Tackling Gang Violence

By Taylor Dungjen

Two Ohio cities apply a new strategy to reduce youth homicides.

The "Missing White Woman Syndrome"

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), there are as many as 100,000 active missing persons cases in the United States at any given time. If you went solely by what you read in the media, you’d probably assume that most of these cases involve pretty white women.

Requiem for Daryl Gates

The death of Los Angeles’ once-polarizing police chief brings back memories of the city’s darkest days—and a style of U.S. policing that has, hopefully, gone forever.

Daryl Gates’ death on Friday came as no surprise. The 83-year-old former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department had been battling bladder cancer since at least last February. He was revered within the LAPD for his loyalty to his troops, and will be much honored in the days to come—which makes it imperative that future generations never forget Gates’ far darker legacy, and the forces in law enforcement that he zealously represented for decades, not just in Los Angeles, but throughout the nation.

Trim, fit and tan, Gates served as LAPD chief from 1978 to his forced resignation following the 1992 Los Angeles riots. A man of quiet, boyish charm, narrow vision, enormous ego, and unlimited ambition, he came of age poor and striving in the ‘30s and ‘40s, when LA was still a provincial city with a small-town mentality, peopled by poor Dust Bowl Okies and a conservative Midwestern middle and ruling-class.

By the ‘70s, however, the movement of large numbers of African Americans, Jews, Mexicans and Central Americans to Los Angeles was transforming both the city’s complexion and politics. On the wider American scene, the increasing visibility of the counterculture, along with the rising women’s, gay and anti-war movements,  were challenging the comfort zones of Gates and millions of middle-class white Americans. Gates, a son of LA’s ultra-conservative political culture, emerged as a spokesman for those Americans—addressing in particular their fear that urban America in the late 20^th century was being overrun by black street crime.

Law-and-Order Generation

That effectively made him the embodiment of a generation of white police chiefs – men with simplistic answers to complex questions of law and order.  On the east coast they were exemplified by Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner and then mayor of Philadelphia in the ‘70s. White, working-class, ethnic Philly cheered when Rizzo proclaimed that the best way to treat criminals was “Spacco il capo” (break their heads), and that the best way to reduce crime was to “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”

Like Rizzo Gates was a master of rancorous rhetoric.  He once used the phrase ”blacks and normal people,” and argued that “casual” drug dealers should be “taken out and shot.” He claimed that Mexican American officers weren’t being promoted because they were lazy.  And he warned his critics that he might make public the LAPD’s intelligence files on them. On the notion of hiring gay cops, he once wondered aloud, “Who would want to work with one?”

He seemed to revel in his enemies: the ACLU, the media, the mayor, critics in the city council, and an African American community which, despite being crippled by crime and desperate for protection, hated him and his LAPD as fiercely as any cops had been hated in deepest Dixie. Gates mockingly ignored pleas to reign in his officers made repeatedly by Tom Bradley, LA’s long-serving black mayor and a former LAPD lieutenant (whom Gates considered a traitor to the force).

Gates knew he was operating in a fear-filled, high-crime  political climate, had astoundingly strong civil service job protections, and could therefore proclaim that he and the LAPD were accountable to no one but themselves. His officers loved both the assertion and his combative attitude. “Cops like it when there’s no gray area,” ex-LAPD chief Tom Reddin once told me. “If a guy gives you some trouble, whack him. He won’t respect you, but he’ll be afraid of you.”  Operating in a high-crime, law-and-order era, and insulated by LA’s rigid civil service protections, the LAPD  policed as they’d been taught: aggressively, arrogantly, confrontationally.

The cost was catastrophic: large numbers of people holding nothing more than a rolled up bathrobe, a sweatshirt, a hairbrush, a typewriter, keys, a flashlight, or nothing at all, shot and killed by LAPD officers; scores more choked to death by officers in equally bizarre circumstances; families left homeless after drug searches left their homes uninhabitable; heads smashed by batons during peaceful demonstrations.

The New Centurions

Many of these practices were refinements of the strategies developed by Gates’ mentor, William H. Parker, who ruled the LAPD from 1950 to 1966 and left behind a small, highly mobile force of “New Centurions” that employed fear and intimidation to control the city.  These were the strategies that fueled the 1965 Watts rebellion; but instead of backing away from them, the LAPD responded to Watts by transforming itself into an army of occupation that routinely turned traffic stops into drawn-gun dramas and ghetto prone-outs. As the late John Jay College professor and former NYPD lieutenant James Fyfe once put it: “Everything [in the LAPD] was discussed as military operations and tactics, as opposed to human relations.”

There were plenty of obvious problems with such tactics.  But the most important one was that they simply didn’t work.

In the decades following Watts, violent crime in LA grew at more than twice the national average. In 1986, Los Angeles had the highest number of reported violent crimes per 100,000 residents and the highest number of property crimes. But Gates’ answer was to do more of the same.  In his battle to defeat Los Angeles youth gangs, the Bloods and Crips, Gates began massive south LA “sweeps” in which thousands of black men were indiscriminately arrested, essentially for being on the street at the wrong time.

Gates’ policies also had a detrimental impact on policing elsewhere.  LAPD tactics and philosophy, lionized in TV cop dramas, movies and books, were unquestioningly accepted through the Southwest.  Numerous LAPD command-rank officers were hired as chiefs by cities who saw Gates’ law-and-order tactics as the policing standard.

The end of the myth

But the LAPD myth was finally exploded by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, set off by the acquittal of four white police officers charged with the brutal beating of  African American motorist Rodney King. The infamous grainy video of the beating went viral around the world, and in the process exposed both the ineffectiveness and the cruelty of  the Gates model of policing. The physical toll of the riots—53 dead, 2,300 injured, and $1 billion in insured losses—almost took second place to the psychological toll on the LAPD.  The Hollywood Golden Boys had become a  symbol of all that was bad, bigoted and brutal in big-city policing. The cost to Gates was the utter destruction of his reputation. As violence, arson and looting spread to the LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters,  Gates slipped out a back door to attend a Brentwood fundraiser organized to defeat an up-coming police-reform ballot amendment. His resignation soon followed.

But his legacy remained powerful among the rank-and-file. Many within the department still believed that Rodney King deserved what he got, and that Daryl Gates didn’t. Over the next decade, the U.S. Justice Department used a new federal law passed by Congress in 1994 in the wake of the King beating and the riots to force a consent decree on the city and department, mandating key reforms overseen by a federal judge. But the 1999 Rampart Scandal made clear that frame-ups, beatings and shootings continued to be part of the  LAPD paramilitary culture.

Then, in 2002, Mayor James Hahn changed the game by hiring former New York City police commissioner William Bratton as chief. It took eight years of hard work by Bratton, the support of reform organizations like the Advancement Project, and the efforts of hundreds of men and women within the department, to erase Gate’s legacy and give the LAPD back to the people of Los Angeles.

The best way for them—and for policy makers throughout the nation—to insure that Daryl Gates’ legacy of police politicization, militarism and unaccountability never returns, is to never forget the dark, stormy days of his tenure.

ED NOTE: A version of this essay has appeared in the Los Angeles Times

Joe Domanick is Associate Director of John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice, the West Coast Bureau Chief of TheCrimeReport.org, and the author of “To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams.”

Photo by Lou Angeli via Flickr.

Richard Siegel

President

American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada

Nevada

siegel@unr.edu

Helen Benedict

Professor

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
2950 Broadway (at 116th Street)
New York, NY 10027

212-854-3622

hb22@columbia.edu

The Staggering Toll of Homicide in the Black Community

According to a new report by the Violence Policy Institute, blacks make up 13 percent of the population and 49 percent of all homicide victims. VPI analyzed data from the FBI's 2007 Supplemental Homicide Report and found that the homicide rate for blacks in the U.S. is five times the national average and nearly seven times greater than for whites. 86 percent of black homicide victims were male and 82 percent were killed by guns.

Click here to read the full report.

Violence Against Women: Do the Homework

Misunderstanding of abuses like trafficking is still widespread, even among liberals, as a new book demonstrates.

After three years of discussion, the United Nations General Assembly last month adopted a resolution to restructure gender institutions in the UN system. The UN Development Fund for Women was merged with the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women.

UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon announced the next day  that the new single entity will be headed by an undersecretary general, and will promote gender equality and women’s well-being. Noting that “sexist attitudes lead to sexual exploitation,” he declared that its establishment underscored the UN’s commitment to combat violence against women.  “There can be no security without women’s security, and we need to shed the silence that shields perpetrators,” he said. 

The significance of his announcement was underlined by its setting: a special panel at the UN’s Trusteeship Council Chamber organized by the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), to mark the publication of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,  a book by New York Times journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

The book’s title comes from the Chinese proverb, “women hold up half the sky,”

And it reads as a collection of life stories of women in the developing world who have been subjected to gender-based violence: beatings, acid burnings, human trafficking, rape (including war rape), female genital mutilation, medical negligence and honor killings.

It is particularly ironic that Kristof and WuDunn preach what our country cannot practice. The United States has yet to ratify three of the most important global treaties related to this issue: 1979 Convention on All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child; or the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Although the panel (and the book) dealt  with violence against women in general, sexual trafficking was an important sub-theme

Global Failure

And on this subject, the failure to develop an adequate legal response is global. A recent UNODC report shows that half of UN member states have yet to convict a single perpetrator of human trafficking. The lack of political will plus widespread corruption help explain this disturbing statistic. Even where there is legislation, there is a lack of enforcement.

Of course, the success or failure of the struggle against human trafficking is hard to measure with numbers alone.  UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said at the panel that he was unable to report  whether human trafficking had increased or decreased in the last three years. “Anyone providing you with numbers to argue either way is simply shooting from the hip,” he said.

Ironically, the limitation of  such “shoot-from-the-hip” responses was underlined by the book itself.  Half the Sky is a gory read for newcomers to these issues—and a tedious read to those familiar with them.  But as someone who teaches this material to undergraduates, I found it surprisingly annoying. 

Kristof and WuDunn have facile explanations for gender-based violence.  They ignore men as perpetrators (indeed, they are as invisible in their book as women have been invisible in the past), cite research results when those results support their arguments, and offer simplistic (albeit well-meaning) solutions. At the same time, they ignore the vast body of research on violence against women, and perhaps most importantly, considering the panel’s setting, they ignore relevant international law and UN efforts in this arena. 

Much of the book is ethnocentric.  There is a chapter about Islam and misogyny, where the authors admit to being “politically incorrect” without realizing they are also ignorant of the nuances that plague the study of world religions and gender.  While there is much discussion of the developing world, there is little discussion of the violations of women’s rights in the developed world, including the United States.

And although Kristof argued “detailed examples that judiciously use evidence” are the best mechanism for raising consciousness, the authors appear ignorant of the strides made by other countries, even if such strides fall short of guaranteeing full human rights for women. 

India’s Innovative Approaches

India, for example, receives quite a bit of criticism.  Yet it enacted a landmark domestic violence law in 2006 and established all-female police units to respond to domestic violence (see Women Police in a Changing Society by John Jay College Professor Mangai Natarajan).  The authors’ own employer, The New York Times, last month called attention to some of India’s innovative approaches, such as establishing all-female  commuter trains in large cities to protect women from so-called “Eve-teasing” (groping and harassment) on public transport.

Natarajan, director of John Jay´s international criminal justice major,  who also attended the panel, observed afterwards that “countries who are making efforts to improve need to be encouraged, not chided.  Oftentimes, although they seem behind, they have come a very long way.” 

In what was perhaps an indirect critique of the authors’ approach, UNODC Director Costa said that his agency is responsible “for the whole sky, not just half the sky”—thus emphasizing that both men and women are responsible for gender equality.  Such points may already have had their desired effect: one of the main messages in the book, “women are not the problem; they are the solution,”  now appears on the book’s website with the afterthought “… along with men.” 

The authors made no secret that their strategy of avoiding hard numbers and examples that might soften their thesis was central to their notion of developing a “grassroots” movement to broaden the campaign against gender violence, which would contain elements such as microfinance and education programs. WuDunn bluntly told the UN audience, largely made up of NGO representatives, that “psychological and neurological research demonstrates that statistics have a dulling effect on human motivation.”  As if to make the point clear, their final chapter is entitled, “What You Can Do: Four Steps You Can Take in the Next Ten Minutes,” followed by an appendix listing organizations that help women worldwide.

In looking for verdicts, I usually ask my students. I gave my seniors a New York Times Magazine excerpt from the book published in August, and assigned them to attend the UN panel event.  “Where are their references in APA style?” one student angrily asked, referring to the authors’ selective and sparse use of scholarly evidence. Another argued in her critique that microfinance programs for downtrodden women are only one way towards gender equality. “We must educate boys about the value and respect for human life,” she wrote.  “Laws must punish those who do not learn this respect, and we must understand that women did not cause the inequality and thus cannot be the only ones to fix it.” 

Kristof and WuDunn are to be congratulated for pushing readers towards action.  But their view of the issue still needs much more homework, including an understanding of gender, its intersection with crime and victimization, and the complexities of international norms.

Rosemary Barberet is Associate Professor in the Sociology Department of  John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and a representative of the International Sociological Association to the United Nations.

Disproportionate Minority Contact in the Juvi System

It's been seven years since Congress tied purse strings to the issue of disproportionate contact between non-white youths and the criminal justice system, but according to the newest bulletin on the subject, disparities are still stark. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Deliquency Prevention reports that African-American youth are still arrested at twice the rate of white youth, while white youth are seven times more likely to live in a neighborhood with an alternative detention program.

Click here to read the full report. Click here to read the accompanying manual.

Use The Crime Report for more information on Race and Sentencing, Juvenile Justice and Race and Gender in Prison.

Was Black Harvard Prof Arrest Racial Profiling?

Was the arrest of prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his front door a case of racial profiling? Cambridge, Ma., were investigating a possible break-in when they encountered Gates, who had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed. He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,”  said a police report quoted by the Boston Globe.

Police said Gates, 58, accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had "no idea who he was messing with.'' Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.