(pensive instrumental music)
- [Khalil] The history
of American policing
has been a system that's
been at the forefront
of regulating Black people's freedom,
and after slavery, their citizenship.
And so it doesn't make
much sense to think about
policing as a problem
of a few rotten apples.
- [Narrator] Because the problem reaches
all the way to the root.
Today, calls for police
reform are everywhere,
but does piecemeal police
reform actually work?
If the past 100 years of investigations
into police brutality as any clue,
the answer is a resounding no.
- [Khalil] This is why
reforming the police
has never been enough.
- [Narrator] This is
Khalil Gibran Muhammad.
- I am a professor of history,
race, and public policy
at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The truth is for a century,
for literally 100 years,
there have been intense
official investigations
into systemic police brutality.
- [Narrator] To be clear,
we're only focusing on
investigations into the police.
The modern police force in the
United States has been around
for closer to 200 years,
and that's not even counting
precursors to law enforcement,
like slave catchers in the south.
We're focusing on past race riots
and resulting investigations
which have proven two things.
One, racism and brutality is systemic
within the police force,
and two, after repeatedly
diagnosing the illness,
we fail to treat it over and over again.
Simply reforming the police
has proven to be a futile task.
Let's review the historical evidence.
We're gonna start in the middle,
the Civil Rights Movement, 1960s.
- [Khalil] Dozens and
dozens and dozens of cities
become ground zero for the
fight between Black residents
and justice where police
officers were concerned.
- I think the police acted
terribly, absolutely atrociously.
I saw wanton beating of
people who had not thrown
any bottles or bricks or anything else,
we're merely walking along the streets,
beaten till their heads were bloody
and they were lying on the pavement.
- [Narrator] Riots broken
out in Los Angeles, Newark,
Detroit, New York City, Atlanta,
Chicago, Tampa, Cincinnati,
and that's just naming a few.
- [Khalil] By 1967, the
president at the time,
Lyndon Baines Johnson, called
for a national commission
on civil disorders.
The Kerner Commission found
that across these various cities
police brutality is pervasive.
Indiscriminate stops and searches
that police systematically harass youths.
And they added that the
beat patrolman, himself,
is expected to participate
and to file a minimum number
of stop and frisk or field
interrogation reports
for each tour of duty.
- [Narrator] A Black social psychologist
named Kenneth Clark testified
before the commission.
- [Khalil] Clark was astounded
that the commissioners
themselves seem to have
very little awareness
of how so many opportunities
to fix policing had come
and gone before.
- [Narrator] Clark tells them-
- [Khalil] "I read the report
of the 1919 riot in Chicago
"as if I were reading the report
of the Harlem riot of 1935,
"the Harlem riot of 1943,
the Watts riot of 1965.
"It is a kind of 'Alice in Wonderland'
"with the same moving picture
reshown over and over again.
"The same analysis, the
same recommendations,
"and the same inaction."
- [Narrator] And those
reports Clark mentioned,
they all did sound the same.
Look at Chicago in 1919.
- [Khalil] Systemic violence took place
in the wake of the stoning
to death of a 17 year old
Black boy by the name of Eugene Williams.
He was swimming with his
friends in Lake Michigan,
happened to cross an invisible color line.
That color line extended
from the beach into the water
and when Eugene Williams crossed it,
white beachgoers stoned him to death.
- [Narrator] Police on
the scene refused to help
the Black people of color.
They enforced segregation
and Black American demand
for justice was met
with white violence.
- [Khalil] A wave of racial
violence directed towards
new Black migrants and their neighborhoods
pulling them off of streetcars,
shooting at them on the
stoops of their own homes.
- [Narrator] The violence finally ended
after days and days of rioting.
- [Khalil] The governor
of Illinois called for
a blue ribbon commission,
the first one to look at
systemic police violence
in the United States of America.
The investigation pointed
out that police were part
of an ecosystem to enforce
those lines of segregation
that protected white interests.
Criminal justice officials admitted,
as white men in law enforcement,
that they and their rank and file officers
profiled, stereotyped,
and treated African American
suspects differently.
And the recommendations did
not lead to systematic change.
In fact, they led to more racial turmoil.
- [Narrator] In his testimony,
Clark also mentions-
- [Narrator And Khalil] The
Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943.
- [Narrator] So let's go
further down the rabbit hole
to the Great Depression Harlem.
- [Khalil] There was a young
Afro-Puerto Rican teenager
who had gone into a local store
where he'd been accused of shoplifting.
- [Narrator] Rumors
circulated leading the crowds
to believe he had been beaten by police
or worse, even killed.
In response, the community rioted.
- [Khalil] They were responding
to systemic discrimination
and prejudice where police
officers were expressing
the racism of white New Yorkers
against Black Harlemites.
What the Harlem riot found
out in its investigation
about 6,000 arrests,
more than 90% of them
were for non-violent,
mostly status offenses.
Disorderly conduct, suspicious characters,
open containers, all the
things that were being policed,
but in fact, represented people living in
a low income community
having to do the kinds of
public vices that wealthier people,
or whiter people in this
case, do behind close doors.
But the mayor buried the
report and it was only because
of a Black newspaper,
"The Amsterdam News",
that the report later became published,
which is how we know
what was in that report
in the first place.
- [Narrator] Harlem rioted again in 1943
after police attacked an
African American soldier
who was defending a Black woman.
As before, the even proved
to be a boiling point
after unending injustice.
- [Khalil] We have to
remember that the numbers
of lynchings of African
Americans in the nation
was growing by the thousands,
such that by the late 1940s,
the number had topped more
than 4,000 recorded lynchings,
and yet no one was ever
punished for that mob violence.
- [Narrator] Another
blue ribbon commission,
another report pointing
out systemic racism
and brutality in the police,
another failure to
enact meaningful change.
- Looking back from where we are today
to the Kerner Commission report,
it is an astonishing
echo that police officers
then were incentivized to
show their productivity
by systematically harassing
African Americans.
That is what we find in pattern
and practice investigations
that really began in the 1990s.
- [Narrator] Fast forward to 1992.
After the police's videotape
beating of Rodney King
and their subsequent acquittal
by an nearly all-white jury-
- [Khalil] African Americans
took to the streets
in what is now called an L.A. rebellion.
- [Narrator] This public
outcry eventually led
to the creation of the pattern
and practice investigation.
It's essentially a spruced up version
of the blue ribbon
commissions of the past.
- [Khalil] So the federal
government can prove that there is
a reason to investigate
constitutional violations
or they can use the power of
the purse by pulling the budget
from those organizations.
- [Narrator] The idea was that,
unlike the inaction of the past,
the Justice Department
and the local police
would agree to a consent decree,
finally leading to reforms.
- [Khalil] The situation
in the LAPD was so endemic
and so bad that is was
under consent decree
for nearly a decade.
- [Narrator] That meant
the police department
was having serious delays in implementing
the agreed-upon reforms.
- It's also true that even
after it was all said and done,
a leader of the local
ACLU also pointed out
evidence that they had
collected for continued
racial discrimination within
the ranks of the department.
When we look more closely at places like
the Chicago investigation
in the wake of the killing
of Laquan McDonald or the
Ferguson investigation
in the wake of the death of Michael Brown.
The system that those
quote-unquote good people
were working in was
fundamentally discriminatory
and violent towards too many people.
- [Narrator] In 2014,
Michael Brown was killed
by a police officer.
- [Khalil] Michael
Brown's body laying dead,
bleeding out for four
hours on a hot summer day
brought into clear view for
the residents of Ferguson
that Black people's lives
truly did not matter.
- [Group] No truth!
- [Narrator] What did the
resulting investigation tell us?
- [Khalil] The Department of Justice found
overwhelmingly substantial
evidence of racial bias
among police and court staff in Ferguson.
They said African Americans
were systemically harassed
and assaulted primarily to
raise money for the city.
These citations were putting
poor people in a cycle of debt
for the purposes of
extracting them for money.
- [Narrator] Chicago 2014,
Laquan McDonald was shot
by police officer Jason Van Dyke 16 times.
According to the dash cam video,
Laquan McDonald was in fact
walking away from the officers
when he was shot.
- [Khalil] What happened
in Chicago tells a story
that shows that this was never just about
a rogue police department.
Not only did Van Dyke
lie in the police report,
but the officers on the
scene supported his story.
It turned out there was a massive coverup.
- I'm angry because our
kids are being murdered,
and it's being covered up.
- It eventually led to
a massive demonstration
that yet again, police
officials could not be trusted
to reign in police officers
when they themselves
actively committed crimes
or covered up for others.
The Department of Justice
investigation found
African Americans were
subjected to 10 times
more uses of force against them
than their white counterparts.
They also noted that 98%
of recorded complaints
against police violence had resulted in
no discipline for officers.
Mayor Rahm Manuel, at the time, said,
"This report did not reflect the good work
"of the vast majority
of police on the force."
and whether or not that's true,
the system that those
quote-unquote good people
were working in was
fundamentally discriminatory
and violent towards too many people.
- [Narrator] Sandra Bland,
Breonna Taylor, George Floyd,
Philando Castile, too many
lives have been taken.
- [Khalil] With so much
evidence over so many years
of the failure of police
to police themselves,
police reform is gonna
continue to fall prey
to institutional inertia,
to police unions who refuse to participate
in any serious discussion
about the fact that
they have defended officers
in a culture that can't
be called anything else
but racist when it comes
to African American lives.
- [Narrator] Now when you hear
calls for fundamental change
or defunding the police,
you'll understand why
activists are done fighting
for piecemeal reform or
leaving it up to the police
to police themselves.
We have over a century
of evidence showing that
that doesn't work.
- [Khalil] Riot of 1935.
- [Narrator] We need to create a new,
more just policing
system rather than trying
and failing to reform a
systemically racist one.
(melancholy instrumental music)
