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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...le-officers-treatment-young-black-men-n873561
After high-profile incidents sparked protests from Sacramento to Philadelphia, black police leaders speak about ingrained issues of bias, force and trust.
When Daniel Hahn became Sacramento’s police chief last August — the first African-American to hold the job — his top priority was to restore faith in a department that had come under fire for police shootings and use of excessive force against black men.
The mayor welcomed Hahn — who grew up in a mostly black Sacramento neighborhood, and spent his career working to improve the black community’s trust in the police — as “a new beginning” for Sacramento.
Less than eight months later, the city erupted, adding even more urgency to the challenges Hahn faced.
On March 28, two officers ─ one black, one white ─ shot to death a young black man in his grandmother’s backyard in the mistaken belief that he was armed. The killing of Stephon Clark ignited weeks of protests, turning the city into the latest national symbol of police brutality. The demonstrations are ongoing, with protesters demanding that the officers who shot Clark be charged with murder.
“It was another piece of evidence that our relationship with the community was not where it needed to be,” Hahn said in a recent interview.
As high-profile police shootings continue to shake the country, Hahn, 49, is among a growing number of black police leaders who are grappling with a crisis in their officers’ treatment of young men of color. These police chiefs face high expectations, from their cities at large but particularly from minority residents within, as they work to attract a more diverse team of officers, curb deadly confrontations with the public they serve, and rebuild relationships with black, Hispanic and other minority neighborhoods.
In interviews with NBC News, several black police executives spoke about their personal and professional experience in confronting the problem of police disproportionately targeting minority communities, an issue with deep institutional roots.
“Diversity is important and valuable, but it can’t be separated from the police culture, from the way we view what our job is, the way we view the community and the way we are viewed by the community,” Hahn said. “It’s a complicated problem that takes a nuanced solution.”
Confronting a ‘dark history’
In recent weeks, the police chiefs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Philadelphia — all black and reform-minded, all appointed in the past three years — have faced pressure to answer for their officers’ actions.
On April 13, [URL='https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-police-punching-black-harvard-student-during-arrest-n866851']Cambridge officers tackled, punched and arrested a 21-year-old black Harvard student who police say had been acting erratically and resisted attempts to restrain him. In Philadelphia, two black men waiting at a Starbucks to meet a white man were arrested for trespassing.
Video of both confrontations was captured by bystanders and went viral online, prompting outrage around the country. These protests have little to do with the race of the cities’ police chiefs, or the race of the officers involved, activists say. The real problem is the systemic police practices that lead to the “harassment and intimidation” of minority communities, said Tanya Faison of Black Lives Matter Sacramento. She wants to see more community oversight of policing, including civilian oversight boards with power to fire officers who act inappropriately.
Cambridge Police Commissioner Branville Bard Jr., who arrived on the job last summer, supported the officers ─ two white, one Hispanic ─ saying they were justified in using force to subdue the student.
But Bard, 47, said in a recent interview that he recognized why the incident was being portrayed as part of a “dark history” of police targeting minorities. “Especially in light of what’s going on around the country with videos of unarmed minorities being taken down, sometimes without cause or with outright abuses of authority,” he said, “it’s easy to see it as one in a long line of abuses.”
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross also defended his officers, saying those involved in the Starbucks arrests “did absolutely nothing wrong.”
But after facing a torrent of criticism on social media, he later apologized to the two men who were arrested, and for his choice of words immediately after the incident, saying he had inflamed the situation.
Ross, 54, who became commissioner in 2016, stressed in a Facebook video after the incident that his officers were trained to prevent biased behavior and learn the history of “atrocities committed by policing around the world.” He also promised to examine the Starbucks case to see “what we can do better.”
Ross declined to be interviewed for this article.
An ‘institutionalized’ problem
American police departments have been struggling for decades with allegations of racism and issues of brutality and trust — and with becoming more diverse. But protests in 2014 after two black men, Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, died in confrontations with white officers, and riots a year later after another black man, Freddie Gray, died of wounds suffered in the custody of Baltimore police, touched off a renewed sense of urgency.
In 2015, President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing issued a list of recommendations, including expanding diversity among the ranks, letting outside agencies investigate officer use-of-force cases, embracing community partnerships and collecting better data on the types of suspects who are stopped and arrested.
Researchers also began looking anew into the link between diversity and the use of force, with mixed results: Some found that having significantly more black officers could ease tensions between police and black communities, while others found that increasing the number of black officers may drive down police killings of black people, but only when black representation on the force reached a “sufficiently high” critical mass of 35 percent or more. Nationally, the most recently available government report from 2013 found that local police departments were 12 percent black and 73 percent white.
What diversity alone does not solve are the biases many officers bring to their work — perceptions of black men as more threatening, for example — which are heightened by a police culture that emphasizes strength and power. That drives racially disparate arrests and the use of force, researchers say.
For example: The more an officer feels threatened, whether the officer is in legitimate danger or not, the more likely that officer is to use force on a suspect, particularly if an encounter occurs as part of a “zero-tolerance” approach to crime and disorder.
You have to increase the costs for bad behavior, including use of excessive force.
You have to increase the costs for bad behavior, including use of excessive force.
“It's institutionalized,” said Nelson Lim, a RAND sociologist who studies recruitment and diversity. “You can swap out the people but the system itself is set up that way."
Bard, the Cambridge chief, agreed.
“Even if we recruit a diverse population of officers, it’s still incumbent on us to train them to be the types of officers we want them to be,” he said.
That means training and elevating the types of officers Bard describes as “the social service promoters” as opposed to “the crime enforcers.”
Better training was among the changes Cambridge initiated nearly a decade ago after the national uproar over the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009 outside his own home on suspicion he was breaking in. The police department now trains officers to de-escalate tense situations, and embraces what’s called “procedural justice,” which involves managing rather than controlling situations, treating people with dignity and respect, and giving citizens a voice during encounters.
Bard, who holds a doctorate in public administration and has written about eliminating racial profiling, said that police culture has to change to send a message to officers that departments “won’t tolerate the slightest amount of abuse” of civilians.
“And then you have to increase the costs for bad behavior, including use of excessive force,” he said.
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