Future Historians

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Excerpt from “Police Interaction with Communities of Color in the 
Context of American Racism” by Jenny Greeman for PAF 9100 Introduction to Public Affairs, Baruch College.

Walk a Mile in His Shoes (Recommendations) Police departments across the country, including the NYPD, have promised reforms in the wake of the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and others. The reforms mentioned sound wonderful: training in de-escalation techniques, community policing, and greater supervision into the Stop and Frisk program. However, to address the symptoms of systemic racism, it is first important to accept its existence.

I have spent ten years in the field of Youth Development and I strongly believe that the training methodologies used in this discipline have a lot to offer the realm of police reform. Responding versus Reacting

New York City classrooms can be chaotic places. Teachers and teaching artists can work with up to thirty children at a time. In a given cohort, it is likely that 90% of these children qualify for free lunch, meaning their families live at or below the poverty line. Fifteen of the thirty are likely to have an Individualized Educational Program; an official Department of Education document that acknowledges a student has certain learning difficulties and which outlines required responses on the part of the teacher. Twenty-five percent of the students are likely English Language Learners and 5% may be living in temporary housing or doubled-up with another family. In some neighborhoods it is safe to assume that every child knows someone caught up in the criminal justice system. One or two students might have a severe learning or physical disability and be designated as Special Ed. Of course, each child has his or her own personality, experiences with puberty and sexuality, family life, and subject preferences. It is within this context that teachers are expected to lead a 45-minute Common Core aligned lesson that is differentiated to meet the various abilities of the students in front of her.

Added to these regular pressures, are students who “act out.” I have seen students throw a pregnant principal against a wall. Students curse at adults and threaten to attack them in the parking lot. Students bite and kick. However, in spite of the enormous hurdles and provocations teachers encounter, is it absolutely unacceptable for an adult educator to react to a child out of fear or anger. Cursing or calling students names is unacceptable. Touching a child – even in self-defense – can lead to removal or a lawsuit.

At my organization, we do not allow part-time teaching artists to react from a place of fear or anger, why should we hold police officers, who have the legal right to take life and liberty, to lesser standards?

One of the fundamental trainings that we provide is called SOAR: Stop, Observe, Analyze, Respond. It is a philosophy for regulating the self in moments of conflict that is grounded in social work and neuroscience. We train our adults to always check-in with themselves: am I angry? Has this child pushed my buttons? Am I afraid this child will hurt me? Have I eaten anything today? Through an honest self-assessment, the adult can better differentiate between the reality of the relationship that is currently existing, and the host of past relationships and experiences that can create biases. Once the adult has recognized and regulated her emotions, she can assess the stakes of the interaction: Is this an issue that must be addressed now or can it wait? Is there a threat of physical danger or only potential embarrassment? Is my main objective in this moment to address this particular child’s need or do I need to continue with the rest of the class? Once the teacher understands her objective, she can respond to the situation from a place of objectivity and calm as opposed to reacting from fear and anger. In our responses, we emphasize responding to the need of the students (Johnny needs attention) as opposed to the behavior that the student has used to express that need (Johnny always talks while I’m talking).

What if Timothy Loehmann had gone through the SOAR process before interacting with Tamir Rice? We can imagine the following alternative scenario:

• Officer Loehmann Stops: He pulls his car up across the street from the park and reviews the information he was given by dispatch. He will not physically enter the arena of conflict without understanding all of the actors.
• Officer Loehmann Observes himself: He notices that his heart is racing. He takes a few deep breaths and reminds himself that he has the equipment, training, and personal commitment to enter into dangerous situations in order to protect the people he loves.
• Officer Loehmann Analyzes: Are other people in the park running away from the person with the gun or interacting with him? Is the person with the gun aiming it at anyone in particular? Is he speaking or moving? (Reports say he was throwing snowballs.)
• Officer Loehmann Responds: Based on his observation of the suspect and the by-standers, Officer Loehmann chooses his response. He may use the car’s bullhorn to tell the suspect to drop his weapon. He may determine that it is safe enough to approach the suspect on foot. Whatever his choice is, it is a choice.

This process may seem like it takes too long to be useful in situations that are often deadly. However, great teachers do this several times a day and the process gets easier with practice. It would certainly take more than the two seconds Officer Loehmann took before he shot a 12-year boy, but it would be time well spent. Use of the Arts

The Arts, particularly literature and drama have the capacity to increase empathy in human beings. Books, films, and plays take us on journeys of the imagination, allowing us to explore worlds with which we are not familiar. The emotional investment that an audience member makes in a character and her environment facilitates understanding on a deeply personal level.

I imagine an NYPD book club run by trained facilitators whose focus is to encourage honest response and discussion. There would be no tests or book reports required and all experiences would be equally validated. Books should be chosen to counteract the racist narrative that fosters fear in the department. Possible options include: slave narratives; works from the Harlem Renaissance; historical fiction such as Kevin Baker’s New York City trilogy Dreamland, Striver’s Row, and Paradise Alley which situates the experiences of black Americans and white immigrants against the turbulent early 20th Century in NYC.

In addition, New York City should invite its police to the theatre. For example, the City should offer subsidies to the Harlem School of the Arts, the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the National Black Theatre, and other arts organizations working in communities of color to allow them to invite their local precincts to performances. In fact, precincts and their families and local school children should be regular guests at subsidized performances at every arts institution in the City. Build a Better Profile

Educators collect a lot of data in order to best serve their students. Police departments could use the idea of differentiated learning to created “individualized policing programs” to guide their work in various communities. The communities that experience the highest rates of racial profiling are often totally non-white communities. Using race as part of a criminal profile is completely useless under these circumstances. Better data collection on the part of the local police department would create opportunities to truly fight crime, not merely perpetuate racial hierarchies. Useful data points include: daily routines, including use of subways or buses; attire indicative of a profession or membership in an organization; interaction with others; use of local services, including grocery stores, libraries, gyms, coffee shops; and other behaviors like littering or cleaning up after pets that speak to an individual’s relationship with her environment.

Omi and Winant assert that “The modern state makes use of ideology – racial ideology in this case – to “glue” together contradictory practices and structures: despotism and democracy, coercion and consent, formal equality and substantive inequality, identity and difference” (Omi, 3615). The good news is that Americans have a variety of “glues” of their own. Racial hierarchy is only one of the foundational American narratives. With a public acknowledgement of the primacy of race a commitment to activities that build empathy and community, American communities – perhaps starting with communities of color and law enforcement – can weave a new origin story, one that includes all of us.

Schwartzman's Scenarios (2 & 3 combined) Let's elaborate. Can this become a “game”? With moves and counter-moves in the prolonged struggles between the capitalism/MIC world state system and the billions of toiler.

Between 2015 and 2020, large-scale implementation of high-efficiency thin film photovoltaics, low-cost capture of ocean currents, and high-elevation tapping of wind energy begins to rapidly decarbonize global energy supplies, radically undermining the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) because of the growing availability of very low-cost clean energy, which requires virtually no rare strategic metals. Corporate-instigated attempts to block this rapid process of solarization are undermined by decentralized grassroots initiatives around the globe. Massive civil disobedience and resistance within the armed forces and police prevent any effective repression of a now global peace and justice movement fighting for survival in the continuing Global Slump. As a result, public support for the MIC plunges, governments are elected around the world, including in the United States, with anticapitalist agendas, promising a 21st century ecosocialist transition to Solar Communism. The dreams of Marx and W. Warren Wagar4 are realized.

Scenario #3, 30% probability of taking place.

(Am I an optimist or a just wishful thinker, given this has one-half the probability of scenario 4?) In the year 2016, what now is thought impossible happens: The explosive growth of a transnational peace and climate security movement begins as a response to the Great Slump, continuing resource wars,5 and the escalating impact of global warming. The proximate trigger of this popular upsurge is a brutal police attack on demonstrating youth in Baltimore, Maryland. The attack sparks a national student strike and then a U.S. general strike, which rapidly spreads around the globe. An ecologically oriented Conversion Economy emerges linking most of Africa, China, India, South America and Russia. By 2018, the military budgets of the United States, Russia, and China are reduced by 75 percent, and these resources are transferred to a global program of climate, food, and health security, fulfilling the call Bolivian President Evo Morales made for such a global program in December 2009. The annual genocide of 10 million children dying of preventable causes6 under the global rule of capital is finally terminated by the UN investment of $80 billion, which is extracted by a Tobin tax on financial speculation. Agroecologies inspired by the vision and practice of permaculture blossom in and around cities across the globe. High-efficiency solar power begins to rapidly replace fossil fuels and nuclear power, as well as serving to sequester carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to reach levels below 350 ppm, the minimum level sufficient for reaching irreversible tipping points leading to catastrophic climate change. Per capita energy consumption in the global South increases to the point where the state-of-the-science life expectancy, health, and education are possible for all citizens. The unsustainable consumption in the global North plunges to levels that insure clean air and clean water, organic food, meaningful employment, and more free creative time for all on this planet, realizing global equity and the highest quality of life for all.

Jenny: in response to the work of James Gilligan and others showing Violence as a logical response to fear, isolation, and the undermining of the self, society embraces restorative practices at every level of social relationship. An ancient practice Restorative Justice became a buzzword in education in the second decade of the 2000s. Luckily, unlike other education fads, this one stuck and became an authentic practice.

The fundamental difference - seemingly simple, but representing a sea change in American culture - is the focus away from punishing the perpetrating to repairing the harm experienced by the victim. Along the way, the “criminal” is invited to rejoin the community after reparations have been made.

The 7 Core Assumptions of Restorative Justice as defined by Carolyn Boyes-Watson and Kay Prants: 1) The true self in everyone is good, wise, and powerful; 2) The world is profoundly interconnected; 3) All human beings have a deep desire to be in a good relationship; 4) All human beings have gifts, and everyone is needed for what they bring; 5) Everything we need to make positive change is already here; 6) Human beings are holistic; and 7) We need practices to build habits of living from the core self.