AUDASE

Who Should Apologize in Police Conflict?

Charles M. Blow NY TIMES

Patrick Lynch, the president of New York City’s largest police union, has once again called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to apologize to the police officers.

 

But this raises a real question: Apologize for what? Is the current tiff between the police and the mayor really just about protests and officers killed, or is it about something much bigger: diverging philosophies of basic fairness, the acquisition and application of power, and the structures of oppression demanding submission?

 

Should de Blasio apologize for running an "anti-police campaign," as the former police commissioner Ray Kelly put it, because as a candidate he promised to reform New York City’s utterly immoral stop-and-frisk program?

The New York Civil Liberties Union characterized the program this way:

"An analysis by the NYCLU revealed that innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 5 million times since 2002, and that black and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics.

 

Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent, according to the NYPD’s own reports."

Or should the police unions apologize for seeking to retain the policy even after a federal judge found that it violated the constitutional rights of minorities, calling it a "policy of indirect racial profiling" and bashing the city’s leadership for its complicity, writing:

"I also conclude that the city’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner."

The judge, The New York Times reported at the time, cited statements that then Mayor Bloomberg and Kelly made defending the policy.

 

Should de Blasio apologize for confessing that he told his biracial son to be cautious during interactions with the police, saying "because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him"?

 

Or should Lynch apologize for the outrageously inflammatory blaming of the mayor and protesters for the murders of the two police officers, saying:

"There is blood on many hands, from those that incited violence under the guise of protest to try to tear down what police officers did every day. That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor."

Who is to apologize for the poor form of hundreds, possibly thousands, of petulant police officers in using their fallen colleagues’ funerals to demonstrate a political grievance?

 

And who is to apologize to the family of Eric Garner? Who is to apologize to all of the Eric Garners and the Erica Garners? Do their lives not deserve honoring, remembering, some modicum of justice?

And to broaden the scope, who is to apologize for bias in policing in general, and generations of racially biased criminal justice, both of which have contributed to mass incarceration?

 

This isn’t only about where the apologies should begin, but where they should end.

Sure, we can search for ways to rationalize behaviors and responses, talking about personal choices, culture, crime and family structures, but those discussions mustn’t be — can’t be — separated from the context of history and the confines of institutional structures.

 

We have to decide what racial conciliation should look like in this country. Does it look like avoidance and go-along-to-get-along obsequiousness, or does it look like justice and acknowledgment of both the personal parts we play and the noxious structural bias enveloping us?

How is mutual understanding achieved without mutual respect being given and blame taken?

How do we reconcile ourselves to one another without the failures of the systems that govern us being laid bare before us?

 

It seems to me, in the New York standoff, that the mayor owes no apology for fighting to overturn stop-and-frisk, disclosing that he talked to his son about encounters with police officers, or being compassionate to protesters. That is the man New Yorkers elected.

 

This, to my mind, is an attack on him as an agent of change. It is a battle to see which arm has the most muscle: the one that wants to deny bias, explicit or implicit, in the exercise of its power while simultaneously clinging to that bias; or the one committed to questioning the power and acknowledging the bias. Eventually, we will have to wrestle with the question of which of those forces must win for us to be true and whole.

 

But for short-term expediency, it’s likely that both sides in New York will have to give a little, as a matter of politics more than principle. Everyone will have to swallow as much contrition as they can stomach.

That, however, won’t satisfy. Right is a stiff thing, and necessarily so. It doesn’t take bending well.

 

There are some apologies owed, to be sure, for a legacy of wrongs and present ones, and some of those apologies need to come from the very people demanding them.