Our real police/race problem: Diverse forces, white resentment, and America’s persistent divides

[xchrom]

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/02/our_real_policerace_problem_diverse_forces_white_resentment_and_americas_persistent_blackblue_divide/


Mayor Bill de Blasio talks with New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton during a NYPD Memorial ceremony last October in New York. (Credit: AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Nearly two decades before last month’s murders of New York police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by a black man, the murder of a black NYPD officer, Charles Davis, anticipated claims we’re hearing that police-community problems aren’t really “black and white” and the only color that really counts is blue.

Yet the problems do remain “black and white” for reasons of economic exploitation and isolation that run deeper than race itself and that are gathering force, despite rising numbers of white/Asian and white/Hispanic marriages and of multiracial children, even in the families of police officers themselves. Unless we can face the reasons why more “diversity” in police ranks is a far-from-sufficient condition of justice, American society will remain more racist than many others, and thereby hangs my tale.

Black on Blue

Shortly before Christmas 1996 in the lower-middle-class Queens neighborhood of East Elmhurst, robbers killed Officer Davis as he tried to protect Ira Epstein, the white owner of a check-cashing store where Davis was moonlighting as a security guard to earn extra money to buy holiday gifts for his 6-year-old daughter, Arielle.

Because Davis was off-duty at the time, it’s unclear if his assailants knew that he was a police officer. But because he was one and was murdered for doing what police officers do, his Episcopal funeral Mass in Garden City, Long Island, was a familiar “tableau of pomp and grief,” as the New York Times put it, with thousands of saluting, white-gloved, white-ethnic officers and a flyover by police helicopters.