How We Can Immediately Address Police Bias Against People of Color
As a dark skinned mixed person who grew up during stop and frisk and has experienced detectives with their badges flipped backwards; jump out of a car and throw me to the ground asking where the drugs were (Spoiler: I had no drugs). I’ve been thinking about the source of the black lives matter movement. That is, police officers who keep killing black people with seemingly no punishments. As a nation, I think we can see that progress is at a stand still. Police officers are still shooting unarmed black people till this day.
So what is the root cause? The diagnosis seems to point to police officers, white, or otherwise, valuing black people as less; and approaching them with a fear based bias, that says black people are wild, and dangerous… You’ve seen The Wire. Given that we know these biases exist, you would think that police organizations would be retraining left and right. However, this simply isn’t the case. It seems like we as a public have no control over this, and we simply must wait for the DOJ to hopefully mandate changes.
This leads me to a theoretical solution. When looking at this situation, I thought to myself. Well why don’t white people receive this treatment? Is there a racist cause? No that can’t be it. There’s no way that many officers are racist. Which led me to my conclusion. Maybe officers use more caution with white people because they might have a good lawyer. Maybe these officers know that statically white people are better represented in court.
Now don’t take what I’m about to say as gospel. This is just a thought experiment. What if we made officers face that same fear (reality), except for black people. Again, this is just a thought, but I would propose a nation wide pro bono lawyer network, to represent black people. This effort would be immense, but I believe it would be the public’s greatest tool to stop this mistreatment. With “good” lawyers fighting cases, more cases revealed to be frivolous, or unjust would in theory be denied by District Attorneys. And these denials would in effect signal police officers away from making these types of arrests, as they know they will lose. Officers would have to think twice, as they would know that these black people either have, or will have, (free of charge) a good lawyer.
All of this is not to disparage legal aids. But the reality is, the workload that they face often times leads them to seek the quickest solution. And that is, plead guilty, even if you’re not.
Even if these lawyer’s are not used at any moment in time, just the sheer concept of black people being perceived as adequately protected; would do so much good to counter the current prejudice police have of black people. If I shoot them, I’ll probably get away with it.
As a side note, we all deserve good representation. The problem is, we all aren’t getting shot for taking out a cellphone, selling cds, or selling loose cigarettes.
