7 Questions on
A City Divided: Race, Fear, and the Law
in Police Confrontations

1. What happened on Tioga Street that night?  Who do you believe?

Plainclothes anti-crime officers, looking for guns and drugs in a dangerous neighborhood, say they saw Jordan lurking next to a house; identified themselves repeatedly as police; saw signs that he had a gun in the way he walked and held himself; and had to subdue him when he ran. Jordan says he was walking to his grandmother’s house as he did every night; he was never near any house except his own; that the police never identified themselves but instead jumped out of their unmarked car, in plain clothes, yelling “Where’s the gun? Where’s the money? Where’s the drugs?,” so that he thought he was being robbed. Where they agree is that Jordan tried to run, fell on the icy ground, and struggled with the men until suffering blows to the head — and was cuffed.  No gun was found on Jordan or in a search of the area. A City Divided lays out these versions, and all of the supporting facts; I think the reader can draw the appropriate conclusions about what happened. What we should not miss is that something terrible happened on that street that night that could have cost a young man his life. The question is why did this happen, and why does it keep happening, and every day and every night, all over this country? And what can we do to minimize or prevent these incidents?

2. Why does it happen?  Two intertwined reasons: race and fear

Race: In any encounter between African Americans and police, race has a powerful impact. According to decades of unassailable science, blackness conjures thoughts of crime, threats, and violence in others. It enables and encourages the viewer to believe they see weapons more readily, to see young black people as larger, more muscular, and older, and to use force more readily. All of this supports race’s toxic twin, fear.

Fear — on the part of police: Virtually all of the scientific evidence about race serves to raise fear of African Americans, and this mixes with aspects of police culture and training based on fear. Police officers are some of the bravest and most courageous people one can meet, but their training creates and reinforces the fear of every civilian encounter turning deadly. The overuse of videos of officers killed as training tools, and the ubiquitous presence of guns in America, have caused American policing to react and train out of fear.

Fear — of the police, by black Americans:  Fear is not limited to the police side of the equation. Through bitter and sometimes abusive experiences of their own, or the experiences of family or friends, many African Americans perceive police as unfair, disrespectful, sometimes abusive or even physically dangerous or life threatening. This becomes so true in some communities that black people often hesitate to call the police in emergencies, let alone to report crime; they, the potential callers, fear that they may be victimized. This much fear on both sides of any police/civilian encounter creates a recipe for catastrophes on the street. 

3. Police say, “Don’t run when we give you an order to stop” – but Jordan did.  Isn’t this all his fault?

Of course, Jordan does not agree that he got a standard order to stop; he says he ran when the three unidentified men jumped out of a car and began yelling about money, drugs, and guns. But let’s assume that the police did give him that kind of order. It’s easy to say Jordan should have just stopped and submitted. But a young black man, in an African American neighborhood, would know that he could not assume that things would go okay if he hadn’t done anything wrong and he just followed orders to comply. 

4. The law is less than helpful, sometimes harmful, and can’t cure the problem.

What the case at the center of A City Divided makes clear is that the law, as currently structured, seldom does much to address police/citizen violence. The Supreme Court of the U.S. has set the bar very high in excessive force cases, making it extremely difficult to prosecute and convict police officers or even to sue them for damages. State-level lawmakers have begun to change use of force law.

5. What needs to change to prevent these kinds of violent encounters in the future? 

Warrior versus Guardian Policing: For some years, many police officers have adopted the Warrior ethos: they take on the mantle of warriors, through their willingness and training to use “righteous violence” to act as “sheepdogs” in order to defend the “sheep” (the rest of us) from the “wolves” (criminal predators). The problem with a warrior outlook is that it turns street—level policing into a war. When policing is viewed that way, whole communities become the enemy. Police must return to what policing began as, and what it must be again: guardianship of public peace and order. 

Relationships: Few things can match the importance of police officers knowing the people in their communities — and the more troubled the community might be in terms of poverty, crime, and other social problems, the more important this is.  The central importance of relationships come from the playbook of community policing. 

Gun violence: Gun violence, and the widespread presence of guns in the hands of those who should not have them, lies at the heart of what we must change.  Gun violence kills and maims more young people in neighborhoods like Jordan’s than anything else. And police must also fear the presence of guns in almost everything they.  There are ways to address this core issue that will make both communities and police officers safer. 

Transparency and accountability: Police must finally come to grips with a basic truth: like every other part of government in a democracy, they owe the public transparency and accountability.  Police agencies and professional groups have always fought this, but some have become to come around. Others are being dragged to it by legislatures and courts.

6. Have things gotten better in Pittsburgh between police and the city’s African American communities?

Yes and no. People at the leadership level of the African American community in Pittsburgh have said that the general attitude of police they see and perceive in the community has improved. But in a recent survey by the Urban Institute of six cities that were part of a National Initiative to Build Community Trust and Justice, Pittsburgh was the only one of the six in which the attitudes of African American communities toward their police became less positive than it had been before the training. There remains a long way to go.

7. For other cities, what’s the take away?

Do something! Do it now, especially do it when you see warning signs of tension and police misconduct, before there is a disaster that divides your city and causes a major loss of confidence in the police among citizens who most need the help of police.