Fibre of the Brain

Wearing did the right thing

The New Haven Police Department doesn't often come across as being smart. After all, this is a force that hasn't been able to find any lead more promising than a stray cat hair two years after Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin was brutally murdered right under its nose. But when Police Chief Melvin Wearing used his discretion to promote black police officers over white counterparts who scored slightly higher, he was finally doing something smart. Unfortunately, Wearing was breaking a stupid law in the process.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

In October, Wearing was charged with racially discriminating against the white officers whom he had chosen not to promote. His defense has been that he was only trying to choose the best officers. Much in the same way that Yale doesn't choose its incoming class based solely on SAT scores, the argument says, officers should not be chosen solely on the basis of standardized tests. But what Wearing and his colleagues aren't allowed to say is that in some cases, choosing the best officer means choosing the black officer.

As a black officer himself, Wearing knows that—whether or not anyone wants to admit it—race matters. This is a fact. It isn't a fact that anyone likes to talk about, but it is one that that everyone is obsessed with trying to fix. Yale tries to fix it with affirmative action. The University of California system tries to fix it by getting rid of affirmative action. President-elect-in-waiting George W. Bush, DC '68, tries to fix it by kissing up to Colin Powell and marching his half-Latino nephew around at political events. His father tried to fix it by appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

Unsurprisingly, no one's fixed it yet. And when it comes to the criminal justice system, it's getting harder to fix every day.

A New Haven charter says that race cannot be used as a factor in choosing police officers to promote. But anyone who has ever bothered to look around New Haven—and to look at who, aside from the occasional angry drunk kid at an SAE party, actually interacts with the police—could see that this charter is only serving to keep the city in a state of denial. Most of the people who get picked up by police in New Haven are not white. Statewide, for example, of the 980 people in Connecticut who are presently in prison for drug possession, 466 are African American and 309 are Hispanic. And that includes any white kids in the state's plush suburbs who get caught packing a bowl in their high school parking lot.

In some parts of New Haven, black people are 10 times more likely than whites to get picked up for marijuana. The bottom line: whereas most police officers are white, most of the people they arrest are black. Police officers obviously see many black people as criminals. Is it any wonder, then, that many black people see police officers not as protectors but as predators?

This issue is nothing new. It has been argued about and analyzed and attacked and denied. Social scientists have labelled both ends of it—racial profiling, police distrust, the criminalization of the black male. But what no one seems willing to do is to take those labels and do something pragmatic and productive with them. And that means accepting, at least for now, the basic fact that race matters. Poor black men living on the other side of Dwight Street do not trust white police officers. White police officers do not trust poor black men. The preliminary solution, if you can get past the taboo of it, is obvious. Do what Wearing was trying to do. Police black citizens with black police officers.

This is not a permanent solution, nor is it necessarily a desirable one. But it is at least the start of one, and with some U.S. cities rotating five percent of their black communities through prisons, it's increasingly becoming a necessary one. Black citizens in tough urban neighborhoods will not trust the police until they are faced with police officers to whom they can at least begin to relate. Likewise, police officers working in those neighborhoods are not likely to begin to trust its inhabitants until they are faced with people to whom they can begin to relate.

Until racism is quashed and the underlying resentment resulting from it disappears—a day that is, realistically, a very long way off—eliminating the issue of racial differences between citizen and police officer is the easiest way to build that trust and begin to erase the gross inequities in our criminal justice system, thus producing a fairer and more effective police force.

Wearing owes it to the people of New Haven to put their interests before the interests of his officers. If the people would be better served by black officers, then he should make an effort to give them black officers. This is not to say that he should promote anyone who is incompetent, or refuse to promote white officers. But he would be foolhardy to act with colorblind vision in a city that is painfully aware of its colors.

Back to Opinion...