr. Joubert, a former gang leader turned peacemaker and respected mentor, say relations with the police have never been better.
Photo
The Watts Towers. It has been 50 years since riots broke out on the streets in Watts for six days starting on Aug. 11, 1965. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

“They don’t think the kid is out to kill them; they’re not out to kill the kid,” Mr. Joubert said. “They walk and they know who they are talking to. We’ve been through this before, we’re still kind of recovering and saying there’s another way.”

Still, this is no utopia.

Each summer, Mr. Joubert, 54, helps run a jobs program for teenagers at Nickerson Gardens, the low-slung public housing complex where he was raised. Twice last week, the teenagers were summoned inside because of shootings, as administrators worried that a stray bullet would endanger them. And little of the trust Mr. Joubert has for the police has filtered to these teenagers.

“They harass us all the time,” said Raydon Boyce, 19.

“Don’t matter what you do,” Nigel Ewers added, echoing the sentiment expressed by all of the teenage boys taking a break one morning last week.

This is not the same Watts their parents grew up in. While the area remains persistently poor, demographics have transformed it from an African-American enclave to a neighborhood that is more than 70 percent Latino. Many blacks have moved to the suburbs in the Inland Empire and the desert north of Los Angeles. Those changes have brought their own tensions; many black residents talk of feeling pushed out while Latinos have struggled to rise to political leadership.

“Sometimes we’re all against everyone,” said Steve Torres, 17, whose sister left Watts for a small town in Virginia last year. Sitting across the table, an African-American teenager spoke of police officers “killing us off.”

“Don’t really matter who you are; we’re just labeled as bad people,” Mr. Torres said.

Big questions hang in the air, sometimes asked aloud: Could what happened in Ferguson happen here? Could Watts explode as it did five decades ago? Alternatively, could the improvements in Watts happen in Ferguson? There is a deep generational divide in the answers.
Photo
Watts residents sell clothing outside an apartment complex; demographics have transformed the area from a black enclave to a neighborhood more than 70 percent Latino. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Last summer, when Los Angeles police officers shot and killed Ezell Ford, an unarmed mentally ill black man, less than a mile away, protesters wanted to march from downtown to Watts. Mr. Joubert and other leaders urged them to stay away, he said.

“There’s always a sense things can boil over,” said Nina Revoyr, the chief operating officer for the Children’s Institute here, which runs dozens of programs and offers free mental health services in the neighborhood. “But there’s a sense of maturity here; the neighborhood has been through all this before and the transformation has happened. There’s a true relationship — you see a problem, and you talk about it.”

After the police caught a group of youngsters who had been stealing from the offices of the Children’s Institute, Ms. Revoyr worked with officers to avoid pressing charges and instead sent them to a diversion program where they completed hours of community service.
Photo
Donny Joubert, a community activist who grew up in a housing project in Watts, said that relationships with the police have never been better. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Every week for the better part of a decade, Mr. Joubert and other local leaders have met as part of the Watts Gang Task Force, exchanging information with the police and trying to find ways to quell tensions in the community, whether they stem from a gang fight or a police interaction.

In some sense, the changes in the area are evidence of the uniqueness of the neighborhood, which covers just more than two square miles. It is, as some residents put it, the smallest neighborhood with the biggest reputation.

The city’s Housing Authority has poured more than $10 million into special projects there in the last several years. The Police Department has dedicated 10 officers and a sergeant to each of the housing complexes, with officers generally signing on for a five-year commitment to patrol the area by foot each day. The police officers have begun a football league for 9- to 11-year-olds and work as coaches on their days off.
Photo
Capt. Alfred Pasos of the Los Angeles Police Department posed for a photo with residents at a National Night Out street fair in Watts last week. Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

There are signs, too, of enormous challenges. The perimeters of the sports fields at one middle school are fortified with mounds of dirt, meant to protect students from bullets. Residents celebrated a park when it opened this year on what had been a weed-infested lot. Now, the gate to the park is locked, and the slides and skateboard ramps were empty on recent summer afternoons.

The area remains physically isolated, crisscrossed by freeways and railroads. There is still no sit-down restaurant, but the father of the city’s food trucks, Roy Choi, has announced plans to open one. The Children’s Institute will soon unveil plans for its new building designed by Frank Gehry, which it hopes will function as a community center.

The persistent doubts remain.

“We look around at what other places have, and we just don’t see the opportunities here,” said Tim Watkins, who runs the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, which his father created after the 1965 uprising, as locals refer to it. “There’s still a lot of desperation around here, and that can lead to desperate acts at any time.”

Sgt. Emada Tingirides, who grew up in the neighborhood and now serves as the coordinator of the Community Safety Partnership program in the housing projects, said hardly a day goes by without talking with residents here about police shootings in other parts of the country.

“If it happened here, we would know what to do after the fact,” she said. But she acknowledged change does not come easily and officers still face mistrust from the young men in the neighborhood. “This is a cultural shift that is going to take time, not just years but decades and generations.”

She thought back to the boy who approached her with the toy gun about six months ago. Mr. Joubert snapped the object in half and then persuaded the ice cream trucks and liquor stores to stop selling them.

That boy, she said, might be someone who now believes the police are out there to protect him, or at least not out to get him.

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: 50 Years Later, Watts Stands in Contrast to Today’s Conflicts.

Watts, 50 Years On, Stands in Contrast to Today’s Conflicts,
NYT, AUGUST 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/us/50-years-after-watts-riots-a-recovery-is-in-progress.html

Emergency Declared in Ferguson

After Shooting

AUG. 10, 2015

The New York Times

By JOHN ELIGON

and MITCH SMITH

FERGUSON, Mo. — The St. Louis County executive declared a state of emergency here on Monday as officials and activists sought to regain control of the volatile streets after plainclothes police officers shot and critically wounded an 18-year-old black man who they said was firing on them late the night before.

The police said the man, Tyrone Harris Jr., was among two groups of young people who exchanged gunfire near peaceful protests late Sunday on the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson. Prosecutors on Monday charged Mr. Harris, of the St. Louis suburb Northwoods, with 10 counts, including four of felony assault on a law enforcement officer.

The declaration of a state of emergency by the county executive, Steve Stenger, empowered the county police force and its top commander, Chief Jon Belmar, to oversee police operations in and around Ferguson, where police units from surrounding towns arrived on Monday to bolster efforts to maintain calm. Gunfire on the fringes of demonstrations commemorating Mr. Brown’s death — which set off looting, arson and confrontations with the police last year — unnerved residents and demonstrators over the weekend.

“The recent acts of violence will not be tolerated in a community that has worked so tirelessly over the last year to rebuild and become stronger,” Mr. Stenger said in a statement. “Chief Belmar shall exercise all powers and duties necessary to preserve order, prevent crimes, and protect the life and property of our citizens.”

On Monday, protesters who had commemorated Mr. Brown throughout the weekend staged acts of civil disobedience across the region. They protested incarceration rates and prison contractors in Clayton, the county seat, and held a rally outside the federal courthouse in St. Louis, where nearly five dozen people were arrested. Another 60 or so were arrested after blocking traffic for about 30 minutes during the evening rush on Interstate 70 in the St. Louis suburbs.

Around 10 p.m., police officers and state troopers began to make arrests after some demonstrators did not clear West Florissant Avenue, which was scarred by vandalism and looting a year ago. There were isolated scuffles, and some frozen water bottles were hurled toward officers.

Some protesters were not so quick to embrace the police version of the shooting of Mr. Harris, whose family has questioned whether he fired on the police or was even carrying a weapon. The authorities said they had recovered a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer next to Mr. Harris that was reported stolen last year.

Still, there seemed to be agreement among some protest leaders — many of whom were from the region, but others who had come into town to commemorate Mr. Brown — that much of the trouble has been caused by young people with no connection to the demonstrations and who were hanging out along the street.

“We continually talk and engage folks and try to help them understand what it is to actually be in confrontation, what resistance looks like, what organized resistance looks like versus like some of what happened last night,” Montague Simmons, the executive director of the Organization for Black Struggle, said Monday. “Some of those folks were not there to protest, obviously. They were just there for their own reasons. I guess the point for us is making sure we’ve got enough people on hand that when that happens, we’re able to help keep folks safe.”

Still, Mr. Simmons faulted the county’s decision to declare a state of emergency, warning that an overly aggressive police stance might provoke new unrest. Protest leaders had also criticized the police for showing up in riot gear late Sunday.

“The state of emergency is the result of county government’s unwillingness to control the police and authorities, who used excessive force on a crowd that was retreating as instructed,” he said in a statement.

The executive order will allow for certain staffing changes to bolster the police presence, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stenger said. It also could allow for a curfew to be put in place, though that step has not been taken.

Thousands of peaceful demonstrators commemorated Mr. Brown’s death with rallies, concerts, demonstrations and church services through the weekend. Though both a local grand jury and federal prosecutors cleared the white police officer who killed him, Darren Wilson, of criminal wrongdoing, Mr. Brown’s death led to protests against police violence across the country and helped start a national debate on law enforcement policies in minority communities.

On Sunday, the mood of the demonstrations started to become tense after a couple of people broke into a beauty supply store along West Florissant Avenue and several police cars responded, with officers lining up along the storefront. Dozens of protesters blocked traffic and started moving off the roadway to yell at the police officers. But when several squad cars raced to an intersection nearby and dozens of officers in riot gear formed a skirmish line, the demonstrators surged back into the street.

After an hourlong standoff, gunfire broke out about 300 yards away in a strip mall where dozens of people who were not part of the protest were milling about.

Shots were being exchanged between two groups, according to the police. Mr. Harris fired a handgun as he ran across West Florissant, the police said in court documents. Four plainclothes officers in an unmarked sport-utility vehicle drove toward Mr. Harris with the S.U.V.’s red and blue lights flashing, the police said, and he fired upon them. They got out and chased him, and after an exchange of gunfire, Mr. Harris was hit, the police said.

But Mr. Harris’s grandmother said that his girlfriend, who was with him, told her that Mr. Harris was running across West Florissant to her car to escape gunfire.

The grandmother, Gwen Drisdel, said she did not know whether Mr. Harris was armed. It would not be unreasonable that he might carry a firearm because of how violent the streets are, she said, but added, “I don’t believe that he would disrespect police like that.”

Mr. Harris was a friend of Mr. Brown’s, Ms. Drisdel said, and he graduated from the same high school, Normandy, this year. Mr. Harris was searching for a job, she said, and was interested in truck driving.

No family members have been allowed to visit Mr. Harris in the hospital, she said. But she did learn that doctors were concerned about a bullet near his spine that they might not be able to remove, she said. Mr. Harris was being held on a $250,000 cash bond.

Hours after Mr. Harris was wounded, two other teenagers were shot and wounded by an unknown assailant on Canfield Drive, where Mr. Brown was killed, according to the police. The authorities were still investigating whether there was a connection between the shootings. The Police Department also said it deployed smoke canisters to disperse crowds on Canfield, though demonstrators said the substance was tear gas.

Some political leaders who have denounced the police in the past were not so critical in the wake of the recent violence.

“I didn’t see anything related to the shooting that I personally saw police handle improperly,” said Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who was in the strip mall near where the gunfire originated Sunday night. “Based upon being out there and what I saw and heard and even felt go whizzing by my head, it was not initiated by police. It was a violent encounter that then apparently spread across the street.”

State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat whose district includes Ferguson, said Monday that she was working to understand what led to the officer-involved shooting. The shootings reinforced the need for protesters to police themselves and ensure that demonstrations remain peaceful, she said.

“I want people who are interested in protesting to continue doing that in a very peaceful way,” she said. “We also have to learn a lot of lessons and teach.”

Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Ferguson, and Timothy Williams from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Emergency Is Declared After a Ferguson Shooting.

Emergency Declared in Ferguson After Shooting,
NYT, AUGUST 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/us/shooting-ferguson-michael-brown.html

Texas Police Fatally Shoot

Unarmed College Football Player

AUG. 7, 2015

9:17 P.M. E.D.T.

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ARLINGTON, Texas — A police officer in suburban Dallas shot and killed a college football player during a struggle after the unarmed 19-year-old crashed a car through the front window of a car dealership, authorities said Friday.

The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office identified the dead man as Christian Taylor, of Arlington. Taylor was a sophomore at Angelo State University in San Angelo.

Officers were responding to a burglary call about 1 a.m. Friday in Arlington when they discovered someone had driven a vehicle through a front window of the Classic Buick GMC, according to a statement from the Arlington Police Department. The statement said police approached the suspect and a struggle ensued. At some point during the struggle, an officer shot Taylor.

Police identified the officer as Brad Miller, a 49-year-old who has been with the department since last September and who has been working under the supervision of a training officer since his graduation from the police academy in March. The police statement said Miller had no police experience before joining the Arlington police force.

He will be placed on administrative leave, which is routine in such cases. Independent criminal and administrative investigations, according to the police statement.

The shooting comes amid increased scrutiny nationwide of police use of force, particularly in cases involving black suspects. Taylor was black.

Taylor's great uncle, Clyde Fuller of Grand Prairie, Texas, described Taylor as "a good kid" and said he didn't believe that Taylor was trying to commit a crime.

"They say he's burglarizing the place by running up in there? Nuh-uh. Something doesn't sound right," Fuller told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

It was unclear whether there was any video of the shooting. Police Sgt. Paul Rodriguez said Arlington officers have not been equipped with body cameras, and police said they haven't found any dealership security video that captured it.

The Star-Telegram reported that court records it reviewed showed Taylor was sentenced to six months of deferred adjudication last December on a drug charge stemming from a September 2013 traffic stop in which police reported Taylor was found with 11 hydrocodone tablets not prescribed to him. The case was dismissed July 14 after Taylor satisfied the requirement of his probation. He graduated from Summit High School in Mansfield, Texas, in 2014.

Angelo State officials said they were saddened to hear of the death of Taylor, a 5-foot-9, 180-pound defensive back.

"We're not familiar with any of the details because it happened away from here, but we'd just like people to know that we are sad and sorry for his family and friend," university spokeswoman Becky Brackin told the San Angelo Standard-Times.

In a Twitter posting, football coach Will Wagner said, "Heart is hurting."

Texas Police Fatally Shoot Unarmed College Football Player,
NYT, AUGUST 7, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/08/07/us/
ap-us-killings-by-police-football-player.html