1986-1990
Day 66
1986: The Drug Abuse Act Subjects Hundreds of Thousands of Blacks to Prison For Petty Crimes While Whites Not Sentenced For Same Crime
There is a lot to today’s post! Honestly, it's too much for a FB post and I am unqualified to discuss it in depth- but I am going to try and shed some light on the gravity of what has happened in the policing and justice systems back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, that has led us to where we are today. It truly illuminates why there are so many protests and mistrust between the justice system and people of color. I am learning this history is essential in understanding why we are where we are today. Watch 13th on Netflix for a starter course on what I’m presenting today…
Who remembers this commercial with an egg and a frying pan: “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
And, of course, the “Just Say No” campaign in the 80s. These two things saved me from a life of drugs!
Actually, no they didn’t. Drugs really weren’t a problem nationally, and opinion polls at the time showed that the vast majority of Americans weren’t at all concerned about drugs. But, not being concerned about drugs will not get you elected! All of a sudden in the 80’s, drugs were “Public enemy #1” and the war on drugs went full throttle with the Drug Abuse Act of 1986.
This act made crack a serious offense, and set mandatory minimums for minor drug infractions like having an ounce of marijuana. It took power away from judges, the most impartial person in the judicial system, and gave all the power to prosecutors to set punishments- 97% of whom are white.
It did not, notably, make cocaine a serious offense. The same prison sentence was given for having 1 ounce of crack as for having 100 ounces of cocaine.
Why would that be since they are basically the same exact thing? Because crack was used by blacks and cocaine, the more expensive form of crack, was used by whites in the suburbs. Newt Gingrich said that was absurdly hypocritical and designed to incarcerate blacks while leaving whites untouched and that they should have been treated as equal.
In fact, when more and more whites started using drugs, drug use mysteriously became a “health issue” not a criminal one, and whites still were not arrested.
Drug law enforcement spending tripled in 1986.
As a result of this, the ACLU uncovered that:
“Recent data indicates that African Americans make up 15 percent of the country’s drug users, yet they make up 37 percent of those arrested for drug violations, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for a drug offense. More than 80 percent of the defendants sentenced for crack offenses are African American, despite the fact that more than 66 percent of crack users are white or Hispanic.
Prior to the enactment of federal mandatory minimum sentencing for crack cocaine offenses in 1986, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 11 percent higher than for whites. Four years later, the average federal drug sentence for African Americans was 49 percent higher.”
The solution to this problem is surprisingly simple: Make the punishment for crack and cocaine the same. Make whites suffer the same fate as blacks for doing the same thing.
Thanks to for-profit prisons, laws were put in place that REQUIRED a certain number of inmates- even if crimes were not committed! So, blacks began to be arrested for every minor infraction and at unheard of numbers to meet these quotas and to prove that politicians were "tough on crime."
Think of all the fathers taken from their children, unable to work and raise their children like white fathers who commit the same crimes. Perhaps we can #SaveTheChildren by saving their fathers from mass incarceration.
NOTE: I am now learning to be wary of politicians who say they are "tough on crime" and they are for "law and order." I am realizing that is code for, "I will lock up black people at unprecedented rates for silly misdemeanor crimes and keep them in jail for really long times for things like jaywalking!" I am now scared every time I hear politicians say these code words.
Sources/Comments:
To be clear, I am NOT for drugs! I have never, not once, used an illegal drug in my entire life. But, I am against imprisoning people for minor drug infractions instead of getting them the help they need while keeping them out of jail- you know, like what they do for white people.
And, watch the movie 13th on Netflix. It will change you.
Day 67
1987: Prosecutors Illegally Exclude Blacks From Juries, Creating Unfair and Biased Jury
WAY back in 1935, if you remember with the Scotsboro Boys, the Supreme Court ruled in Norris vs. Alabama that blacks could not be excluded from juries. Sadly, even today that doesn’t stop prosecutors from keeping blacks off of juries. They are very sophisticated in skirting around this law to ensure all white juries- today you will see just how deceptive they are.
From EJI:
It is unconstitutional for prosecutors to exclude jurors on the basis of race. Racially biased use of peremptory strikes and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection nonetheless remain widespread, particularly in serious criminal cases and capital cases. Hundreds of people of color called for jury service have been illegally excluded from juries after prosecutors asserted pretextual reasons to justify their removal.
Timothy Foster was a poor, Black, intellectually compromised 18-year-old when he was charged in 1986 with murdering Queen White, an elderly white woman who worked as a school teacher before her retirement.
The prosecution’s jury selection notes from the 1987 trial show that prosecutors explicitly relied on race in selecting the jury. They highlighted the names of Black jurors on the jury list; circled the word “Black” next to the “race” question on the juror questionnaires of Black prospective jurors; identified Black prospective jurors as “B#1,” “B#2,” and “B#3”; and ranked the Black prospective jurors against each other in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the Black jurors.”
The prosecution struck all four Black prospective jurors, giving about a dozen different excuses for each strike. These reasons included facts that were equally true of white jurors who were not excluded. For example, prosecutors said they struck several Black jurors for having sons about the same age as Mr. Foster, but white jurors with sons the same age remained.
The prosecutor later argued to the all-white jury that it should sentence Timothy Foster to death in order to “deter other people out there in the projects from doing the same again.” Black families occupied more than 90 percent of the units in the local housing projects at that time.
Timothy Foster, who is represented by lawyers at the Southern Center for Human Rights, was convicted and sentenced to death. He argued on appeal that prosecutors had illegally discriminated against Black jurors, but Georgia’s courts denied his claim despite the evidence contained in the prosecutor’s own notes. The Supreme Court will now address whether Georgia’s courts were wrong to permit prosecutors to eliminate all Black jurors from Timothy Foster’s capital jury.
At the argument (in front of SCOTUS) Justice Kagan told the state’s attorney, “Look. You have a lot of new information here from these files that suggests that what the prosecutors were doing was looking at the African-American prospective jurors as a group, that they had basically said, we don’t want any of these people.”
Sources/Comments:
Answer me this: If you are illegally arrested on trumped up charges and false claims, given a defense attorney who is overworked and doesn’t care, sent before an all white jury, and then have judges who always side with the prosecutors and minimum sentences that send you away for decades for petty crimes, where are you supposed to find justice in this system? That is what it means to have a rigged system- every step of the justice train is rigged for you to go to jail and never receive a fair trial. This is still happening today!
Click HERE
Day 68
1988: Operation Hammer: LAPD Destroys Apartment Complexes of Innocent Families
So often we think that history exists in isolation. For example, we think that Rosa Parks was an isolated event- that she was just tired one day, stayed seated, white people listened, and everything changed. But, of course, Rosa Parks was one cog in a wheel of oppression that had been building up for over a hundred years and finally exploded.
The riots in LA for the beating of Rodney King didn’t happen just because of his senseless beating. Instead, it was several years of oppression and brutality by the LAPD toward the black community that climaxed and exploded when Rodney King was beaten.
Thanks to the “War on Drugs” police forces started to become militarized in the 1980’s. They are still heavily militarized. This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of examples of why turning our police into military is a horrible idea.
In 1988, the LAPD implemented “Operation Hammer,” a massive show of force and a crackdown on drugs and gangs in LA (ie, black people). The problem: They attacked and destroyed innocent people, not the drug dealers and gang members.
The LA Times reported:
On Aug. 1, 1988, scores of Los Angeles police officers descended on two apartment buildings on the corner of 39th Street and Dalton Avenue in southwest Los Angeles. It was an all-out search for drugs and a massive show of force designed to deliver a strong message to the gangs.
The police smashed furniture, punched holes in walls, destroyed family photos, ripped down cabinet doors, slashed sofas, shattered mirrors, hammered toilets to porcelain shards, doused clothing with bleach and emptied refrigerators. Some officers left their own graffiti: “LAPD Rules.” “Rollin’ 30s Die.”
Dozens of residents from the apartments and surrounding neighborhood were rounded up. Many were humiliated or beaten, but none was charged with a crime. The raid netted fewer than six ounces of marijuana and less than an ounce of cocaine.
The property damage was so great that the Red Cross offered assistance to 10 adults and 12 minors who were left homeless.
The raid at 39th and Dalton came amid rising public clamor for a crackdown on gangs. Gang warfare had spread to Westwood Village in January 1988, when Karen Toshima, an innocent bystander, was caught in a cross-fire and killed. Crack cocaine, dominated by street gangs, was an epidemic.
Southwest Capt. Thomas Elfmont, just five months on the job, encouraged his officers to take back the block. Some of his officers recall Elfmont’s telling them before the raid to render the buildings “uninhabitable.”
“There wasn’t a lot of care taken,” he said. “That was the mentality. At the time, if you were selling dope, we were going to knock your house down with a battering ram. And we were sure going to dump the sugar on the counter. It was the standard method of operation of the LAPD.
“We weren’t just searching for drugs. We were delivering a message that there was a price to pay for selling drugs and being a gang member. With that mentality, 39th and Dalton was born. I looked at it as something of a Normandy Beach, a D-day.”
The invaders found Gloria Flowers taking a bath. She scrambled, naked, to check on her two young children when she heard glass shattering and was confronted by gun-wielding officers rushing into her three-bedroom apartment.
“I got about as far as the bathroom door,” she said. “And then the police kicked the apartment door in, and the next thing I knew there was a gang of police officers in my house, pointing their guns at me.
“I tried to cover myself, and a lady police officer said, ‘Get your hands over your head and lay on the floor.’ Another officer threw a blanket on me.”
When she asked what was going on, an officer told her: “You’re being evicted.”
The next day, (Lieutenant) Elfmont went to the buildings to see the destruction firsthand. Initially, police blamed gang members for the damage. But Elfmont suspected otherwise and began gathering evidence to bring charges against officers.
“In Dalton, you have 70 or more officers--mass destruction,” he said. “You have a series of civil rights violations in the presence of police officers, done by police officers, sanctioned by command level officers.
“What happens? What did we do about it? In the D.A.'s office, what we did was file misdemeanors.”
A couple of officers were fired. More than 25 were suspended without pay. The lawsuits against the city never went before a jury. The city paid more than 50 residents, property owners and those rounded up in the raid a record of nearly $4 million in damages in an out-of-court settlement.”
But, the resentment of what the LAPD did to Dalton would not go away. And 4 years later, it would explode with the beating of Rodney King. How do you trust a police department that does this to you when you did nothing wrong?
Sources/Comments:
All the people in the above picture were innocent of any crime. The cops just arrested people randomly, humiliating, beating, and terrorizing them without cause. This is one of the million reasons that, I believe, cops are not trusted by people of color. How do you trust people who do this to you routinely?
My experiences with cops have always been positive. I don't worry that my house will be destroyed or that I will be shot when I am pulled over for speeding. That isn't the case with many Americans, however, and it is heartbreaking and needs to change.
Click HERE
Day 69
1989: Central Park Five: Teenagers Beaten To Get Coerced Confessions, Sentenced For Rape They Didn’t Commit
As you read this story, please remember two things: They were innocent, and they were aged 14-16. Now picture your teenage sons and think of what you would do if these were your kids.
On April 19, 1989 a woman was attacked and raped (she spent 12 days in a coma) while jogging in Central Park.
Immediately, the community- of course- put pressure on law enforcement for an arrest.
Without any evidence, but with public pressure mounting, 5 African American boys aged 14-16 were arrested. The Central Park Five were Kevin Richardson, 14, Raymond Santana, 14, Antron McCray, 15, Yusef Salaam, 15, and 16-year-old Korey Wise. Without a lawyer, and without their parents, they were each interrogated for several hours.
Of the interrogation, Yusef Salaam later said:
"I would hear them beating up Korey Wise in the next room.
"They would come and look at me and say: 'You realise you're next'.
"The fear made me feel really like I was not going to be able to make it out".
Eventually 4 of the 5 confessed. However, none of the DNA matched, and two weeks later all of them took back their coerced confessions and pled not guilty.
At this point, a businessman named Donald Trump spent $85,000 to put four full page ads in newspapers demanding that they be given the death penalty.
He wrote: "I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them."
In an interview with CNN at the time, he said: "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."
Remember, no murder took place as the victim did survive, and no white person has ever been sentenced to death for rape- ever. Also, remember again these boys were innocent.
Talking about the advertisements, Salaam later told the Guardian:
"We were all afraid. Our families were afraid. Our loved ones were afraid. For us to walk around as if we had a target on our backs.
"Had this been the 1950s, that sick type of justice that they wanted - somebody from that darker place of society would have most certainly came to our homes, dragged us from our beds and hung us from trees in Central Park."
Eventually, all of them were found guilty and sent to jail. But, in 2002 Matias Reyes came out and confessed to the crime. He was already serving time for other rapes- including one in Central Park TWO DAYS before this rape, but he was never considered a suspect in this case. (Note: How is that possible?!?!?!?!).
His DNA matched.
The Central Park Five were exonerated after almost serving their full sentences and awarded $41 million. Reyes was never prosecuted for the crime because the statute of limitations had passed.
Corey Wise said, "You can forgive but you won't forget. You won't forget what you lost. No money could bring that time back. No money could bring the life that was missing or the time that was taken away."
Sources/Comments:
I don’t know how to put into words the unjustness of this and the thousands of other cases that are similar. When we focus only on justice, hate, fear, “law and order,” and “bringing back the police,” we forget that we are dealing with humans- many of whom are innocent.
Arresting someone just to put somebody behind bars for crime, regardless of whether they are innocent or not, is not justice and is now "law and order." But it's what happens.
The more I research, the more I see that black and latino men are consistently, and wrongly, targeted and accused, even when there is no evidence to support the claims. And to see it happening over and over and over and over again- it’s just too much. I understand why the black community is saying, “Enough!” And, I’m joining the chorus- ENOUGH!
Can we please stop this war on black men, disguised as “law and order”, and bring back mercy and love- and following where the evidence takes us, not where our racial bias takes us, in determining who is guilty? It’s just all so…..heavy. My heart truly is breaking for our black brothers and sisters who have to daily live with so much injustice and hate.
Day 70
1990: 1033 Program Enacted, Giving Police Military Equipment (Without Training On How To Use It)
The Department of Defense Excess Property Program, usually known as the "1033 program," distributes surplus military equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies for use in counter-terrorism and counter-narcotic activities.
"It allows police departments to get pretty much any equipment that they want from the defense department," Kara Dansky, who studies the program for the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. "We've seen across the country police departments getting some pretty heavy weaponry that was built and designed for use in combat overseas, and using that equipment domestically."
The 1033 program's roots lie in the drug war as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorized the Pentagon to transfer military equipment to local law enforcement if it was "suitable for use in counter-drug activities."
The gear was meant for extreme situations- like hostage or terrorist situations. However, part of getting the cool new equipment is that you are required to use it within one year. Because most places don’t have terrorist situations on a regular basis, this heavy duty military equipment started to be used for things like search warrants.
Oh, and there is ZERO training provided on how to use it.
Without proper training, sometimes things go horribly wrong.
"When cops, just like other human beings, are frightened — and sometimes they are! — there's a tendency to act impulsively. Which is to say: to do exactly the opposite of what they need to be doing," former Seattle police chief Norman Stamper said.
The ACLU's report on police militarization documents numerous incidents in which innocent people were injured or killed by SWAT teams during the execution of warrants — an activity SWAT teams were never intended to be used for in the first place.
It's not hard to see how a bunch of heavily armed cops who have not been adequately trained might make mistakes.
Eurie Stamp, a grandfather of 12, was shot and killed when SWAT officers raided his home in search of a suspect who had actually already been arrested. Ninteen-month-old Bou Bou Phonesavanh went into a medically-induced coma after a SWAT team threw a flashbang grenade into his crib. The grenade blew a hole in his face and chest, leaving a wound so deep his ribs were exposed, and covering his body in third degree burns. (The baby has since awoken from his coma, but the county is refusing to pay his medical bills.) Seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was also hit by a flashbang grenade while sleeping, then shot by a SWAT team member who fired a single shot as he entered her home.
"The one thing I would say is to reserve SWAT," former Seattle Police Chief Norman Stamper stressed. "Reserve that equipment and those tactics for active shooter cases, barricaded suspects, armed and dangerous barricaded suspects with hostages. Do not employ those tactics, that equipment on routine drug raids or warrants service, or any other situation where you don't have what I would consider to be inherently dangerous circumstances."
This doesn't just militarize a suburban area and introduce a dangerous potential for accidents, it means that police are escalating the situation when their role, Stamper says, should be finding ways to de-escalate.
"Your mission is not to provoke, it is to de-escalate," he said, explaining that how police dress and arm themselves is a real part of that. "I think it's so important to hold those kinds of weapons in reserve, and use them or show them only when you're dealing with a violent confrontation. Keeping the peace at a demonstration essentially means having police officers in standard everyday uniforms- not military garb."
Ideally, LAPD Police Chief Stephen Downing said, a police department would have a "reservoir of goodwill" in the community to rely on: established relationships with members of clergy and other local leaders who could assist with communication and conflict resolution during times of crisis. Standing behind an arsenal of military gear sends the opposite message, treating the community as an inherently hostile force to be suppressed, rather than as neighbors.
"Good police officers understand that they need to be hearing what is actually being said, listening actively to the concerns and grievances of the community, paraphrasing it and feeding it back, and saying okay, now what can we do jointly to address these problems?" Stamper explained. It's not something that can be achieved with kevlar and MRAPs. "It's a function of collaboration."
Sources/Comments:
-I know this is LONG. There’s SO MUCH RESEARCH about this. But, it’s important! It’s important because when peaceful protestors are met with tear gas, tanks, and SWAT teams, often that escalates the peaceful protest into one of violence- not because of the protestors, but because of the military force they meet! It’s important because when people say, “Defund the Police” (a term I hate, by the way), they are meaning let’s not give them this super expensive military equipment that they really don’t need except in extreme situations but that they now use routinely whenever they see a group of black people, and instead let’s put that money to things like social workers and community programs that will help us, not attack us.
-Understanding that cops do not receive training for this equipment and that this equipment is being used to hurt people of color is important, even if it is a lot of reading.
-In Wisconsin alone during the 1990s, local police departments were given nearly 100,000 pieces of military equipment valued at more than $18 million. Columbia County, Wisconsin (population: 52,468), was given more than 5,000 military items valued at $1.75 million, including, according to the Capital Times, “11 M-16s, 21 bayonets, four boats, a periscope, and 41 vehicles, one of which was converted into a mobile command center for the SWAT team.” The county also received “surveillance equipment, cold weather gear, tools, battle dress uniforms, flak jackets, chemical suits, computers, and office equipment.”
-Also, this comes as a suggestion from a friend: Not sure if you do Twitter but Patrick Skinner is an outstanding follow on this subject. He doesn't focus on the racism aspect per se but his philosophy of policing is really outstanding and directly relevant to this post. He's had a lot to say about 2020 events, but HERE is the article that really put him on the map if you're interested.
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