AUDASE

The death of Eric Garner has rattled many thoughtful Americans of every station political belief and faith. Here is the latest New Yorker muse on this tragedy

 

 

THE HEART OF POLICING

George Packer The New Yorker

 

 

 

Few people really want to know what it takes to keep them safe. Policing is the kind of work—like sewage treatment, care of the elderly, legislating, embalming, and combat—that most of us prefer not to think about. It’s both ugly and essential, so essential that it creates a feeling of shame and resentment—and to avoid being disturbed by the thought we push it out of our minds, into the shadows, where the cops who protect us go about the dirty work of using the threat of violence to enforce the law. That’s where we want them to stay, so that we don’t have to think too much about what goes on in our defense, how the job of patrolling streets, questioning suspects, and making arrests rubs everyone raw. It breeds fear and hatred on both sides of the line. The best that citizens and police can expect from one another in a crowded, unruly city is a respectful distance.

This is true of even the most professional police department in the country, in a city whose crime rate has dropped, in some neighborhoods, to infinitesimal levels. The street peace that has settled over New York and other cities is one of the few compelling arvguments against the idea of a general American decline over the past thirty years. It came in no small degree because of changes in police tactics—changes that made formerly dicey areas of the city unimaginably safer and more orderly, while subjecting many of the city’s younger, non-white residents to routine inconvenience, sometimes humiliation, even a downturn in the trajectory of their lives. Crime became part of the story of inequality in New York—the two cities that Bill de Blasio invoked in his mayoral campaign: rates of serious crimes fell everywhere, with the greatest benefit to poorer neighborhoods, but there the price was paid in the friction and suspicion produced by stop and frisk. Prospect Heights and Greenwich Village saw only benefit.

A lot of people who moved to New York after the millennium and could afford to live in more expensive neighborhoods must have thought they had relocated to wonderland: artisanal pickles, upscale cupcake shops, Stumptown cafes, shiny playgrounds, safe subways, humming nighttime streets. How many of them wanted to think about the constant chafing between cops and young people two or three neighborhoods away that partly underwrote their happiness? Or the way the growing gulf between the two cities made the chafing harsher? The renaissance of the city has produced a different moral situation from that of the previous era, when New York was feared and shunned. The problem today is more like bad faith—the phenomenon of New Yorkers whose well-being here depends on cops whose behavior (if given a bit of thought) they don’t like.

There’s a passage in Richard Price’s tour de force novel "Clockers," published in 1992, about cops and dealers in a New Jersey city in the bad days of crack, which still stays with me after two decades. A detective named Thumper tells his partner Rocco about an incident at a housing project: a kid on the way to his fast-food job may or may not have signalled to his dealer friends to run when he saw the police approach. From there the encounter escalated, pointlessly and inexorably. "It was all about dis," Thumper tells Rocco. "The kid disrespected me by raising up in my face. I dissed him by throwing him up against the fence and doing the Johnson check. He dissed me by walking off. I dissed him by flicking his hat in front of his people. He dissed me by giving me a shove. The mother comes along, she disses me by snatching the keys. I dis her by making fun of her wheeze. Everything’s dis. Because, you know, out there all you got to your name is your heart. You got a crowd around you, you got to show heart. Not just them but us too. We go in, we don’t show heart, we let ourselves get dissed, Jesus Christ, they’ll be all over us, we might as well disband the unit." Thumper has to be seen to be in control—anything that threatens the appearance is intolerable. He doesn’t like the code, but if he doesn’t live by it, he’s doomed. "The whole thing’s a trap. You got a crowd on you, you best got to act the part or you’re nothing."

The passage made me think of Orwell’s classic 1936 essay "Shooting an Elephant": the narrator, a British imperial policeman in Burma, tracks down an elephant that’s gone on a rampage and killed a villager. At the moment of truth, he realizes that he has to shoot the elephant in spite of his horror at doing so, because of the huge crowd he’s attracted: "I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at." The essay is also about "dis" and "heart," in a different language. The British colonial officer, like the Jersey detective, is trapped and has lost his freedom to the role he has to play: "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."

　

In other words, the answer to a tragedy like Eric Garner’s death at the hands of police on Staten Island is not just body cameras, sensitivity training, grand-jury reform, and a police force that’s required to live in the city. The video of Garner’s last minutes is a grotesque study in "dis" and "heart," complete with the watching crowd and (an innovation) the citizen cameraman. In the era of "broken windows," the incident translated Detective Thumper’s speech from the crack epidemic and took it to a fatal extreme.

Does this mean that police misconduct is built into the job, should be understood as such, and forgiven? Of course not. A grand jury chose not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who administered the fatal squeeze, but he should not be on the force and maybe not even at liberty. The reforms proposed in the wake of the grand-jury decision are useful suggestions. Every democratic institution has to be subject to public scrutiny and reform. The idea that a politician who calls for changes to department practices is somehow "anti-police" is itself anti-democratic—the assumption of regimes where the law is above the law. De Blasio hurt himself in more symbolic ways: he identified closely with Al Sharpton, who never apologized for his role in the Tawana Brawley affair; and he defended an official whom he had appointed to his wife’s staff after it came out that her boyfriend, who has a long criminal record, including a manslaughter conviction as a teen-ager, made vicious anti-police comments on social media.

The Mayor is doing what he can to overcome ill will among police. It’s probably too late—in just a year he’s lost his department. This is a disaster for a city that elected de Blasio with seventy-three per cent of the vote, and that also—judging by the wide and deep sympathy expressed after the execution of two officers in Brooklyn—generally supports its police force. Patrick Lynch, the demagogue who leads the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, is playing a very dangerous game by inflaming his rank and file, politicizing funerals, countenancing an unprofessional work stoppage (imagine aggrieved nurses refusing to treat patients), and laying the two officers’ murders at de Blasio’s feet. If New Yorkers are forced to choose between the Mayor and the police, the result—already showing up in polls and public discourse—will be a racially polarized city. If the police who turned their backs on the Mayor imagine that this confrontation will bring the city around to their side, they’re deluded. The only way for the police to keep the public’s trust is by stopping crime, which requires the public’s support.

The starting point should be an honest recognition of the human reality between cops and citizens. When the police find themselves criticized, challenged, sometimes shoved back, the reason might be that dis works both ways—that they’re not the only ones who need to show heart. When the police stand around in insular groups and show no interest in talking to the people they’re protecting—a sight so regular I usually forget to be bothered by it—the reason might be that they don’t feel much solidarity with those of us who can afford to live in neighborhoods they can’t, but don’t have to absorb the hostility and take the risks.