Local policing efforts cheered
UPDATED, March 6: Close to 300 people turned out for a Saturday night Town Hall forum, rare in itself, and they heard a probing discussion of how the U.S. criminal-justice responds to issues of race and class.
In the view of four panelists, the overall verdict about these issues mirrored the forum’s title: Nationwide, justice is unequal.
In Arlington, the loud cheers from those gathered for Fred Ryan, who recently chose to remain here as chief instead of moving to head the MBTA, indicated support for the style of policing practiced in town. Helping to shape local justice, the chief said, are community policing, a social worker, juvenile diversion and restorative justice.
“A kid who got in trouble at a five-and-dime was brought into this program,” Ryan said, referring to restorative justice, whose goal is to avoid a life-blemishing criminal complaint by bringing the parties involved together in the same room.
The store owner was angry about what the youngster had done, but after a series of meetings, the relationship turned around. “He ended up hiring the kid,” Ryan said, to audience applause.
Panelists address Ferguson case
This local example is a far cry from Ferguson.
That distinction is what moderator David Whitford got after in his first question to the panelists. Beside Ryan, they were Bonie Bagchi Williamson, co-chair, Vision 2020 Diversity Task Group, the event’s main sponsor; Frank Rudy Cooper, professor of Law, Suffolk University; and Don Perry,a parole-reform activist. Peniel Joseph, professor of history at Tufts University, was ill and could not attend.
Whitford, an editor-at-large at Inc. magazine who was fighting a cold, asked all for their reactions to the grand jury decision not to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of young black Michael Brown last August in suburban St. Louis.
Cooper expressed a range of feelings — initially, a “lack of surprise,” and then “exhausted,” but after that, he felt some hope in response to the Arlington Black Lives Matter rally in December, which drew an estimated 400 people. Williamson echoed these comments.
Ryan said he “wasn’t surprised” and went on to say that the criminal-justice system in the United States is “imperfect.” He said he sees “good cases” get “turned around” in court. He called the Town Hall turnout “amazing” for a Saturday night, “to address the elephant in the room” — race and class.
Perry answered carefully. He said he was “not so much surprised,” emphasizing the two words in the middle of the phrase. That stress suggested his long experience with the prison system. The 61-year-old who served 18 years after an armed-robbery conviction said he is grateful for social media, which can communicate alternative voices.
Whitford, moderating in a relaxed, direct way, asked why the events in Missouri were so “catalytic.”
Opinion: what can we do?
A tale of two community relationships
Ryan drew contrasts between the relationship among those in the St. Louis County community and in Arlington. The latter was “completely broken …. It is so important to know a community,” he said, noting his own first-name-basis knowledge of residents here.
Perry called the criminal-justice system there “dysfunctional.” Cooper said activists were an important part of the mix at Ferguson.
Asked to offer context about the state of incarceration in the United States, Cooper provided numbers: black men are two times as likely as Latinos to be imprisoned. Further, Latinos are two and a half times as likely as whites to face the same penalty. He said the U.S. rate is “vastly more” than other countries.
On the issue of stop-and-frisk polices, which former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly supported, Cooper said they included patdowns around the groin. The law professor said that this is considered a “minor” intrusion under the Fourth Amendment, but, to him, it’s “quite an indignity.”
Ryan said he has a friend in Milwaukee who follows the Kelly model, but the chief said the approach is “too simplistic.”
He told the story of a woman using Wi-Fi in an Arlington restaurant but not buying anything. The manager wanted police to remove her for trespassing. An officer talked to her about the concern, rather than take a heavy-handed approach. “We have to be more sophisticated in our responses,” the chief said.
Stance toward police growing up
Asked about their relationship with police while growing, two black men on the panel responded.
Cooper, now 46, said that in 1986 while living in Cambridge, he feared police.
The connection was “negative, that’s safe to say,” said Perry, a North Carolina native. Noting that one in three blacks end up in the U.S. criminal-justice system, he said: “I was destined for it.”
Asked whether justice is enforced fairly, Williamson, a native of India who is a dean at a community college, said the suspension rates for blacks is three times higher than for whites. She called “out-of-school suspensions the No. 1 predictor of problems with the criminal-justice system.”
She appeared to criticize the prevalence of police officers in schools, and said that if they are there, “then you have to use them.”
She cited a complaint brought at a school in which a student had fashioned a Pop Tart in the shape of a gun. This is “a need for common sense,” she said, to some laughter.
Whitford followed up about officers in our schools, and drew a defense from Ryan.
He pointed to Brian Gallagher, the school resource officer who is at Arlington High. He was also present that night to help assist when an audience member fell ill. As EMTs arrived, Ryan left the stage for a short time.
Ryan said complaints in Arlington about students have declined after an officer was placed in the school.
He also cited a juvenile-diversion program to handle lesser cases (alcohol, small quantities of drugs), with an aim to avoid a criminal complaint. Under restorative justice, an officer asks: Was there harm? How do we repair the harm?
Styles of justice
Whitford asked whether he preferred that style of justice, and that led Perry to offer a series of stories about his life. At 14, one of seven children, he saw his dad shoot his mom, who was 9 months’ pregnant. After that, he concluded: “No one would ever put their hands on me.”
He started shooting heroin at 15. Whiles long in prison, he put his life on an educational track. While in school, he worked in a gun factory, where he had the ends of two fingers blown off.
He held up that hand and said, to applause, “Nothing would deter me from getting my cap and gown.” His degree is from UMass/Amherst.
Perry later served another 19 months at Walpole on “a whim,” he said, and this led him to become a parole activist.
Whitford moved the conversation from personal specifics to broader policy. Best practices appear to point the way, he said, but how much of these issues are solvable and how much is deeper?
The first step to recognize problems and make policy-level changes, Ryan said. “Stop name-calling and have a mature conversation,” he said to applause.
Addressing a key factor underlying the discussion — bias — Williamson said some are built in. She discussed “implicit bias,” a positive or negative mental attitude toward a person, thing or group that a person holds at an unconscious level.
Solvable or deeper? Cooper said: “For the most part [the issues] are deep-rooted.
Audience responses
Opened to the audience, Neil Osborne, president of the Mystic Valley Area Branch NAACP, asked, “How can we get young people interested in careers in law enforcement?
Asked how to improve diversity, Ryan called the current Civil Service broken and “handcuffed” by unions. He thinks police administrators need “should have far more discretion” in hiring.
Thea Paneth, a member of United for Justice and Peace, said her daughter has gone through Arlington public schools never having had a black teacher. “What can we do?” she asked.
Williamson said pay in Arlington cannot compete, as Boston pays much more.
Superintendent Kathleen Bodie, who was in the audience, said the town schools dos not get a large minority candidate pool. She said the administration has a “laser light” on the issue.
Selectman Joseph Curro, former Human Rights Commission chairman, said he had no better partner than the town police. When the group wanted traffic-stop data, they got it.
Introducing and thanking Whitford was Kathy Leydon-Conway of the Vision 2020 Diversity Task Group.
ON ACMi
The initial broadcast schedule for “Unequal Justice: Consequences of Race and Class in Our Criminal Justice System” is 4 p.m. Friday, March 6; 11 a.m. Saturday, March 7; and 5 p.m. Monday, March 9.
Watch on video on demand >>
RELATED LINKS
Globe, March 3, 2015: Obama panel seeks outside inquiries on police killings
CNN, March 3, 2015: Witness who took video: Man killed by LAPD didn’t reach for officer’s gun
N.Y. Times, March 1, 2015: Justice Department to Fault Ferguson Police, Seeing Racial Bias in Traffic Stops
This news summary was published Tuesday, March 3, 2015. It updated March 4 to add an opinion link and March 6 to add an ACMi link. The crowd estimate is according to the supporters’ Facebook page.
