Noel A. Cazenave - Killing African Americans: Police and Vigilante Violence as a Racial Control Mechanism

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Noel A. Cazenave is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut (UConn). He is also on the faculty of the Urban and Community Studies program of UConns Hartford campus and is a faculty affiliate with UConns Africana Studies Institute and its American Studies Program. His recent and current work is in the areas of: racism theory, U.S. poverty policy, political sociology, urban sociology, criminal justice, and the sociology of emotions. In addition to numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other publications, Professor Cazenave co-authored Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against Americas Poor, which won five book awards, and has since then published Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs, The Urban Racial State: Managing Race Relations in American Cities, and Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language. His current book project is tentatively titled The Courage to Be Kind.

Around midnight on February 4, 1999, as the world contemplated the coming of a new millenniumone in which America might finally cross the color line that W.E.B. DuBois had warned would be its great challenge of the twentieth centuryreality raised its ugly head for all to see. Amadou Diallo, a street vendor from Guinea, was shot nineteen times by four plainclothes New York City Police (NYPD) officers who, after mistaking him for a suspected rapist, fired a barrage of forty-one bullets as he stood in front of his apartment door in the Bronx holding a wallet in his hand, which they mistook for a gun. His killers were all members of the NYPDs cocky Street Crime Unit, whose macho motto was We own the night. For African Americans in the nations largest city, on that night and many others, they certainly did.

Killing African Americans: Past, Present, and Future

That appalling slaughter of an unarmed and hardworking young immigrant who was here seeking the American dream, only to end up enveloped in its racial nightmare, shocked not only this nation but much of the world. There was a profound sense that something was fundamentally wrong in the way the police treated dark-skinned people in the United States and that surely things could not now simply return to normal. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened as a verdict was read that cleared all four police officers of any wrongdoing, and an administrative review by the NYPD concluded that the officers had, in fact, acted consistently with departmental guidelines. Although the City of New York later settled a civil suit with Diallos family for three million dollars, that criminal trial verdict and the administrative ruling did more than spare those officers any punishment for their reckless actions; they reaffirmed for all to see that American police officers could kill with impunity those they deemed to be black and dangerous. The slaying of Amadou Diallo was but one of many racially charged acts of police violence that decade in the United States premier city, during the racially intense era of the Rudolph Giuliani administration, against men such as Anthony Baez, Abner Louima, Antoine Reid, and Patrick Dorismond. Such violence was so pervasive and routine, not just in New York City but throughout the United States, that it supported historian Manning Marables conclusion that the central civil rights issue of the 1990s was racism within all aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system.

From Outrageous to Routine

Unfortunately, for many African Americans, the public outrage over the killing of Amadou Diallo toward the end of that decade seemed to have been snuffed out by a much more powerful and enduring state-issued license to kill on the part of the police: one which makes little if any distinction between the will, the right, and the need to do so. That incident, and its business-as-usual outcome, confirmed that it was indeed possible that there could be no act of police violence so egregious and morally reprehensible that it would force politicians to reform the criminal justice system they build and maintain. Instead, they seemed to echo the ruling articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taneys determination in the 1857 Dred Scott case that African Americans had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. The resilience of such violence and of such an apparent attitude was evident early into the twenty-first century, just two years later, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Timothy Thomas (2001): Racial Tensions Explode in Cincinnati

On April 7, 2001, a European American police officer killed an unarmed African American teenager in Cincinnatis impoverished Over-the-Rhine neighborhood as he fled arrest for various minor misdemeanors, like his failure to fasten his seat belt. Timothy Thomas was the fifteenth African American male who was shot to death by a Cincinnati police officer over the six-year period from 1995 to 2001. Most of those men were unarmed, and the problem appeared to be escalating. Indeed, Thomas was just the latest of five African Americans killed by the police since September of the previous year.

That shooting did not go over well with the citys African American residents and their leaders. Peaceful protests were soon overshadowed by violence. During three nights of violent unrest, dozens of people were injured and more than 800 were arrested before a citywide curfew was imposed and more than two dozen windows were broken at City Hallan obvious symbol of white power and aggression. Although, unlike in so many other cases, the officer who killed ThomasStephen Roachwas tried, as usual when there is a trial, he was acquitted. Long after the violent protests died down, local African American leaders continued their economic boycott against the citya boycott they vowed not to end until Cincinnatis city government settled lawsuits brought against its police for their use of excessive force in handling the unrest that followed Thomas killing. The city settled those lawsuits for four and a half million dollars.

Back to the Future: Americas Legacy of Police Killings and Racial Unrest

Such violent protests against what many African Americans see as state-sanctioned repression by the police should have come as no surprise. They were merely a repeat of much larger and more destructive racial rebellions such as those in Watts in 1965, in Newark and Detroit in 1967, in Miami in 1980, and in Los Angeles in 1992, as well as an omen of what was to come in places such as Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and Baltimore the following year. In each case, the violent unrest was sparked by an incident of perceived police misconduct and fueled by a long history of unresolved grievances against the local police. They all fit the finding of the 1968 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders report that there was a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a double standard of justice and protectionone for Negroes and one for whites. That document, which came to be known as the Kerner report, included the results of a survey of a sample of the scores of cities that experienced civil unrest, in which African Americans ranked police practices first among their grievances. It concluded that as a nation, the United States was splitting into two societies, one black, one whiteseparate and unequal. Fast forward to nearly a half-century later, when the author of a highly publicized book on racial inequality in the criminal justice system in the United States has asserted that the appropriate metaphor to describe current race relations in that country is a colony in a nation, in which European American citizens of the nation receive all of the rights and protections of law while the African American residents of its occupied racial colony receive only the often violent imposition of its racially repressive order.