Next Up: police reform for the United States

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In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing a little more than three weeks ago, America has entered a phase of protests against social injustice, not seen since the mid 1960s, and the demand for a change in policing against black Americans, they have crowded the nation’s streets.

Reaching back, we can see that the problem has existed for decades, and in some cities, there has been a brutal legacy, Cmdr. Jon Burge, in Chicago, is but one known example, as he tortured and brutalized hundreds of black men in the 1950s.

George Floyd

Floyd’s name, unfortunately, enters a long litany of black people victimized by the police, their names engraved as the inheritors of racial prejudice in the country, but now, the challenge presents itself: to begin to change wholesale systemic racism, in a new “woke” country, where there are urgent calls to stop the killings, made even more urgent after the shooting of another unarmed black man, this time Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, after a sobriety test.

The most urgent question, among many, is how can there be effective, legal, and race neutral policing in a society that has prided itself on a legacy of freedom? It seems to begin with the surge of young people, black, white and brown, that have taken to the streets to demand change, chanting among others, the elegiac words: “I can’t breathe!”

Can America finally come of age and demand accountability from those tasked to serve and protect? This, of course, is a monumental task, and the fact that both shootings occured in progressive cities; one with a progressive mayor,and the other, headed by a black woman, speaks volumes about the change to long held biased behavior, and where some police departments have become a law unto themselves.

Starting points

In Chicago, where the city’s first black gay female mayor is Lori Lightfoot, who by her own admission, is no stranger to protest, has suggested, among other plans, to have young people of color give tours of their South and West neighborhoods to police, so that they can get to know the places, and people, that they serve, since one of the many charges is that white officers do not have any knowledge of the black communities that they patrol, and often charge in like an occupying force without attempts to understand the residents.

Understandably, this action alone will not by itself create change but in a less than perfect world, the beginning has to have a start, and developing youth leadership is a laudable goal.

Crossing from the earlier hopeful years of the last century, Martini Luther King, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” can be a starting point to reawaken the legacy of those efforts; but, also needs a rallying point to begin afresh, and this has begun with the murder of Floyd, and now Brooks. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom was the first to take the bull by the horns and had his attorney general, Jackie Lacey, outlaw the choke hold maneuver that was used by Minneapolis police and now those efforts have been galvanized by police associations in San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles.

Law enforcement response

“The San Jose Police Officers Association, the San Francisco Police Officers Association and the Los Angeles Police Protective League are announcing this effort with full-page ads in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News,” reported ABC7News.com.

Together they said, “"Our unions are committed to the continuous improvement of policing in America," the statement reads, in part. " We believe that each of our departments has made tremendous strides in strengthening accountability, transparency and adopting policies that reduce the number and severity of uses-of-force.”

Among a host of ideas, these are but a sample of the most salient:: ”a national database of former police officers fired for gross misconduct to help prevent other agencies from hiring them; a national use-of-force standard that emphasizes a reverence for life, de-escalation, a duty to intercede if witnessing excessive force or misconduct,” and “an early warning system to identify officers that may need more training and mentoring; ongoing and frequent crisis intervention and de-escalation training of police officers; and a transparent and publicly accessible use-of-force analysis website that allows the public to monitor when and how force is used.”

Many advocates have also stressed that police misconduct is  a violation of the Fourth Amendment, a fact that is often lost in the plurality of voices in the national and social media.

Taking a look at the recent past

If the past is prologue then there has to be a look at the recent past, and that takes us to the 2017 Chicago Consent Decree that was created in the waning days of the Obama administration, under the direction of then U.S. Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, all 164 pages that made a number of succinct observations about both the conduct and the character of much of the Chicago Police Department.

Both its release, and the resulting press conference, delivered a firestorm of reaction, from former Mayor Rahm Emanuel who characterized it as “misguided” and a wholesale disregard by former police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.

Chicago faced a mountain of accusations for its police board and force: “A review by the feds of more than 100 IPRA files revealed a consistent unwillingness to probe or dispute officers’ narratives, according to a source familiar with the DOJ’s findings. The report is also expected to point to specific use-of-force cases that revealed insufficient training in de-escalation techniques,” according to the Chicago Sun Times.

Pointedly, it also supported U.S. Constitutional violations, and racial disparities.

It reached its zenith of  condemnation by the U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in his confirmation hearings said, “"These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that." 

Jeff Sessions and Pres. Trump

Vanita Gupta, then working under Lynch noted, much later, in a letter of support, that for the city, it was paramount, according to the Chicago SunTimes, who reported that she said,“The city wants this reform,” and “The Chicago Police Department wants this reform. And the community, which has been waiting far too long, wants this reform.”

Sessions later remarked, “Chicago’s violent crime crisis would not be solved through civil litigation, and murders of Chicagoans will not be prevented by subjecting the CPD and its officers to multiple, costly monitors through various settlement agreements and consent decrees.”

Using a less than conciliatory tone, he then added, in a later speech, according to reports, that “he also complained that “lame-duck politicians” wrote the proposed consent decree to control CPD “from their political graves.”

One year later, in the aftermath of the police shooting of black teenager, Laquan McDonald, Emanuel, did a turn about, and with the then State Attorney General Lisa Madigan, at his side, announced a state directed consent decree, with Madigan stating that, ““For decades, Chicago has endured tragedies ... and failed attempts at real police reform. The resulting lack of trust between the public and police is untenable, and exacerbates a complicated violence problem,” Madigan said. “The consent decree gives us a unique opportunity to change that.”

That agreement with input from Black Lives Matter was given a five year period to implement changes.

However it was later revealed that while CPD had implemented some of the decree, others it has not, for others;and, mostly on use of force, with a “met” of only 37 of 50 deadlines, according to the federally appointed monitor Maggie Hickey.

The way ahead

In its response, CPD said in a statement, that “it remains committed to adopting and implementing the meaningful, enforceable police reforms outlined in the consent decree.”

“While we are working diligently to comply with the requirements as quickly as possible, we are placing greater importance on affirming the reforms have undergone the appropriate reviews to ensure we’re working toward a more transparent, accountable and professional Department of which the entire city can be proud. We believe that public safety and reform strategies are mutually reinforcing and can be accomplished simultaneously, and will continue working alongside the Independent Monitoring Team and Office of the Illinois Attorney General to implement change and sustain compliance with the consent decree.”

On Thursday Hickey announced that Chicago had met 25 of 74 items between September of. 2019 and February 29th, of this year, two thirds of its consent decree deadlines, in her second of ten semiannual reports that she and her team will provide over the next five years.

WTTW Chicago reported that “In a joint statement published following the report’s release, Lightfoot and CPD Superintendent David Brown said Hickey’s findings illustrate “how the level of transformational change and reform we are working toward cannot be reached overnight.”

“While we have continued to build on a host of police reform and accountability measures since then, we have been clear that this moment is just the start, not the end of our journey,” they said. “We can do better, and we are redoubling our efforts to meet important milestones mandated by the consent decree.”

Hickey also plans to release a report on the recent protests and civil unrest that roiled the city.

The view from the White House

What most have noted most lacking in the discussion is federal leadership, namely from President Trump, whose recent statements seem to indicate a lack of firmness, and a direction that is focused on playing to his political base, despite last week’s ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, where he read the names of those killed in police action, and mentioned the possibility of banning choke holds, with some exceptions.

The president seemed anxious to change the subject and segue into a discussion of the stock market and retail sales. And, then somewhat bizarrely to both listeners and television viewers, then said that “school choice” was a new course for civil rights; which most Capitol Hill observers attribute to Education Secretary Betsy De Vos’s influence.

Reaction has been tepid, and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi described it as “inadequate.”

Previously the president has referred to peaceful protesters as “thugs” and “terrorists” and in the ceremony noted that he believed that there was a “small number of police officers” involved and “they are very tiny, I use the word tiny.”

In a bill tasked by Sen. Tim Scott, by Trump, it seems to be, in the words of his critics, to nibble around the edges of the problem and offers encouragement for choke hold bans and no knock entries by police, and while it provides anti lynching seems to encourage the study through commissions of the lack of police accountability, which is often seen as the death knell for issues that don’t have political support.

Sen. Scott

The lack of an explicit ban on the above measures gives credence to "The Senate proposal of studies and reporting without transparency and accountability is inadequate," said Pelosi in a statement. "The Senate's so-called Justice Act is not action."

Meanwhile Scott said that he hoped that his bill would take the same precautions that the Congress took with COVID 19 and according to NPR, added, “"I believe if we take that same consciousness into this process, and we don't make it about bipartisan or partisan politics, we make it about families who have lost loved ones, we make it about restoring trust, about respecting officers ... we'll get to the finish line," Scott said.

The House has its own competing bill and “The proposal, titled the Justice in Policing Act, would prohibit police from using choke-holds, create a national registry to track police misconduct, lower legal standards to pursue criminal and civil penalties for police misconduct, and ban certain no-knock warrants. (You can read a summary of the bill here.),” reported  NPR.

Across the country there has been specific responses that mirror these bills, but in stronger terms, such as New York, which has disbanded the types of plain clothes units such as the one in the Eric Garner case; and, in New Jersey, the Attorney General has ordered the police to disclose the names of police with “severe discipline violations.”

In Chicago, Lightfoot has proposed a “panel of residents, activists and police officers” to review policy and when officers can use force.

The recognition of the magnitude of police reform for black Americans has unified people across the globe, in the United Kingdom, and Japan, to name but two, and has also enjoined the struggle for protective rights towards LGBT people, and all those whose lives have been endangered, even beyond police reform, tilting the demands for human rights.

The Guardian, a UK newspaper and website, perhaps said it best, when they noted, in their coverage, that with the coronavirus, and the subsequent deterioration of the U.S. economy, that “This is a perfect storm killing Black Americans.”

U.S. May Jobs Report gives surprises

We may be one of the few people who don’t like surprise parties, so taking that a bit further, the U.S. Labor Department’s May Jobs Report  gave a real jolt to many economists, and observers, that there was actually a gain in non-farm payroll jobs, to the tune of 2.5 million for that month, as with more than a grain, or two of logic, expected a deep drop after the arrival of the  pandemic COVID-19.

If 13.3 was the unemployment rate, were all asleep at the proverbial wheel? Adding to the confusion was the disclaimer that was put on the report that the numbers may be wrong.

Then the specter of 8.1 million people misclassified? More confusion, then another look revealing that the more accurate figure was 16.4 percent. Adding that figure to the mix, it was still better than 19.5 percent from the April report.

What was expected was also 19.8 unemployment, so taking either the 13.3 or the 16.4 that some say is the real number, gives some satisfaction.

Then again 18 million people were jobless, and in February, 21 million people lost their jobs, a fact that gives support to the now widespread belief that it was the month that the recession began in the United States. Taking an even closer look, we have for purposes of discussion, 129,718 for February and in May, 111,732, down by 17,986.

A payoff of 2,905 jobs? Talk about the brass ring.

From all of the mainstream media reports, we have learned that many of the Labor and Census interviewers, data technicians, and their support staff, were working from home without their customary, in-office tools of support; but, in hindsight we also see that there were revisions for both March and April. But, and this is a big but, those months traditionally are subject to revision.

Another possibility is that respondents answered the questions posed incorrectly, when asked in the household survey, of 60,000, that they were not working, when in fact they might have been on jury duty

If that does not make your head spin, then sitting back for a bit and waiting on the August and September reports will give a clearer picture.

What is evident is that there were two factors, both interrelated that showed a higher number, the Payroll Protection Program, that allowed for some businesses to bring back some employees and hire more accompanied by another caveat, noted by Forbes in their online report, that some companies might not “rebound fast enough to justify all the people that are working, which could lead to a second round of layoffs.”

Putting the May numbers aside for a while, we can see, as Forbes outlined, that “26% of the roughly 18 million previously gained jobs are needed to get back to the February employment level.”

The Federal Reserve concluded its two day meeting on Wednesday, and the expectation that they would not change the interest rate,  keeping it at 0.025 was met, and also that the recovery was indeed in recession, and that the road ahead would be a long and hard slog, with recovery not to be seen till 2022, at best.

Jerome Powell

They will continue Quantitative Easing and the buying may help as it did in the Great Recession of 2007 and 2008, but there is some danger in the increase of overall debt, and falls in the stock market, and some are advocating for dealing with an ageing population, and understanding welfare policies, but mostly a greater increase in the handling of the COVID 19 pandemic, and its effect on the country.

“We remain confident that the overall economy will continue to improve dramatically in the third and fourth quarter,” said the Fed Chair,Jay Powell, and that was a more optimistic tone than some expected, yet giving a “doom and gloom” scenario would not have improved matters, and perception is one tenth of the law for most economic forecasters.

In that vein, small businesses will continue to need support, and some have given monies back from the Paycheck Protection Program, partly in fear that they might not be able to afford to hire back workers, and remain open for business with reduced demand and program rules.

Some lawmakers are advocating for increased direct payments, not loan, to them, but as we have seen with the U.S. House voting on another round of stimulus checks, a move that has not been welcomed by Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, this is an area that will require intense support.

For individuals, there is some chatter of reducing unemployment benefits on the Senate side, a move that in a presidential reelection year would prove disastrous for President Trump.

In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, there is much talk on Capitol Hill of creating more fiscal policy to help American blacks after decades of neglect and disinvestment in many of their communities.

Some are looking to the May report as signs of an increase, if not outright improvement for them and the figures do show that there was an increase from16.7 to 16.8, with some of the greatest gains in black youths 16 to 19 years of age from 28 percent to 34.9, but why the increase has no rationale as of yet.

In the end run, while numbers will be adjusted, there is also the realization that the 15 percent overall increase is still far below pre COVID 19 levels.

George Floyd murder wreaks havoc on United States

America’s most intractable problem, as we’ve noted before, is race, specifically relations between blacks and whites, and has pocked its history with slavery, violence, and Jim Crow laws leading to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, and now 50 years later, the nation is reeling from the murder of George Floyd, by a white policeman in Minneapolis, Minn. who knelt on the man’s neck until he died.

The fact that the crime occured in a relatively progressive city, that includes a sympathetic mayor and that has two transgendered blacks on the city council speaks volumes, not only for irony, but for the common pattern of police statements saying that Floyd was resisting arrest, but a later video showed that he was not; gives credence to the maxim, that as much as things change they remain the same.

As protests have spread across the nation, with most peaceful, they have been tailgated by those intent on robbing stores, and the sounds of breaking glass that have been accompanied by alarm bells, and police sirens, and fleeing vandals, their arms bulging with stolen mobile phones, athletic shoes, designer handbags, and other merchandise.

These looters have sullied both the message of the protests, sending people into a tailspin of anger, disappointment,and hurt, at the loss of millions of dollars, and the lives behind them, for both employer and employee, as broken as the shards of plate glass that litter the streets of New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, and Ft. Lauderdale, just some of the more prominent, and notable cities in the United States.

As Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot noted, in an initial speech, asked who comes to a peaceful protest bearing shovels, pick axes, metal pipes, and bottles filled with urine?

Those hell bent on taking advantage of the situation for personal gain.

There is also some evidence, although not all is known, that there were extremists from either the far right, or the left, intent on bending the peaceful demonstrators to their goals of anarchy and lawlessness, what some media reports are calling, “violent radical elements.”

Nevertheless a mob is still a mob.

The pattern of police abuse will linger long after the glass and debris have been swept away, leaving this still gaping hole in the moral fabric of a country that was once referred to as the New Jerusalem, the City on the Hill, but now wearing a tattered suit of racism, dismay, and for some disbelief.

Needing fundamental change in race relations and policing is nothing new, amidst the horror stories of not just unwarranted arrests, but aslo forced confessions, torture, and the whip of cruelty. What is needed, these past decades has not been possible as local lawmakers face a legacy of racism, and the lack of will to make systemic changes in a society that often turns a blind eye to the destruction of individuals and families.

Now, what is desparetly sought is leadership on the federal level, besides to assist with that of local and state lawmakers, but with President Donald Trump in office, nothing is to be gained, and everything is to be lost, as he has shown a pattern of turning a blind eye to the need for both.

His history when dealing with racial tension, and specifically sports players, demonstrating the police brutality, in taking a knee, in protest begun by Colin Kapernick, proved to be a pivotal moment when he said that, and what was most infamously noted, with the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, in 2017, where a white protestor was killed, and the president later commented that there were good people on both sides.

On Monday, the president had a peaceful protest broken up with the assistance of United States Park Police, and the Secret Service who used tear gas and rubber bullets, so that he could walk to historic St. John’s Episcopal church, for a photo op, in front of the church, which had suffered minor damage from a basement fire, standing outside in front of the church, holding a Bible.

Trump never entered the church, nor did he notify, with customary professional courtesy, that he was coming to the local bishop, The Rt. Rev. Marianne Budde, (who ironically was a rector in Minneapolis for eighteen years), which is normally done, when a sitting president visits.

Using the church for the photo was, as most agree, a play to his political base, as his poll ratings have plunged to below 34 percent. But Budd, along with Presiding American Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry, expressed their profound displeasure, with Curry citing biblical injunctions.

With racial justice and legalities, now brought to the forefront, is perhaps no more succinctly seen than in the lack of will to enforce the consent agreement formed in the waning days of the Obama administration, for Chicago’s police department which found huge holes in how black people were treated, mostly worse, than white citizens, ironically by those sworn to protect and serve; in behavior, more akin to that of an occupying force.

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Taking a rearview look in the mirror, we can see Rodney King, in Los Angeles and the dragging of the black man in Texas, James Byrd, behind a pickup truck, as sad historical antecedents, among many others, giving the nation a sad legacy of brutality.

The financial cost of the damage done by looters, and vandals, are in the millions, but what cannot be calculated is the range of emotions, in the aftermath of of the outrage and anger in the genocide of black Americans.

Updated 8 June, 2020 CSDT