Bad Apples, Introduction

Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police when they are not attacking or have a weapon: George Floyd. Black teenagers are 21 times more likely than White teenagers to be killed by police: Tamir Rice and Antwon Rose. A Black person is killed every 40 hours by police: Jonathan Ferrell and Koryn Gaines. One in every 1,000 Black people are killed by police: Breonna Taylor. And, as sobering as these statistics are, they are improvements to the past. These statistics are the reason why from Minneapolis to Los Angeles people are protesting, marching, and rioting.

We must wonder if we would even know about George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, or Christian Cooper without phone videos. These incidents should make us all wonder how many more like them there are that did not get the opportunity to become martyred hashtags. Most Black people will tell you there are many more unnamed martyrs than named ones. In the words of Will Smith: “Racism is not getting worse. It is getting filmed.”

As I turn 40, I [Rashawn Ray] have been stopped while driving cars, sitting in parked cars, riding on buses and trains, walking, running, studying, eating, and clubbing. I have been cussed out, thrown up against concrete walls, and arrested by police. I have a PhD, am a professor at a major university, and do not have a criminal record. I also have several members of my family who are retired or former police and military. My great uncle, Walter J. Gooch, was the first Black chief of police in my hometown of Murfreesboro, TN. My grandfather, Clarence Williams, served in two wars, receiving a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. I should not even have to say these things because they do not seem to matter much.

As the father of two Black boys, I worry about the moment they will go from cute to criminal in the eyes and minds of so many people; how people will dehumanize their minds, weaponize their Blackness, and criminalize their bodies; how no credential, no degree, no level of income or wealth, no smile, no level of professionalism or grace can protect my babies from the gaze and guise of police violence and white supremacist stereotypes: Christian Cooper and Omar Jimenez (Ray 1-2)

Calls to reform, defund or dismantle police departments are being brought forth as solutions to the systemic racism that pervades many police departments in Texas and across the country. There is a tension between those who believe that there are “a few bad apples” and others who contend that departments in certain municipalities are so problematic that the system of policing has to change (Awad 1).

From Atlanta to Buffalo, New York, officers handling protests are being charged after violent videos spread, contradicting the officers' testimonies. When asked about the incidents, [Trump] national security advisor Robert O’Brien said in an interview with CNN that the issue is the result of a "few bad apples," not a result of systemic racism.

At a House committee hearing on police brutality on Tuesday, Republican Rep. Mike Johnson blamed problems in law enforcement on a "few bad apples."

And on Thursday at a discussion on race relations and policing, President Donald Trump stated, "You always have a bad apple, no matter where you go," claiming bad actors will always be a part of life, but "there aren't too many of them in the police department" (Cunningham 4).

The focus on a few bad apples is misguided at best and dangerous at worst. To root out racism, we need to fix the barrels.

… the killing of George Floyd demonstrates how one bad apple may have spoiled the bunch from a systemic racism perspective.

Derek Chauvin, the officer who is being charged with second degree murder, was able to snuff out George Floyd while three other officers watched and did not intervene. The other three officers are being charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder, given that it was their inaction that also led to murder.

Let’s assume that Chauvin is the bad apple, a status cemented by at least 17 prior complaints lodged against him. His presence probably ruined the integrity of his fellow officers to the point where they stood by and let their fellow colleague murder a man. However, it was unlikely that Chauvin was the first bad apple in the Minnesota Police Department. Given other prior allegations lodged against the department, there was something about the system itself that corrupted the officers, perpetuating the creation of more bad apples. This gives credence to the notion of systemic racism.

The fact that two of the officers involved in the George Floyd case were rookie officers drives home the point that it is something about the system itself. One was working his third shift as an officer, and the other had been an officer for only four days. They looked to their more senior colleagues to figure out what to do.

The “bad apples” narrative is also being used to describe excessive force used by police officers during these racial protests. Some of the more recent instances caught on camera include: The pushing of a 75-year-old protester by two Buffalo police officers that resulted in the elderly man hospitalized in serious condition. The excessive use of force on college students in Atlanta that included the use of a Taser on one of the students. And a New York Police Department vehicle veers toward a group of protesters.

How many bad apples do you need before the “bunch” is spoiled?

...

In the words of Chris Rock: “Bad apples? Some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody gotta be good” (Awad 1-3)

Paul Butler is a law professor at Georgetown, a former federal prosecutor, and the author of the 2017 book Chokehold: Policing Black Men. His work has long focused on the fundamentals of America’s criminal justice system and why they keep reproducing the same outcomes for black Americans. Here are excerpts of an interview he did for Vox Magazine.

The point of policing the hood is to demonstrate that the police officer dominates. That he’s the man, regardless of gender, that the officer is the boss, and that everybody else is subordinate. The way that that message is communicated is with fear. Fear for your physical safety. I called this “torture lite” in my book Chokehold, and some people thought that that was extreme. But I was actually thinking about a specific thing in international human rights law, and a specific evolution of torture, from the horrible pulling out of your fingernails to the way it works now — which is to make people feel both humiliated and terrified that anything could happen to them at any moment.

This attitude is present in a lot of police officers who work in communities of color, and it defines the dynamic between them and the people they’re supposed to be serving. It impacts all of us. I went to a fancy college and law school; I have a good job and drive a nice car. But every time there’s a police car behind me, my heart starts beating quickly. Every black man I know has the same story. Because you just never know.

Let’s think about the Floyd case. Before we get to the killing, let’s think about the arrest. The store owner called the police and said that someone had tried to pass a fake $20 bill. The police respond, and what they do is virtually impossible to imagine happening to a white person. What they do is to approach Mr. Floyd’s car like he’s a violent thug. They order Mr. Floyd and the passengers to exit the car. One officer has his hand on his gun. They put Mr. Floyd in handcuffs. When he falls to the ground, they leave him on the ground in handcuffs, and then, as the whole world knows, they hold him down by his back and knee and legs for 10 minutes until he dies. I just can’t imagine that happening to a white person over a $20 bill.

… a lot of the conduct that people of color complain about is totally legal. … The defense [in the George Floyd case] will be that their use of force was reasonable. And they have a case to make. They don’t have a great case, given that Mr. Floyd was handcuffed, but what they will say is that he was resisting arrest and they used reasonable force to subdue him.

Outside of that case, in theory, the power that police have is unreal. I have a police officer buddy who comes and visits my criminal law class, and to demonstrate how much power he has, he invites my students to go on a ride-along in his car, to see what it’s like to patrol the streets of DC. He plays a game with them called Pick That Car. He tells the student, “Pick any car that you want, and I’ll stop it.” So the student will say, “How about that white Camry over there.”

… he says that he could follow any car, and after five minutes or three blocks, the driver will commit some traffic infraction, and then under the law he has the power to stop the car, to order the driver and the passengers to get out of the car. If he has reasonable suspicion that they might be armed or dangerous, he could touch their bodies, he can frisk them, he can ask to search their car. And it’s totally legal. That’s an example of the extraordinary power that police have.

And that extraordinary power, that constitutional power, is used more aggressively against black and brown men than against white soccer moms.

I don’t think police officers are any more racist than law professors or doctors or anybody else. In fact, I think that some people go into that work because they want to be warriors, and that’s not constructive, so when we think about change, we need to think about guardianship as a model, not war.

But I think a lot of people go into the work because they really want to help communities, and they really want to make a difference, and this belief is based on my experience as a prosecutor working with police officers of all backgrounds and of all races. So I don’t think that police officers are especially racist. But I do think we give them tools and authority in a context that leads them to deploy it unjustly against people of color.

So the problem is about culture, and it runs much deeper than a few racists here and there.

[Interviewer]: … how is it that non-racist cops, or cops who set out with good intentions, succumb to perverse incentives and end up enforcing inequalities they themselves would probably reject in the abstract?

The culture of law enforcement is very much a paramilitary culture. You’re part of a team and you have to have each other’s back. Part of the reason your question is so important is that we’re not just talking about white cops, we’re also talking about black cops. Police officers of color get caught up in the same loops. In hip-hop, there’s a lot of interest in black police officers, and the message you often hear is that black officers are actually worse than white officers, because they want to show off for the white cops.

… we can save lives in other ways before we [attempt to] crush white supremacy.

So in the meantime, we can make a difference by teaching cops to intervene when their peers are crossing the line, by teaching them how to deescalate, by changing our entire approach to nonviolent criminal arrests. These things are not going to bring the revolution, but they can save lives.

Martin Luther King says the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. I hope that’s right. One of the most poignant moments of that horrific video [of Floyd’s death] is there’s a bystander who says to the cop, “Bro, he’s human.” The truth is that I don’t think those police officers saw Mr. Floyd as human. And I’m not sure that’s a problem that can be solved by a reform (Illing 1-6).

A growing body of research suggests that some of the most widely adopted reform efforts have not succeeded at curbing police violence in the ways the policies intended.

Research into the use of body cameras by police officers has showing no statistical difference in behaviors or reduction in force when the cameras are on. Body cameras also haven’t stopped egregious killings, have rarely led to discipline or termination, and have almost never yielded charges or convictions.

In Oakland, California, a police department monitor found that officers were failing to properly turn on cameras nearly 20% of the time.

…

Policies aimed at preventing excessive force and protecting free speech rights at protests have similarly led to little change. In protests across the country this week officers from some of the same departments that enacted reforms were seen violating those policies.

“The issue is not a ‘bad apples’ problem,” said Alisa Bierria, an organizer with Survived and Punished, a prison abolition group. “There is something specific about the institution of policing that is intrinsically violent.”

In Austin, policy dictates that officers may use beanbag rounds to de-escalate potentially deadly situations or “riotous behavior” that could cause injury. But at one of the early protests after Floyd’s death, police fired a beanbag round at a 16-year-old boy’s head, even though he was alone on a hill far from officers, and appeared to be watching the events. His brother said the ammunition fractured his skull and required emergency surgery.

There is also minimal evidence that implicit bias trainings affect officers’ prejudiced behavior on the job, and some research suggesting they could even be counterproductive, making officers resentful and more entrenched in racist viewpoints. In San Jose, California, earlier this month, a black community activist who had trained police on implicit bias for years, and personally knew the chief and others, tried to de-escalate a confrontation between officers and protesters. Police shot him in the groin with a rubber bullet, possibly preventing him from having children.

These kinds of repeated scandals are reminders that misconduct, abuse and brutality aren’t isolated acts that reforms can fix, activists said.

That idea was exemplified this month in Buffalo when two officers were suspended after video showed them shoving a 75-year-old peace activist to the ground. More than 50 officers, the entire emergency response team, resigned from that unit after the suspension, apparently in support of the two colleagues.

…

But given the failure of many past reforms, a coalition of activists  actively opposes such moderate policy shifts and argues the US needs more radical change, pointing at the failures of past reforms. These activists say that it would not only be a waste of the momentum of these global protests, but that continuing to rely on police departments to address their own violence will simply lead to ongoing harm.

They point at the continued power and influence of police unions and legal protections for police officers accused of wrongdoing and excessive force as barriers to change. If police and politicians who oversee law enforcement continue to adopt policies that focus on fixing individual behaviors, they say, it will not address institutional and deeply embedded cultural problems.

Instead, they are backing efforts to immediately reduce police power and size, as a way to move toward dismantling police departments and creating different models of safety (Levin 1-4).

In order to fundamentally solve police brutality, we have to replant the roots of rotten trees within law enforcement. To deal with rotten roots, America needs to be honest that law enforcement originated from slave patrols meant to capture my descendants who aimed to flee from enslavement. America has not fully dealt with this. We also have to deal with the “above the law” mentality of officers, the fact that fear is used as an excuse to enact force, and the blue wall of silence that extends from police departments to prosecutor’s offices and courtrooms.

Most importantly, there needs to be a restructuring of civilian payouts for police misconduct. Eventually, there will be a large civil payout for the death of George Floyd. Troublingly, his family’s taxpayer money will be used to pay for the dehumanization of his body. Typically, officers are immune from the financial impacts of these civil payouts. Since 2010, the city of St. Louis has paid over $33 million and Baltimore was found liable for about $50 million for police misconduct. Over the past 20 years, Chicago spent over $650 million on police misconduct cases. …

My policy recommendation is for police department insurances to replace taxpayer money concerning civilian payouts for police misconduct. This restructuring will allow for police chiefs to better identify bad apples and justify their removal. Healthcare uses this model to make determinations about physicians. When hospital premiums increase due to medical malpractice, hospitals perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine if physicians should allow to continue surgeries.

Furthermore, bad apples should not be allowed to proliferate and spread to other trees. For many people, it is clear that the Minneapolis officers should have been fired long ago. Chavin has had 18 misconduct complaints against him, as have some of the other officers involved. While being fired instantly sends a clear message about accountability, this should be commonplace in a country that should treat every human life like it matters. However, it needs to be ensured they cannot work in law enforcement again. If this happened with the officers who killed Tamir Rice and Antwon Rose, those teenagers may still be alive (Ray 3-4).

Works cited:

Awad, Germine. “Saying ‘A Few Bad Apples’ Does Not End Systemic Racism in Policing.” UT News, June 22, 2020. Net. https://news.utexas.edu/2020/06/22/saying-a-few-bad-apples-does-not-end-systemic-racism-in-policing/

Cunningham, Malorie. “'A Few Bad Apples': Phrase Describing Rotten Police Officers Used to Have Different Meaning.” ABC News, June 14. 2020. Net. https://abcnews.go.com/US/bad-apples-phrase-describing-rotten-police-officers-meaning/story?id=71201096

Illing, Sean. “Why the Policing Problem Isn’t about ‘a Few Bad Apples’.” Vox, June 6, 2020. Net. https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/6/2/21276799/george-floyd-protest-criminal-justice-paul-butler

Levin, Sam. “’It's Not about Bad Apples': How US Police Reforms Have Failed to Stop Brutality and Violence.” The Guardian, June 16, 2020. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/16/its-not-about-bad-apples-how-us-police-reforms-have-failed-to-stop-brutality-and-violence

Ray, Rashawn. “Bad Apples Come from Rotten Trees in Policing.” Brookings, May 30, 2020. Net. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/05/30/bad-apples-come-from-rotten-trees-in-policing/