History > 2016 > USA > African-Americans (I)

JooHee Yoon

On the Beat of Black Lives and Bloodshed        NYT        JAN. 28, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/
opinion/sunday/on-the-beat-of-black-lives-and-bloodshed.html

Protests Erupt in Charlotte

After Police Kill a Black Man

 

SEPT. 20, 2016

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

Demonstrators clashed with police officers in riot gear overnight in Charlotte, N.C., after the police shot and killed a black man while trying to serve a warrant on another person at an apartment complex.

The shooting, which occurred just before 4 p.m., and the subsequent protest in the University City neighborhood in northeast Charlotte, near the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, revived scrutiny of a police department that last drew substantial national attention about three years ago, when a white officer was quickly charged with voluntary manslaughter after he killed an unarmed black man.

The circumstances of Tuesday’s shooting were, according to the police, far different, with department officials saying that an officer had opened fire because the black man, Keith L. Scott, 43, who they said was armed with a gun, “posed an imminent deadly threat.”

Although their accounts sometimes diverged, members of Mr. Scott’s family generally told local news outlets that he had not had a weapon. Instead, they said, he had been clutching a book while waiting to pick up a child after school.

Protesters are burning stuff from the trucks now. This is all happening on I-85 @wsoctv pic.twitter.com/82fdCyfCkX
— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) Sept. 21, 2016

Early Wednesday, protesters blocked a stretch of Interstate 85, with a livestream from local television showing some demonstrators looting trucks that had been stopped on the highway and setting fire to the cargo.

A reporter for WSOC-TV spoke to a truck driver who said people took cargo from her trailer.
 

She tells me... "I understand they want to make a statement but they are hurting innocent people trying to make a living."
— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) Sept. 21, 2016

After about two hours, police warned the protesters to leave the interstate, and local news outlets reported that the police had begun moving demonstrators off the road.

Traffic up and moving on I-85 as CMPD moves protestors off highway to exit ramp. Still heavy scene. Drivers honking at protestors. pic.twitter.com/100CaTDuVR
— David Sentendrey (@DavidFox46) Sept. 21, 2016

Earlier, the police had said that “agitators” were “destroying marked police units” and that officers were working “to restore order and protect our community.” About a dozen officers had been injured; one officer was hit in the face with a rock. The police did not say whether any protesters had been arrested.

Crowds now throwing more rocks and destroying police cruisers. #KeithLamontScott @WBTV_News pic.twitter.com/vIGq0pOjAk
— WBTV Ben Williamson (@benlwilliamson) Sept. 21, 2016

Amid a handful of social media posts, Mayor Jennifer Roberts urged calm in her city of about 827,000 residents, 35 percent of whom are black.

“The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue,” Ms. Roberts said on her Twitter account after police officers deployed what witnesses said they believed was tear gas or smoke. “Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together.”

The shooting in Charlotte was the latest in a long string of deaths of black people at the hands of the police that have stoked outrage around the country. It came just a few days after a white police officer in Tulsa, Okla., fatally shot an unarmed black man who could be seen on video raising his hands above his head. The encounters, many of them at least partly caught on video, have led to intense debate about race relations and law enforcement.

In Charlotte, dozens of chanting demonstrators, some of them holding signs, began gathering near the site of the shooting on Tuesday evening. Around 10 p.m., the Police Department said on Twitter that it had sent its civil emergency unit to the scene “to safely remove our officers.”

“Demonstrators surrounded our officers who were attempting to leave scene,” the department said. It identified the officer who fired his weapon as Brentley Vinson, an employee since July 2014. Officer Vinson is black, according to local reports.

According to the department, officers saw Mr. Scott leave a vehicle with a weapon soon after they arrived at the apartment complex.

“Officers observed the subject get back into the vehicle, at which time they began to approach the subject,” the department said in its first statement about the shooting. “The subject got back out of the vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers, who subsequently fired their weapon, striking the subject.”

A police spokesman did not respond to an after-hours inquiry about whether a dashboard or body camera had recorded the shooting. The police chief, Kerr Putney, acknowledged at a news conference that Mr. Scott had not been the subject of the outstanding warrant.

On Facebook, a woman who identified herself as Mr. Scott’s daughter said that the police had fired without provocation.

“The police just shot my daddy four times for being black,” the woman said moments into a Facebook Live broadcast that lasted about an hour. Later in the broadcast, she learned that her father had died and speculated that the police were planting evidence. (The police said that investigators had recovered a weapon.)

In September 2013, officials charged a Charlotte police officer with voluntary manslaughter after he fired a dozen rounds at an unarmed black man, killing him. The criminal case against the officer, Randall Kerrick, ended in a mistrial, and the authorities did not seek to try him again.

The department, which said on Tuesday that Officer Vinson had been placed on administrative leave, said it was conducting
“an active and ongoing investigation” into the killing of Mr. Scott.

Correction: September 21, 2016

An earlier version of this article misstated the day
protesters remained on I-85. It was Wednesday,
not Thursday.

Protests Erupt in Charlotte After Police Kill a Black Man,
NYT,
Sept. 20, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/us/
protests-erupt-in-charlotte-after-police-kill-a-black-man.html

Video Released

in Terence Crutcher’s Killing

by Tulsa Police

SEPT. 19, 2016

The New York Times

By LIAM STACK

The Police Department in Tulsa, Okla., released video on Monday of an encounter during which, the authorities said, a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man who could be seen raising his hands above his head.

The department opened a criminal investigation into the shooting and said the Tulsa County district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, would review its findings. The federal Justice Department opened a separate civil rights investigation.

During the encounter, which took place around 7:40 p.m. Friday, Terence Crutcher, 40, was shot once and killed by Betty Shelby, a Tulsa police officer since 2011, after the police received reports of an abandoned vehicle blocking a road, the department said.

Video recorded by a police helicopter and a patrol car’s dashboard camera shows Mr. Crutcher raising his hands, walking toward a car and leaning against it. He was then Tasered by one officer, Tyler Turnbough, and fatally shot by Officer Shelby, the department said, though the view from both cameras is obstructed in the moments before those actions.

Tulsa’s police chief, Chuck Jordan, said at a news conference Monday that Mr. Crutcher was unarmed and did not have a weapon in his vehicle. Shane Tuell, a police spokesman, said Officer Shelby gave a statement to homicide detectives on Monday morning. She is on paid administrative leave, the department said.

In an interview, Officer Shelby’s lawyer, Scott Wood, said the officer had thought that Mr. Crutcher had a weapon. Mr. Wood said Mr. Crutcher had acted erratically, refused to comply with several orders, tried to put his hand in his pocket and reached inside his car window before he was shot.

Chief Jordan said Officer Shelby had encountered Mr. Crutcher and his vehicle while en route to another call and requested backup because she was “not having cooperation” from him. Officer Turnbough and his partner responded to Officer Shelby’s request for backup. It was the dashboard camera in their patrol car that recorded the shooting.

According to that video, when the second police car arrived, Mr. Crutcher had his hands raised and was walking away from Officer Shelby, who walked behind him with her gun pointed at his back. She was soon joined by three more officers. Mr. Crutcher was shot less than 30 seconds after the second car arrived.

The helicopter video shows the same scene from above. “He’s got his hands up there for her now,” one officer aboard the helicopter can be heard saying. “This guy is still walking and following commands.”

“Time for a Taser, I think,” a second officer in the helicopter can be heard saying.

“I got a feeling that’s about to happen,” said the first officer, identifed by Mr. Wood as Officer Shelby’s husband, Dave Shelby.

“That looks like a bad dude, too,” the second officer said. Mr. Crutcher was shot moments later, and the helicopter camera captured footage of him sprawled on the pavement, his shirt stained with blood. A woman’s voice can be heard yelling over the radio, “Shots fired!”

Members of Mr. Crutcher’s family watched both videos on Sunday, the Police Department said. At a separate news conference on Monday, they called for a thorough investigation and urged protesters to remain peaceful.

Benjamin L. Crump, a lawyer for the family, placed Mr. Crutcher’s death in the context of police shootings of African-Americans across the country and the conviction last year of Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma City police officer, for sexually assaulting 13 black women while he was on duty.

“This is an issue that is not unique to Tulsa, Oklahoma,” Mr. Crump said. “This is an issue that seems to be an epidemic happening all around America. What are we as an American society going to do about it?”

The Police Department released the video out of a commitment to “full transparency and disclosure,” Officer Tuell, the spokesman, said. The mayor, Dewey F. Bartlett Jr., urged city residents to come together to help Mr. Crutcher’s family grieve and promised a fair investigation.

“This city will be transparent, this city will not cover up, this city will do exactly what is necessary to make sure that all rights are protected and to make sure that all rights shall be done,” Mr. Bartlett said.

Jack Begg contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2016,
on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline:
Video Shown After Officer Kills a Black Man in Tulsa.

Video Released in Terence Crutcher’s Killing by Tulsa Police,
NYT,
Sept. 19, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/us/
video-released-in-terence-crutchers-killing-by-tulsa-police.html

Racial Violence in Milwaukee

Was Decades in the Making,

Residents Say

 

AUG. 14, 2016

The New York Times

By JOHN ELIGON

The burning buildings, smashed police cars and scuffles between police officers and angry protesters on Milwaukee’s north side over the weekend might have seemed like a spontaneous eruption.

But for many in the city’s marginalized black community, it was an explosive release decades in the making.

Milwaukee is one of the United States’ most segregated cities, where black men are incarcerated or unemployed at some of the highest rates in the country, and where the difference in poverty between black and white residents is about one and a half times the national average. There are barren lots and worn-down homes all over the predominantly black north side, while mostly white crowds traffic through the restaurants and boutiques downtown, or inhabit the glossy lakefront high rises.

Add to that the disrespect that many black people say the police show them, and many of Milwaukee’s African-American residents are unsurprised by the volatile response after a police officer fatally shot a black man on Saturday — even though, as it turns out, the officer also was black.

“This isn’t just, ‘Oh, my gosh, all of a sudden this happened,’” said Sharlen Moore, 39, who lives in Sherman Park, the mostly African-American neighborhood where the shooting and unrest occurred. “It’s a series of things that has happened over a period of time. And right now you shake a soda bottle and you open the top and it explodes, and this is what it is.”

Milwaukee, a city of nearly 600,000, joins other embattled parts of the country like Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., where police killings did not so much draw outrage for the deaths alone, but for the systemic problems that have so many black people feeling hopeless.

In some ways, city officials had been bracing for, if not expecting, a surge of unrest.

After federal prosecutors declined last year to charge a former Milwaukee police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, the city’s police chief, Edward A. Flynn, asked the Justice Department to work with his department to examine its patterns and practices. The review, Chief Flynn has insisted, would show that his department was doing things right and committed to transparency.

In that shooting from 2014, the victim, Dontre Hamilton, had a history of mental illness and had been sleeping in a park when the officer, Christopher Manney, approached him. Mr. Manney, who was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, said that Mr. Hamilton, 31, had grabbed his baton and hit him, though some witnesses disputed that account.

Chief Flynn received praise from some black people for firing Mr. Manney, but some criticized the chief because he refused to say that the shooting itself was unjustified.

“At the end of the day, he’s going to support his officers, even when wrong is wrong,” Ms. Moore said.

The authorities are still investigating whether the officer in Saturday’s shooting did anything wrong. The police have so far said that two men ran from a car, one of them was armed and when he refused orders to drop his gun, an officer fatally shot him.

In his two and a half decades as a Milwaukee police officer, Cedric Jackson said he did not feel that supervisors appropriately addressed concerns of wrongdoing within the department. One common practice, he said, was that after catching suspects who ran, officers would rough them up.

“If they caught you in a backyard or alleyway, they’d want to beat you up,” said Mr. Jackson, who is black and retired in 2011.

His complaints about that custom to colleagues and supervisors were ignored, he said. As was the dismay he expressed about how officers policed communities that were predominantly black. White officers, he said, “really viewed blacks as less than them or animals or not deserving of respect.”

That is how Noble Durrah, 17, said he felt he was treated one day when he was walking home from school with his 4-year-old niece. The police appeared to be chasing someone and they ran through an alley and stopped him. A white officer grabbed him, he said, shoved him down and swore at him as he told him not to move.

The officer continued his chase and then returned to ask him questions, Mr. Durrah said. “I was like, ‘You just pushed me down and was roughing on me, and you expect me to tell you stuff,’” Mr. Durrah recalled.

Timothy Durrah, 53, Noble’s great-uncle, added that “Milwaukee is one of the most prejudiced cities there is.”

That problem, some residents say, began from the time black people started migrating to Milwaukee in large numbers in the second half of the 20th century.

They settled there as the city’s manufacturing economy began to dwindle, when jobs disappeared or moved to the suburbs. Many black people found themselves trapped in substandard living conditions on the north side without stable jobs to help them reach a better life.

For a time, efforts to tear down the racially discriminatory housing barriers went unheeded, if not ignored. Vel Phillips, the first black woman elected to the City Council, saw her colleagues repeatedly vote against a fair housing ordinance she proposed in the 1960s. As the Council failed to act, riots broke out in July 1967 that led to the deployment of the National Guard. That unrest left at least three dead, 100 injured and 1,740 arrested, according to the Milwaukee County Historical Society.

While historians do not point to a single inciting event for that riot, it came at a time of growing resentment over housing segregation, poor schools and the construction of highways that wiped out many black businesses and households in Bronzeville, which was the economic heart of black Milwaukee.

“Unless something is done about the uninhabitable conditions that the black man has to live in, Milwaukee could become a holocaust,” the Rev. James E. Groppi, a leading civil rights activist at the time, told the City Council five days before the 1967 riot started, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Father Groppi, who died in 1985, eventually would lead 200 straight days of protests, and the city finally passed its fair housing law after Congress passed its landmark federal legislation in 1968.

But while many formal discriminatory barriers have fallen, many black residents of Milwaukee today see a persistent racial divide that they say has created an urgency similar to what Father Groppi expressed decades ago.

“The people have been calm,” Dontre Hamilton’s brother, Nate, told reporters two years ago after local prosecutors declined to file charges. “The people have not stood up. So when will we stand up?”

Imbalances in mortgage lending continue to stifle homeownership and devalue predominantly black areas. A study released last month by National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that while black people made up 16 percent of the metro population in 2014, they received only 4 percent of the loans.

While court-ordered and voluntary desegregation programs had helped to usher in school integration by 1987, those programs have since faded and schools in the metropolitan area are as segregated now as they were in 1965. Nearly three in four black students attend schools where at least 90 percent of the students are not white, according to Marc V. Levine, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Only 15.7 percent of Milwaukee Public School students tested proficient in reading in 2013-14, and 20.3 percent in math.

And even those people fortunate enough to graduate from these highly segregated schools have a grim outlook. Nearly one out of every eight black men in Milwaukee County has served time behind bars, according to a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study. The black unemployment rate in Milwaukee County is 20 percent, nearly three times greater than for white people.

These social ills foster a grim cycle, said Reggie Moore, who is the director of the city’s Office of Violence Prevention and is married to Ms. Moore. They create transient communities with a lot of poverty, he said, where residents are less likely to be invested and engaged in what is going on, which allows crime to fester more easily.

Tackling the root causes of crime would be the most effective way to make the community safer and calm tensions, he said.

“I think it’s a matter of having a dual conversation about what justice needs to look like in this particular situation, but also the broader conversation of what a just community looks like,” Mr. Moore said. “What are the systemic issues that need to be addressed around poverty, racism, segregation and inequity to reduce the likelihood of this happening again?”

Kay Nolan contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2016,
on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline:
Violence in Milwaukee Was No Shock to Some.

Racial Violence in Milwaukee Was Decades in the Making, Residents Say,
NYT, Aug. 14, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/
racial-violence-in-milwaukee-was-decades-in-the-making-residents-say.html

National Guard Deployed in Milwaukee

Amid Unrest Over Fatal Police Shooting

AUG. 14, 2016

By NIRAJ CHOKSHI

and CHRISTOPHER MELE

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin activated the Wisconsin National Guard on Sunday to assist local law enforcement following a night of violence in Milwaukee that began hours after a police officer fatally shot a fleeing armed man there.

Angry crowds confronted the police in Milwaukee on Saturday night, setting fires and throwing rocks following the shooting that afternoon. One fire, at a gas station in the Sherman Park neighborhood, burned unattended while gunshots kept firefighters from extinguishing it. Other fires burned at an auto-parts store, a beauty supply company and a bank branch.

One police officer was hospitalized with a head injury after a brick was thrown through the window of his patrol car, Mayor Tom Barrett said at a news conference early Sunday morning. The police reported just before 3:30 a.m. that order was being restored to the area.

In a statement, Governor Walker praised volunteer clean-up efforts on Sunday morning.

“This act of selfless caring sets a powerful example for Milwaukee’s youth and the entire community,” he said. “I join Milwaukee’s leaders and citizens in calling for continued peace and prayer.”

Mr. Walker noted that, under Wisconsin law, the shooting was being examined by an independent investigation and asked that people give law enforcement “the respect they deserve for working so hard to keep us safe.”

Mr. Walker said he decided to make the National Guard available to provide assistance upon request after consulting with the mayor of Milwaukee and the Milwaukee County sheriff.

Three people were arrested on unspecified charges during the mayhem, in which crowds of at least 200 people filled the streets, said Assistant Chief James Harpole of the Milwaukee police.

The shooting and protests come as communities across the nation scrutinize what many see as excessive use of force by law enforcement officers, particularly against black people. Protests broke out across the country last year after a police officer in Madison, Wis., fatally shot an unarmed biracial man.

The race and identity of the officer and the man shot and killed on Saturday were not immediately released.

Many of the protesters were black, and Alderman Khalif J. Rainey expressed the frustration within the community. “The black people of Milwaukee are tired,” he said. “They’re tired of living under this oppression.

“What has happened may not have been right,” Mr. Rainey said, “I’m not justifying that, but nobody can deny that there are racial problems here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that have to be rectified, because if you don’t, you’re one day away.”

Crowd breaks widows of unoccupied squad near Sherman and Auer. Other squad set afire and broken windows on another. pic.twitter.com/Jux2mJZYyQ
— Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) Aug. 14, 2016

Three buildings in flames. Two stores & a gas station. #Milwaukee pic.twitter.com/wrqd4xpYSY
— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) Aug. 14, 2016
 

The Saturday shooting came after more violence in Milwaukee. Five people were shot and killed overnight Friday, Mr. Barrett said at a news conference recorded by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier on Saturday. At least two of those occurred near where the officer shot the man on Saturday.

The violence overnight Saturday erupted after an officer killed a man who the police said was armed with a semiautomatic handgun and who fled after a traffic stop.

The police said two uniformed officers stopped two people in a car at about 3:30 p.m. on Saturday. The police did not provide details on why the car was stopped, though Mr. Barrett said the episode began when police spotted a “suspicious vehicle.”

Both occupants ran from the car. During the pursuit, Mr. Barrett said, an officer ordered the man to drop his gun and fired when he did not, striking the man in the chest and an arm. He said the gun held 23 rounds.

The man, described by the police as a 23-year-old Milwaukee man with a lengthy arrest record, died at the scene.

The handgun had been taken in a burglary in March, the police said. The officer was not named, but officials said he was 24 and had been an officer for three years. He was placed on administrative duty.

Mr. Barrett appealed to parents to keep their children off the streets in order to restore calm in the neighborhood. “Parents, get your kids home,” he said at the news conference.

Mr. Barrett said that the officer was wearing a body camera that he understood to be operating and that the investigation into the shooting would be conducted by the Wisconsin Department of Justice because the case involved a Milwaukee police officer.

Correction: August 14, 2016

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a Milwaukee alderman. He is Khalif J. Rainey, not Raney.
Correction: August 15, 2016

A earlier headline with this article referred incorrectly to the man, later identified as Sylville K. Smith, who was fatally shot by the police. As the article correctly states, he was armed with a handgun, he was not unarmed.

Justin Porter and Lew Serviss contributed reporting.

National Guard Deployed in Milwaukee
Amid Unrest Over Fatal Police Shooting,
NYT, AUG. 14, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/us/
violent-crowd-confronts-police-in-milwaukee-after-fatal-shooting.html

Baton Rouge Shooting

Jolts a Nation on Edge

 

JULY 17, 2016

The New York Times

By JULIE BLOOM,

RICHARD FAUSSET

and MIKE McPHATE

BATON ROUGE, La. — A gunman fatally shot three law enforcement officers and wounded three others here on Sunday before being killed in a shootout with the police. The attack’s motive was unclear as of Sunday evening, leaving an anxious nation to wonder whether the anger over recent police shootings had prompted another act of retaliation against officers.

What was clearer were the waves of worry that rushed across the United States as sketchy details emerged of a bloody melee Sunday morning on a workaday stretch of highway in Louisiana’s capital — a city that had already been rocked by the police shooting on July 5 of a black man, a purported murder plot against the police that was apparently foiled and many racially charged nights of protest and rage.

State and local officials speaking at a news conference here on Sunday afternoon did not address whether the law enforcement officers who were killed and wounded — three members of the Baton Rouge Police Department and three deputies from the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office — had been lured to the scene. Police officials said the officers had responded to a call about a man carrying a gun.

Officials initially believed that other people might have been involved in the attack, but the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, said at a news conference that it was the act of a lone gunman.

Some details about the gunman began to emerge late Sunday: Officials identified him as Gavin Long, an African-American military veteran. According to military records released by the Marine Corps, Mr. Long served as a data network specialist and was a sergeant when he left the Marines in 2010. He enlisted in his hometown, Kansas City, Mo., in 2005, and was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, his records show. They also show a number of commendations, including the Good Conduct Medal.

On a social media site registered under the name Gavin Long, a young African-American man who refers to himself as “Cosmo” posted videos and podcasts and shared biographical and personal information that aligned with the information that the authorities had released, so far, about the gunman.

In one YouTube video, titled, “Protesting, Oppression and How to Deal with Bullies,” the man discusses the killings of African-American men at the hands of police officers, including the July 5 death here of Alton B. Sterling, and he advocates a bloody response instead of the protests that the deaths sparked.

“One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors,” he said, “have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed. Zero have been successful just over simply protesting. It doesn’t — it has never worked and it never will. You got to fight back. That’s the only way that a bully knows to quit.”

“You’ve got to stand on your rights, just like George Washington did, just like the other white rebels they celebrate and salute did,” he added. “That’s what Nat Turner did. That’s what Malcolm did. You got to stand, man. You got to sacrifice.”
Photo
East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy Brad Garafola. Credit East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, via Associated Press

In one of a string of podcasts the man posted, titled, “My Story,” he expounded on the recurrence of the number seven in his life. “My father was born in 1947. My mother was born in 1957. And I took physical form on 7/17/87.”

Sunday was the man’s 29th birthday.

Around the country, political leaders, police officers and activists focused their attention, and their mourning, on the slain officers. They also sought to calm the tensions that welled up this month over the killings of black men by the police and the retaliatory violence directed at officers, including the July 7 killings of five officers in Dallas, carried out by a black man who said he wanted to kill white police officers.

Just last week, President Obama was in Dallas for a memorial service, and on Sunday afternoon, he was at the White House, again addressing the nation after an assault on police officers. He said the killings were “an attack on all of us.”

“We have our divisions, and they are not new,” he said, noting that the country was probably in store for some heated political speech during the Republican National Convention this week in Cleveland.

“Everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further,” the president said. “We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us.”

Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said, “The violence, the hatred just has to stop.”

Colonel Edmonson said a call came in to police dispatch early Sunday reporting “a guy carrying a weapon” in the vicinity of the Hammond Aire Plaza shopping center on Airline Highway — a commercial thoroughfare dotted with carwashes, car dealerships and chain stores that cuts through a leafy residential neighborhood. It is also about a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where protesters had held numerous rallies since July 5, when the police here fatally shot Mr. Sterling, after a confrontation in front of a convenience store.

On Sunday, around 8:40 a.m., law enforcement officers observed the man, wearing all black and holding a rifle, outside a beauty supply store, the colonel said. In the next four minutes, there were reports of shots fired and officers struck, said Colonel Edmonson, whose agency will take the lead on the investigation, helped by local and federal investigators.

Mark Clements, who lives near the shopping center, said in a telephone interview that he was in his backyard when he heard shots ring out. “I heard probably 10 to 12 gunshots go off,” he said. “We heard a bunch of sirens and choppers and everything since then.”

Avery Hall, 17, who works at a nearby carwash, said he was on his way to work when the gunfire erupted. “I was about to pull in at about 8:45, and we got caught in the crossfire,” he said. “I heard a lot of gunshots — a lot. I saw police ducking and shooting. I stopped and pulled into the Dodge dealership. I got out and heard more gunshots. We ducked.”

On the police dispatch radio, a voice could be heard shouting: “Shots fired! Officer down! Shots fired. Officer down! Got a city officer down.”

Around 8:48 a.m., officers fired at the suspect, killing him, Colonel Edmonson said.

On Sunday afternoon, officials said that two of the slain officers were Baton Rouge city police officers, and that the third was from the Sheriff’s Office. One city police officer and two sheriff’s deputies were wounded, including one who was in critical condition.

The shooting was the latest episode in a month of violence and extraordinary racial tension in the country. The night after the police shooting of Mr. Sterling, who was selling CDs outside a convenience store here, a black man was killed by the police during a traffic stop in a St. Paul suburb. The next night, five police officers were killed by a gunman in Dallas.

Violence against the police, Mr. Edwards said, “doesn’t address any injustice, perceived or real.”

He continued, “It is just an injustice in and of itself.”

Speaking at the news conference, the police chief here, Carl Dabadie Jr., called the shooting “senseless” and asked people to pray for the officers and their families.

“We are going to get through this as a family,” he said, “and we’re going to get through this together.”

The police in Baton Rouge had in recent days announced that they were investigating a plot by four people to target police officers, and they cited the threat to explain why their presence at local protests, which had been light at first, had grown heavy.

The police said a 17-year-old was arrested this month after running from a burglary of the Cash American Pawn Shop in Baton Rouge. He and three others, including a 12-year-old arrested on Friday, were believed to have broken into the pawnshop through the roof. It was unclear whether the burglary was connected to Sunday’s shooting.

Chief Dabadie told reporters at the time that the 17-year-old had told the police “that the reason the burglary was being done was to harm police officers.”

The explanation, however, was met with skepticism on social media sites, where many people believed the report was concocted by the police to justify their militarized response to the protests after the death of Mr. Sterling.

“That was bull — it was a scare tactic to calm things down,” Arthur Reed of Stop the Killing, the group that first released the video of Mr. Sterling’s shooting, said on Sunday. “And it worked. I ain’t going out there if people are going to be out there trying to kill police.”

The intense protests had started to lose steam. Sima Atri, a lawyer who represented some of the protesters who were arrested last weekend, said recently that many protesters were afraid to hit the streets after the authorities’ aggressive approach last weekend, which included nearly 200 arrests. (Nearly 100 charges were dropped on Friday.)

A protest on Saturday afternoon attracted fewer than a dozen people, who huddled on the side of the road under a tent to escape the blazing sun and flashed signs at passing cars. They were mostly white; the protesters at large demonstrations shortly after Mr. Sterling’s death had been nearly all black.

Louisiana has lately taken a harder line to defend its police officers, who this year will become a protected class under the state’s hate crimes law.

The killing of the officers on Sunday occurred as hundreds of police officers trained in crowd-control tactics braced for protests outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Cat Brooks, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, cautioned against criticizing activists after the attack on Sunday in Baton Rouge.

“I think anytime that there’s a loss of life — black, white, police officer, otherwise — it’s cause for us to take a moment and be sad about that life,” she said. “And I think we have to be really careful about where these shootings of police officers steer the conversation. I think it’s absurd to insinuate that a movement that is doing nothing more than demanding that the war on black life come to an end is in any way responsible for these police officers getting shot.”

Stephen Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, has urged people not to bring their guns anywhere near Cleveland’s downtown during the convention because officers are in a “heightened state.”

In Cleveland on Sunday, Steve Thacker, 57, of Westlake, Ohio, stood in the city’s Public Square holding a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle — allowed under the state’s open-carry law — as news broke that several officers had been killed in Baton Rouge. When asked about Mr. Loomis’s comments and the Baton Rouge shooting, Mr. Thacker said that despite the attack, he wanted to make a statement and show that people could continue to openly carry their weapons.

“I pose no threat to anyone. I’m an American citizen. I’ve never been in trouble for anything,” said Mr. Thacker, an information technology engineer. “This is my time to come out and put my two cents’ worth in, albeit that it is a very strong statement.”

Correction: July 17, 2016

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated a part of the service record of Gavin Long. He served six months in Iraq, not a year.

Julie Bloom and Richard Fausset reported from Baton Rouge, and Mike McPhate from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alan Blinder from Dallas; Rick Rojas, Katie Rogers, Mike McIntire and Frances Robles from New York; Yamiche Alcindor from Cleveland; and Christiaan Mader from Baton Rouge.

A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Attack on Officers Jolts a Nation on Edge.

Baton Rouge Shooting Jolts a Nation on Edge,
NYT, July 17, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/18/us/
baton-rouge-shooting.html

Obama Tells Mourning Dallas,

‘We Are Not as Divided as We Seem’

 

JULY 11, 2016

The New York Times

By GARDINER HARRIS

and MARK LANDLER

DALLAS — President Obama said on Tuesday that the nation mourned with Dallas for five police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, but he implored Americans not to give in to despair or the fear that “the center might not hold.”

“I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem,” Mr. Obama said at a memorial service for the officers in Dallas, where he quoted Scripture, alluded to Yeats and at times expressed a sense of powerlessness to stop the racial violence that has marked his presidency. But Mr. Obama also spoke hard truths to both sides.

Addressing a crowd of 2,000 at a concert hall, the president chided the police for not understanding what he called the legitimate grievances of African-Americans, who he said were victims of systemic racial bias.

“We cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid,” Mr. Obama said to applause. “We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps even by your white friends and co-workers and fellow church members again and again and again — it hurts.”

But the president also turned to the protesters of the Black Lives Matter movement and said they were too quick to condemn the police. “Protesters, you know it,” Mr. Obama said. “You know how dangerous some of the communities where these police officers serve are, and you pretend as if there’s no context. These things we know to be true.”

It was the poignant speech of a man near the end of his patience about a scourge of violence that he said his own words had not been enough to stop. Mr. Obama spoke after a week in which the police killed two black men, in Minnesota and Louisiana, and Micah Johnson, the Army veteran, killed the five officers in Dallas.

“I’ve spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve hugged too many families. I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been.”

He acknowledged that the Dallas killings — “an act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred” — had exposed a “fault line” in American democracy. He said he understood if Americans questioned whether the racial divide would ever be bridged.

“It’s as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened,” Mr. Obama said. “And although we know that such divisions are not new, though they have surely been worse in even the recent past, that offers us little comfort.”

Americans, he said, “can turn on the TV or surf the internet, and we can watch positions harden and lines drawn, and people retreat to their respective corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention or avoid the fallout. We see all this, and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won’t hold and that things might get worse.”

But Mr. Obama insisted on holding out hope.

“Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he knew that because of “what I’ve experienced in my own life, what I’ve seen of this country and its people — their goodness and decency — as president of the United States.”

He cited both the Dallas police and protesters as part of that decency. “When the bullets started flying, the men and women of the Dallas police, they did not flinch and they did not react recklessly,” Mr. Obama said. “They showed incredible restraint. Helped in some cases by protesters, they evacuated the injured, isolated the shooter and saved more lives than we will ever know. We mourn fewer people today because of your brave actions. ‘Everyone was helping each other,’ one witness said. ‘It wasn’t about black or white. Everyone was picking each other up and moving them away.’”

Mr. Obama concluded: “See, that’s the America I know.”

A row of police officers behind Mr. Obama in the concert hall did not clap when Mr. Obama spoke of racial bias in the criminal justice system, saying that “when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.”

But when Mr. Obama added, “We ask the police to do too much, and we ask too little of ourselves,” the officers behind him applauded.

Law enforcement officials who attended the service broadly welcomed Mr. Obama’s remarks.

“To me, this is one of his best speeches I’ve ever heard,” said Chief Warren Asmus of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who saw the speech as a milestone in the acrimonious national debate about policing and race.

“He started to build that bridge that I think hasn’t been built for a long time,” Mr. Asmus said. “From what I heard today, I see it as a turning point.”

But Chief Terrence M. Cunningham of the Wellesley, Mass., police said that while he liked much of Mr. Obama’s speech, he was concerned about the president’s discussion of the shootings by the police in Louisiana and Minnesota, which remain under investigation.

“It’s almost like he’s put his thumb on the scale a little bit,” he said. “Let’s let the facts come in.”

Some protesters responded positively to Mr. Obama’s remarks.

“I liked his speech,” said Dominique Alexander, the founder of Next Generation Action Network, an activist group in Dallas that organized the protest the night of the shooting. The president, he said, “did a good job” in a situation where “both sides are mourning, both sides are hurting.”

Many conservatives were angry about a reference Mr. Obama made in his remarks to gun control, when he said that “we flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”

Three others spoke at the memorial, including former President George W. Bush, a Dallas resident who said his city was not prepared for the evil visited upon it on Thursday, nor could it have been. “Today the nation grieves, but those of us who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family,” Mr. Bush said. He said the forces pulling the country apart sometimes seemed greater than the ones bringing it together.

“Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions,” Mr. Bush said to applause. “And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.”

The memorial was held in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, a cavernous concert hall with a massive 4,535-pipe organ dominating the back of the stage. Nearly all of the auditorium’s seats were filled, many with men and women wearing blue police uniforms from places like Massachusetts and South Carolina, and from towns throughout Texas, like League City, Huntsville, Robinson and La Marque. They walked into the hall under a giant American flag strung from fire trucks.

On one side of the stage, five seats sat empty except for uniform hats and folded American flags to memorialize the five dead.

Gardiner Harris reported from Dallas, and Mark Landler from Washington. Alan Blinder and John Eligon contributed reporting from Dallas.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 13, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Obama Consoles and Challenges a Shaken Nation.

Obama Tells Mourning Dallas, ‘We Are Not as Divided as We Seem’,
NYT, July 11, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/us/
politics/obama-dallas-attacks-speech.html

A Week From Hell

JULY 8, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

This was yet another week that tore at the very fiber of our nation.

After two videos emerged showing the gruesome killings of two black men by police officers, one in Baton Rouge, La., and the other in Falcon Heights, Minn., a black man shot and killed five officers in a cowardly ambush at an otherwise peaceful protest and wounded nine more people. The Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said, “He was upset about Black Lives Matter” and “about the recent police shootings” and “was upset at white people” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

We seem caught in a cycle of escalating atrocities without an easy way out, without enough clear voices of calm, without tools for reduction, without resolutions that will satisfy.

There is so much loss and pain. There are so many families whose hearts hurt for a loved one needlessly taken, never to be embraced again.

There is so much disintegrating trust, so much animosity stirring.

So many — too many — Americans now seem to be living with an ambient terror that someone is somehow targeting them.

Friday morning, after the Dallas shootings, my college student daughter entered my room before heading out to her summer job. She hugged me and said: “Dad, I’m scared. Are you scared?” We talked about what had happened in the preceding days, and I tried to allay her fears and soothe her anxiety.

How does a father answer such a question? I’m still not sure I got it precisely right.

Truth is, I am afraid. Not so much for my own safety, which is what my daughter was fretting about, but more for the country I love.

This is not a level of stress and strain that a civil society can long endure.

I feel numb, and anguished and heartbroken, and I fear that I am far from alone.

And yet, I also fear that time is a requirement for remedy. We didn’t arrive at this place overnight and we won’t move on from it overnight.

Centuries of American policy, culture and tribalism are simply being revealed as the frothy tide of hagiographic history recedes.

Our American “ghettos” were created by policy and design. These areas of concentrated poverty became fertile ground for crime and violence. Municipalities used heavy police forces to try to cap that violence. Too often, aggressive policing began to feel like oppressive policing. Relationships between communities and cops became strained. A small number of criminals poisoned police beliefs about whole communities, and a small number of dishonorable officers poisoned communities’ beliefs about entire police forces. And then, too often the unimaginable happened and someone ended up dead at the hands of the police.

Since people have camera phones, we are actually seeing these deaths, live and in living color. Now a terrorist with a racist worldview has taken it upon himself to co-opt a cause and mow down innocent officers.

This is a time when communities, institutions, movements and even nations are tested. Will the people of moral clarity, good character and righteous cause be able to drown out the chorus of voices that seek to use each dead body as a societal wedge?

Will the people who can see clearly that there is no such thing as selective, discriminatory, exclusionary outrage and grieving when lives are taken, be heard above those who see every tragedy as a plus or minus for a cumulative argument?

Will the people who see both the protests over police killings and the killings of police officers as fundamentally about the value of life rise above those who see political opportunity in this arms race of atrocities?

These are very serious questions — soul-of-a-nation questions — that we dare not ignore.

We must see all unwarranted violence for what it is: A corrosion of culture.

I know well that when people speak of love and empathy and honor in the face of violence, it can feel like meeting hard power with soft, like there is inherent weakness in an approach that leans so heavily on things so ephemeral and even clichéd.

But that is simply an illusion fostered by those of little faith.

Anger and vengeance and violence are exceedingly easy to access and almost effortlessly unleashed.

The higher calling — the harder trial — is the belief in the ultimate moral justice and the inevitable victory of righteousness over wrong.

This requires an almost religious faith in fate, and that can be hard for some to accept, but accept it we must.

The moment any person comes to accept as justifiable an act of violence upon another — whether physical, spiritual or otherwise — that person has already lost the moral battle, even if he is currently winning the somatic one.

When we all can see clearly that the ultimate goal is harmony and not hate, rectification and not retribution, we have a chance to see our way forward. But we all need to start here and now, by doing this simple thing: Seeing every person as fully human, deserving every day to make it home to the people he loves.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

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A Week From Hell,
NYT, July 8, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/11/
opinion/a-week-from-hell.html

The Horror in Dallas,

a Country Drowning in Grief

 

JULY 8, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Instantly, shockingly, the murder of five police officers on duty at a peaceful protest in Dallas has compounded the nation’s continuing agony. The devastating attack wounded seven other officers and two civilians. In mere hours, the carnage left the country with a wrenching shift: from grieving the latest black victims of police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana to grieving for the police officers slain so viciously in Dallas.

“It looked like an execution, honestly,” Ismael Dejesus said after witnessing the assassination of a policeman, captured on video. “He stood over him after he was already down and shot him three or four more times in the back.” Addressing horrifying violence for a second time in two days, President Obama called the murders “a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.”

In the aftermath, possible motives will be ticked off for the killer and any accomplices. But the police and protesters alike could only wonder what might truly account for such a level of atrocity. The police quoted the main suspect — Micah Johnson, a black Army veteran with service in Afghanistan, who was killed after being cornered — as intent on killing white people and avenging the innocent deaths of black citizens in police encounters elsewhere. “This must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens,” said Dallas’s police chief, David Brown, who is black.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch touched on the sense of contagion that at times seemed to be driving the deadly encounters. Speaking at the Justice Department, she urged Americans “not to allow the events of this week to precipitate a ‘new normal’ in our country.” Her plea was basic: “Turn to each other, not against each other.”

A Dallas minister and organizer of the street protest, Dominique Alexander, said the demonstration was entirely about peaceful change, not revenge. It was a local protest, he noted, praising a police sergeant he saw running to assist a civilian injured in the melee. The Thursday night march, one of multiple protests across the nation, offered no early hint of violence. Police officers wore summer shirts, not the SWAT team military gear that can antagonize protesters. There was no warning that a sniper lurked nearby until shots rang out and officers fell.

The streaming videos this time caught police officers, suddenly the prime targets, instinctively heading toward the gunfire and shepherding panicked crowds toward safety.

“The officers who were killed were probably walking with us to keep us safe,” said DeKanni Smith, who was among the demonstrators. “I’m disgusted.”

Disgust may well summarize the nation’s reaction to such an appalling twist in what seems to be a nonstop cycle of violence. As with the lives lost in Louisiana and Minnesota, the murdered officers in Dallas now cry out to us for something better, for a fresh and far stronger resolve to repair relations in the cause of law enforcement and to stem the nation’s bleeding.

This editorial has been updated to reflect news developments.

A version of this editorial appears in print on July 9, 2016,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:
A Country Drowning in Grief.

The Horror in Dallas, a Country Drowning in Grief,
NYT, July 8, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/
opinion/the-horror-in-dallas-a-country-drowning-in-grief.html

My Protests and Prayers in Dallas

JULY 8, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Op-Ed Contributor

By SANDERIA FAYE

Dallas — On Friday, the city of Dallas was in mourning, and so was I.

We lost five police officers. They were gunned down at a peaceful protest on Thursday night that took place just a few blocks from where I live. I was at that protest too.

So was my friend Angela. She stayed longer than I did, leaving right before the shots rang out. “Peaceful crowd. Sprits lifted and prepped for action. Sad to see it turn out like this,” she later wrote on Facebook.

Everyone is sad to see it turn out like this. The city planned a prayer vigil for noon on Friday and I decided to go and maybe to stay until the end this time.

I walked to Thanks-Giving Square, where the vigil was held, down a street lined with police officers in their dress blue uniforms. They were pleasant to everyone who greeted them. Some people took pictures. I took a photo of some people posing with the police too.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, and others in the crowd expressed condolences as well.

I imagine it feels, for the Dallas police, as if a member of their family has died.

That’s how it felt for me, watching the terrible news earlier in the week, hearing about Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile. And how it felt after we lost Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and the long list of others.

I walked to the center of the square and stood on the steps next to a man dressed in a business suit. It was hot — 96 degrees. I drank a bottle of water but he didn’t open his. The speakers, seemingly every dignitary and politician from the area, were lined up under a circular plaque that read: “Come into his courts with praise. Psalm 100.” We bowed our heads in prayer.

“Were you there last night?” I whispered to the man in the suit.

“Yeah, I am one of the organizers. I’m James.”

We whispered back and forth to each other between and during the speeches.

“The crowd is different today,” he said.

I nodded. There were many more people, maybe 1,000. It appeared as if the majority of them were white. The atmosphere was different. The voice of Black Lives Matter had become a silent whisper between James and me.

“They’re blaming us,” he said.

At one point, a speaker said the answer was to love one another. The speaker said, I want everybody here to find someone in the crowd who is different from you and shake his hand and give him a hug.

James and I exchanged glances. Several white people were lined up against the wall to my left. They hugged each other as they clasped hands. A few of them looked at me, and I awkwardly shook their hands and hugged them. I didn’t see James hug anyone, and I wished that I hadn’t either. My Southern politeness kicked in, even though I always find a forced hug uncomfortable.

During the vigil, a parade of dignitaries spoke: preachers of every faith, City Council members, the police chief. Friday belonged to the city officials and the necessary public mourning. But Thursday night, before the shooting, the Black Lives Matter protests belonged to us, the people who were mourning two senseless deaths at the hands of the police in Louisiana and Minnesota.

The police chief, David Brown, took his turn speaking. He was the hero of the hour. He had captured the villain who killed his officers. He was proud of his accomplishments and the audience was moved by his speech. He told us how most of the time, wearing the police uniform in Dallas, he hears negative comments and gets complaints. But it felt good today, it gave him some measure of comfort, to hear the words: “Thank you.”

The crowd then spontaneously shouted, “Thank you.”

The chant went through the crowd, all of us who had found someone different from us to hug: “Thank you.”

The chant that resonated more with me was from Thursday night.

“Enough is enough,” the crowd chanted. “Enough is enough,” I chanted along too, with the call and response, standing on the edge of the park just a few blocks from my home.

I had gone to the protest that night not only to show respect for the deceased and their families but for myself, for my well-being. It’s similar to the reason we attend funerals. I wanted to be with the bereaved so that we could lift up each other.

People young and old, black, white, Latino, were taking a stand in Dallas on Thursday night. One little boy had a sign pinned to his back with a quotation from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on it. Police officers and citizens talked and took selfies. The speakers stepped to the microphone, one by one, to speak about the horrific deaths in Louisiana and Minnesota. Their volume rose as they spoke about hope, and they finished with chants — “Enough is enough”; “No more 404,” the police code when something like this happens; “Black lives matter.” I clapped and I chanted too. But whatever I had gone to the protest for, I was feeling the opposite effect.

I decided to leave early, around 8, so I wouldn’t have to walk home in the dark. Also my phone had died.

When I was home and plugged it back in, I saw a text from my friend Angela. She told me to turn on the news.

I watched the cameras broadcasting images of the park where I had just been standing, the police officers who had been posing for selfies now under attack.

How could the peaceful demonstration I had been a part of turned to this?

I live two blocks from Baylor Hospital and I heard sirens going back and forth all night.

I was at the protest Thursday night to be lifted up out of my sadness. “Enough is enough,” we chanted. I added my voice. But it was not enough because within a couple of hours five more people were dead.

Sanderia Faye is the author of the novel “Mourner’s Bench.”

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My Protests and Prayers in Dallas,
NYT, July 8, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/
opinion/my-protests-and-prayers-in-dallas.html

Divided by Race, United by Pain

JULY 8, 2016

The New York Times

 SundayReview

Op-Ed Columnist

Frank Bruni

THERE aren’t any ready answers for how to end this cycle of bloodshed, these heart-rending images from Louisiana and Minnesota and Texas of a country in desperate trouble, with so much pain to soothe, rage to exorcise and injustice to confront.

But we have choices about how we absorb what’s happened, about the rashness with which we point fingers. Making the right ones is crucial, and leaves us with real hope for figuring this out. Making the wrong ones puts that possibility ever further from reach.

So does a public debate that assigns us different tribes and warring interests, when almost all of us want the same thing: for the killing to cease and for every American to feel respected and safe.

We have disagreements about how to get there, but they don’t warrant the inflammatory headlines that appeared on the front of The New York Post (“Civil War”) or at the top of The Drudge Report (“Black Lives Kill”). They needn’t become hardened battle lines.

“We have devolved into some separatism and we’ve taken our corners,” Malik Aziz, the deputy chief of police in Dallas, said in an interview with CNN on Friday. “Days like yesterday or the day before — they shouldn’t happen. But when they do, let’s be human beings. Let’s be honorable men and women and sit down at a table and say, ‘How can we not let this happen again?’ and be sincere in our hearts.”

“We’re failing at that on all sides,” he concluded, expressing a sentiment uttered by public officials black and white, Democrat and Republican, in laments that drew on the same vocabulary.

Separate, divided: I kept hearing those words and their variants, a report card for America as damning as it was inarguable.

Separate, divided: I kept seeing that in pundits who talked past and over one another, in a din that’s becoming harder and harder to bear.

Separate, divided: I kept thinking of Donald Trump and how he in particular preys on our estrangement and deepens it.

On Friday he didn’t, putting out sorrowful, thoughtful messages on Twitter and Facebook and announcing his postponement of a speech on economic opportunity that he had been scheduled to deliver. He was otherwise silent, and while that was entirely out of character, it was wholly in line with the shock and confusion that Americans were feeling.
Interactive Feature

Hillary Clinton wrestled with that confusion in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, stressing, “We can’t be engaging in hateful rhetoric.” Asked if and why she’d be better at dealing with race relations than Donald Trump would, she declined to disparage him. This wasn’t the moment for that.

We can’t keep falling into the same old traps. We can’t keep making hasty conclusions, faulty connections. Predictably, there was a recurrence of talk after the killings of five police officers in Dallas late Thursday night that this was the fruit and fault of the Black Lives Matter movement and that cries of police misconduct equal a bounty on police lives.

That was a willfully selective interpretation of events. It ignored an emerging profile of the suspected gunman as someone who acted alone, not as the emissary of any aggrieved group.

It ignored how peacefully the protest in Dallas began and how calmly it proceeded up until shots rang out. Black and white stood together. Civilians and cops stood together. Those cops were there precisely because they’d been briefed on the demonstration and brought into its planning. They were a collaborative presence, not an enemy one.

“We had police officers taking pictures with protesters, protecting them, guarding them, making sure they was getting from one point to another,” Aziz recalled.

And their instincts amid the gunfire weren’t to flee for cover but to run toward its source and to hurry demonstrators out of the way. If we don’t pay full tribute to that, we’ll never get the full accountability from police officers that we also need, and we’ll never be able to address the urgent, legitimate demands at the heart of the Dallas demonstration and others like it.

“We’re hurting,” Dallas’s police chief, David Brown, said during a news conference on Friday morning. “Our profession is hurting.”

He’s black. So are many other officers on the Dallas force, a diverse one with a good record. And he implored everyone to remember that these men and women, in Dallas and elsewhere, “literally risk their lives to protect our democracy.”

“We don’t feel much support most days,” he continued. “Let’s not make today most days.”

That appeal was all the more poignant for how it united police and protesters in a desire that no sweeping, damning judgments be made about a whole class of people; that such prejudice be resisted; that such cynicism be renounced.

We must be openhearted and coolheaded that way.

But we have to be honest, too, and not shrink from the ugliness laid bare by technology and social media — by the footage of the police pumping bullets into Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., on Tuesday and of Philando Castile bleeding and dying beside his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, on Wednesday in Falcon Heights, Minn. Over and over, Reynolds says “sir” to the police officer who shot Castile and whose gun is still visibly pointed toward the interior of the car where both she and her 4-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna, sit. It’s a shockingly intimate portrait of disbelief and helplessness.

On Friday morning, Reynolds appeared on CNN and insisted that her story not be seen in isolation. “It’s about all of the families that have lost people,” she said.

“This thing that has happened in Dallas, it was not because of something that transpired in Minnesota,” she continued. “This is bigger than Philando. This is bigger than Trayvon Martin. This is bigger than Sandra Bland. This is bigger than all of us.”

She added that Friday was Dae’Anna’s graduation from preschool, that Castile was supposed to be there, and that his absence would be hard on the little girl.

Reflecting on Castile’s death, Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota asked: “Would this have happened if those passengers would have been white? I don’t think it would have.”

It’s an important question, a defensible guess, and we need to be able to hear and express both without the instant commencement of political warfare, without superimposing particular causes and constituencies over the narrative, as if every new development and every next death were a bludgeon to be wielded.

There’s only one cause here: taking the appropriate steps — in criminal justice, in police training, in schools, in public discourse — so that each of us goes about our days in as much peace as possible. And the constituency for that is all of America.

Among the important choices we’re making is whom to listen to. There are voices out there — too many of them — that seek to inflame. There are others that don’t. Three from Dallas stood out.

One was that of Mayor Mike Rawlings, who lamented how racial issues “continue to divide us.”

“This is on my generation of leaders,” said the mayor, who is white. “It is on our watch that we have allowed this to continue to fester, that we have led the next generation down a vicious path of rhetoric and actions that pit one against the other.”

Another voice was that of Erik Wilson, the deputy mayor pro tem of the city, who is black. “No conflict has ever been solved with violence,” he told CNN. “It’s always been solved with conversation. And that is something that we need to focus on.”

And then there was Deputy Police Chief Aziz, who is also black. Referring to nationwide instances of excessive police force, he said, “We should be held accountable, and that is what we have a criminal justice system for.”

But of equal importance, he said, was “a real dialogue with the community that we can no longer be separate. We can’t divide ourselves.”

Separate, divided: those words again. They’re our curse right now. Must they be our fate?

I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni) and join me on Facebook.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 10, 2016,
on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Divided by Race, United by Pain.

Divided by Race, United by Pain,
NYT, July 8, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/
opinion/how-america-heals-after-dallas.html

Bad Guys Win

if the Police Reject Protests

JULY 8, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Op-Ed Contributor

By NICK SELBY

THURSDAY night in Dallas, a calm and peaceful protest was shattered by a brutal precision attack against officers at the scene. Just moments before, some of those same officers had been amiably chatting with young families and others in the diverse group of demonstrators.

As the news spread that five officers had been slain and seven others, along with two civilians, wounded, my colleagues in departments around Dallas responded as if family members had been shot.

“My neighbor asked me, ‘Why are you crying? You said you didn’t know any of those guys,’” one friend who recently retired said to me. “I don’t even know how to explain to him how hard this hits me.”

Along with palpable grief, the most common reaction I heard was pride. Those of us who couldn’t be there were glued to the television, watching officers charge toward the gunfire, engage the gunman and protect civilians. We heard a radio call for plainclothes officers to suit up in their body armor — many didn’t want to waste the time.

For me, though, the pride was over more than just those acts of bravery; it was over the commitment to professionalism, trust and respect by the Dallas police that will allow the department to be as levelheaded in the aftermath of the massacre as it was in the midst of it.

Friday morning, after our brothers were assassinated for being white and for being officers, the word was sent out: more protests are expected, and we must not interfere with them. And that is the way it should be.

Some might ask why there are no tanks or National Guard troops in the streets of Dallas. One reason is the relationship that Chief David O. Brown has built with the community. Since taking over the department in 2010, Chief Brown has worked to get officers to reduce the tension when they confront suspects or other civilians. Even as budget cuts have trimmed the ranks and increased stress on the police, complaints about officers’ use of force have gone down, along with assaults on officers and the crime rate.
Photo
A Dallas police officer responding to the shooting on Thursday night. Credit Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News

The department has also been more open. Even as his officers fought terror in the streets — the worst loss of life for law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001 — Chief Brown maintained his commitment to transparency, briefing reporters while the bullets were still flying.

Last year, when a rifle-wielding gunman in an armored vehicle attacked the Dallas Police Headquarters, officers live-tweeted the attack.

The department has also thoroughly reported all shootings involving its officers and detailed how its officers have used force.

Such a ready release of information is an important way for police agencies to make a deposit in the bank of community good will.

Demonstrators on Thursday night were protesting shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. Much is made of the body count of police shootings. Far fewer people follow through to learn that, by the count of The Washington Post, 90 percent of the times when police officers shot someone, that person had had a gun or knife, or had posed another threat.

Police officers and protesters are less far apart in their goals than we might think, watching the local news.

The Dallas police and other departments in the area are being clear in our internal conversations: We’re here to protect and serve. When we make mistakes, we try to fix them. When we explain what we do to the public, the public rewards us with trust.

And while Chief Brown has called for an end to “this divisiveness between our police and our citizens,” let’s let the protesters have their say; let’s hear it all. And maybe, if both sides listen, we can get somewhere.

Nick Selby is a police detective in the Dallas area and an author of “In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Civilians.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 9, 2016,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
Police and Protesters Can Co-Exist.

Bad Guys Win if the Police Reject Protests,
NYT, July 8, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/
opinion/bad-guys-win-if-the-police-reject-protests.html

Study Supports Suspicion

That Police Are More Likely

to Use Force on Blacks

 

JULY 7, 2016

The New York Times

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

The vast majority of interactions between police officers and civilians end routinely, with no one injured, no one aggrieved and no one making the headlines. But when force is used, a new study has found, the race of the person being stopped by officers is significant.

The study of thousands of use-of-force episodes from police departments across the nation has concluded what many people have long thought, but which could not be proved because of a lack of data: African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.

The report, to be released Friday by the Center for Policing Equity, a New York-based think tank, took three years to assemble and largely refutes explanations from some police officials that blacks are more likely to be subjected to police force because they are more frequently involved in criminal activity.

The researchers said they did not gather enough data specifically related to police shootings to draw conclusions on whether there were racial disparities when it came to the fatal confrontations between officers and civilians so in the news.

The study’s release comes at a particularly volatile time in the relationship between the police and minority communities after high-profile fatal police shootings of African-American men this week in Louisiana and Minnesota prompted widespread outrage.

Portions of the episodes, both captured on video and released publicly, have intensified calls for police reform as many departments across the nation have been slow to deploy body cameras or to mandate changes in officer training standards after the high-profile deaths of a number of African-Americans at the hands of police officers in the past two years.

African-American activists who have demanded greater police accountability since the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., set off days of rioting, said Thursday that the study was critical to the conversation, but far from surprising.

“It’s kind of like, ‘Is water wet?’” said Aislinn Sol, organizer of the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter. “But what we gain with each study, each new piece of information is that we are able to win people over who are on the fence. The evidence is becoming overwhelming and incontrovertible that it is a systemic problem, rather than an isolated one.”

The organization compiled more than 19,000 use-of-force incidents by police officers representing 11 large and midsize cities and one large urban county from 2010 to 2015. It is the sort of data the Obama administration and the Justice Department have been seeking from police departments for nearly two years, in many cases, unsuccessfully.

The report found that although officers employ force in less than 2 percent of all police-civilian interactions, the use of police force is disproportionately high for African-Americans — more than three times greater than for whites.

The study, “The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and Police Use of Force,” did not seek to determine whether the employment of force in any particular instance was justified, but the center’s researchers found that the disparity in which African-Americans were subjected to police force remained consistent across what law enforcement officers call the use-of-force continuum — from relatively mild physical force, through baton strikes, canine bites, pepper spray, Tasers and gunshots.

“The dominant narrative has been that this happens to African-Americans because they are arrested in disproportionate numbers,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity, based at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But the data really makes it difficult to say that crime is the primary driver of this. In every single category, the anti-black disparity persists.”

The study found that the overall mean use-of-force rate for all black residents was 273 per 100,000, which is 3.6 times higher than the rate for white residents (76 per 100,000) and 2.5 times higher than the overall rate of 108 per 100,000 for all residents.

For those who were arrested, the mean rate of use of force against blacks was 46 for every 1,000 arrests, compared with 36 per 1,000 for whites.

The Obama administration has been nudging police departments to adapt de-escalation tactics and to fix broken relationships with poor and minority communities across the nation, which typically experience far more intensive policing because of what are frequently higher crime rates.

But because police departments often refuse to release use-of-force data that would illustrate such trends, the federal government has had a difficult time in determining whether police departments are employing force less often.

The federal government cannot generally compel police departments to hand over such material, and many local agencies say they do not require officers to submit use-of-force reports.

Other departments say they lack the resources to collect such information, and others acknowledge privately that they fear that the release of their data would subject them to unwanted scrutiny from the public and the federal government.

But when the Justice Department has had the ability to review use-of-force records, it has found evidence of abuse.

In Seattle, federal investigators found that one out of every five use-of-force episodes had been excessive.

In Albuquerque, the Justice Department determined that most police shootings from 2009 to 2012 had been unjustified.

Researchers for the center said Thursday that the compilation of the use-of-force material after years of failed efforts to determine whether racial bias was present represented a significant success. The data is so closely held by police departments that the agencies that cooperated with the project did so anonymously.

Though the 12 municipalities that provided data were not named, they represented a large urban county in California and 11 cities spanning the nation with populations that range from less than 100,000 to several million, with an average population of 600,000.

The center said that given the diversity of the municipalities — six are predominantly white, one is predominantly black or Latino, and five have populations in which no single racial or ethnic group represents 50 percent or more of the population — that the findings are likely to hold true for most other cities.

Cameron McLay, the police chief of Pittsburgh, said his agency had been among those to share its use-of-force data. He said use of force by his officers had decreased in recent years, but acknowledged that there remained concerns about disparities in use of force when it came to African-Americans.

“We are responsible for not just bringing down the crime rate, but for making people feel safe in their communities,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 8, 2016,
on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:
Study Supports Suspicion That Police Use of Force Is
More Likely on Blacks.

Study Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks,
NYT, July 7, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/
study-supports-suspicion-that-police-use-of-force-is-more-likely-for-blacks.html

Death in Black and White

JULY 7, 2016

The New York Times

Sunday Review

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Michael Eric Dyson

This essay has been updated to reflect news developments.

We, black America, are a nation of nearly 40 million souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. And I fear now that it is clearer than ever that you, white America, will always struggle to understand us.

Like you, we don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die the same.

But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want cops to be executed at a peaceful protest. We also don’t want cops to kill us without fear that they will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our death on a homemade video recording. This is a difficult point to make as a racial crisis flares around us.

We close a week of violence that witnessed the tragic deaths of two black men — Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile — at the hands of the police with a terrible attack in Dallas against police officers, whose names we’re just beginning to learn. It feels as though it has been death leading to more death, nothing anyone would ever hope for.

A nonviolent protest was hijacked by violence and so, too, was the debate about the legitimate grievances that black Americans face. The acts of the gunman in Dallas must be condemned. However, he has nothing to do with the difficult truths we must address if we are to make real racial progress, and the reckoning includes being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted.

In the wake of these deaths and the protests surrounding them, you, white America, say that black folks kill each other every day without a mumbling word while we thunderously protest a few cops, usually but not always white, who shoot to death black people who you deem to be mostly “thugs.”

That such an accusation is nonsense is nearly beside the point. Black people protest, to one another, to a world that largely refuses to listen, that what goes on in black communities across this nation is horrid, as it would be in any neighborhood depleted of dollars and hope — emptied of good schools, and deprived of social and economic buffers against brutality. People usually murder where they nest; they aim their rage at easy targets.

It is not best understood as black-on-black crime; rather, it is neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If their neighbors were white, they’d get no exemption from the crime that plagues human beings who happen to be black. If you want interracial killing, you have to have interracial communities.

We all can see the same videos. But you insist that the camera doesn’t tell the whole story. Of course you’re right, but you don’t really want to see or hear that story.

At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the encounter is over.

Those binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories, about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who can’t be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t make it into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed down, informally, from one white mind to the next.

The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much. You think we have been handed everything because we have fought your selfish insistence that the world, all of it — all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace — should be yours first, and foremost, and if there’s anything left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully.

So you demand the Supreme Court give you back what was taken from you: more space in college classrooms that you dominate; better access to jobs in fire departments and police forces that you control. All the while your resentment builds, and your slow hate gathers steam. Your whiteness has become a burden too heavy for you to carry, so you outsource it to a vile political figure who amplifies your most detestable private thoughts.

Whiteness is blindness. It is the wish not to see what it will not know.

If you do not know us, you also refuse to hear us because you do not believe what we say. You have decided that enough is enough. If the cops must kill us for no good reason, then so be it because most of us are guilty anyway. If the black person that they kill turns out to be innocent, it is an acceptable death, a sacrificial one.

Terror was visited on Dallas Thursday night. Unspeakable terror. We are not strangers to terror. You make us afraid to walk the streets, for at any moment, a blue-clad officer with a gun could swoop down on us to snatch our lives from us and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes, or compact discs, or breathing too much for your comfort, or speaking too abrasively for your taste. Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or being silent, or doing as you say, or not doing as you say fast enough.

You hold an entire population of Muslims accountable for the evil acts of a few. Yet you rarely muster the courage to put down your binoculars, and with them, your corrosive self-pity, and see what we see. You say religions and cultures breed violence stoked by the complicity of silence because peoples will not denounce the villains who act in their names.

Yet you do the same. In the aftermath of these deaths, you do not all condemn these cops; to do so, you would have to condemn the culture that produced them — the same culture that produced you. Condemning a culture is not inciting hate. That is very important. Yet black people will continue to die at the hands of cops as long as we deny that whiteness can be more important in explaining those cops’ behavior than anything else.

You cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I write is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug insistence that you are different — not like that ocean of unenlightened whites — satisfy us any longer. It makes the killings worse to know that your disapproval of them has spared your reputations and not our lives.

You do not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with ourselves, because we don’t know how to make you stop, or how to make you care enough to stop those who pull the triggers. We do not know what to do now that sadness is compounded by more sadness.

The nation as a whole feels powerless now. A peaceful protest turned into the scene of a sniper attack. Day in and day out, we feel powerless to make our black lives matter. We feel powerless to make you believe that our black lives should matter. We feel powerless to keep you from killing black people in front of their loved ones. We feel powerless to keep you from shooting hate inside our muscles with well-choreographed white rage.

But we have rage, too. Most of us keep our rage inside. We are afraid that when the tears begin to flow we cannot stop them. Instead we damage our bodies with high blood pressure, sicken our souls with depression.

We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.

Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown, is the author of “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America” and a contributing opinion writer.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 10, 2016,
on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline:
Death in Black and White.

Death in Black and White,
NYT, July 7, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/
opinion/sunday/what-white-america-fails-to-see.html

Michael Brown’s Mom,

on Alton Sterling

and Philando Castile

 

JULY 7, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Op-Ed Contributor

By LEZLEY MCSPADDEN

St. Louis — I CRIED on Wednesday as I watched, like much of the country, the horrifying video images from Baton Rouge, La., showing a black man being shot to death, in the back and chest, after being wrestled into submission by two white police officers. On Thursday, I woke up to the news of a black man in Minnesota, shot by the police during a traffic stop. I am devastated and infuriated.

Alton Sterling is dead. Philando Castile is dead. My son, Michael Brown, has been dead for almost two years now.

Death isn’t pretty for anyone, but what these families now face is the horror of seeing their loved one die over and over, in public, in such a violent way. They face the helplessness of having strangers judge their loved one not on who he was or what he meant to his family but on a few seconds of video. Mr. Sterling died in a very lonely way, surrounded by his killers. Can you imagine a lonelier death? Mr. Castile died with his girlfriend and her young daughter watching as he was gunned down.

Sometimes it seems like the only thing we can do in response to the police brutality that my son and so many other black boys and men have suffered is to pray for black lives. Yes, they matter, but is that changing anything? What is going to be different this time?

There is again an uproar, and people are going to once again do a lot of talking about black-on-black crime versus white-on-black crime. Truth is, black on black crime is perpetuated by systemic injustice and social ills. But, real talk, this debate is meaningless so long as we still live in a world where a black man can get killed for selling cigarettes on the street, where a black boy can get killed for waving a toy gun.

It’s a problem when you look to the law as a protector and it comes into your community and shoots people dead with no remorse or consequences. It is a problem that you have some law officers trying to do the right thing, and then others who bring shame on the badge.

Someone asked me what I would say to Mr. Sterling’s family, if I had the chance. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t know what to say. When Michael was killed, people tried to talk to me, but I was in shock; I didn’t know how to respond. I know enough now to advise well-meaning people to pause before offering kind words. So many told me, “I am so sorry for your loss.” After a while, all the “sorrys” bled together, and at the end of it, nothing changed. Let Mr. Sterling’s family members grieve with the people in their lives who knew him before everyone else saw these shocking images and felt they had to put their two cents in.

The mothers I’ve met along the way — Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother; Wanda Johnson, Oscar Grant III’s mother — we’ve helped one another cope, and we’ll try to do the same for Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile’s families. I’ll never forget meeting Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice. I looked at this strong woman and was amazed to think that she was just starting a horrible journey, one that will never end, one that I am still on.

When their children are killed, mothers are expected to say something. To help keep the peace. To help make change. But what can I possibly say? I just know we need to do something. We are taught to be peaceful, but we aren’t at peace. I have to wake up and go to sleep with this pain everyday. Ain’t no peace. If we mothers can’t change where this is heading for these families — to public hearings, protests, un-asked-for martyrdom, or worse, to nothing at all — what can we do?

Since I lost my son to a police shooting, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ve gone to therapy, as have my other children. I’ve started a foundation in Michael’s honor. I’ve campaigned in St. Louis to mandate body cameras on police officers at all times. We cannot assume that justice will be done. So I will never stop talking about my son or fighting for justice for him.

People will try to twist the words of Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile’s families and turn them into something ugly. These men will be called “thugs” and much, much worse. It’s already happening. Click on the comments section of any article you read about their deaths, and you will be shocked by the racist comments of people who insist — insist — that they obviously deserved to die.

So what would I say to their families? When you’re ready, and if you need me, I’ll be there for you. But the people I would really like to say something to are the ones who claim that justice will prevail. Whose justice? When justice comes to the one who didn’t pull the trigger, that’s when I’ll believe you.

Lezley McSpadden is the author of “Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil: The Life, Legacy and Love of My Son Michael Brown.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 8, 2016,
on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Mothers of Dead Black Men.

Michael Brown’s Mom, on Alton Sterling and Philando Castile,
NYT, July 7, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/
opinion/michael-browns-mom-on-alton-sterling-and-philando-castile.html

When Will the Killing Stop?

 

JULY 7, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Videos of two fatal shootings of African-American men have again documented what appear to be almost casual killing by the police. They prompt the deepest shock at what the nation has witnessed over and over again: a chance encounter with the police and an innocent black life ended.

In the first killing, videos showed Alton Sterling on Tuesday pinned to the ground outside a store in Baton Rouge, La., when he was shot in the chest and back at close range by police officers.

The second death came on Wednesday in Minnesota when Philando Castile was stopped for an alleged traffic infraction in a St. Paul suburb and was shot several times by a police officer. The video starts seconds after, taken by a woman next to the wounded man. “He was just getting his license and registration, sir,” she calmly tells the officer. She says to the camera that he was not reaching for the gun he was licensed to carry.

“Would this have happened if the passengers, the drivers were white? I don’t think it would have,” Gov. Mark Dayton said at a news conference on Thursday. “All of us in Minnesota are forced to confront that this kind of racism exists.”

Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said she told her son: “If you get stopped by the police, comply. Comply, comply, comply.” She added, “I think he was just black in the wrong place.”

The Justice Department has been called on to investigate the two shootings. It speaks volumes that local law enforcement is not to be trusted to carry out investigations, as communities take to the streets to demand justice.

The shootings seem part of some gruesome loop of episodes of law enforcement gone amok. For African-Americans, the threat of police abuse — in the form of random stops, assaults and violations of civil rights — has long been part of life. Yet this grievous reality became a national issue only with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in an encounter with a white officer in Ferguson, Mo.

After a year and a half of racial upheaval in Ferguson, the local government there agreed to reforms of a law enforcement system that Department of Justice investigators found regularly violated constitutional rights. Minority citizens were routinely harassed by police officers and shuttled through a court system that further exploited and victimized local residents.

Unfortunately, after Ferguson, police shootings of black citizens have continued, with the police too often maintaining their wall of resistance with the help of local prosecutors. Until ordered to do so by a judge, Chicago officials fought release of a dashboard video of the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. He was shot 16 times by a police officer later indicted on charges of first-degree murder.

The killing in Minnesota on Wednesday was the 123rd killing of a black person by law enforcement in America so far this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Fortunately, the rise of social media and smartphones in the hands of witnesses has delivered video evidence to much of the nation of what black communities have known all too well.

The latest killings are grim reminders that far more reforms are needed to make law enforcement officers more professional and respectful of the citizens they have a duty to protect. Intensive training, stricter use-of-force standards and prosecutions of officers who kill innocent people are necessary to begin to repair systems that have tolerated this bloodshed.

And beyond that, with killings happening in cities, suburbs and rural communities, there needs to be leadership in every police department in the country that insists on cultural and attitudinal change. Credible civilian oversight of the police has to be a factor if community trust is ever to be restored. The latest ghastly images show how much has not been done, two years after Ferguson.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on July 8, 2016,
on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline:
When Will the Killing Stop?.

When Will the Killing Stop?,
NYT, July 7, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/
opinion/when-will-the-killing-stop.html

What White America Fails to See

JULY 7, 2016

The New York Times

Michael Eric Dyson

IT is clear that you, white America, will never understand us. We are a nation of nearly 40 million black souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. We don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die the same.

But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want the cops to kill us without fear that they will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our death on a homemade video recording.

You will never understand the helplessness we feel in watching these events unfold, violently, time and again, as shaky images tell a story more sobering than your eyes are willing to believe: that black life can mean so little. That Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile, black men whose deaths were captured on film this past week, could be gone as we watch, as a police officer fires a gun. That the police are part of an undeclared war against blackness.

You can never admit that this is true. In fact, you deem the idea so preposterous and insulting that you call the black people who believe it racists themselves. In that case the best-armed man will always win.

You say that black folks kill each other every day without a mumbling word while we thunderously protest a few cops, usually but not always white, who shoot to death black people who you deem to be mostly “thugs.”

That such an accusation is nonsense is nearly beside the point. Black people protest, to one another, to a world that largely refuses to listen, that what goes on in black communities across this nation is horrid, as it would be in any neighborhood depleted of dollars and hope — emptied of good schools, and deprived of social and economic buffers against brutality. People usually murder where they nest; they aim their rage at easy targets.

It is not best understood as black-on-black crime; rather, it is neighbor-to-neighbor carnage. If their neighbors were white, they’d get no exemption from the crime that plagues human beings who happen to be black. If you want interracial killing, you have to have interracial communities.

We all can see the same videos. But you insist that the camera doesn’t tell the whole story. Of course you’re right, but you don’t really want to see or hear that story.

At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the encounter is over.

Those binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories, about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who can’t be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t make it into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed down, informally, from one white mind to the next.

The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know. Your knowledge of black life, of the hardships we face, yes, those we sometimes create, those we most often endure, don’t concern you much. You think we have been handed everything because we have fought your selfish insistence that the world, all of it — all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace — should be yours first, and foremost, and if there’s anything left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully.

So you demand the Supreme Court give you back what was taken from you: more space in college classrooms that you dominate; better access to jobs in fire departments and police forces that you control. All the while your resentment builds, and your slow hate gathers steam. Your whiteness has become a burden too heavy for you to carry, so you outsource it to a vile political figure who amplifies your most detestable private thoughts.

Whiteness is blindness. It is the wish not to see what it will not know.

If you do not know us, you also refuse to hear us because you do not believe what we say. You have decided that enough is enough. If the cops must kill us for no good reason, then so be it because most of us are guilty anyway. If the black person that they kill turns out to be innocent, it is an acceptable death, a sacrificial one.

You cannot know what terror we live in. You make us afraid to walk the streets, for at any moment, a blue-clad officer with a gun could swoop down on us to snatch our lives from us and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes, or compact discs, or breathing too much for your comfort, or speaking too abrasively for your taste. Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or being silent, or doing as you say, or not doing as you say fast enough.

You hold an entire population of Muslims accountable for the evil acts of a few. Yet you rarely muster the courage to put down your binoculars, and with them, your corrosive self-pity, and see what we see. You say religions and cultures breed violence stoked by the complicity of silence because peoples will not denounce the villains who act in their names.

Yet you do the same. You do not condemn these cops; to do so, you would have to condemn the culture that produced them — the same culture that produced you. Black people will continue to die at the hands of cops as long as we deny that whiteness can be more important in explaining those cops’ behavior than the dangerous circumstances they face.

You cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I write is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug insistence that you are different — not like that ocean of unenlightened whites — satisfy us any longer. It makes the killings worse to know that your disapproval of them has spared your reputations and not our lives.

You do not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with ourselves, because we don’t know how to make you stop, or how to make you care enough to stop those who pull the triggers. What else could explain the white silence that usually greets these events? Sure, there is often an official response, sometimes even government apologies, but from the rest of the country, what? We see the wringing of white hands in frustration at just how complex the problem is and how hard it is to tell from the angles of the video just what went down.

We feel powerless to make our black lives matter. We feel powerless to make you believe that our black lives should matter. We feel powerless to keep you from killing black people in front of their loved ones. We feel powerless to keep you from shooting hate inside our muscles with well-choreographed white rage.

But we have rage, too. Most of us keep our rage inside. We are afraid that when the tears begin to flow we cannot stop them. Instead we damage our bodies with high blood pressure, sicken our souls with depression.

We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.

Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown, is the author of “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America” and a contributing opinion writer.

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What White America Fails to See,
NYT, July 7, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/
opinion/sunday/what-white-america-fails-to-see.html

The Racist Roots of a Way to Sell Homes

 

APRIL 29, 2016

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

From the 1930s through the 1960s, most African-Americans could not get mortgages because the government had deemed neighborhoods where they lived ineligible for federal mortgage insurance, the Depression-era innovation that made mortgages widely affordable.

The situation exposed black families to hucksters who peddled homeownership through contracts for deed, in which a home seller gives a buyer a high-interest loan, coupled with a pledge to turn over the deed after 20 to 40 years of monthly installment payments. These contracts enriched the sellers by draining the buyers, who built no equity and were often evicted for minor or alleged infractions, at which point the owner would enter into a contract with another buyer. In the process, families and neighborhoods were ruined.

Contracts for deed are making a comeback. They are increasingly being used by investment firms that have bought thousands of foreclosed homes and want to sell them to lower-income buyers “as is,” according to a recent report in The Times by Alexandra Stevenson and Matthew Goldstein. Many of the homes are in Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. In one example in the article, investors who bought foreclosed homes at an average price of $8,000 issued a contract on one in Ohio in 2011 for $36,300 at 10 percent interest.

Contracts for deed make gouging possible, because unlike traditional mortgages, there is no appraisal or inspection to ensure that the loan amount is reasonable. They also let an investor swiftly evict buyers for missed payments, rather than giving them time to catch up, as required under a mortgage. And they usually require the buyer to pay hefty upfront fees. Unlike a rental security deposit, however, the fee is almost never refundable.

Contracts for deed are similar in some ways to the subprime lending that contributed to the housing bust in this century. Investors in the contracts include some of the Wall Street players who inflated the mortgage bubble, including Daniel Sparks, the former Goldman Sachs executive, whose department was betting on a crash in 2007 even as the bank was selling toxic mortgage securities. The stated rationale for contracts for deed is that low-income buyers cannot qualify for mortgages — the same line that was used to justify subprime lending.

What became evident from the crash was that many subprime borrowers who were wiped out — and who were disproportionately black and Hispanic — could have qualified for better terms and were misled.

Even for buyers truly unable to get mortgages, contracts for deed nearly always inflict harm. The exception is a few programs where public agencies or nonprofits use interest-free contracts to sell homes to needy families and then help them refinance into traditional mortgages. Federal housing agencies could foster that approach by selling more of their foreclosed properties to nonprofits.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau must assert its authority over these contracts, which are legally murky and hard to track. Some states do not require that they be recorded, and in states that do, noncompliance is high. The bureau’s mandate is to stop unfair, deceptive or predatory lending. Contracts for deed are all three.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on April 29, 2016,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:
A Home Sale Tactic Rooted in Racism.

The Racist Roots of a Way to Sell Homes,
NYT, April 29, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/
opinion/the-racist-roots-of-a-way-to-sell-homes.html

The Secret to School Integration

FEB. 23, 2016

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Op-Ed Contributors

By HALLEY POTTER

and KIMBERLY QUICK

BY most measures, America’s public schools are now more racially and socioeconomically segregated than they have been for decades.

In the Northeast, 51.4 percent of black students attend schools where 90 percent to 100 percent of their classmates are racial minorities, up from 42.7 percent in 1968. In the country’s 100 largest school districts, economic segregation rose roughly 30 percent from 1991 to 2010.

In some ways, it’s as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened. Increasing residential segregation and a string of unfavorable court cases are partly to blame. But too many local school officials are loath to admit the role that their enrollment policies play in perpetuating de facto segregation.

While Mayor Bill de Blasio has supported several recent grass-roots efforts to integrate individual schools in New York City, district officials have avoided taking a stand on school integration amid controversy. Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor, recently declined to support parent proposals to merge attendance zones for two highly segregated schools just nine blocks apart on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She instead placed the responsibility for integration on individual parents. “Parents make choices,” she said.

In Seattle, in 2008, the superintendent and school board also cited residential segregation as the reason for not making integration a priority. “It’s not my job to desegregate the city,” the chairwoman of the school board explained to The Seattle Times.

In Florida, the Pinellas County school board voted to tie school zones more strictly to residential patterns, moving thousands of formerly integrated black students into underperforming schools. One of the board members called the problem “a nationwide thing, not just us.”

School leaders need to stop making excuses for segregation. Diverse classrooms reduce racial bias and promote complex reasoning, problem solving and creativity for all students. Five decades of research confirm that students in socioeconomically and racially diverse schools have higher test scores, are more likely to enroll in college, and are less likely to drop out, on average, than peers in schools with concentrated poverty. Low-income students’ achievement improves in integrated schools, and contrary to many parental concerns, middle-class students’ achievement does not suffer.

The structural and political challenges to integration are substantial, but viable options are still within reach for nearly any community that makes integration a priority. Take socioeconomic integration. According to our research, more than 90 school districts and charter schools in 32 states are using socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment.

These districts and charters enroll more than four million students. Because socioeconomic and racial segregation so often overlap — even as black and Latino families are more likely to live in persistent, unstable poverty — these strategies are a necessary step toward preventing racial marginalization from persisting in schoolhouses.

In Champaign, Ill., for example, families rank their top choices from among all schools in the district, and students are assigned based on an algorithm to ensure socioeconomic diversity. Under this system, 80 percent to 90 percent of families typically receive their first choice.

In Rhode Island, a mayor from affluent Cumberland led the passage of legislation to create regionally integrated charter schools that would draw students from rich suburbs and struggling cities together in the same classrooms.

In Louisville, Ky., where racial integration plans were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2007, school officials, parents and students rallied to create a new integration plan that includes measures like family income and educational attainment alongside neighborhood-level racial factors to ensure that their schools did not resegregate.

Political backlash is inevitable. But when interests collide, courageous leaders must recognize that integration is worth the work.

In 2010, Somali parents and the superintendent in the majority-white Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie led efforts to redraw elementary school boundaries to integrate the schools. Despite fierce protests by some white families, the boundaries were redrawn. Six years later, the elementary schools are not only more socioeconomically and racially integrated, but they are producing higher test scores.

School integration has found its way into the presidential campaign. In a speech this month in Harlem, Hillary Clinton lamented the “dangerous slide towards resegregation in our schools.” The push for integration is also poised to make the leap from politics into policy.

The budget request President Obama released this month includes $120 million to support integration efforts led by districts, more than double current funding. John King, the acting secretary of education, has deemed school integration a national priority, calling the opportunity to attend strong, socioeconomically diverse schools “one of the best things we can do for all children.”

With this work underway, at least partly, in 32 states, there may well be hope for a new wave of school integration.

Halley Potter is a fellow and Kimberly Quick is a policy associate
at the Century Foundation.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 23, 2016,
on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Secret to School Integration.

The Secret to School Integration,
NYT, FEB. 23, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/
opinion/the-secret-to-school-integration.html

On the Beat of Black Lives

and Bloodshed

 

JAN. 28, 2016

The New York Times

By TRYMAINE LEE

IN my early years as a police reporter, I often pulled up to a crime scene minutes before the homicide detectives arrived. Too many times to count I’d find a young black man my age or younger dead with a halo of blood or brain matter splashed on the pavement. Often there were shell casings sprinkled around freshly fallen bodies.

Some were killed over turf, some out of revenge. Many were victims of the deadly grind of the drug trade. Others were killed by the police. A high number were innocent people caught in crossfire, many of them children.

I learned to identify family members by the level of grief they’d show. Inconsolable wailing, unsteady feet, breathless delirium — a mother or sister. Angry, with balled fists and tears — a brother or close cousin. Girlfriends often ran in after the police had arrived, and the crime scene was set, clawing at the police tape. The best friends and homeboys stayed close but not too close, trading whispers before leaving the scene on clouds of three or four people at a time, vengeance bubbling up in their minds. The fathers always seemed stoic, either numbed by the pain or resigned to the way young black male life was so easily lost. They, too, had been young black men once.

In many of their faces I’d seen the faces of my own family, people I loved and who loved me. I saw my own mother’s tears and could imagine my older brother and his boys with guns tucked into their waistbands, ready to squeeze off shots had I been the one with a bloody halo.

Over more than a dozen years I’ve evolved from a run-and-gun street reporter in Philadelphia and New Orleans to a national reporter flying across the country to cover social justice issues, high-profile incidents of shootings by police officers and the growing Black Lives Matter movement. But no matter the cause of the bloodshed I continue to chronicle, the tool of the garden-variety thug and beat cop alike remains essentially the same. The gun.

The toll of gun violence in our most beleaguered, depleted communities is great. And we’ve recently arrived at yet another moment when the issue of guns has been thrust into the national political dialogue. President Obama just weeks ago rolled out executive actions aimed at, among other things, closing the so-called gun show loophole and the flow of illegal weapons to people who shouldn’t have them. What followed was much what you’d expect from the partisan debate over guns. Conservatives rebuffed calls to make it the slightest bit more difficult to buy firearms. Many liberals said the president’s actions didn’t go far enough.

As politicians tangle over how best to manage the country’s obscenely huge and growing arsenal of privately owned guns, the rat-a-tat of gun violence continues to bleed us all.

For those of us keeping tabs on the impact of guns in black and brown communities, there is no solace. This exhausting dance between black death and black scribe is as much a performance in journalism as it is a perpetual act of catharsis.

My family has experienced its own measure of gun death. In the mid-1970s, a couple of years before I was born, a disgruntled prospective tenant murdered my grandfather over a $160 security deposit. Decades later a young woman put a bullet in the back of my stepbrother’s head. Years later, two cousins, brothers, would be touched by the plague: One was shot down and the other is serving a long prison sentence for a separate incident, a botched robbery turned murder.

An act of gun violence is central to the story of how I came to be, too. In 1924 my maternal grandmother’s family joined the Great Migration north from Georgia after a white gunman killed her older brother. He was just 12 years old. The family eventually landed in New Jersey, but violence followed. In 1951 another of my grandmother’s brothers, this one younger, was shot and killed by a New Jersey State Trooper. He was just 17. Years later, when my grandfather was killed he left behind eight children, including my mother.

Many times when I sat with victims’ families and slowly drew out their stories and their tears, I have to believe, they saw me as one of their own. They often shooed away white reporters, but shared with me intimate memories of their loved ones. They dug up old yearbook photos and rattled off their dead boy’s — they were almost always boys — hopes and dreams. They didn’t shy away from their shortcomings, criminal or otherwise.

Years ago, in Philadelphia, I met a 19-year-old named Kevin Johnson who weeks earlier had been paralyzed by a bullet to his spine. A group of teenagers had pressed a gun to the back of his neck and demanded the basketball jersey off his back. He refused and one of them pulled the trigger. The day I met him he’d just started talking again and his family had smuggled me into his hospital room. Medical tubes and wires snaked from his body, tangling his lanky, limp brown frame.

“God wouldn’t give me anything I couldn’t handle,” Kevin told me. “I’m going to try and live a regular life.”

His mother and I traded a look over his hospital bed, knowing his life would be anything but regular. A few years later, under the weight of catastrophic injury and medical complications, Kevin’s body finally gave in.

I like to tell myself that I’ve served as a conduit for the last whispers of lives lost too soon. That I am capturing, in a crucial way, the sad mundanity of American gun violence. But sometimes, it seems I’m little more than a peddler of pain. A cog in a much broader story that seems to give short shrift to black death and too little scrutiny to a gun industry that profits while so many perish.

My days glued to a police scanner are long behind me. The fever of chasing gunfire and sirens has broken. I’ve mostly traded covering individual tragedies for covering a movement that wants those individual tragedies to actually lead to some form of positive change. It feels as much like a natural progression as it does a sort of masochistic calling.

There are more than 300 million guns in America. Almost as many guns as there are Americans. And each year about 11,000 people are killed by guns wielded by others. An additional 20,000 or so use guns to take their own lives. While gun violence has fallen since the bad old days of the late 1980s and early ’90s, far too many people — in poor black communities in particular — remain trapped and traumatized by violence.

Last month, I was in Chicago, where through the first two weeks of the year, according to the Chicago police, homicides are up 113 percent and shootings are up nearly 200 percent from the same period last year.

I met a woman whose 20-year-old daughter was killed a couple of years ago, trapped in the crossfire of a gang shootout. She held her daughter’s funeral on what would have been the girl’s 21st birthday. There have been no arrests in her daughter’s case. Investigators haven’t given her any updates and they’ve all but stopped answering her incessant phone calls, she said.

“She just lost her life for nothing,” the woman told me, cradling a heavy gold urn filled with her daughter’s ashes. “I take her with me everywhere I go, because before she was killed we spent every minute together. I’m going to keep carrying her with me until her death makes sense.”

As that mother waits for closure, the bodies of the 90 or so people who are killed each day by guns in this country will continue to pile up. Whether we’re carrying them in an urn or not, the burden of their weight belongs to all of us.

Trymaine Lee is a national reporter at MSNBC, a fellow at the New American Foundation and is at work on “Million Dollar Bullets,”
a book about gun violence in America.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 31, 2016,
on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline:
Black Lives and Bloodshed.

On the Beat of Black Lives and Bloodshed,
NYT,
JAN. 28, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/
opinion/sunday/on-the-beat-of-black-lives-and-bloodshed.html