One of us is a former white head of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the other is a black civil rights attorney who regularly sues his department.
Seventeen years ago we stopped fighting and co-founded the Community Safety Partnership’s policing – an alternative for the entire community to paramilitary enforcement that changes the conditions in the neighborhood to increase security, build trust, and reduce the use of the police and end violent crime with fewer arrests. With extraordinary effort and resources, a team of local executives, residents, experts, agencies and CSP officials are jointly implementing this security strategy in the most violent, underfunded neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Our national conscience and many police officers want this kind of holistic, racially fair and effective police work. But the political will to end the inequalities that block it does not exist. These inequalities are not just individual but systemic. They don’t just happen; society creates them. And they are particularly devastating in the police and criminal justice sectors.
Postal codes shouldn’t be fate
Addressing bias and inequality in our systems in no way excuses crime – individuals who commit serious crime should take serious action. But when racial segregated groups and the poor constantly suffer from debilitating conditions to the point that zip codes become fate, it is systemic.
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Needless to say, there are huge differences in race, class and gender throughout the criminal justice system. Black men and boys consistently constitute a worrying majority of those who are stopped, arrested and imprisoned for petty, drug and violent crime across America. They are also the majority of victims of violent crime and are more commonly used by police and sometimes deadly violence. A recent USA TODAY poll confirms that only 22% of Americans agree that the police treat everyone equally.
Why do these and other characteristics of unequal policing persist despite 50 years of police reform?
Because police do not exist in a vacuum. The police reflect and enforce the racial order of a great country that Martin Luther King Jr. would lament is still behind on an equality promissory note. Countless reports confirm that our systems are characterized by racial and class inequality. These injustices, which have worsened over 400 years, have built a maze of exclusion and prejudice that permeates our culture and systems of employment, health, wealth, education, housing and justice. Until we fix these other areas besides policing, we will not see any permanent change in any of them.
Racism in America:CRT reminds us that there is systemic racism. We don’t bury it in my classroom, we discuss it.
The Kerner Commission told us that 55 years ago. Hired by President Lyndon Johnson to explain what caused the racial unrest in the 1960s, the commission concluded that America needed to end institutionalized racism against blacks, cease violent repression of policing, and make massive investments to end it, what Johnson called “breeding conditions” is desperation and violence. “Otherwise, the commission concluded, the nation would be divided into racial unequal societies and ultimately cause” the destruction of fundamental democratic values. ”
Most of white America opposed the report. It’s time to get it out of the trash can.
Fixing the basics improves policing
The many honorable officials we know agree that nothing excuses abuse, racism, or excessive police violence. In our view, the mass incarceration and repression tactics used by society and police to control rather than repair what the Kerner Commission calls “ghetto conditions” must also change. Urban policing is a reflection of the inequality that we have anchored in all of our systems. However, smashing the mirror will not end the conditions or guidelines that create the ugly mirror image.
USA TODAY poll confirms that most Americans want more police force to tackle rising crime, but 62% also want more funding for social services and community policing, steps that lead to trust, respect, and problem-solving in the community Safety Partnership.
Driving while black:The police should stop doing minor traffic controls, which too often turn into major tragedies
Americans want security for themselves and only police work for poor communities. But inner-city policing will not change until the nation faces the fact that it is creating separate ghettos and barrios and then demands that the police suppress what they inevitably produce. An independent UCLA assessment confirms that with CSP “the community feels protected and empowered”.
We know how to fix police work. The question is this: does the nation have the will to end the unequal conditions that are blocking our progress?
Charlie Beck (@ChiefCharlieBeck) is a former police chief for the Los Angeles Police Department. Connie Rice is a civil rights attorney, a former member of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and the author of Power Concedes Nothing.
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