In recent weeks, incidents of lethal police violence against unarmed young black men have occurred in cities across the country, not just Ferguson. But in Ferguson more than anywhere, police doubled down on their role as a hostile occupying force in the community, showing off theirmassive collection of military-grade equipment and weaponry in a crude (and so far unsuccessful) attempt to intimidate the local population it purports to serve.
This isn’t the first time a local police force has turned an American city into something resembling a war zone in the name of civilian crowd control. In 1999, during the “Battle of Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization, national headlines were accompanied by images like what we’re seeing out of Ferguson today: prrotesters being tear gassed and beaten by men in uniform. The Seattle chief of police was forced to resign in the wake of that debacle.
Since that time, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper has made an astonishing political transformation, not only owning up to his own mistakes at the WTO protests, but becoming a staunch advocate of reforming the police and legalizing and regulating drugs. I got in touch with Stamper to get his take on modern police culture and the militarization of law enforcement in Ferguson and across the country.
The images we’ve seen coming out of Ferguson over the last week are reminiscent of the ones we saw 15 years ago at the WTO protests in Seattle, when you were the police chief there. At that time, you almost immediately regretted your decision to use tear gas, flash bang grenades, and other military-grade hardware against the protesters, and resigned the day after the ministerial ended. What comes to mind as you watch the Ferguson police make essentially the same mistakes that you made?
A whole lot of heartbreak, and I have to admit to some irritation, and some righteous anger. It seems like the rest of the country is hell-bent—I think back to the Occupy movement, for example, and the May Day demonstration—that so many police departments seem to outdo themselves in not paying attention to the lessons of WTO. I made, personally, the biggest mistake of my career that week. If you’re looking for a prescription of what to do wrong, you need look no further.
I think with the advent of the drug war, which certainly preceded WTO in 1999, and, for that matter, 9/11, we still see something that is extremely troubling to me, and that is that in the name of the drug war, we continue to uniform, equip, and arm police officers as soldiers, and then commit them to early morning, sometimes pre-dawn drug raids, in which the target is somebody alleged to have a half a baggie of marijuana in the family home. And of course we’ve seen tragedy after tragedy result from that kind of mentality.
And then we get 9/11. I was retired roughly two years when 9/11 struck, and one of the things that was most unsettling to me was while we had a president who was saying “Bring ‘em on,” and talking tough and so forth, we were very slowly but surely sending a message to local law enforcement that this can happen in your community. Well, of course it can, but it hasn’t, nor is it likely to. That’s no reason, obviously, not to be prepared; it’s no reason not to do training exercises; it’s no reason not to have proper equipment on hand.
Let’s assume for the moment that you’re white, you’ve grown up in an all or predominantly white community, you’ve had little interaction with African-Americans, and you are now a police officer. And you’ve been told either in the academy or upon graduation from the academy, sea story after sea story of tales from the streets. You’ve heard about dangerous people. You’ve heard about individuals who have threatened or attacked police officers, pulled a gun on a police officer. Almost always, in police departments that are not thoughtful, those stories are situated in the black community. So what’s happening at a very subtle level—you don’t have to even express a racist point of view, you’re just simply telling a story from your point of view, as factually as you’re inclined to relate it. But what you’re doing, the meta-communication of all of that is: If you’re going to get hurt as a cop, it’s going to be at the hands of a black person. It’s going to be a male.
Nobody wants to get hurt, everybody wants to get home from their job everyday without suffering great bodily injury or worse, so it’s important for outsiders and insiders to recognize that officer safety is a legitimate and very important responsibility of executive leadership, and middle management, and first-line supervisors; indeed, it’s a responsibility of peers. So that if, for example, I’m scared of young black men that I meet on my beat, but with fear being a socially unacceptable emotion in police work, I can’t really express it, then I’m going to sublimate the fear, and I’m going to compensate in my behavior. In other words, because I’m scared, I’m going to act tough. I’m going to become the bully. Officers don’t say that, not even to themselves, but it is in fact, I’m convinced, what happens when fear is operating among white cops in black neighborhoods.
These recent events would seem to suggest that this culture of institutional police racism has not changed much since you began your career. Would it be a mistake to assume that?
It has changed a lot. That doesn’t mean it’s changed necessarily for the better. If it has become a sub-rosa problem, if it has become a hidden problem, in some respects, that’s even worse. Because if you get serious about improving race relations, one of the things you need to say to your cops is, “If you use racial or ethnic slurs, if you are trigger-happy, if you are heavy-handed in working in the African-American community and we document that case, you’re history. You’re out of here.” So one of the things that happens is, the tougher the talk gets, the smarter those forces within the ranks—not everybody, but those forces within the ranks who are for whatever their personal reasons, committed to a campaign of racism—will become more subtle and discreet. But if the phenomenon is still operating, it is going to affect the way cops behave toward the community.
This post originally appeared in Vice. Photo by Jade Getz.