Tim Scott delivered a powerful and deeply personal speech from the Senate floor on Wednesday in which he detailed how, even inside the Capitol building, the relationship between law enforcement and the black community can be strained.
The South Carolina senator spoke of multiple instances in which he felt he had been unfairly targeted by police because of the color of his skin, including one encounter with the U.S. Capitol Police. Scott, who is black, said that as recently as last year he was stopped by a Capitol Police officer who did not recognize him as a senator even though he was wearing his member’s pin.
“The pin, I know. You, I don’t,” Scott recalled the officer saying with “a little attitude.” Scott said the tone of the encounter suggested that the officer believed he was impersonating a senator.
The South Carolina Republican said he received a call later that evening from a Capitol Police supervisor apologizing for the officer’s behavior. It was the third such call he has received from either the chief of the Capitol Police or a supervisor since joining the Senate in 2013, he said.
Scott said that in the course of one year as an elected official, he was stopped seven times by law enforcement. And while in some of those instances he was speeding, Scott said the “vast majority” of those encounters were the result of “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”
Scott’s remarks punctuate a particularly raw period in the nation, after two black men were fatally shot by police in separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota last week. Also last week, during a peaceful protest in Dallas, a gunman opened fire on police, killing five officers and wounding nine others.
During his speech, Scott also shared the story of a former staffer of his who drove a Chrysler 300, “a nice car without any question, but not a Ferrari.” The staffer wound up selling that car out of frustration after being pulled over too often in Washington, D.C., “for absolutely no reason other than for driving a nice car.” He told a similar story of his brother, a command sergeant major in the U.S. Army, who was pulled over by an officer suspicious that the car Scott’s brother was driving was stolen because it was a Volvo.
“I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself,” Scott said.
None of the encounters, Scott said, or others like them, should lead anyone to feel it necessary to break the law. Nor should it cloud the respect the public should rightly feel for law enforcement officers “who go beyond the call of duty.” But Scott pleaded in his remarks that the issues African-Americans face in dealing with law enforcement not be ignored.
“I simply ask you this: Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist,” he said. “To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear. It will simply leave you blind and the American family very vulnerable.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/tim-scott-capitol-racism-senate-225507
MATT LEWIS
10.08.17 12:00 AM ET
Call me a unicorn, but I have been outspoken about my criticism of NFL players refusing to stand for the national anthem, and I continue to believe that police brutality directed at African Americans is a serious problem.
Last summer, in the wake of the police killings of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Philando Castile, I wrote a column outlining how video had changed my perception about the prevalence of police violence directed at African Americans. The piece made some waves―NPR had me on to discuss it, and Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro name-checked me on “This Week.”
Nothing that I have said or written about the NFL has changed my mind about this other serious problem. And this seems like a good time to reiterate the fact that there is, indeed, a problem. Ironically, I want just what Colin Kaepernick says he does from his protest: To help call attention to the problem of police abuse.
As someone who currently boycotts the NFL, I hope that I have a certain amount of credibility as this messenger. However, my credibility does not compare with that of U.S. Senator Tim Scott, a black Republican, who shared his personal experience last summer.
After recounting multiple times he was harassed by the police, the South Carolina Republican offered this advice on the Senate floor: “Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist. To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear, it simply leaves you blind and the American family very vulnerable. Some search so hard to explain away injustice that they are slowly wiping away who we are as a nation. But we must come together to fulfill what we all know is possible here: peace, love, and understanding. Fairness.”
“I don't think Tim Scott was making all of that up,” says Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. “And if you don't think he would make that sort of thing up, you have to start considering the possibility that most of the other black and Latino people—NFL players or otherwise—who have had similar experiences are telling the truth, too.”
Around the same time I was writing about police abuses last year, conservative Leon Wolf posted something similar at RedState.com. It was a powerful post (you should read the whole thing), but arguably the most compelling admission was that, when it comes to police abuse, a lot of conservatives simply turn a blind eye. “A huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of police will never happen to them,” Wolf wrote. “As long as the cops keep people away from my door,” the rationale goes, “they have my blessing handling ‘the thugs’ in whatever way they see fit.”
In the wake of the NFL controversy, I caught up with Wolf to get his take on the backlash. “The NFL protests have been one of the most harmful things to happen to the movement [to forge a consensus about police abuse], in my opinion,” he told me. “It's one thing for the players to say they aren't protesting the anthem or the flag itself, but it's pretty foolhardy of them to expect Joe Q. Public not to perceive it that way.”
Conservative reformers are frequently pushed in this unenviable position. Just as Barack Obama poisoned the well for advocates of conservative immigration reform to advance their cause by unilaterally issuing his DACA order, Kaepernick complicates matters for conservatives who have been pushing issues like criminal justice reform (which includes a myriad of systemic or structural issues, many of which unfairly and disproportionately affect the black community) for years.
The only way to affect significant change is to win the hearts and minds of a broad swath of Americans. You cannot reach consensus on an issue that excludes or repels a large chunk of the population.
To be sure, some people are simply not open to hearing the truth. “There are people who, for lack of a better word, ethnically identify as conservative or Christian, but don’t see it as a principle identifier, just a demographic one. And they are as tribal as many of their political opponents,” explains conservative Erick Erickson, author of the new book Before You Wake. “Because their opponents support taking a knee, they oppose it and because the other side is outraged by police brutality, they either don’t care or defend the police.”
These tribalists won’t easily be reached. But there are plenty of others who represent a more principled , less tribalistic, brand of conservatism. These folks might not cotton to NFL players who kneel, but they also shouldn’t be allowed to turn a blind eye to a very real problem that the NFL protests clumsily attempted to highlight. We shouldn’t let them forget about the problem.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/my-fe...ce-brutality-behind-kneeling-football-players
Let me say this right off the bat: I don’t at all condone any shooting of police officers or attacking them in any way. I hope that the people responsible are caught and punished to the fullest extent of the law – which, given that the attacks appear to have been premeditated and directed at law enforcement, means the death penalty. I assume, given that these idiots chose to perpetrate their crime in Texas, that this is exactly what will happen.
Fine. Good, even.
Now let’s take a step back and look at the forces that would drive someone to do something like this yesterday. Here’s the reality that we don’t often talk about – that societies are held together less by laws and force and threats of force than we are by ethereal and fragile concepts like mutual respect and belief in the justness of the system itself.
In America, there are 376 police officers per 100,000 citizens – or one police officer per every 266 citizens. Stop and think about that. Could every police officer in America maintain order over 266 unruly people who had no respect for him him or the badge he wields? Absolutely not. The only thing that makes the situation even a little bit tenable is that the vast majority of people never think about confronting or challenging a police officer, and instead get up each day with the commitment to live their lives peacefully and lawfully, because they believe a) that they live in a society that is basically just and b) they believe that the few policemen who do exist will be there to protect them if something goes wrong and c) they have faith, by and large, that if someone commits a crime against them, they will be caught and punished.
Think, though, about what happens when these invisible bonds that are the most important part of maintaining law and order begin to dissolve – especially within a given subcommunity. Perception is, quite often, more important than reality. We are, in addition, creatures of our upbringing. The way our parents raise us to think about people and institutions shapes us to degrees that we often can’t or won’t acknowledge.
As the child of white parents who grew up in the rural panhandle of Texas, I was taught that police were there to help, any time I had a problem I should go to them. I should always follow their orders and show them the utmost respect. No one is more important and helpful to your community than the police.
Now imagine, for a minute, that your parents instead grew up as black people in the 50s or 60s in one of the many areas where police were often the agents of – let’s call it what it was – white oppression. How might that have changed, for understandable reasons, the way not only those people but also their children and their children’s children interact with the police? More importantly, how might it impact the belief that police will ever be held accountable for abuses of their power?
I think the evidence would show that the vast majority of police do their jobs with the greatest professionalism possible. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer to the reality of lingering mistrust between police and minority communities, especially in certain areas of the country. And the proliferation of cell phone video recording has really confirmed (in their minds) something they have long anecdotally believed or been taught – that police often interact with minority communities in different ways than they do with the white community.
And here’s the most important part: when they do so, they never or almost never face punishment.
Look, I don’t know. I don’t want to rush to judgment on either the Baton Rouge shooting or the Falcon Heights shooting, but based upon what we have seen, they look bad. Very bad. They look, at least at first glance, to confirm a lot of biases that people have. They look like a scenario that has played out all too often that the white community either doesn’t believe ever happens (or at least believes is at most a freak occurrence) and minority communities believe is a systemic occurrence. And they look, most importantly, like many other scenarios in which officers have skated either scot free or with a slap on their wrist.
And here is the important point and the point I have been trying to make with this excessively wordy post. The most important safety valve to prevent violence like we saw in Dallas last night is the belief that when officers do go off the rails, the legal system will punish them accordingly. If minority communities (and everyone else, for that matter) believed that, resort to reprisal killings would be either non existent or far less frequent.
But they don’t, and there’s good reason for that. And that is because a huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of police will never happen to them. As long as the cops keep people away from my door, they have my blessing handling “the thugs” in whatever way they see fit.
I see the attitude all the time even in the comments to the stories I write here at RedState. I’ll post about some story or video where someone did something to break the law and thus found themselves in contact with the police. Fine. During the course of interaction with the police, however, the police drastically escalate the confrontation using what I think any reasonable person should consider to be wildly excessive force in bringing the situation to heel, and someone ends up either seriously injured or dead. Very often, the victim of this escalation is black.
Every time I post these stories, I get a flood of comments from people who look for even the smallest hook on which to hang an excuse for the cops. “Well, he was rude and confrontational to the cop.” “Well, when the officer was trying to arrest him, he ran.” “He was ‘resisting arrest.'” (My personal favorite, which was used by several dozen people I talked to regarding Eric Garner, whose “resisting arrest” consisted entirely of turning his back to a cop and putting his hands in the air.)
Look, this is not how a free society works. Being rude/disrespectful to a cop, running from a cop, demanding in a hostile tone to know why a cop has pulled you over might well be contraindicated to the peaceful continuation of your day, but they are not an excuse for someone getting shot. I’m for the death penalty, but the kind that is carried out after, you know, a trial and some appeals – not the kind that is carried out on the spot by a cop who’s had his authority challenged in some non life-threatening way.
These excuses, though, are indicative of an abdication of critical thinking about the legal and proper application of police force that really and truly is endemic in America. Prosecutors are often guilty of it when deciding whether to indict officers for excessive force. More often, they know that jury members will be extremely guilty of it if they decide to bring charges at all, which makes the whole exercise not worth their time.
Here’s all you need to know: since 2000, NYPD officers have shot and killed about 180 people. Only 3 of those officers was even indicted for anything and only 1 was convicted, for a non-jail time offense. And these statistics are fairly typical of the nation at large.
Reasonable people can disagree about the prevalence of police brutality in America, and the extent to which race plays a factor in it. I don’t think reasonable people can disagree that excessive police force is punished way less often than it actually happens. And that’s the kind of problem that leads to people taking up guns and committing acts of violence – tragically (and with evil intent) against cops who as far as we know have done nothing wrong.
But people’s willingness to act rationally and within the confines of the law and the political system is generally speaking directly proportional to their belief that the law and political system will ever punish wrongdoing. And right now, that belief is largely broken, especially in many minority communities.
And it’s the blind, uncritical belief that the police never (or only in freak circumstances) do anything wrong that is a major contributing factor to that.
It’s at least as much of a factor, if not more so, than the blind, uncritical belief that the police always do things wrong – which many conservatives today are blaming in entirety for what happened in Dallas.
The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle, but acknowledging that requires looking in the mirror in a way that makes us all a little uncomfortable.
https://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/07/08/uncomfortable-reason-came-dallas-yesterday/
The South Carolina senator spoke of multiple instances in which he felt he had been unfairly targeted by police because of the color of his skin, including one encounter with the U.S. Capitol Police. Scott, who is black, said that as recently as last year he was stopped by a Capitol Police officer who did not recognize him as a senator even though he was wearing his member’s pin.
“The pin, I know. You, I don’t,” Scott recalled the officer saying with “a little attitude.” Scott said the tone of the encounter suggested that the officer believed he was impersonating a senator.
The South Carolina Republican said he received a call later that evening from a Capitol Police supervisor apologizing for the officer’s behavior. It was the third such call he has received from either the chief of the Capitol Police or a supervisor since joining the Senate in 2013, he said.
Scott said that in the course of one year as an elected official, he was stopped seven times by law enforcement. And while in some of those instances he was speeding, Scott said the “vast majority” of those encounters were the result of “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”
Scott’s remarks punctuate a particularly raw period in the nation, after two black men were fatally shot by police in separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota last week. Also last week, during a peaceful protest in Dallas, a gunman opened fire on police, killing five officers and wounding nine others.
During his speech, Scott also shared the story of a former staffer of his who drove a Chrysler 300, “a nice car without any question, but not a Ferrari.” The staffer wound up selling that car out of frustration after being pulled over too often in Washington, D.C., “for absolutely no reason other than for driving a nice car.” He told a similar story of his brother, a command sergeant major in the U.S. Army, who was pulled over by an officer suspicious that the car Scott’s brother was driving was stolen because it was a Volvo.
“I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself,” Scott said.
None of the encounters, Scott said, or others like them, should lead anyone to feel it necessary to break the law. Nor should it cloud the respect the public should rightly feel for law enforcement officers “who go beyond the call of duty.” But Scott pleaded in his remarks that the issues African-Americans face in dealing with law enforcement not be ignored.
“I simply ask you this: Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist,” he said. “To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear. It will simply leave you blind and the American family very vulnerable.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/tim-scott-capitol-racism-senate-225507
MATT LEWIS
10.08.17 12:00 AM ET
Call me a unicorn, but I have been outspoken about my criticism of NFL players refusing to stand for the national anthem, and I continue to believe that police brutality directed at African Americans is a serious problem.
Last summer, in the wake of the police killings of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Philando Castile, I wrote a column outlining how video had changed my perception about the prevalence of police violence directed at African Americans. The piece made some waves―NPR had me on to discuss it, and Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro name-checked me on “This Week.”
Nothing that I have said or written about the NFL has changed my mind about this other serious problem. And this seems like a good time to reiterate the fact that there is, indeed, a problem. Ironically, I want just what Colin Kaepernick says he does from his protest: To help call attention to the problem of police abuse.
As someone who currently boycotts the NFL, I hope that I have a certain amount of credibility as this messenger. However, my credibility does not compare with that of U.S. Senator Tim Scott, a black Republican, who shared his personal experience last summer.
After recounting multiple times he was harassed by the police, the South Carolina Republican offered this advice on the Senate floor: “Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist. To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear, it simply leaves you blind and the American family very vulnerable. Some search so hard to explain away injustice that they are slowly wiping away who we are as a nation. But we must come together to fulfill what we all know is possible here: peace, love, and understanding. Fairness.”
“I don't think Tim Scott was making all of that up,” says Radley Balko, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces. “And if you don't think he would make that sort of thing up, you have to start considering the possibility that most of the other black and Latino people—NFL players or otherwise—who have had similar experiences are telling the truth, too.”
Around the same time I was writing about police abuses last year, conservative Leon Wolf posted something similar at RedState.com. It was a powerful post (you should read the whole thing), but arguably the most compelling admission was that, when it comes to police abuse, a lot of conservatives simply turn a blind eye. “A huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of police will never happen to them,” Wolf wrote. “As long as the cops keep people away from my door,” the rationale goes, “they have my blessing handling ‘the thugs’ in whatever way they see fit.”
In the wake of the NFL controversy, I caught up with Wolf to get his take on the backlash. “The NFL protests have been one of the most harmful things to happen to the movement [to forge a consensus about police abuse], in my opinion,” he told me. “It's one thing for the players to say they aren't protesting the anthem or the flag itself, but it's pretty foolhardy of them to expect Joe Q. Public not to perceive it that way.”
Conservative reformers are frequently pushed in this unenviable position. Just as Barack Obama poisoned the well for advocates of conservative immigration reform to advance their cause by unilaterally issuing his DACA order, Kaepernick complicates matters for conservatives who have been pushing issues like criminal justice reform (which includes a myriad of systemic or structural issues, many of which unfairly and disproportionately affect the black community) for years.
The only way to affect significant change is to win the hearts and minds of a broad swath of Americans. You cannot reach consensus on an issue that excludes or repels a large chunk of the population.
To be sure, some people are simply not open to hearing the truth. “There are people who, for lack of a better word, ethnically identify as conservative or Christian, but don’t see it as a principle identifier, just a demographic one. And they are as tribal as many of their political opponents,” explains conservative Erick Erickson, author of the new book Before You Wake. “Because their opponents support taking a knee, they oppose it and because the other side is outraged by police brutality, they either don’t care or defend the police.”
These tribalists won’t easily be reached. But there are plenty of others who represent a more principled , less tribalistic, brand of conservatism. These folks might not cotton to NFL players who kneel, but they also shouldn’t be allowed to turn a blind eye to a very real problem that the NFL protests clumsily attempted to highlight. We shouldn’t let them forget about the problem.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/my-fe...ce-brutality-behind-kneeling-football-players
Let me say this right off the bat: I don’t at all condone any shooting of police officers or attacking them in any way. I hope that the people responsible are caught and punished to the fullest extent of the law – which, given that the attacks appear to have been premeditated and directed at law enforcement, means the death penalty. I assume, given that these idiots chose to perpetrate their crime in Texas, that this is exactly what will happen.
Fine. Good, even.
Now let’s take a step back and look at the forces that would drive someone to do something like this yesterday. Here’s the reality that we don’t often talk about – that societies are held together less by laws and force and threats of force than we are by ethereal and fragile concepts like mutual respect and belief in the justness of the system itself.
In America, there are 376 police officers per 100,000 citizens – or one police officer per every 266 citizens. Stop and think about that. Could every police officer in America maintain order over 266 unruly people who had no respect for him him or the badge he wields? Absolutely not. The only thing that makes the situation even a little bit tenable is that the vast majority of people never think about confronting or challenging a police officer, and instead get up each day with the commitment to live their lives peacefully and lawfully, because they believe a) that they live in a society that is basically just and b) they believe that the few policemen who do exist will be there to protect them if something goes wrong and c) they have faith, by and large, that if someone commits a crime against them, they will be caught and punished.
Think, though, about what happens when these invisible bonds that are the most important part of maintaining law and order begin to dissolve – especially within a given subcommunity. Perception is, quite often, more important than reality. We are, in addition, creatures of our upbringing. The way our parents raise us to think about people and institutions shapes us to degrees that we often can’t or won’t acknowledge.
As the child of white parents who grew up in the rural panhandle of Texas, I was taught that police were there to help, any time I had a problem I should go to them. I should always follow their orders and show them the utmost respect. No one is more important and helpful to your community than the police.
Now imagine, for a minute, that your parents instead grew up as black people in the 50s or 60s in one of the many areas where police were often the agents of – let’s call it what it was – white oppression. How might that have changed, for understandable reasons, the way not only those people but also their children and their children’s children interact with the police? More importantly, how might it impact the belief that police will ever be held accountable for abuses of their power?
I think the evidence would show that the vast majority of police do their jobs with the greatest professionalism possible. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer to the reality of lingering mistrust between police and minority communities, especially in certain areas of the country. And the proliferation of cell phone video recording has really confirmed (in their minds) something they have long anecdotally believed or been taught – that police often interact with minority communities in different ways than they do with the white community.
And here’s the most important part: when they do so, they never or almost never face punishment.
Look, I don’t know. I don’t want to rush to judgment on either the Baton Rouge shooting or the Falcon Heights shooting, but based upon what we have seen, they look bad. Very bad. They look, at least at first glance, to confirm a lot of biases that people have. They look like a scenario that has played out all too often that the white community either doesn’t believe ever happens (or at least believes is at most a freak occurrence) and minority communities believe is a systemic occurrence. And they look, most importantly, like many other scenarios in which officers have skated either scot free or with a slap on their wrist.
And here is the important point and the point I have been trying to make with this excessively wordy post. The most important safety valve to prevent violence like we saw in Dallas last night is the belief that when officers do go off the rails, the legal system will punish them accordingly. If minority communities (and everyone else, for that matter) believed that, resort to reprisal killings would be either non existent or far less frequent.
But they don’t, and there’s good reason for that. And that is because a huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of police will never happen to them. As long as the cops keep people away from my door, they have my blessing handling “the thugs” in whatever way they see fit.
I see the attitude all the time even in the comments to the stories I write here at RedState. I’ll post about some story or video where someone did something to break the law and thus found themselves in contact with the police. Fine. During the course of interaction with the police, however, the police drastically escalate the confrontation using what I think any reasonable person should consider to be wildly excessive force in bringing the situation to heel, and someone ends up either seriously injured or dead. Very often, the victim of this escalation is black.
Every time I post these stories, I get a flood of comments from people who look for even the smallest hook on which to hang an excuse for the cops. “Well, he was rude and confrontational to the cop.” “Well, when the officer was trying to arrest him, he ran.” “He was ‘resisting arrest.'” (My personal favorite, which was used by several dozen people I talked to regarding Eric Garner, whose “resisting arrest” consisted entirely of turning his back to a cop and putting his hands in the air.)
Look, this is not how a free society works. Being rude/disrespectful to a cop, running from a cop, demanding in a hostile tone to know why a cop has pulled you over might well be contraindicated to the peaceful continuation of your day, but they are not an excuse for someone getting shot. I’m for the death penalty, but the kind that is carried out after, you know, a trial and some appeals – not the kind that is carried out on the spot by a cop who’s had his authority challenged in some non life-threatening way.
These excuses, though, are indicative of an abdication of critical thinking about the legal and proper application of police force that really and truly is endemic in America. Prosecutors are often guilty of it when deciding whether to indict officers for excessive force. More often, they know that jury members will be extremely guilty of it if they decide to bring charges at all, which makes the whole exercise not worth their time.
Here’s all you need to know: since 2000, NYPD officers have shot and killed about 180 people. Only 3 of those officers was even indicted for anything and only 1 was convicted, for a non-jail time offense. And these statistics are fairly typical of the nation at large.
Reasonable people can disagree about the prevalence of police brutality in America, and the extent to which race plays a factor in it. I don’t think reasonable people can disagree that excessive police force is punished way less often than it actually happens. And that’s the kind of problem that leads to people taking up guns and committing acts of violence – tragically (and with evil intent) against cops who as far as we know have done nothing wrong.
But people’s willingness to act rationally and within the confines of the law and the political system is generally speaking directly proportional to their belief that the law and political system will ever punish wrongdoing. And right now, that belief is largely broken, especially in many minority communities.
And it’s the blind, uncritical belief that the police never (or only in freak circumstances) do anything wrong that is a major contributing factor to that.
It’s at least as much of a factor, if not more so, than the blind, uncritical belief that the police always do things wrong – which many conservatives today are blaming in entirety for what happened in Dallas.
The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle, but acknowledging that requires looking in the mirror in a way that makes us all a little uncomfortable.
https://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2016/07/08/uncomfortable-reason-came-dallas-yesterday/
