Black Lives Matter protests focus spotlight on inequality in criminal justice system
Demonstrators marched through the North End on Saturday in an action that coincided with national protests of police shootings of black men. Police arrested 23 demonstrators.
Protests over police shootings of black men continued for the third straight week, with major demonstrations in New York City and Washington, D.C. drawing tens of thousands, and a smaller protest of about 1,000 demonstrators in Boston last weekend.
As protesters white, black, Latino and Asian take to the streets, the “Black Lives Matter” theme has generated a wider discussion about racism and the criminal justice system in the United States.
Following the Ferguson, Missouri police shooting of teenager Michael Brown, many activists called for long-sought-after policy changes — body-worn cameras for officers, shared data on police shootings, independent investigations of police shootings.
But it became clear that policies aren’t enough to protect blacks from the criminal justice system after a New York grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the New York police officer who killed Eric Garner in an illegal chokehold during an incident that was recorded on cellphone video by a bystander.
The grand jury’s refusal to see wrongdoing, despite the video evidence, points to entrenched racial attitudes among police and the U.S. public.
“The problem we have is a philosophy of white supremacy that’s pervasive,” said New York-based author and news commentator Keith Boykin. “Until we address that, we’re pretty much putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. We’re not dealing with the root cause of the problem.”
A growing body of studies has demonstrated that white police officers harbor unexamined subconscious negative attitudes toward blacks. The studies include a 2005 Florida State University study that found that police are more likely to shoot unarmed blacks than unarmed whites.
The profound effects of these attitudes have played out with increasing frequency in the news media and on social media as one police shooting after another finds its way into the national discourse – 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot dead by Cleveland, Ohio police while holding a BB gun; John Crawford III shot dead by police in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, while holding a BB gun he intended to buy for his children – often accompanied by video footage.
Yet many whites are all too willing to follow the dominant narrative of police protecting the public from crime-prone blacks. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani echoed the sentiments of many whites with his assertion that black-on-black violence is a larger problem than police shootings. That argument, which has played out in opinion pieces and in arguments on social media, underscores what some commentators say is an unwillingness among many in the white community to see the lack of respect for black life in the nation’s criminal justice system.
Demonstrators marched through Tremont Street on Saturday in an action that coincided with national protests of police shootings of black men. Police arrested 23 demonstrators.
“Changing people’s consciousness is one of the biggest challenges,” said NAACP Boston Branch President Michael Curry. “Many mainstream white folks don’t realize that the criminal justice system doesn’t work for us.”
While whites and blacks, conservatives and progressives talk past each other in their arguments around police shootings, many activists are seeing promise in the national discourse around race and criminal justice.
“In the democratic process, it’s important for our government to hear what people are saying,” said ACLU Massachusetts attorney Carlton Williams. “It’s obvious that there are a lot of people concerned. And there are more and more people feeling empowered to say ‘we’re not going to take this anymore.’”
In the Boston demonstration Saturday, whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians of all ages held Black Lives Matter signs. Some white demonstrators held signs reading “white silence = complicity.”
“It’s a great show of force,” said Jamaica Plain resident Bruce Marks, who came to the march with his wife and daughter. “You have young people and old and a cross section of all racial backgrounds. You see the same energy of the protests from the ’60s and ’70s.”
In addition to the Boston protests, demonstrations have been staged in Cambridge, Somerville and Lexington. Middle school and high school students have participated. Harvard Medical School students staged a die-in. NBA players have appeared on the court wearing Black Lives Matter tee-shirts during warm ups.
Solidarity demonstrations have been held cities around the world, including in London, Sydney, in Gaza and in Tokyo.
Curry says the energy from the demonstrations may well end up leading to substantive policy changes. Earlier this month, President Obama allocated $263 million to provide 50,000 body-worn cameras for local police departments. And Virginia Congressman Bobby Scott last week passed legislation creating a national database for data on police shootings, after multiple failed attempts.
In Massachusetts, activists are hoping the national discourse on police shootings will help move a bill sponsored by state Rep. Byron Rushing and state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz that would require police departments to report data on race and traffic stops.
At the national level, many are questioning the grand jury system, where prosecutors who work hand-in-hand with police present cases of police misconduct to jurors without an attorney to represent the victims.
As flawed as the grand jury system is, grand juries alone are not to blame for the culture of impunity surrounding police officers who kill blacks.
“We need a change the rules and regulations,” Williams said. “But that’s the smaller part. “The rules for a police officer killing someone are the same as for anyone. They’re subject to the same law. But for some reason, when police kill, and race is involved, they get a pass. We need to change the culture.”
Boykin said the kind of changes activists want to see will likely require a movement. And there are signs that the movement is already happening.
“It started from the ground up,” he said. “That is a key ingredient of any successful, long-term movement.”
