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Black And Blue

Inside the Divide Between the Police and Black America

Prometheus Books

REFORM IS IN THE AIR

I spent about ten years in New York City, working for a local television station. The station's success was built on a belief in covering the city by blanketing it with reporters in news vans ready to spring into action for breaking stories.

For nearly a decade, mostly during the late afternoon and into the night, that was my job. I would cover breaking news — shootings, multi-car pileup accidents, fires, and just about any other tragedy. But among the most memorable images I have of what I would witness in some of the city's toughest neighborhoods. It was often at night. The streetlights were out or dim, and my crew and I would race down a street in a news van heading to the next story. I would sit in the back of the van in the "captain's chair," sometimes reading e-mails but most of the time staring out of the back window. The brownstones would blend together as we rushed by, and the people walking down the street would become a mix of different indistinguishable colors. But then there would be a burst of dark blue. That's when I would see a young police officer, sometimes alone and standing with his or her back against a wall. I remember that the rookie officers were pressed to the brick of the building, head essentially on a swivel. Slowly, looking left and then right. They were brave but, boy, did they look terrified.

In certain neighborhoods where crime was a problem, their posture was important for survival because it limited their blind spots. The biggest blind spot, of course, was not being able to see what might have been coming up from behind. With their backs pressed against the wall, at least they could prepare and see what was coming at them.

Nowadays, police officers across the country see an even more challenging future. Reform is in the air in the wake of police shootings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and Milwaukee. It was the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson that really focused the public's attention on the issue. In subsequent years, there would be more incidents. Americans everywhere were becoming more attuned to the disparities in the way justice was being administered. By the time five police officers were killed in Dallas in 2016, the rhetoric had reached a fever pitch and voices on both sides of the divide knew that the time had come to lower the volume. Police departments have begun changing tactics just as some cities see disturbing spikes in crime.

In 2015 the number of homicides in major US cities increased 17 percent, which marks the greatest increase in a quarter century. There are different theories behind the increase, but based on the data I've seen, the lack of trust between police and inner-city communities of color may be a contributing factor. Police are also frustrated, tired, and angry.

FBI director James Comey had been trying to get the world to notice that the crime stats were heading in the wrong direction. While some dismissed the sharp spikes in violence as a "blip," Comey knew that it was more than that and that there were underlying issues that had to be dealt with openly. Among the first few times he really made a point of sounding the alarm about rising crime was in a meeting with a small group of national reporters.

Comey walked into the room; the assembled reporters sat up in their chairs, pushed their notepads into place, and made sure their cell phone recorders were ready to capture the words of the most powerful voice in law enforcement. The director pulled a chair from under the table to take a seat. It was a boardroom-sized table, and assembled around it were about a dozen or so print and television reporters from the major publications and broadcasting outlets. Only they were granted access to the director like this every few months.

In the halls of the famed Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, these meetings were called "Pen and Pads" by the FBI. But that was old-school. There were no cameras, only audio devices to record the director's words, to guard against misquoting him. There was an agreement in place that allowed reporters to record Comey's statements, but we couldn't use the audio for broadcast. They are the rules of the game or the price of admission, depending on how you look at it.

Comey sank into his chair at the head of the table. The man who is essentially the CEO of American law enforcement had a lot on his mind. He often spoke in very colorful language, and he was about to unleash another vivid portrait of the current threats to national security.

"How does it feel to have seven recorders in front of you?" a radio reporter asked Comey.

He replied, "It always freaks me out a bit." The reporters laughed, and so did Comey. It was perhaps his way of breaking the ice in these sessions, which can often turn tense.

For the record, very little seems to rattle Comey. At about 6'8", he is one of the rare Washington "power players" who has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations and seems to have no qualms speaking truth to power. That had also worked against him at times. Some former colleagues had called him "honest to a fault."

On October 1, 2015, with the nation embroiled in a national-security crisis in the Middle East, the most pressing threat to the American people may have been domestic. The rift between law enforcement and "communities of color" was growing. A blunt assessment may have been exactly what was needed. Crime was spiking across the country. At the same time, an Obama administration effort at criminal-justice reform had garnered bipartisan support, and it would ultimately result in the "rapid-fire" release of more than forty thousand federal prisoners from custody. Separately, states across the country were in the middle of their own criminal-justice reforms to reduce prison populations. It was a tsunami of potential problems that rank-and-file police officers on the nation's streets would be forced to confront first.

The men and women who make up police agencies were already coming under fire in more ways than one. They were on the defensive as a result of misconduct by some officers, and their actions were being scrutinized more than ever. Once-routine arrests were now escalating into fatal encounters. Cell phone videos of police in action were going viral, and it was having a negative impact on everyone associated with law enforcement.

The stain had pushed morale to a new low, and departments couldn't fill the ranks that were being depleted by retirement. How can you protect life and property if you don't have the number of police officers you need? Or if the officers you have lack the trust of the neighborhoods they patrol? You don't have to be a genius to figure out that there was a major problem in law enforcement.

As the news conference began, Comey had answers for most of the questions we asked of him. What he could not explain was why crime was spiking in the nation's major cities. When he was questioned about that, he told the assembled reporters that the spike in crime was, "very concerning." He didn't stop there, "I think all of us need to figure out what is going on here [because]," Comey said, "the chiefs tell me that they're seeing huge spikes in violent crime, especially in homicide." As he reported, some of the chiefs were in panic mode, and so were some FBI agents who were aware of the trend. I had gotten a tip about it several weeks before and had begun to look into it. Eventually, I confirmed that the Department of Justice was kicking around the idea of expanding the number of cities in which it had increased its presence. In a select number of cities with increasing crime problems the DOJ had partnered the FBI, ATF, and DEA with local police. The feds were on the ground there, seeing firsthand how the tide had violently and unexpectedly turned.

During 2015, there were reported spikes in crime of 20 percent, 50 percent, and even 70 percent, and yet there was no clear indication why it was happening. Even the FBI director was at a loss in attempting to explain the data. Then, for the first time publicly, the assembled reporters heard him use the term "Ferguson effect." Comey said, "Some people have suggested to me — look, a wind is blowing through law enforcement, sort of a 'Ferguson effect' that has changed the way people police — and some have said that police officers aren't getting out of their cars and talking to gang bangers on street corners anymore, and the answer is ... I don't know."

"What I do know," Comey said, "is that a whole lot of people are dying. According to the chiefs, they are overwhelmingly young men of color dying, and we [have] got to care about that."

But that wasn't the only factor having an impact on crime. Heroin use was at epidemic levels. Criminal-justice reform was having an impact by clearing outjails and prisons. And then there was a change in police tactics. It wasn't just the "Ferguson effect"; it was the end of stop and frisk as well. The latter had been discredited and branded a harsh police tactic that had alienated communities of color. A judge in 2013 found that it was being used in a manner that violated the US Constitution. All of those factors combined had, in a way, tied the hands of law enforcement across the country.

Police departments were being forced to change their tactics, and that was a sign of law enforcement being at a crossroads. Stop and frisk, for example, had been used for years in New York City to stop, question, and frisk people suspected of crimes. But the tactic mostly targeted people of color. The New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that, historically, blacks and Latinos were disproportionately targeted by police using this tactic. In 2011, blacks and Latinos in New York City made up 87 percent of the people stopped by police; of those people, 88 percent were totally innocent. It was getting easier to draw a line from certain police procedures to the outcomes that were now being recorded by cell phone cameras across the country as evidence of unconstitutional policing. The targeting (or harassment) of certain populations, without probable cause, was taking a toll on people who were fed up with being singled out.

But Comey cautioned against rapid changes in how police and political leaders enacted reforms, "As we do it, we need to be very, very thoughtful." Imagine if you tried to reengineer a car while it was driving down the street. Attempting to revamp police tactics in the middle of an uptick in crime was a dangerous practice. It's one thing to do it if crime is up across the board and has been that way for some time. But at this point in history, if you look at the numbers, there are still historic lows in some categories of crimes. The FBI's Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report (UCR) showed declines in the number of property crimes reported for the first six months of 2015 when compared with the same point the year before. Also, according to the numbers, cities with populations from 50,000 to 99,999 inhabitants saw a 0.3 decrease in violent crime; and cities with 500,000 to 999,999 in population experienced a smaller 0.1 decrease in violent crime.

Meanwhile, the Brennan Center for Justice, which is a nonpartisan law and policy institute, published statistics that showed that over the last ten years, twenty-seven states had seen a 23 percent drop in crime since 2006. While the numbers offered by the UCR continued to show a decline, law enforcement professionals knew better than to trust that data. Those statistics were old, and the 2015 numbers wouldn't be available to police and the FBI until 2016. The streets showed the real trends, and Comey was reading between the lines. He knew that trouble wasn't on the horizon — it was already here.

The FBI director had been working to change how such data are collected. It's been a mission of his to get local departments to gather and report the latest stats. He believes that having the data readily available means having facts. And having the facts, he said, "help[s] us find truth and understanding." Comey believed that the nation could not address issues about use of force and officer-involved shootings or why violent crime was up in some cities if law enforcement didn't really know what was going on. He insisted, "we need to improve the way we report, analyze, and use information and crime statistics. And we need that information to be accurate, to be timely, and to be accessible to everybody — or it doesn't do much good."

The lack of current data was an obvious blind spot that was having an impact on how to respond to the changing dynamics of law enforcement. Comey pointed out that, nowadays, cell phones can give you up-to-date data on just about anything you need to make accurate decisions in your daily lives, and yet police could not call up the data they needed in order to make life-or-death decisions. According to Comey, "It just didn't make sense!"

Public-opinion polls did provide almost immediate results, and Americans' opinions on race relations were distressing. Negative views of race relations in the country had risen to a level not seen since the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the Rodney King verdict. Just 26 percent of Americans now believed race relations in the United States "are mostly good"— an eleven-point drop from a year earlier — while 69 percent say they "are mostly bad." A divisive presidential campaign season was having an impact, and the string of police shootings and takedowns caught on tape were dredging up hard feelings among blacks and whites. Every incident with a hint of race at its core seemed to rub salt in the wound. He's not a politician, but Comey sometimes makes speeches that sound as if he is running for office. He'll tackle a potentially divisive issue — like race and law enforcement — even though some believe he stands to gain very little and lose a lot. In February 2015, in an auditorium at Georgetown University, he weighed in on the current state of law enforcement just months after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Eric Garner was killed by a police officer's illegal stranglehold in New York's Staten Island, and in 2014 two police officers were murdered in New York City by a man who claimed before taking his own life that he was angered by the deaths of Garner and Brown. When I asked some of my law enforcement sources why he chose to deliver the speech, I was told that Comey had been thinking about it for a while and felt like he needed to say something.

It is surprising that Comey publicly broached the issue, considering that talking about race essentially sank the career of Attorney General Eric Holder. In 2009, the nation's first African American attorney general referred to America as "a nation of cowards" when it comes to discussing race. Even President Obama has had a difficult time navigating the race-based complexities of police-involved shootings of unarmed black men. Every speech he has given about the subject has drawn the ire of his critics, who accuse him of being divisive. But Comey pushed ahead with his speech. "We are at a crossroads," Comey told a packed auditorium at Georgetown. "As a society, we can choose to live our everyday lives, raising our families and going to work, hoping that someone, somewhere, will do something to ease the tension — to smooth over the conflict. We can roll up our car windows, turn up the radio, and drive around these problems, or we can choose to have an open and honest discussion about what our relationship is today — what it should be, what it could be, and what it needs to be — if we took more time to better understand one another. In places like Ferguson and New York City, and in some communities across this nation, there is a disconnect between police agencies and many citizens — predominantly in communities of color." The director's speech was well received. Comey had placed himself in the middle of one of the most divisive issues of the day, and it wouldn't be the last time he would do it.

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Excerpted from Black And Blue by Jeff Pegues. Copyright © 2017 Jeff Pegues. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
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