"This must stop," yells a protester to Missouri National Guardsmen who were posted outside the Ferguson Police Department on Wednesday, Nov 26, 2014, during protests over the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown case. Photo: AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Laurie Skrivan WASHINGTON — When Vernellia Randall’s son, Tshaka, attended the University of Dayton in Ohio, police often stopped and questioned him as he walked home through the historically white, upper middle-class neighbourhood of Oakwood where the Randalls lived.
Like Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old who was shot dead by a policeman Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Mo., Tshaka was a big boy.
Vernellia worried that one day her son might react angrily to the police harassment and get himself arrested or, worse, shot. So she decided to take action.
“I went to the police chief and had a conversation with him,” she recalled. “I told him that we are part of this community. He was white. He didn’t want to admit that it was happening. But I showed him a picture of my son and told him, ‘Look, it has to stop because sooner or later my six-foot-three, 300-pound 19-year-old is going to get pissed.’ It stopped for a while and then started back up with my younger son.”
Randall, 70, is a law professor at the University of Dayton specializing in racism in various sectors of society, including justice and health care. She grew up in Amarillo, Texas, in the Jim Crow era that essentially rendered Texas an apartheid state.
She knows what a black mother has to do to keep her children safe in America.
You can tell your boy not to get angry, but young people don’t always listen to their parents, she said laughing.
“First time stopped, OK, second time, OK, but the third time you get mad and you say something smart and then the cop gets scared ’cause you’re big and now we’ve got a dead teenager on the ground because the cop doesn’t have the training or whatever to control the situation,” she said.
This is the reason why the killing of Michael Brown resonates throughout African-American communities in the U.S., she said. They feel they or their loved ones are next.
“There’s an anti-black racism in the society that dates back to slavery and that has just morphed with the age,” she said.
Many in the black community became particularly incensed when Darren Wilson, 28, the policeman who killed Brown, said on CNN that he would do it again.
“In his eyes he killed a dangerous person,” she said. “His eyes come from his training. And that’s part of the problem with the justice system. The justice system only holds officers to the standard of their training and so the problem is when you begin to train them in a way that makes them lethal for groups of people such as blacks and the mentally ill.”
That training has essentially created a ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ mentality designed, above all, to protect the police officer, she said.
Crime statistics prove that throughout the U.S., police target blacks far more than whites. Even in communities where blacks are a small minority, they are more likely than whites to be stopped, more likely to be arrested and suffer more severe penalties than whites for the same crimes.
Ferguson, Mo., is a case in point. While Blacks comprise 67.4 per cent of the population, only three of the 53-man police force are blacks. The rest are whites. In 2013, 92.7 per cent of police arrests were blacks; 6.9 per cent were whites. The mayor is white. The council is 5-to-1 white and the school board is all white.
“Over and over again, it’s reinforced that black life is not respected and I think that that’s why the reaction (to the Brown shooting) is so furious,” she said.
In the last five years in Utah, more people have been killed by police than by gangs, drug dealers or in family violence, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. Since the Brown shooting police have shot dead at least five black men. These include John Crawford, who police shot as he was purchasing a BB gun at a Walmart in Dayton, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who brandished a pellet gun in a park. The policeman shot him within 1.5 to two seconds of arriving at the scene. The killings occurred after police responded to complaints.
“In the African-American community, we keep amazing track of who’s been shot,” Randall said. “So this (the Brown shooting) became a watershed moment for our community. Black lives don’t seem to matter in this society. This is so clear.”
The issue, she said, is not whether Darren Brown correctly responded to a perceived threat.
“If Mr. Brown had been white and had had that altercation with the police officer, that police officer wouldn’t have shot him because his biases wouldn’t have kicked in,” she said. “It’s not that blacks are getting into more altercations with police. It’s that blacks are having more deadly outcomes with police.”
The U.S. Justice Department and state’s attorneys general keep careful crime statistics. But they don’t track police shootings of unarmed people. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks all firearms fatalities as a result of “legal intervention,” which goes beyond police. The 1999-2012 statistics show blacks are more than twice as likely to be shot than whites.)
Randall said she believes this is intentional. “The reason they don’t collect statistics is because then they would be bound to deal with them,” she said. “So it’s not that they don’t know that the statistics need to be collected. It’s like, ‘Ya, we’d just rather not know because as long as we don’t know then we can’t be held responsible.’ So nobody is responsible. And this is what is causing the anger.”
What’s more, the recent militarization of the police has brought a new robotic hardness to their actions, she says.
“So what do you do in the era of terrorism when you want to fight terrorism without having to pull the military in to enforce state law? You turn your police officers into para-military and I think that’s what’s happened. Then when you combine that training, that change of focus with the implicit bias that people have, then that plays out in terms of African Americans being disproportionately affected,” she said.
wmarsden@postmedia.com
BY THE NUMBERS
Racism by the numbers in Ferguson, Mo.:
Population of Ferguson: 21,111
Percentage black: 67.4
Percentage white: 30
Number of blacks on city council: 1 of 7
Number of blacks in the police department: 3 of 53
Numbers of blacks on school board: 0
Percentage of arrests in 2013 that involved blacks: 92.7
Percentage of traffic stops that targeted African-Americans: 86
Percentage of traffic stops targeting whites: 12.7
Percentage of stops of blacks resulting in a search: 12.1
For whites: 0.6
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