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History > 2014 > USA > African-Americans (II)
SC Department of Archives and History,
via Associated Press
A Boy’s Execution, 70 Years Later
Seeking Justice for George Stinney
NYT
By JESSE WEGMAN
JUNE 15, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/opinion/seeking-justice-for-george-stinney.html
Ben Ammi Ben-Israel,
Leader of Black Americans
Who Migrated to Israel, Dies at 75
DEC. 31, 2014
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG
Ben Ammi Ben-Israel, a former Chicago metal worker who led a
migration of hundreds of fellow black Americans to what they consider their
ancestral homeland, Israel, died on Saturday in a hospital in Be’er Sheva,
Israel. He was 75.
His organization, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, announced his
death on its website. The cause was not disclosed.
To his followers, who called him the father or the holy father, Mr. Ben-Israel
was a prophet-like figure who maintained that he had a vision in 1966 in which
the angel Gabriel told him to lead an exodus of black Americans to Israel.
Since the first African Hebrews arrived there in 1969, the community has grown
to about 3,000 members, half of whom were born in Israel. Most live in the city
of Dimona, at the edge of Israel’s Negev Desert, and two nearby towns.
“We were returning to be reconciled with the Creator,” Mr. Ben-Israel said in a
2008 interview with WBEZ, a public radio station in Chicago.
The African Hebrews, like many black Americans in a wider movement that sprang
up in the early 1900s, believe that their ancestors were biblical Israelites,
members of the tribe of Judah who dispersed to West Africa after the destruction
of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Generations later, they say,
descendants of those Israelites were taken to America as slaves.
Under Israel’s Law of Return, any Jew can live there and become a citizen. But
the African Hebrews do not consider themselves Jews and refuse to convert. “That
is our tribal origin,” said Ahmadiel Ben-Yehuda, a spokesman. “We’re not
adherents to the religion of Judaism.”
For decades, Israelis regarded the African Hebrews as a strange and possibly
dangerous cult. The African Hebrews wear vibrant clothing, follow a vegan diet
and do not smoke or drink. Birth control is prohibited. The men often have
multiple wives.
Since they were not Jews, the Israeli government denied them work permits and
health care and threatened to deport them. Mr. Ben-Israel, in turn, lashed out
with anti-Semitic remarks and accusations of racism.
“We came here offering ‘shalom,’ ” Mr. Ben-Israel told The New York Times in
1971. “We have been met with no jobs, no decent housing and Jim Crow policies
similar to what we left behind.”
Later that year, he told The Baltimore Sun that two million blacks from the
United States would wrest Israel from its Jewish inhabitants. “The Lord
personally ordered me to take possession of Israel,” he said.
More followers made their way to the African Hebrew compound in Dimona,
overstaying tourist visas. Tensions flared anew on April 17, 1986, when the
police surrounded the village to prevent a planned protest march. Mr. Ben-Israel
made an impassioned proclamation of strength to his followers but without the
inflammatory talk of earlier years, and they did not push ahead with the march.
“We’re sons and daughters of peace,” he said. “We will not leave. We will wait.
We will wait.” In 1990, the Israeli government offered the African Hebrews a
path to permanent residency and citizenship. In return, the African Hebrews
agreed to stop the flow of new members.
The community soon became more entwined with Israeli society. Many of its
children who grew up in Israel have served in the country’s military. The
African Hebrews have opened a small chain of vegan restaurants, and they
manufacture tofu cheese for a vegan pizza sold by the Domino’s pizza chain.
Mr. Ben-Israel became an Israeli citizen in 2013.
He was born Ben Carter in Chicago on Oct. 12, 1939. After dropping out of high
school, he served three years in the Army while earning his equivalency diploma,
Mr. Ben-Yehuda, the spokesman, said. After his discharge he worked as a
metallurgist at the Howard Foundry on the West Side of Chicago, where, he
recounted, a black co-worker came up to him one day in 1961 and asked, “Did you
know we are descendants of the biblical Israelites?”
Mr. Ben-Israel adopted his Hebrew name after studying the Bible. In the turmoil
of the 1960s, he allied himself with those who believed that blacks would be
better off leaving the United States than trying to change it from within
through the civil rights movement. They established a congregation and a meeting
place, calling it the A-Beta Hebrew Israel Cultural Center.
Mr. Ben-Israel took about 350 of his followers to Liberia in 1967 as part of
what he called a cleansing process, which lasted two and a half years. Some
followers died. A few remained in Liberia. Most went back to the United States,
but Mr. Ben-Israel and about 140 others went on to Israel.
He is survived by four wives, Tikvah, Yoninah, Baht Zion and Baht Ammi; 25
children; 45 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.
His followers spoke of Mr. Ben-Israel as having been anointed by God to lead
them, though he made no claims to being divine, Mr. Ben-Yehuda said. Yet, he
said, Mr. Ben-Israel was once asked if he was the messiah, and he answered with
a parable:
“Someone came up to two people — a wise man and a fool — saying, ‘Ben Ammi is
the Messiah!’ The fool jumped up and said, ‘No, he’s not!’ Whereas the wise man
looked around at the state of the world and replied, ‘I don’t know, but I sure
hope that he is!’ ”.
Ben Ammi Ben-Israel, Leader of Black Americans
Who Migrated to Israel,
Dies at 75, NYT, 31.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/world/middleeast/
ben-ammi-ben-israel-leader-of-black-americans-
who-migrated-to-israel-dies-at-75.html
Pursuing Justice for All
DEC. 21, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
Charles M. Blow
He is prisoner No. 260. He stares into the camera for his mug
shot, head cocked, eyes forlorn of hope. It is the kind of picture that haunts.
He is 14. His name is George Stinney Jr. He is a child, someone’s baby.
He is a black boy arrested in the murder of two white girls in the rural town of
Alcolu, S.C.
He is tried for the murders just a month after the arrest. An all-white,
all-male jury is empaneled. That same afternoon, the trial commences. It lasts
only a few hours. The white lawyer assigned to Stinney’s defense cross-examines
no witnesses and calls none of his own. The jury deliberates for only 10 minutes
before finding Stinney guilty. That same day, the boy is sentenced to death by
electrocution.
There are no appeals. There are no requests for a stay. When the day comes for
the boy’s execution, less than two months after the trial, guards reportedly had
a hard time fitting the small boy into the big chair.
He was just 5 feet 1 inch. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, “He weighed 95
pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in
the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders.”
Some say the book he sat on wasn’t a phone book but the Bible.
(Note to humanity: When the person in your death machine requires a booster
seat, maybe you should reconsider what you are about to do.)
As Jesse Wegman of The Times’s editorial board wrote on the Taking Note blog:
“Reports from the execution chamber said he was so small that the jolt of
electricity knocked the mask from his face.”
That day, June 16, 1944, Stinney became the youngest person executed in America
in the 20th century. This unconscionable cruelty — the execution of children —
used to be routine. As The Times pointed out in 2005, in the 1940s juveniles
were executed at a pace of “nearly once every two months.”
It’s not clear whether Stinney saw the faces of anyone who loved him when he was
marched into that execution chamber and strapped into that chair. His sister,
Aime Ruffner, told The Guardian this year that the family was run out of town
the day her brother was taken away. She is quoted as saying: “I never went back
there. I curse that place. It was the destruction of my family and the killing
of my brother.”
Last week, a South Carolina judge threw out the conviction, saying “I can think
of no greater injustice than a violation of one’s constitutional rights, which
has been proven to me in this case” and finding “by a preponderance of the
evidence standard, that a violation of the defendant’s procedural due process
rights tainted his prosecution.”
This was a victory of sorts: a 70-years-too-late admission that the justice
system failed that black child, and that the failure culminated — in short order
— in the taking of his life. Yet something about it feels hollow and
discomforting, like the thunder that rolls long after the lightning has cracked
the sky and split the tree.
It boldly announces itself in all its noisy nothingness. It was the white flash
that did the damage and produced the splinters.
That is all too often what “righting” racial injustice looks like in this
country: a hollow pronouncement that follows the damage but doesn’t prevent its
recurrence.
The overturning of this particular conviction comes at a most profound time —
following the decisions by grand juries not to indict police officers in the
killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and John Crawford III and preceding the
ambush and murder of two police officers in Brooklyn
The decision provides a generational through-line of sorts for questions about
judicial fairness in this country, about the speed with which people can be
judged a threat or an enemy and have their lives taken.
The heart aches for every life lost.
Why are there so many touchstones of outrage to mark the African-American
experience in this country? Why is there so much tension between officers of the
law and minority neighborhoods?
We have seen many polls recently examining race relations, policing and bias in
the justice system. In general, we as a nation are thinking more about these
issues — at least at the moment. That is quite encouraging and is a potential
starting point for some needed acknowledgments, as well as some needed changes.
All lives are valuable — those of the public and the police. We can and must
condemn the deranged suicidal cop killer (who also shot his former girlfriend)
as well as the cops who kill. There is no contradiction there. Humanity is the
common thread.
The cries of ancestors mingle with those of activists and those of dead
officers. Anguish stretches across generations and across the racial gulf. Equal
justice demands its proper place. The taking of life on both sides of the badge
must be redressed.
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at
chblow@nytimes.com.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A27 of
the New York edition with the headline: Pursuing Justice for All.
Pursuing Justice for All, NYT, 21.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/
charles-blow-pursuing-justice-for-all.html
South Carolina Judge
Vacates Conviction of George Stinney
in 1944 Execution
DEC. 17, 2014
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Calling it a “great and fundamental injustice,” a South Carolina
judge on Wednesday vacated the 1944 murder conviction of 14-year-old George J.
Stinney Jr., the youngest person executed in the United States in the last
century.
Judge Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule that the conviction of Mr.
Stinney for the murder of two white girls in the town of Alcolu was wrong on the
merits. She did find, however, that the prosecution had failed in numerous ways
to safeguard the constitutional rights of Mr. Stinney, who was black, from the
time he was taken into custody until his death by electrocution.
The all-white jury could not be considered a jury of the teenager’s peers, Judge
Mullen ruled, and his court-appointed attorney did “little to nothing” to defend
him. His confession was most likely coerced and unreliable, she added, “due to
the power differential between his position as a 14-year-old black male
apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small,
segregated mill town in South Carolina.”
The order was a rare application of coram nobis, a legal remedy that can be used
only when a conviction was based on an error of fact or unfairly obtained in a
fundamental way and when all other remedies have been exhausted.
“I am not aware of any case where someone who was convicted has had the trial
conviction and sentence vacated after they’d been executed,” said Miller W.
Shealy Jr., a professor at the Charleston School of Law and one of the lawyers
who worked on behalf of the Stinney family to have the conviction thrown out.
Ernest A. Finney III, the solicitor who had opposed the request on the state’s
behalf — and a son of the first black State Supreme Court justice since
Reconstruction — had argued in a two-day hearing in January that the conviction
was valid under the legal system in place at the time. He did not return calls
for comment.
At the hearing, in Sumter, Mr. Stinney’s two sisters testified, and a videotaped
deposition from his brother was played. They spoke of the morning in March 1944
when the two girls, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7, were seen
riding bicycles by the pastures in rural Alcolu. The girls’ bodies were found
the next morning in a ditch, their skulls crushed. Mr. Stinney was taken into
custody within hours, and confessed to the murders that day.
Two white men who had helped search for the girls also testified, and a cellmate
of Mr. Stinney’s recounted conversations in which Mr. Stinney said he was
innocent and had been made to confess. Less than three months passed between the
murder and the execution; the trial and sentencing took less than a day.
Some of the problems of due process highlighted in the ruling were not rare in
the Jim Crow South. Still, Mr. Shealy cautioned that this case was exceptional,
due in part to Mr. Stinney’s age. Judge Mullen also emphasized that it should
not become a standard resort for families grieving over decades-old injustices.
“The extraordinary circumstances discussed herein simply do not apply in most
cases,” she wrote.
A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2014, on page A28 of
the New York edition with the headline: Judge Vacates Conviction in 1944
Execution.
South Carolina Judge Vacates Conviction of
George Stinney in 1944 Execution,
NYT, 17.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/us/
judge-vacates-conviction-in-1944-execution.html
Hope and Anger at the Garner Protests
DEC. 5, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By BRENT STAPLES
The country has historically reacted with doubt or indifference
when African-Americans speak of police officers who brutalize — or even kill —
people with impunity. Affluent and middle-class white Americans who were treated
with respect by the police had difficulty imagining the often life-threatening
mistreatment that black Americans of all walks of life dealt with on a daily
basis. Perhaps those days are passing away.
You can see that from the multiracial cast of the demonstrations that have swept
the nation since Wednesday, when a grand jury decided not to indict a white New
York City police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black
man.
In city after city, white and nonwhite citizens have surged through the streets
chanting or bearing signs with Mr. Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe.”
Others chanted: “Hands up; don’t shoot” or “Black lives matter” — slogans from
the racially troubled town of Ferguson, Mo., where another grand jury declined
to indict the officer who shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The viral spread of the demonstrations — and the wide cross section of Americans
who are organizing and participating in them — shows that what was once seen as
a black issue is on the way to being seen as a central, American problem.
The question of the moment is whether the country’s political leadership has the
will to root out abusive and discriminatory policing — corrosive, longstanding
problems that bore down on minority communities, large and small, urban and
suburban.
The scope of the problem is evident from the work of the Justice Department,
which has opened 20 investigations into local police departments over the last
five years and is currently enforcing reform agreements with 15 departments,
some of which were investigated in previous administrations.
This week, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. released a particularly alarming
report on the barbaric conduct of the police department in Cleveland, which has
been riven with discord in recent weeks, after a white police officer shot and
killed a 12-year-old black boy, Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun.
The Times reported on Friday that the officer had quit a suburban police force
after his supervisors judged that he had a “dangerous loss of composure” during
firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to deal with the stresses of
the job. The Cleveland Police Department had failed to examine the officer’s
work history before hiring him. Thus an officer who had been unable to cope in a
suburban district was given the power of life and death over people in a big
city, where the task of policing the streets is far more demanding.
The Justice Department report describes the Cleveland Police Department as
something far closer to an occupying military force than a legitimate law
enforcement agency. The officers, for example, seem to take a casual view of the
use of deadly force, shooting at people who pose no threat of harm to the police
or others. In one case in 2013, for example, they actually fired at a victim who
had been held captive in a house — as he escaped, clad only in boxer shorts.
The record in Cleveland is extreme. But aspects of illegal police conduct can be
found in cities all over the country, subjecting millions to intimidation and
fear that they could be killed for innocent actions.
Congress will have an opportunity to discuss this issue soon, during the Senate
confirmation hearings of Loretta Lynch, the United States attorney for the
Eastern District of New York, who has been nominated to succeed Mr. Holder as
attorney general.
Ms. Lynch’s office will oversee the federal civil rights investigation into the
Garner case. Some in Congress clearly understand that the grand jury’s failure
to indict the officer — despite a clear video showing him choking the man —
deserves review, not just on its face, but because it goes to the heart of the
fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Others, however, seem poised to argue that the federal government, which has a
clear responsibility to enforce civil rights laws, should not be taking the
lead. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, for example, asked, “Why does
the federal government feel like it is its responsibility and role to be the
leader in an investigation in a local instance?” That sounds like something out
of the Jim Crow era, when Southern states argued that they were entitled to
treat black citizens any way they wished.
Mr. Holder was on the mark when he said that the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric
Garner and Tamir Rice raised urgent, national questions about the breakdown of
trust between minority communities and the police forces that are supposed to
serve and protect them.
That so many are in the streets protesting police abuse shows that outrage over
these injustices is spreading. Now it is up to the nation’s political leaders to
confront this crisis.
A version of this editorial appears in print on December 6, 2014, on page A22 of
the New York edition with the headline: Hope and Anger at the Garner Protests.
Hope and Anger at the Garner Protests, NYT,
5.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/opinion/
hope-and-anger-at-the-garner-protests.html
Eric Garner and the Legal Rules
That Enable Police Violence
DEC. 5, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributors
By SHAKEER RAHMAN and SAM BARR
ERIC GARNER was not the first American to be choked by the
police, and he will not be the last, thanks to legal rules that prevent victims
of police violence from asking federal courts to help stop deadly practices.
The 1983 case City of Los Angeles v. Lyons vividly illustrates the problem. That
case also involved an African-American man choked by the police without
provocation after he was stopped for a minor offense — a burned-out taillight.
Unlike Mr. Garner, Adolph Lyons survived the chokehold. He then filed a federal
lawsuit, asking the city to compensate him for his injuries. But he wanted more
than just money. He also asked the court to prevent the Los Angeles Police
Department from using chokeholds in the future. The trial court ordered the
L.A.P.D. to stop using chokeholds unless an officer was threatened with death or
serious injury, and to institute better training, reporting and record-keeping.
The Supreme Court overturned this order by one vote. The court explained that
Mr. Lyons would have needed to prove that he personally was likely to be choked
again in order for his lawsuit to be a vehicle for systemic reform. Without
that, he could win compensation only for past injuries.
This is the legal standard when a plaintiff asks a federal court for an
injunction — or a forward-looking legal order — in order to stop illegal
practices that could harm him in the future. It makes some sense in the
abstract: If someone can’t show he will be harmed in the future, why should a
court try to prevent the harm? But even though Mr. Lyons couldn’t prove that the
L.A.P.D. would choke him again, he could be confident that the police would
eventually choke someone else. When the stakes are this deadly, federal courts
should step in.
The decision instead left it to local authorities to enact solutions. History
shows they’re not up to the job. In 1985, the New York Police Department agreed
that chokeholds were “potentially lethal and unnecessary” and announced that it
would no longer use them “routinely.” That policy failed. After more deadly
chokeholds, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly banned their use altogether in 1993.
But just last year, the city received 233 allegations of police chokeholds.
Federal courts could address police violence by legally forbidding practices
like chokeholds, as well as by mandating improved training and reporting. If
police departments still failed to comply, federal judges could impose penalties
and harsher requirements.
How do we know that these interventions would be more effective? Consider school
segregation. Local officials had promised change but failed to ensure it, and it
took decades of close supervision by federal courts to make a dent in the
problem. As the courts started to leave this field in more recent years, de
facto segregation returned.
In his dissent in the Lyons case, Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed out that,
without judicial enforcement, the city would “continue the policy indefinitely
as long as it is willing to pay damages for the injuries and deaths that
result.” Today we still depend on bureaucratic cost-benefit analysis, with
cities weighing the cost of compensating victims against the perceived value of
aggressive policing.
Unfortunately, the hurdles to winning compensation are also severe. To get money
from police officers who act illegally, victims must prove not just that a
practice is illegal, but that no reasonable officer would think the practice was
legal. To get money from a local government, a victim must prove that his injury
was part of a pattern or policy. On the rare occasions when victims do prevail,
governments can afford the costs and have little incentive to reform.
To be sure, there are still ways that federal courts can address the Garner
case. The Justice Department has announced that it will conduct a federal civil
rights investigation, as it did in Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo. But
the Justice Department has limited resources and fluctuating political will.
Protests help bolster this will. But the Justice Department cannot notice (let
alone investigate) every allegation of police violence. Citizens need to be able
to instigate judicial reform on their own.
Some federal judges have recently acted boldly to allow these suits despite the
Lyons precedent. For example, in last year’s N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk decision,
the judge found that discriminatory police searches were pervasive enough to
issue an injunction in a case brought by past victims.
Public indignation about police violence should be directed not only at the
grand juries and prosecutors that fail to vindicate victims of police violence,
but also at the legal rules that enabled this violence in the first place. The
law shouldn’t just serve to punish past conduct: It should also drive reform.
Shakeer Rahman and Sam Barr are third-year students at Harvard Law School.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 6, 2014, on page A23 of the
New York edition with the headline: Legal Rules Enable Police Violence.
Eric Garner and the Legal Rules That Enable
Police Violence,
NYT, 6.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/opinion/
eric-garner-and-the-legal-rules-that-enable-police-violence.html
Eric
Holder’s Legacy
SEPT. 25, 2014
The New York
Times
The Opinion
Pages | Editorial
By THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
By any
measure, the nearly-six-year tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has been
one of the most consequential in United States history. His decision to resign,
which he announced on Thursday, was long anticipated; he has said he will stay
on through his successor’s confirmation. It is hard to imagine that anyone who
could make it through the current Senate would have an impact comparable to Mr.
Holder’s.
As the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement
official, Mr. Holder broke ground the moment he took office. In a position that
rarely rewards boldness — and in the face of a frequently hostile Congress — Mr.
Holder has continued to stake out strong and laudable legal positions on many of
the most contested issues of our time. But his record is marred by the role the
Justice Department played in matters of secrecy and national security under his
leadership.
SAME-SEX
MARRIAGE In 2011, Mr. Holder announced that the Justice Department would no
longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage under federal
law as between a man and a woman. The law was unconstitutional, he said. It was
a critical moment that foreshadowed both President Obama’s own “evolution” on
same-sex marriage the following year and the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling
invalidating an important part of the law. Since the court’s decision, nearly
two dozen federal courts have struck down state bans on same-sex marriage
throughout the country, and the Supreme Court has been asked again to rule on
whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage — a question it
dodged in 2013.
VOTING RIGHTS
Mr. Holder successfully fought discriminatory voting restrictions around the
country before the 2012 elections. When the Supreme Court gutted the core of the
Voting Rights Act in 2013, he was quick to find new ways to challenge
discriminatory laws. Shortly after the ruling, the Justice Department joined
lawsuits challenging new restrictions like strict voter-ID requirements and
cutbacks to voting hours in North Carolina and Texas. In both states,
Republican-controlled legislatures imposed rules that most heavily burden poorer
and minority voters, who tend to vote Democratic.
“The history of this nation has always been to try to expand the franchise,” Mr.
Holder told The New Yorker in February. “We’ve always found ways in which we’ve
made the voting process more inclusive. What these folks are intending to do, or
certainly the impact of what they’re going to do, is to turn their backs on that
history.”
CRIMINAL
JUSTICE From early in the Obama administration’s first term, Mr. Holder made
broad criminal-justice reform a central goal of his tenure. “Too many Americans
go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement
reason,” he said in a landmark speech last year. He often spoke about the issue
in starkly moral terms, no more so than when discussing race. The
disproportionately harsh treatment of blacks throughout the criminal justice
system, he said, “isn’t just unacceptable; it is shameful.”
Among other things, Mr. Holder strongly supported a 2010 law that eliminated the
difference in sentences for crimes involving crack versus powder cocaine. Last
year, he ordered federal prosecutors to be more lenient toward low-level drug
offenders, and he supported legislation that would reduce mandatory minimum
sentences for many drug crimes. He has investigated police departments for
excessive force — including in Ferguson, Mo. — and fought for more financing for
indigent defense services.
In February, he called for the repeal of “profoundly outdated” felon
disenfranchisement laws, which, in some states, prevent as many as one in five
African-Americans from voting. And, in April, he directed prosecutors to seek
out thousands of prisoners to be considered for early release from overlong drug
sentences.
•
While much of Mr. Holder’s legacy rightly will be defined by the improvements he
made in areas of civil rights and criminal justice reform, it will also be
defined by deeply harmful actions — and failures to act — involving issues of
national importance.
Under Mr. Holder, the Justice Department approved the targeted killing of
civilians, including Americans, without judicial review, and the Obama
administration fought for years to keep the justifications for such efforts
secret. In the zeal to stop leaks of government information, Mr. Holder brought
more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than during all previous presidencies
combined. In tracking the sources of leaks, prosecutors seized phone and email
records of journalists who were doing their jobs.
Even as the Justice Department devoted so much misguided energy to preventing
leaks, it neglected to prosecute some of the most glaring cases of wrongdoing.
Driven by Mr. Obama’s desire to “look forward,” Mr. Holder used claims of
government secrecy and immunity to toss out lawsuits seeking accountability for
torture and other criminal abuses committed in the war on terror.
On the financial front, he did not prosecute a single prominent banker or firm
in connection with the subprime mortgage crisis that nearly destroyed the
economy. These are not accomplishments to be proud of.
Of course, Mr. Holder has always served at the pleasure of the president, who
has his own policy priorities and political survival to consider. At his best,
Mr. Holder stepped up and said things that Mr. Obama could not or would not say.
And in wielding the muscle of his office, in a job of exasperating complications
and irreconcilable conflicts, Mr. Holder has worked to increase justice for many
of America’s most dispossessed or forgotten citizens.
A version of
this editorial appears in print on September 26, 2014, on page A30 of the New
York edition with the headline: Eric Holder’s Legacy.
Eric Holder’s Legacy, NYT, 25.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/opinion/eric-holders-legacy.html
Mostly White Forces
in Mostly Black Towns:
Police Struggle for Racial Diversity
SEPT. 9, 2014
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN
MAPLE HEIGHTS, Ohio — The population of this working-class
Cleveland suburb has gone from nearly all white to two-thirds black since its
mayor declared more than 35 years ago that he did not know “what a minority is.”
But its police and fire departments have not kept pace: The Maple Heights police
force today still has only two black officers out of 35; the fire department is
100 percent white.
Maple Heights is far from unique. Across the country, police departments still
struggle to hire and retain minority candidates — in some cases despite great
efforts, in others because of a lack of initiative. But now, the problem has
taken on new relevance since the fatal shooting of a young black man last month
in Ferguson, Mo., where just four of the 53 police officers are black, according
to the police chief.
Nationwide, the total number of minority police officers has risen, but they
remain heavily concentrated in larger cities, with the numbers falling off
sharply in smaller ones, like Ferguson and Maple Heights.
Data from a federal survey of police departments in 2007, analyzed for The New
York Times by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, found that
nearly 400 departments, most with fewer than a hundred officers, were
substantially whiter than the populations they served. In these departments, the
share of white officers was greater than the share of white residents by more
than 50 percentage points.
Ferguson and Maple Heights are about the same size, just over 20,000 people, and
in both, the black population has surged in recent decades. Both cities have
white mayors and largely white political leaderships. And both police
departments have fallen far short of reflecting the communities they serve —
even as some of Maple Heights’s neighboring police departments have achieved
much higher levels of diversity.
Critics point to the lack of racial balance in police departments as evidence of
systemic racism. But experts say the experiences of the two towns illustrate the
obstacles to achieving diversity in law enforcement, even for departments that
have made it a priority.
“I see all these pundits come on the Sunday talk shows and say: ‘Of course you
can hire more black people. Of course they’re not trying,’ ” said Nelson Lim, a
senior sociologist at the RAND Institute’s Center on Quality Policing who has
consulted with departments in Los Angeles and San Diego. “But it’s very, very,
very difficult.”
There is little hard evidence that diversity correlates with better performance,
in part because it is difficult to control for complex variables and to know
which outcomes, from crime rates to brutality cases, to measure. In fact, one
study of a Florida police department found that black officers were more likely
than white to use force against black suspects.
A review of court cases going back to the early 1990s revealed only a handful of
civil rights or excessive-force cases against the Maple Heights police, two of
which involved a white officer who is no longer with the department, and none
that involved a fatality like the shooting in Ferguson.
Still, it is an accepted tenet of community policing that when departments
reflect the communities they serve, they have an easier time building trust and
defusing, rather than escalating, tense situations.
In Maple Heights, some residents said they would like to see more black
officers, while others said that it was the attitude, experience and training of
the officer, not race, that mattered. Chris Turney, a home renovator who lives
with his wife and two daughters, said it was more important for officers to live
in the city. All but one do not.
“The police come here, they do their jobs, they don’t try to get to know
anybody,” said Mr. Turney, who is black. “The police don’t wave.”
Other residents drew a contrast between police attitudes in Maple Heights and
neighboring Bedford Heights, where three-quarters of the residents, and nine of
28 police officers, are black. “Bedford’s not going to do you like Maple,” said
Carlos Walker, 41, who is black. “You have to do something real stupid for
Bedford. Maple, soon as they get behind you, you sweating.”
In her 11 years as an officer in Bedford Heights, Detective Ericka Payne, who is
black, has often provided backup on calls in Maple Heights. “There are
definitely differences in the ways the departments interact with the outside
community,” Detective Payne said. “We try to be a little bit more community
oriented. Because we are a little bit more diverse, we understand those dynamics
and maybe have a little bit more ease dealing with that.”
Several Maple Heights officials said the diversity of the police and fire
departments had never been a major issue. It is hard to find qualified
candidates of any race, said John C. Popielarczyk, who has been with the Maple
Heights Police Department since 1990 and the acting police chief since May.
Maple Heights, devastated by the foreclosure crisis, has fallen on hard times,
and the police force has shrunk. And with most officers staying on the job for
25 years, Chief Popielarczyk said, the opportunity to hire is scarce. Of eight
recent hires, two were black. One, the chief said, was fired for cause before
his probationary period ended.
The department has advertised in minority newspapers and changed the private
company that administers its Civil Service exam in hopes that more minority
candidates would pass, he said. But he added: “The real goal of the department
is to provide qualified officers who are competent and can provide quality
service regardless of race. I don’t think people really care about the color of
the officer that responds; they care that the officer responds quickly, is
effective, treats them well and is respectful.”
The acting fire chief, James Castelucci, said much the same, adding that one
promising black candidate withdrew when his current employer offered him more
money.
The obstacles to diversity are many, Dr. Lim, the sociologist, said. Candidates
usually must pass written tests, physical agility tests, psychological tests,
polygraphs and background checks, some of which can have a disparate impact on
minority candidates. Qualified black candidates are sought after not just by
competing police departments, but also by employers in other industries. And
some police chiefs have cited a negative attitude toward law enforcement among
blacks that hinders recruiting.
Police departments have tried all kinds of remedies, from personal trainers to
help with physical fitness tests to tailored recruiting. (A RAND survey found
that women were attracted to the good salaries in policing, blacks to the
profession’s prestige and Asians to the excitement of the job.)
But many small departments lack the resources, or the will, to conduct an
exhaustive review of their hiring practices. In Maple Heights, job candidates
are ranked by how well they score on the written exam, earning bonus points for
factors like previous training, military experience and city residency. For each
opening, the candidates are considered one by one, in order of their score.
Some nearby suburbs like Bedford Heights and Cleveland Heights — where about 40
percent of the residents and 22 of 102 officers are black — do things
differently. The chiefs of both departments said officials were allowed to
consider the top 10 candidates on the list, which helps them hire more minority
candidates. Both chiefs said their cities took an aggressive approach to
diversity as early as the 1970s.
Cleveland Heights has two types of officer positions, one that requires a Civil
Service exam and a college degree, and a lower tier, called basic patrol, that
does not. Once a basic patrol officer is hired, the city will reimburse tuition
costs, and many eventually earn a degree and work their way to the upper tier.
The diversity of neighboring police departments poses a challenge to cities like
Maple Heights, Dr. Lim said: “If the leadership, if the police chief, is
dedicated to getting more diversity in the work force, how hard is it to figure
out how the other department is doing such a good job?”
Asked why Maple Heights considered only one candidate at a time, Chief
Popielarczyk said: “We’ve always done it that way. My understanding is that
that’s how we’re supposed to do it.”
Some Maple Heights residents have tried to persuade the city to hire more
blacks, forming a committee called the Maple Heights Citizens for Change. In
2012, Elaine Stone, a committee member who runs a blog called the Maple Heights
African American Gazette, was digging around and discovered a long-forgotten
affirmative action agreement, signed by the mayor, a citizens’ committee and a
representative from the federal Justice Department in 1977.
In that deal, Maple Heights, at the time about 96 percent white, agreed that
within three years minorities would make up at least 4 percent of its police and
fire departments. But it soon became clear that the city was less than fully
committed to this goal.
“I figure we’re all minorities,” the mayor at the time, Emil J. Lisy Jr., told
reporters when he was criticized for failing to live up to the agreement. “The
first thing is to find out what a minority is, and I haven’t figured that out.”
Federal officials threatened to withhold $500,000 in funds, but backed down
after the mayor submitted a 65-page response.
When Ms. Stone learned about the agreement, she contacted Frank Ross, the only
surviving signer of the document. Mr. Ross was a teacher in his 20s when he came
to Maple Heights, at a time when real estate brokers steered black customers to
a part of town called Presidential Row. He now lives 12 miles away, but agreed
to go to meetings of the committee, where he suggested that the group call the
Community Relations Service of the Justice Department, the same office that
helped broker the earlier deal.
Though new discussions were opened between the city and the service, which
provides mediation and training to governments, residents feel the talks have
stalled. Neither the mayor nor the Maple Heights legal director returned calls
for comment for this article, and the service does not publicly discuss its
work. Participation by local governments is strictly voluntary.
Ms. Stone said economics, not overt racism, had kept the police and fire
departments largely white. “There was white flight, but people were trying to
hold on to their jobs,” she said. “I can understand you don’t want to give up
that job.”
Mr. Ross said apathy among black voters was partly to blame for the situation.
But he does not accept the city’s excuses.
“They’re telling me in 40 years they can’t find any African-American policemen?”
he said. “Forty years later — it’s very emotional for me. Forty years later, I’m
still dealing with the same thing.”
Richard A. Oppel Jr., Susan Beachy and Archie Tse contributed reporting from New
York.
A version of this article appears in print on September 10, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Mostly White Forces in Mostly Black
Towns: Police Struggle for Racial Diversity.
Mostly White Forces in Mostly Black Towns:
Police Struggle for Racial Diversity, NYT, 9.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/us/
for-small-police-departments-increasing-diversity-is-a-struggle.html
A Step Toward Fairness in Ferguson
SEPT. 9, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The racially torn city of Ferguson, Mo., took an important step
on Monday when the City Council announced proposals aimed at remaking its
troubled court system and creating a civilian review board for the Police
Department.
The initiatives, which have yet to be fully explained, speak to longstanding
grievances in the black community and are meant to defuse racial tensions that
erupted into riots last month after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager,
was shot to death by a white policeman.
For the reforms to be truly meaningful, they will need to be adopted by
neighboring towns in St. Louis County that have similarly unfair legal systems,
which appear to single out black motorists for traffic and streets stops. The
reform effort also needs a strong push from the State Supreme Court, which
should bring the municipal courts into line with state law and United States
Supreme Court rulings that make it illegal to jail indigent defendants solely
because they are unable to pay fines.
Defense lawyers say that such abuses are common in St. Louis County, where black
motorists are often targeted for petty offenses that generate fines, which
provide some towns with 40 percent or more of their revenues. When motorists who
can’t afford to pay the fines and penalties miss their court dates, arrest
warrants are issued — which makes them vulnerable to losing job opportunities
and housing.
A Times article on Tuesday said that Ferguson had the highest number of warrants
relative to its size in the state. A report by ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit
organization, found that last year Ferguson issued roughly three warrants for
every household in town.
The City Council seems to have gotten the message. It announced that it would
take up a proposal to repeal the offense of “failure to appear” in municipal
court so that defendants would no longer be charged or fined for not appearing.
Presumably, the new system will allow defendants to explain their absences and
permit them to work out payment plans for fines.
The Council also said it would take up proposals that limit court-fine totals to
15 percent or less of the city’s revenue and abolish onerous fees that can have
a catastrophic effect on the lives of impoverished defendants. The Council also
expressed the hope that municipal judges and prosecutors would explore
alternative methods of sentencing, including community service.
The state courts in Missouri are already forbidden by law to jail indigent
clients solely because they are too poor to pay. The State Supreme Court should
grant a recent request by defense lawyers and legal scholars that expressly
states that the same standard applies in municipal courts to indigent
defendants, many of whom are racial minorities.
In acting this week, the Ferguson City Council was clearly being mindful that
the Justice Department has begun a broad investigation into police practices in
Ferguson, focusing on issues like mistreatment of prisoners, use of excessive
force and discriminatory traffic stops.
That investigation needs to go forward, not just in Ferguson but in neighboring
towns in St. Louis County, which have been similarly bad records. The goal
should be to induce those towns to embrace judicial fairness as well.
A version of this editorial appears in print on September 10,
2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: A Step Toward
Fairness in Ferguson.
A Step Toward Fairness in Ferguson, NYT,
9.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/opinion/a-step-toward-fairness-in-ferguson.html
Justice Dept. Inquiry to Focus
on Practices of Police in Ferguson
SEPT. 3, 2014
The New York Times
By MATT APUZZO
and MANNY FERNANDEZ
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department will open a broad civil
rights investigation into police practices in Ferguson, Mo., where a white
police officer killed an unarmed black teenager last month and set off days of
racially charged unrest, the city’s police chief and other officials said
Wednesday.
The inquiry is in addition to the F.B.I. civil rights investigation that is
looking specifically into the shooting of the teenager, Michael Brown, on Aug.
9. The new investigation is expected to be announced soon, according to two
federal government officials who were briefed on the plans.
The broader Justice Department inquiry will cover whether the police in Ferguson
have a history of discrimination or misuse of force beyond the Brown case, but
the Justice Department has not ruled out expanding it to other St. Louis County
departments, one of the federal officials said. Both officials spoke on the
condition of anonymity because the investigation had not been formally
announced.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his aides first discussed such an
investigation weeks ago, immediately after the death of Mr. Brown, 18, when
reports surfaced that the Ferguson police force had previously been accused of
abuse.
Hundreds of police departments across the nation have forces with a white
percentage that is more than 30 percentage points higher than the communities
they serve.
Ferguson’s police chief, Thomas Jackson, said in an interview on Wednesday night
that he would welcome the investigation.
“We’ve been doing everything we can to become a professional police department
and a professional city,” he said. “We have no intentional policies or
procedures which discriminated or violated civil rights. But if we have anything
there which may unintentionally do that, we need to know about it.”
Chief Jackson said he met with Justice Department officials on Wednesday
afternoon and discussed the broader investigation. “Obviously, we have gaps. And
any help we can get to help fill those gaps and to make ourselves stronger, we
welcome,” he said. The population in Ferguson, a city of about 20,000 people
just north of St. Louis, is about two-thirds African-American. The city’s Police
Department has 53 officers, four of whom are black.
Adolphus M. Pruitt II, president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in the city of St.
Louis, said the investigation should be “just a start.” He said black leaders
had long complained about what he described as racial profiling, harassment and
improper stops of black residents by white officers from suburban St. Louis
police departments.
“They’re doing what we asked for,” Mr. Pruitt said of the Justice Department’s
inquiry. “We’re hoping that it brings some resolution to any number of
complaints we have in front of the Justice Department about various police
departments in St. Louis County.”
In the Ferguson case, the Justice Department will conduct what it calls a
“pattern or practice” investigation, with officials looking for evidence that
the police have repeatedly violated residents’ civil rights. Such inquiries have
been one of the Justice Department’s preferred tactics in addressing accusations
of police misconduct. The Ferguson investigation was first reported by The
Washington Post.
Under Mr. Holder, the Justice Department has opened 20 such civil rights
inquiries into police departments nationwide, more than twice the number opened
in the five years before he took office. The inquiries can lead to agreements
that give the Justice Department oversight of the police departments. The
Justice Department has said it is currently enforcing 13 such agreements, the
largest number in its history.
Mr. Brown was shot six times after Officer Darren Wilson, 28, stopped him for
“walking down the street blocking traffic,” as Chief Jackson put it. Mr. Brown
fell on his stomach, his arms at his sides and his head bloody. His body was
left on the street for hours. Officer Wilson, who was placed on administrative
leave, has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Protests immediately after Mr. Brown’s killing led to a riot, and violence
continued for days as area police departments responded with a show of
military-style force.
Mr. Holder has personally assured Mr. Brown’s family that the federal
investigation will be thorough and independent. Civil rights investigations into
police shootings are difficult: Courts have given the police wide latitude to
use deadly force when they feel threatened. To bring charges, prosecutors must
show that Officer Wilson intended to violate Mr. Brown’s civil rights when he
opened fire and that he did so willfully — meaning he knew it was wrong but
fired anyway.
One incident that caught the attention of the federal authorities after the
Brown shooting was a 2009 case in which an African-American man said that
officers beat him and then charged him with damaging government property — by
getting his blood on their uniforms. Missouri N.A.A.C.P. leaders lodged another
Justice Department complaint against the St. Louis County Police Department last
year, accusing its officers of engaging in widespread racial profiling in an
attempt to crack down on crime in and around the South County Center, a shopping
mall.
Mr. Pruitt said one of the incidents referred to in the complaint involved two
white officers who arrested 145 black men and women in a 30-day period in the
mall area for outstanding warrants.
“We determined that the stops were not legitimate stops,” Mr. Pruitt said. “They
stopped them because they were black. The question is, how many blacks did they
have to go through to find 145 with warrants?”
Matt Apuzzo reported from Washington, and Manny Fernandez from Ferguson, Mo.
A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2014, on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline: Justice Dept. Inquiry to Focus on
Practices of Police in Ferguson.
Justice Dept. Inquiry to Focus on Practices of
Police in Ferguson,
NYT, 3.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/us/politics/
justice-dept-to-investigate-ferguson-police-practices.html
|
