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+1AC Police Brutality |
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+Framework |
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+Social institutions must remedy systemic violence. |
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+Young 2009 - Young, Iris Marion Prof. Political Science U. Chicago. "Five faces of oppression." Geographic thought: A praxis perspective (2009): 55-71. |
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+Finally, many groups suffer the oppression of systematic violence. Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person. In American society women, Blacks, Asians, Arabs, gay men, and lesbians live under such threats of violence, and in at least some regions Jews, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and other Spanish-speaking Americans must fear such violence as well. Physical violence against these groups is shockingly frequent. Rape Crisis Center networks estimate that more than one-third of all American women experience an attempted or successful sexual assault in their lifetimes. Manning Marable (1984, pp. 238–41) catalogues a large number of incidents of racist violence and terror against Blacks in the United States between 1980 and 1982. He cites dozens of incidents of the severe beating, killing, or rape of Blacks by police officers on duty, in which the police involved were acquitted of any wrongdoing. In 1981, moreover, there were at least five hundred documented cases of random white teenage violence against Blacks. Violence against gay men and lesbians is not only common, but has been increasing in the last five years. While the frequency of physical attack on members of these and other racially or sexually marked groups is very disturbing, I also include in this category less severe incidents of harrassment, intimidation, or ridicule simply for the purpose of degrading, humiliating, or stigmatizing group members.¶ Given the frequency of such violence in our society, why are theories of justice usually silent about it? I think the reason is that theorists do not typically take such incidents of violence and harrassment as matters of social injustice. No moral theorist would deny that such acts are very wrong. But unless all immoralities are injustices, they might wonder, why should such acts be interpreted as symptoms of social injustice? Acts of violence or petty harrassment are committed by particular individuals, often extremists, deviants, or the mentally unsound. How then can they be said to involve the sorts of institutional issues I have said are properly the subject of justice?¶ What makes violence a face of oppression is less the particular acts themselves, though these are often utterly horrible, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable. What makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, and not merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character, its existence as a social practice.¶ Violence is systemic because it is directed at members of a group simply because they are members of that group. Any woman, for example, has a reason to fear rape. Regardless of what a Black man has done to escape the oppressions of marginality or powerlessness, he lives knowing he is subject to attack or harassment. The oppression of violence consists not only in direct victimization, but in the daily knowledge shared by all members of oppressed groups that they are liable to violation, solely on account of their group identity. Just living under such a threat of attack on oneself or family or friends deprives the oppressed of freedom and dignity, and needlessly expends their energy.¶ Violence is a social practice. It is a social given that everyone knows happens and will happen again. It is always at the horizon of social imagination, even for those who do not perpetrate it. According to the prevailing social logic, some circumstances make such violence more “called for” than others. The idea of rape will occur to many men who pick up a hitchhiking woman; the idea of hounding or teasing a gay man on their dorm floor will occur to many straight male college students. Often several persons inflict the violence together, especially in all-male groupings. Sometimes violators set out looking for people to beat up, rape, or taunt. This rule-bound, social, and often premeditated character makes violence against groups a social practice.¶ Group violence approaches legitimacy, moreover, in the sense that it is tolerated. Often third parties find it unsurprising because it happens frequently and lies as a constant possibility at the horizon of the social imagination. Even when they are caught, those who perpetrate acts of group-directed violence or harrassment often receive light or no punishment. To that extent society renders their acts acceptable.¶ An important aspect of random, systemic violence is its irrationality. Xenophobic violence differs from the violence of states or ruling-class repression. Repressive violence has a rational, albeit evil, motive: rulers use it as a coercive tool to maintain their power. Many accounts of racist, sexist, or homophobic violence attempt to explain its motivation as a desire to maintain group privilege or domination. I do not doubt that fear of violence often functions to keep oppressed groups subordinate, but I do not think xenophobic violence is rationally motivated in the way that, for example, violence against strikers is.¶ On the contrary, the violation of rape, beating, killing, and harrassment of women, people of color, gays, and other marked groups is motivated by fear or hatred of those groups. Sometimes the motive may be a simple will to power, to victimize those marked as vulnerable by the very social fact that they are subject to violence. If so, this motive is secondary in the sense that it depends on a social practice of group violence. Violence-causing fear or hatred of the other at least partly involves insecurities on the part of the violators; its irrationality suggests that unconscious processes are at work. In my Chapter 5 I discuss the logic that makes some groups frightening or hateful by defining them as ugly and loathsome bodies. I offer a psychoanalytic account of the fear and hatred of some groups as bound up with fears of identity loss. I think such unconscious fears account at least partly for the oppression I have here called violence. It may also partly account for cultural imperialism.¶ Cultural imperialism, moreover, itself intersects with violence. The culturally imperialized may reject the dominant meanings and attempt to assert their own subjectivity, or the fact of their cultural difference may put the lie to the dominant culture’s implicit claim to universality. The dissonance generated by such a challenge to the hegemonic cultural meanings can also be a source of irrational violence.¶ Violence is a form of injustice that a distributive understanding of justice seems ill equipped to capture. This may be why contemporary discussions of justice rarely mention it. I have argued that group-directed violence is institutionalized and systemic. To the degree that institutions and social practices encourage, tolerate, or enable the perpetration of violence against members of specific groups, those institutions and practices are unjust and should be reformed. Such reform may require the redistribution of resources or positions, but in large part can come only through a change in cultural images, stereotypes, and the mundane reproduction of relations of dominance and aversion in the gestures of everyday life. I discuss strategies for such change in my Chapter 5. |
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+Plan Text: The US ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers |
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+Solvency |
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+Civil lawsuits force police departments to improve policies, training, and oversight. |
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+Worral 04 - John L. Worral Assoc. Prof. of Criminal Justice, CSU San Bernardino; PhD in Political Science from Washington State U., “Chapter 10: Police Officers, Excessive Force, and Civil Liability,” Controversies in Policing. Eds Quint C. Thurman Texas State U., San Marcos and Andrew Giacomazzi Boise State U.. Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing, Lexis Nexis Group. pp. 139-155 (2004). AT |
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+Civil lawsuits can also serve as something of a quality-of-service yardstick against which to measure police officers’ performance. Many important court cases, resulting from a lawsuit being filed against a police officer, supervisor, or agency, have fostered improvements in police training and more responsible law enforcement in general, especially in the area of use of force (Kappeler, 2001). To this end, an important Supreme Court decision was Tennessee v. Garner (1985), which placed serious restrictions on the ability of the police to use deadly force.¶ Changes in public organizations are often akin to “bending granite” (Guyot, 1979); few civil servants enjoy parting with the comforts of tradition. However, lawsuits can give police agencies a strong incentive to change. Alpert and Dunham (1996:244) have stated that “suits against the police that rove inadequate administrative controls, deficient policies, or customs and practices that are improper or illegal, can force the department to correct its specific deficiencies and review all policies, practices, and customs.” While civil lawsuits may be undesirable, they serve an important function, which allows police agencies to grow and evolve to meet the demands placed on them by a changing public. |
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+Civil liability is more effective at settling wrongs than criminal liability. |
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+Geller and Toch ’59 - William A. Geller, JD, (Director of Geller and Associates) and Hans Toch (professor of psychology in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany). “Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force.” Yale University Press, Nov 12, 1959. Google Books. |
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+The main objective of a criminal case is to adjudicate guilt and express societal condemnation of morally culpable individuals. The criminal law is not an effective way to prevent excessive force or to cure systemic misbehavior. Indeed, the use of criminal law to punish police who brutalize, assault, abuse, and even murder citizens represents a failure of preventive measures and, if the misdeeds are wide- spread, signals the need for immediate and thorough internal reform. The criminal law can proceed only against specific wrongdoers and within very circumscribed procedural forms. Criminal law can punish and, in some instances, deter police brutality, but it cannot of itself force fundamental change in how a department is run, supervised, led, and made accountable. Criminal law’s most appropriate application, therefore, is against “bad apples”-individual officers who have committed sanctionable acts. By contrast, the civil law, because of its greater flexibility and scope, has the potential to serve as the instrument of systemic reform. In adjusting rights and settling wrongs, civil remedies generally offer distinct advantages over criminal sanctions. First, a victim of police misconduct can sue on his or her own behalf and need not await the government’s decision to go forward. Second, an injured party need not overcome the heightened procedural protections afforded the criminally accused. For example, a plaintiff can prevail under a preponderance of evidence standard rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, although the civil law, like the criminal law, can punish via its potential for imposition of punitive damages, the civil law provides compensation to victims who have been harmed by police misconduct. Recompense is beneficial in itself, and damage awards can spur reform if the costs of misbehavior are high. Fourth, civil lawsuits permit broad discovery of information and may provide a means to uncover police misbehavior and stir public reaction. Finally, the civil law offers various possibilities for framing relief which go beyond punishment or compensation and include remediation. That is, the civil law offers equitable relief, via court injunction and specific orders, that can force a deficient department not only to pay for harm caused but to reform so that the harm is not likely repeated. |
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+Advantage 1: Racial Discrimination |
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+Qualified immunity harms the groups and communities most victimized by police wrongdoing. Crockford ‘15 |
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+Kade Crockford, "Militarization of Police and Racial Justice Gone Wrong: The Eurie Stamps Tragedy", ACLU, Speak Freely, 09/29/2015 |
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+Duncan invokes the qualified immunity doctrine, which holds that police officers cannot be sued for conduct that doesn’t clearly violate the law, conduct which at the time appeared reasonable. By that theory, while the actions that preceded the shooting – taking the gun off safety, pointing it at Stamps – were clearly unconstitutional, as soon as Duncan (accidentally) pulled the trigger, he became immune from liability for his conduct. As my colleagues write in a friend-of-the-court brief, the defendant’s argument is dangerous and bizarre. It would, if accepted, produce a legal doctrine that provides incentive for police officers to injure or kill people they have subjected to unconstitutional police practices. It inoculates officers if, but only if, their unreasonable actions cause injury. As applied to the facts of this case, this rule means that an officer who unreasonably aims a firearm at a civilian’s head would incur liability if the civilian is not shot, but not if the firearm discharges and the civilian is killed. Other possibilities abound. For example, if an officer seeks to extract a confession by dangling a suspect over the ledge of a high-rise, the officer will be liable under if he later pulls the suspect back to safety. Yet, under the defendants’ rule, the officer will acquire immunity if his grip should fail and he accidentally – but as a consequence of his prior, intentional, and unreasonable conduct – drops the suspect to this death. A ruling accepting this argument would be terrible and absurd under any circumstances, but particularly given the climate of militarized policing in the United States today – a burden borne disproportionately by Americans with darker skin. Across the nation, police departments armed with military weapons and flash-bang “grenade” bombs barge into people’s homes in the early morning, simply to serve search warrants or arrest suspects. More often than not, these raids are conducted to look for drugs or someone suspected of selling them. An ACLU survey of departments throughout the nation found that 71 percent of the targets of these militarized raids are people of color. Moreover, as my colleagues argue in their brief, Black and Latino people are subjected to more police stops than whites, even when controlling for crime and other factors. Studies show that “race can influence the probability that the police will erroneously harm an innocent person during an encounter.” Other studies “have extensively documented unconscious negative associations about people of color, including an association between Blacks and crime.” Americans are more likely to think Black people holding innocuous objects are holding guns, and to erroneously “shoot” those Black people when given the opportunity. Subjected to more dangerous SWAT raids and police stops, and the targets of racist tropes about criminality and Blackness, people with darker skin are much more likely than whites to suffer the repercussions of unconstitutional policing. Therefore, a legal doctrine establishing that officers cannot be held liable for the final, accidental twitch in a string of unconstitutional actions would further endanger individuals and communities already bearing the brunt of disparate, aggressive policing. It’s our hope that the court will clearly rebuke the defense’s dangerous argument, sending an unmistakable message to police officers throughout the northeast: You will be held liable for your mistakes when the likelihood of making them is compounded by prior illegal actions. You cannot turn the safety off your gun and then illegally point it at someone, only to claim that the final act of shooting them was accidental and so absolves your prior conduct. |
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+Police brutality is a common experience in communities of color. |
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+Coates 2015 - Ta-Nehisi Coates Writer; Journalist; Educator; McArthur Fellow, Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau (2015). p. 9 AT |
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+I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible. |
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+More than 1,100 people a year are killed by police, and it disproportionately affects people of color. |
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+Internationailst 2016 - The Internationalist, “Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America,” The Internationalist. (Summer 2016). Accessed November 1, 2016. http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html AT |
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+As 2014 drew to a close, according to the most detailed account based on publicly published sources, a total of 1,100 people had been killed by the police in the United States.”4 The actual numbers may be much higher, and there are no official figures since the government relies on very partial voluntary reporting by police departments. But the stark reality is that at least three individuals a day had their lives terminated by the forces of “law and order.” The last to die that year was Kevin Davis, a 44-year-old black worker who lived on the outskirts of Decatur, Georgia. Davis had called the police after being stabbed with a knife by an assailant who fled. When the police arrived, first they shot Davis’ dog and then him. When he was taken to the hospital, police refused to let his family have contact with him until he “expired” two days later (Alternet, 27 January).¶ Now we are half-way through 2015, and as of this writing (June 26) at least 549 people have been killed by cops, almost exactly the same rate as last year. Another, more elaborate, database of police killings, “The Counted,” has now been set by the U.S. edition of the British newspaper The Guardian, which includes information on race and ethnicity, gender, age, whether the victim was armed or unarmed, and other details. This tells us that 29 of those killed by police as of June 1 were black, although African Americans are only 13 of the U.S. population; that one-third of the black victims were unarmed, and two-thirds of unarmed people killed by police were members of minorities; that the average age of a person killed by police was 37, that 27 had mental health issues and 95 were men. One-third of the women were killed by police in their own home, as was Tanisha Anderson, killed by Cleveland cops only days before they shot Tamir Rice. |
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+Morality requires a rejection of racism. |
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+Memmi 2000 - Albert Memmi Professor Emeritus of Sociology, U. of Paris, Naiteire, Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Trans. Steve Martinot (2000). pp. 163-165. AT |
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+The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. |
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+Racism transcends physical murder and destroys the spirit. It exploits the way that our identities are vulnerable to cultural norms and systemic violence. Reforming the law helps us to prevent the law from rigidifying into inhumane abstraction. |
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+Williams ’87 - Patricia Williams Associate Prof. of Law, CUNY Law School at Queens College, “Spirit-Murdering the Messenger: The Discourse of Fingerpointing as the Law's Response to Racism,” 42 U. Miami L. Rev. 127 (1987) pp. 129-152 |
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+The second purpose of this article is to examine racism as a crime, an offense so deeply painful and assaultive as to constitute something I call "spirit-murder." Society is only beginning to recognize that racism is as devastating, as costly, and as psychically obliterating as robbery or assault; indeed they are often the same. Racism resembles other offenses against humanity whose structures are so deeply embedded in culture as to prove extremely resistant to being recognized as forms of oppression.7 It can be as difficult to prove as child abuse or rape, where the victim is forced to convince others that he or she was not at fault, or that the perpetrator was not just "playing around." As in rape cases, victims of racism must prove that they did not distort the circumstances, misunderstand the intent, or even enjoy it.¶ II. CRIMES WITHOUT PASSION¶ A. Eleanor Bumpurs and the Language of Lawmakers¶ On October 29, 1984, Eleanor Bumpurs, a 270-pound, arthritic, sixty-seven year old woman, was shot to death while resisting eviction from her apartment in the Bronx. She was $98.85, or one month, behind in her rent.' New York City Mayor Ed Koch and Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward described the struggle preceding her demise as involving two officers with plastic shields, one officer with a restraining hook, another officer with a shotgun, and at least one supervising officer. All of the officers also carried service revolvers. According to Commissioner Ward, during the course of the attempted eviction Mrs. Bumpurs escaped from the restraining hook twice and wielded a knife that Commissioner Ward says was "bent" on one of the plastic shields. At some point, Officer Stephen Sullivan, the officer positioned farthest away from her, aimed and fired his shotgun. It is alleged that the blast removed half of her hand, so that, according to the Bronx District Attorney's Office, "It was anatomically impossible for her to hold the knife." 9 The officer pumped his gun and shot again, making his mark completely the second time around."10¶ In the two and one-half year wake of this terrible incident, controversy raged as to whether Mrs. Bumpurs ought to have brandished a knife and whether the officer ought to have fired his gun. In February 1987, a New York Supreme Court justice found Officer Sullivan not guilty of manslaughter." The case centered on a very narrow issue of language pitted against circumstance. District Attorney Mario Merola described the case as follows: "Obviously, one shot would have been justified. But if that shot took off part of her hand and rendered her defenseless, whether there was any need for a second shot, which killed her, that's the whole issue of whether you have reasonable force or excessive force."' 2 My intention in the following analysis is to underscore the significant task facing judges and lawyers in undoing institutional descriptions of what is "obvious" and what is not, and in resisting the general predigestion of evidence for jury consumption.¶ Shortly after Mr. Merola's statement, Officer Sullivan's attorney, Bruce Smiry, expressed eagerness to try the case before a jury. 3 Following the heavily publicized attack in Howard Beach, however, he favored a bench trial. In explaining his decision to request a nonjury trial, he stated:¶ I think a judge will be much more likely than a jury to understand the defense that the shooting was justified .... The average lay person might find it difficult to understand why the police were there in the first place, and why a shotgun was employed ... Because of the climate now in the city, I don't want people perceiving this as a racial case. 14¶ Since 1984, Mayor Koch, Commissioner Ward, and a host of other city officials repeatedly have described the shooting of Mrs. Bumpurs as completely legal. 5 At the same time, Commissioner Ward has admitted publicly that Mrs. Bumpurs should not have died. Mayor Koch admitted that her death was the result of "a chain of mistakes and circumstances" that came together in the worst possible way, with the worst possible circumstances.' 6 Commissioner Ward admitted that the officers could have waited for Mrs. Bumpurs to calm down, and that they could have used teargas or mace instead of gunfire. According to Commissioner Ward, however, these observations are made with hindsight. As to whether this shooting of a black woman by a white police officer had racial overtones, he stated that he had "no evidence of racism." 17 Commissioner Ward pointed out that he is sworn to uphold the law, which is "inconsistent with treating blacks differently,"'" and that the shooting was legal because it was within the code of police ethics.19 Finally, city officials have resisted criticism of the police department's handling of the incident by remarking that "outsiders" do not know all of the facts and do not understand the pressure under which officers labor.¶ The root of the word "legal" is the Latin word lex, which means law in a fairly concrete sense-law as we understand it when we refer to written law, codes, and systems of obedience.20 The word lex does not include the more abstract, ethical dimension of law that contemplates the purposes of rules and their effective implementation. This latter meaning is contained in the Latin word jus, from which we derive the word "justice."'" This semantic distinction is not insignificant. The word of law, whether statutory or judicial, is a subcategory of the underlying social motives and beliefs from which it is born. It is the technical embodiment of attempts to order society according to a consensus of ideals. When society loses sight of those ideals and grants obeisance to words alone, law becomes sterile and formalistic; lex is applied without jus and is therefore unjust. The result is compliance with the letter of the law, but not the spirit. A sort of punitive literalism ensues that leads to a high degree of thoughtless conformity. This literalism has, as one of its primary underlying values, order-whose ultimate goal may be justice, but whose immediate end is the ordering of behavior. Living solely by the letter of the law means living without spirit; one can do anything as long as it comports with the law in a technical sense. The cynicism or rebelliousness that infects one's spirit, and the enthusiasm or dissatisfaction with which one conforms is unimportant. Furthermore, this compliance is arbitrary; it is inconsistent with the will of the conformer. The law becomes a battleground of wills. The extent to which technical legalism obfuscates and undermines the human motivations that generate our justice system is the real extent to which we as human beings are disenfranchised.¶ Cultural needs and ideals change with the momentum of time; redefining our laws in keeping with the spirit of cultural flux keeps society alive and humane. In the Bumpurs case, the words of the law called for nonlethal alternatives first, but allowed some officer discretion in determining which situations are so immediately life endangering as to require the use of deadly force.22 This discretionary area was presumably the basis for the claim that Officer Sullivan acted legally. The law as written permitted shooting in general, and therefore, by extension of the city's interpretation of this law, it would be impossible for a police officer ever to shoot someone in a specifically objectionable way.¶ If our laws are thus piano-wired on the exclusive validity of literalism, if they are picked clean of their spirit, then society risks heightened irresponsibility for the consequences of abominable actions. Accordingly, Jonathan Swift's description of lawyers weirdly and ironically comes to life: "There was a Society of Men among us, bred up from their Youth in the Art of proving by words multiplied for the Purpose, that White is Black and Black is White, according as they are paid. To this Society all the rest of the People are Slaves."23 We also risk subjecting ourselves to such absurdly empty rhetoric as Commissioner Ward's comments to the effect that both Mrs. Bumpurs' death and racism were unfortunate, while stating "but the law says .... "24 Commissioner Ward's sentiments might as well read: "The law says ... and therefore the death was unfortunate but irremediable; the law says ... and therefore there is little that can be done about racism." The law thus becomes a shield behind which to avoid responsibility for the human repercussions of both governmental and publicly harmful private activity.25¶ A related issue is the degree to which much of the criticism of the police department's handling of this case was devalued as "noisy" or excessively emotional. It is as though passionate protest were a separate crime, a rudeness of such dimension as to defeat altogether any legitimacy of content. We as lawyers are taught from the moment we enter law school to temper our emotionalism and quash our idealism. We are taught that heartfelt instincts subvert the law and defeat the security of a well-ordered civilization, whereas faithful adherence to the word of law, to stare decisis and clearly stated authority, would as a matter of course lead to a bright, clear world like the Land of Oz, in which those heartfelt instincts would be preserved. Form is exalted over substance, and cool rationales over heated feelings. But we should not be ruled exclusively by the cool formality of language or by emotions. We must be ruled by our complete selves, by the intellectual and emotional content of our words. Governmental representatives must hear the full range of legitimate concerns, no matter how indelicately expressed or painful they may be to hear.¶ But undue literalism is only one type of sleight of tongue in the attainment of meaningless dialogue. Mayor Koch, Commissioner Ward, and Officer Sullivan's defense attorneys have used overgeneralization as an effective rhetorical complement to their avoidance of the issues. For example, allegations that the killing was illegal and unnecessary, and should therefore be prosecuted, were met with responses such as, "The laws permit police officers to shoot people."26 "As long as police officers have guns, there will be unfortunate deaths. '2 7 "The conviction rate in cases like this is very low."'2 8 The observation that teargas would have been an effective alternative to shooting Mrs. Bumpurs drew the dismissive reply that "there were lots of things they could have done."29¶ Privatization of response as a justification for public irresponsibility is a version of the same game. Honed to perfection by President Reagan, this version holds up the private self as indistinguishable from the public "duty and power laden" self. Public officials respond to commentary by the public and the media as though it were meant to hurt private, vulnerable feelings. Trying to hold a public official accountable while not hurting his feelings is a skill the acquisition of which would consume time better spent on almost any conceivable task. Thus, when Commissioner Ward was asked if the internal review board planned to discipline Officer Sullivan, many seemed disposed to accept his response that while he was personally very sorry she had died, he could not understand why the media was focusing on him so much. "How many other police commissioners," he asked repeatedly, "have gotten as much attention as I have?" 30¶ Finally, a most cruel form of semantic slipperiness infused Mrs. Bumpurs' death from the beginning. It is called victim responsibility.3 It is the least responsive form of dialogue, yet apparently the easiest to accept as legitimate.¶ All these words, from Commissioner Ward, from the Mayor's office, from the media, and from the public generally, have rumbled and resounded with the sounds of discourse. We want to believe that their symmetrical, pleasing structure is the equivalent of discourse. If we are not careful, we will hypnotize ourselves into believing that it is discourse.¶ B. Howard Beach and the "Private Property" of Neighborhood ¶ In the early morning hours of December 20, 1986, three young black men left their stalled car on Cross Bay Parkway, in the New York City borough of Queens, and went to look for help. They walked into the neighborhood of Howard Beach, entered a pizzeria, ordered pizzas, and sat down to eat. An anonymous caller to the police reported their presence as "black troublemakers." A patrol car came, found no trouble, and left. After the young men had eaten, they left the pizzeria and were immediately surrounded by a group of eight to ten white teenagers who taunted them with racial epithets. The white youths chased the black men for about three miles, catching them at several points and beating them severely. One of the black men died as a result of being struck by a car as he tried to flee across a highway. Another suffered permanent blindness in one eye.32¶ In the extremely heated public controversy that ensued, as much attention centered on the community of Howard Beach as on the assailants themselves. A veritable Greek chorus formed, comprised of the defendants' lawyers and resident after resident after resident of Howard Beach, all repeating and repeating and repeating that the mere presence of three black men in that part of town at that time of night was reason enough to drive them out. "They had to be starting trouble."33 "We're a strictly white neighborhood."34 "What were they doing here in the first place?"35¶ Although the immensely segregationist instincts behind such statements may be fairly evident, it is worth making explicit some of the presuppositions behind such ululations.¶ Everyone who lives here is white.¶ No black could live here.¶ No one here has a black friend.¶ No white would employ a black here.¶ No black is permitted to shop here.¶ No black is ever up to any good.¶ These presuppositions themselves are premised on lethal philosophies of life.¶ 1. "IT'S BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY"¶ "Are we supposed to stand around and do nothing while these blacks come into our area and rob us?" 6 one woman asked a reporter in the wake of the Howard Beach attack. A twenty year old, who had lived in Howard Beach all of his life, said, "We ain't racial .... We just don't want to get robbed."37 The hidden implication of these statements is that to be safe is not to be sorry, and that to be safe is to be white and to be sorry is to be associated with blacks. Safety and sorrow, which are inherently alterable and random, are linked to inalterable essences. The expectation that uncertain conditions are really immutable is a formula for frustration; it is a belief that feeds a sense of powerlessness. The rigid determinism of placing in the disjunctive things that are not in fact disjunctive is a set up for betrayal by the very nature of reality. The national repetition that white neighborhoods are safe and blacks bring sorrow is an incantation of powerlessness. And, as with the upside-down logic of all irrational incantations, it imports a concept of white safety that almost necessarily endangers the lives as well as the rights of blacks.¶ It is also an incantation of innocence and guilt, much related to incantations that affirmative action programs allow presumably "guilty" blacks to displace "innocent" whites.3 " (Even assuming that "innocent whites" were being displaced by blacks, does that make blacks less innocent in the pursuit of education and jobs? If anything, are not blacks more innocent in the scheme of discrimination?) In fact, in the wake of the Howard Beach incident, the police and the press rushed to serve the public's interest in the victims' unsavory "guilty" dispositions. They overlook the fact that racial slurs and attacks "objectify people-the incident could have happened to any black person who was there at that time and place. This is the crucial aspect of the Howard Beach affair that is now being muddied in the media. Bringing up defendants' past arrest records is another way of saying, 'He was a criminal who deserved it.'" Thus, the game of victim responsibility described above is itself a slave to society's stereotypes of good and evil.¶ It does no good, however, to turn race issues into contests for some Holy Grail of innocence. In my youth, segregation and antimiscegenation laws were still on the books in many states. During the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents, and for several hundred years before them, laws prohibited blacks from owning property, voting, and learning to read or write. Blacks were, by constitutional mandate, outlawed from the hopeful, loving expectations that being treated as a whole, rather than three-fifths of a human being can bring. When every resource of a wealthy nation is put to such destructive ends, it will take more than a few generations to mop up the mess. 40¶ We have all inherited that legacy, whether new to this world or new to this country. It survives as powerfully and invisibly reinforcing structures of thought, language, and law. Thus, generalized notions of innocence and guilt have little place in the struggle for transcendence; there is no blame among the living for the dimension of this historic crime, this national tragedy.41 There is, however, responsibility for never forgetting one another's histories, and for making real the psychic obliteration which lives on as a factor in shaping relations, not just between blacks and whites,42 or blacks and blacks,43 but also between whites and whites. Whites must consider how much this history has projected onto blacks the blame for all criminality, and for all of society's ills. It has become the means for keeping white criminality invisible.44¶ 2."DISCRIMINATION DOESN'T HURT AS MUCH AS BEING ASSAULTED" OR "A PREJUDICED SOCIETY IS BETTER THAN A VIOLENT SOCIETY"¶ The attempt to split bias from violence has been this society's most enduring and fatal rationalization. Prejudice does hurt, however, just as the absence of prejudice can nourish and shelter. Discrimination can repel and vilify, ostracize and alienate. White people who do not believe this should try telling everyone they meet that one of their ancestors was black. I had a friend in college who having lived her life as a blonde, grey eyed white person, discovered that she was one-sixteenth black. She began to externalize all the unconscious baggage that "black" bore for her: the self-hatred that is racism. She did not think of herself as a racist (nor had I) but she literally wanted to jump out of her skin, shed her flesh, and start life over again. She confided in me that she felt "fouled" and "betrayed." She also asked me if I had ever felt this way. Her question dredged from some deep corner of my suppressed memory the recollection of feeling precisely that, when at the age of three or so, some white playmates explained to me that God had mixed mud with the pure clay of life in order to make me.¶ In the Vietnamese language, "the word T (toi) ... means 'your servant'; there is no T as such. When you talk to someone, you establish a relationship."4 Such a concept of "self" is a way of experiencing the other, ritualistically sharing the other's essence, and cherishing it. In our culture, seeing and feeling the dimension of harm that results from separating self from "other" requires more work. 46 Very little in our language or our culture encourages or reinforces any attempt to look at others as part of ourselves. With the imperviously divided symmetry of the marketplace, social costs to blacks are simply not seen as costs to whites,47 just as blacks do not share in the advances whites may enjoy.¶ This structure of thought is complicated by the fact that the distancing does not stop with the separation of the white self from the black other. In addition, the cultural domination of blacks by whites means that the black self is placed at a distance even from itself, as in the example of blacks being asked to put themselves in the position of the white shopkeepers who view them.48 So blacks are conditioned from infancy to see in themselves only what others who despise them see. 49¶ It is true that conforming to what others see in us is every child's way of becoming socialized. 50 It is what makes children in our society seem so gullible, so impressionable, so "impolitely" honest, so blindly loyal, and so charming to the ones they imitate.5 Yet this conformity also describes a way of being that relinquishes the power of independent ethical choice. Although such a relinquishment can have quite desirable social consequences, it also presumes a fairly homogeneous social context in which values are shared and enforced collectively. Thus, it is no wonder that western anthropologists and ethnographers, for whom adulthood is manifested by the exercise of independent ethical judgment, so frequently denounce tribal cultures or other collectivist ethics as "childlike."¶ By contrast, our culture constructs some, but not all, selves to be the servants of others. Thus, some "I's" are defined as "your servant," some as "your master." The struggle for the self becomes not a true mirroring of self-in-other, but rather a hierarchically-inspired series of distortions, where some serve without ever being served, some master without ever being mastered, and almost everyone hides from this vernacular domination by clinging to the legally official definition of “I” as meaning "your equal."¶ In such an environment, relinquishing the power of individual ethical judgment to a collective ideal risks psychic violence, an obliteration of the self through domination by an all powerful other. In such an environment, it is essential at some stage that the self be permitted to retreat into itself and make its own decisions with self-love and self-confidence. What links child abuse, the mistreatment of women, and racism is the massive external intrusion into psyche that dominating powers impose to keep the self from ever fully seeing itself.52 Because the self's power resides in another, little faith is placed in the true self, that is, in one's own experiential knowledge. Consequently, the power of children, women and blacks is actually reduced to the "intuitive," rather than the real; social life is necessarily based primarily on the imaginary.53 Furthermore, because it is difficult to affirm constantly with the other the congruence of the self's imagining what the other is really thinking of the self, and because even that correlative effort is usually kept within very limited family, neighborhood, religious, or racial boundaries, encounters cease to be social and become presumptuous, random, and disconnected.¶ This peculiarly distancing standpoint allows dramas, particularly racial ones like Howard Beach, to unfold in scenarios weirdly unrelated to the incidents that generated them. At one end of the spectrum is a laissez faire response that privatizes the self in order to remain unassailably justified. At the other end is a pattern that generalizes individual or particular others into terrifyingly uncontrollable "domains" of public wilderness, against which proscriptive barriers must be built to protect the eternally innocent self.¶ a. Privitizing Innocence¶ The prototypical scenario of the privatized response is as follows: ¶ Cain: Abel's part of town is tough turf.54¶ Abel: It upsets me when you say that; you have never been to my part of town. As a matter of fact, my part of town is a leading supplier of milk and honey.55¶ Cain: The news that I'm upsetting you is too upsetting for me to handle. You were wrong to tell me of your upset because now I'm terribly upset.56¶ Abel: I felt threatened first. Listen to me. Take your distress as a measure of my own and empathize with it. Don't ask me to recant and apologize in order to carry this conversation further.57¶ This type of discourse is problematic because Cain's challenge in calling Abel's turf "tough" is transformed into a discussion of the care with which Abel challenges that statement. While there is certainly an obligation to be careful in addressing others the obligation to protect the feelings of those others gets put above the need to protect one's own. The self becomes subservient to the other, with no reciprocity, and the other becomes a whimsical master. Abel's feelings are deflected in deference to Cain's, and Abel bears the double burden of raising his issue properly and of being responsible for its impact on Cain. Cain is rendered unaccountable for as long as this deflection continues because all the fault is assigned to Abel. Morality and responsiveness thus become dichotomized as Abel drowns in responsibility for valuative quality control, while Cain rests on the higher ground of a value neutral zone.¶ Caught in conversations like this, blacks as well as whites will feel keenly and pressingly circumscribed. Perhaps most people never intend to be racist, oppressive, or insulting. Nevertheless, by describing zones of vulnerability and by setting up fences of rigidified politeness, the unintentional exile of individuals as well as races may be quietly accomplished.¶ b. Publicizing Guilt¶ Another scenario of distancing self from the responsibility for racism is the invention of some great public wilderness of others. In the context of Howard Beach, the specter against which the self must barricade itself is violent: seventeen year old, black males wearing running shoes and hooded sweatshirts. It is this fear of the uncontrollable, overwhelming other that animates many of the more vengefully racist comments from Howard Beach, such as, "We're a strictly white neighborhood.... They had to be starting trouble.” 58¶ These statements set up angry, excluding boundaries. They also imply that the failure to protect and avenge is bad policy, bad statesmanship, and an embarrassment. They raise the stakes beyond the unexpressed rage arising from the incident itself. Like the Cain and Abel example, the need to avenge becomes a separate issue of protocol and etiquette-not a loss of a piece of the self, which is the real cost of real tragedies, but a loss of self-regard. By self-regard, I do not mean self-concept as in self-esteem; I mean that view of the self that is attained by the self stepping outside the self to regard and evaluate the self. It is a process in which the self is watched by an imaginary other, a self-projection of the opinions of real others, where "I" means "your master" and where the designated other's refusal to be dominated is felt as personally assaultive. Thus, the failure to avenge is felt as a loss of self-regard. It is a psychological metaphor for whatever trauma or original assault that constitutes the real loss to the self.59 It is therefore more abstract, more illusory, more constructed, and more invented. Potentially, therefore, it is less powerful than "real" assault, in that with effort it can be unlearned as a source of vulnerability. This is the real message of the attempt to distinguish between prejudice and violence: names, as in the old "sticks and stones" ditty, although undeniably and powerfully influential, can be learned or undone as motivation for future destructive action.6" As long as they are not unlearned, however, the exclusionary power of such free-floating emotions makes its way into the gestalt of prosecutorial and jury decisions and into what the law sees as crime, or as justified, provoked or excusable.61 Law becomes described and enforced in the spirit of our prejudices.62¶ 3. THE EVIDENTIARY RULES OF LEGITIMATING TURF WARS¶ The following passage is a description of the arraignment of three of the white teenagers who were involved in the Howard Beach beatings:¶ The three defense lawyers also tried to cast doubt on the prosecutor's account of the attack. The lawyers questioned why the victims walked all the way to the pizza parlor if, as they said, their mission was to summon help for their car, which broke down three miles away .... At the arraignment, the lawyers said the victims passed two all-night gas stations and several other pizza shops before they reached the one they entered.¶ A check yesterday of area restaurants, motels and gas stations listed in the Queens street directory found two eating establishments, a gas station and a motel that all said they were open and had working pay phones on Friday night.¶ A spokesman for the New York Telephone Company, Jim Crosson, said there are six outdoor pay telephones.., on the way to the pizzeria.63¶ In the first place, lawyers must wonder what relevance this has. Does the answer to any of the issues the defense raised serve to prove that these black men assaulted, robbed, threatened or molested these white men? Does it even prove that the white men reasonably feared such a fate? The investigation into the number of phone booths per mile does not reveal why the white men would fear the black men's presence. Instead, it is relevant to prove that there is no reason a black man should walk or just wander around the community of Howard Beach. This is not semantic detail; it is central to understanding burdensomeness of proof in such cases. It is this unconscious restructuring of burdens of proof into burdens of white over black that permits people who say and who believe that they are not racist to commit and condone crimes of genocidal magnitude. It is easy to rationalize this as linguistically technical, or as society's sorrow. As one of my students said, "I'm so tired of hearing the blacks say that society's done them wrong." Yet these gyrations kill with their razor-toothed presumption. Lawyers are the modern wizards and medicine people who must define this innocent murderousness as crime.¶ Additionally, investigations into "closer" alternatives eclipse the possibility of other explanation. They assume that the young men were not headed for the subway (which was in fact in the same direction as the pizzeria), and further, that black people must have documented reasons for excursioning into white neighborhoods and out of the neighborhoods to which they are supposedly consigned.¶ It is interesting to contrast the implicit requirement of documentation imposed on blacks walking down public streets in Howard Beach with the implicit license of the white officers who burst into the private space of Mrs. Bumpurs' apartment. In the Bumpurs case, lawmakers consistently dismissed the availability of less intrusive options as presumption and idle hindsight.64 This dismissal ignored the fact that police officers have an actual burden of employing the least harmful alternatives. In the context of Howard Beach, however, such an analysis invents and imposes a burden on nonresidents to stay out of strange neighborhoods. It implies harm in the presence of those who do not specifically "own" something there. Both analyses skirt the propriety and necessity of public sector responsibility. Both redefine public accountability in privatized terms. Whether those privatized terms act to restrict or expand accountability is dichotomized according to the race of the actors.¶ Finally, this factualized hypothesizing was part of a news story, not an editorial. "News," in other words, was reduced to hypothesis based on silent premises: they should have used the first phone they encountered; they should have eaten at the first "eating establishment;" they should have gone into a gas station and asked for help; surely they should have had the cash and credit cards to do any of the above or else not travel in strange neighborhoods. In elevating these to relevant issues, however, The New York Times did no more than mirror what was happening in the courtroom.¶ 4. THE APPROPRIATION OF PSYCHIC PROPERTY¶ In an ill-fated trip to the neighborhood of Jamaica, in the borough of Queens, Mayor Koch attempted to soothe tensions by asking a congregation of black churchgoers to understand the disgruntlement of Howard Beach residents about the interracial march by 1400 protesters through "their" streets. He asked them how they would feel if 1400 white people took to the streets of the predominantly black neighborhood of Jamaica.65 This remark, from the chief executive of New York City, accepts and even advocates a remarkable degree of possessiveness about public streets. This possessiveness, moreover, is racially rather than geographically bounded. In effect, Koch was pleading for the acceptance of the privatization of public space. This is the de facto equivalent of segregation. It is exclusion in the guise of deep-moated private property "interests" and "values." In such a characterization, the public nature of the object of discussion, the street, is lost. 66¶ Mayor Koch's question suggests that 1400 black people took to the streets of Howard Beach. In fact, the crowd was integratedblacks, browns, and whites, residents and nonresidents of Howard Beach. Apparently, crowds in New York are subject to the unwritten equivalent of Louisiana's race statutes (which provide that 1/72 black ancestry renders a person black) and to the Ku Klux Klan's "contamination by association" standard ("blacks and white-blacks" was how one resident of Forsythe County, Georgia described an interracial crowd of protesters there).¶ On the other hand, if Mayor Koch intended to direct attention to the inconvenience, noise, and pollution of such a crowd in those small streets, then I am sympathetic. My sympathy is insignificant, however, compared to my recognition of the necessity and propriety of the protestors' spontaneous, demonstrative, peaceful outpouring of rage, sorrow, and pain.¶ If, however, Mayor Koch intended to ask blacks to imagine 1400 angry white people descending on a black community, then I agree, I would be frightened. This image would also conjure up visions of 1400 hooded white people burning crosses, 1400 Nazis marching through Skokie, and 1400 cavalry men riding into American Indian lands. These visions would inspire great fear in me, because of the possibility of grave harm to the residents. But there is a difference, and that is why the purpose of the march is so important. That is why it is so important to distinguish mass protests of violence from organized hate groups that openly threaten violence. By failing to make this distinction, Mayor Koch created the manipulative specter of unspecified mobs sweeping through homes in pursuit of vague and diffusely dangerous ends. From this perspective, he appealed to thoughtlessness, to the pseudoconsolation of hunkering down and bunkering up against the approaching hoards, to a glacially overgeneralized view of the unneighborhooded "public" world.¶ Moreover, the Mayor's comments reveal that he is ignorant of the degree to which the black people have welcomed, endured, and suffered white marchers through their streets. White people have always felt free to cruise through black communities and to treat them possessively. Most black neighborhoods have existed only as long as whites have permitted them to exist. Blacks have been this society's perpetual tenants, sharecroppers, and lessees. Blacks went from being owned by others, to having everything around them owned by others. In a civilization that values private property above all else, this effectuates a devaluation of humanity, a removal of blacks not just from the market, but from the pseudospiritual circle of psychic and civic communion. As illustrated in the microcosm of my experience at the store,67 this limbo of disownedness keeps blacks beyond the pale of those who are entitled to receive the survival gifts of commerce, the property of life, liberty, and happiness, whose fruits our culture places in the marketplace. In this way, blacks are positioned analogically to the rest of society, exactly as they were during slavery or Jim Crow.68¶ There is a subtler level to the enactment of this dispossession. The following story may illustrate more fully what I mean: Not long ago, when I first moved back to New York after some twenty years, I decided to go on a walking tour of Harlem. The tour, which took place on Easter Sunday, was sponsored by the New York Arts Society, and except for myself, was attended exclusively by young, white, urban, professional, real estate speculators. They were pleasant looking, with babies strapped to their backs and balloons in their hands. They all seemed like very nice people.¶ Halfway through the tour, the guide asked the group if they wanted to "go inside some churches." The guide added, "It'll make the tour a little longer, but we'll probably get to see some services going on . . . Easter Sunday in Harlem is quite a show." A casual discussion ensued about the time that this excursion might take.¶ What astonished me was that no one had asked the people in the churches if they minded being stared at like living museums. I wondered what would happen if a group of blue-jeaned blacks were to walk uninvited into a synagogue on Passover or St. Anthony's of Padua in the middle of High Mass. Just to peer, not pray. My overwhelming instinct is that such activity would be seen as disrespectful.¶ Apparently, the disrespect was invisible to this well-educated, affable group of people. They deflected my observations with comments such as, "We just want to look"; "No one will mind"; "There's no harm intended." As well intentioned as they were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them whom their intentions could not govern.69 Despite the lack of apparent malice in their demeanor,7" it seemed to me that to live so noninteractively is a liability as much as a luxury. To live imperviously to one's impact on others is a fragile privilege, which depends ultimately on the inability of others to make their displeasure known. ¶ III. THE GIFT OF INTELLIGENT RAGE¶ A. Owning the Self in a Disowned World¶ Reflecting on Howard Beach brought to mind a news story from my fragmentary grammar school recollections of the 1960's: a white man acting out of racial motives killed a black man who was working for some civil rights organization or cause. The man was stabbed thirty-nine times, a number which prompted a radio commentator to observe that the point was not just murder, but something beyond.¶ What indeed was the point, if not murder? I wondered what it was that would not die, which could not be killed by the fourth, fifth, or even tenth knife blow; what sort of thing that would not die with the body but lived on in the mind of the murderer. Perhaps, as psychologists have argued, what the murderer was trying to kill was a part of his own mind's image, a part of himself and not a real other. After all, statistically and corporeally, blacks as a group are poor, powerless, and a minority. It is in the minds of whites that blacks become large, threatening, powerful, uncontrollable, ubiquitous, and supernatural.¶ There are certain societies that define the limits of life and death very differently than our own. For example, death may occur long before the body ceases to function, and under the proper circumstances, life may continue for some time after the body is carried to its grave.7 "These non-body-bound, uncompartmentalized ideas recognize the power of spirit, or what we in our secularized society might describe as the dynamism of self as reinterpreted by the perceptions of other.72 These ideas comprehend the fact that a part of ourselves is beyond the control of pure physical will and resides in the sanctuary of those around us. A fundamental part of ourselves and of our dignity is dependent upon the uncontrollable, powerful, external observers who constitute society.73 Surely a part of socialization ought to include a sense of caring responsibility for the images of others that are reposited within us.74¶ Taking the example of the man who was stabbed thirty-nine times out of the context of our compartmentalized legal system, and considering it in the hypothetical framework of a legal system that encompasses and recognizes morality, religion, and psychology, I am moved to see this act as not merely body murder but spirit-murder as well. I see it as spirit-murder, only one of whose manifestations is racism-cultural obliteration, prostitution, abandonment of the elderly and the homeless, and genocide are some of its other guises. I see spirit-murder as no less than the equivalent of body murder.¶ One of the reasons that I fear what I call spirit-murder, or disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard, is that its product is a system of formalized distortions of thought. It produces social structures centered around fear and hate; it provides a tumorous outlet for feelings elsewhere unexpressed. 75 For example, when Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers in a New York City subway, an acquaintance of mine said that she could understand his fear because it is a "fact" that blacks commit most crimes. What impressed me, beyond the factual inaccuracy of this statement,76 was the reduction of Goetz' crime to "his fear," which I translate to mean her fear. The four teenage victims became all blacks everywhere, and "most crimes" clearly meant that most blacks commit crimes. |
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+Advantage 2: LGBTQ+ Discrimination |
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+Police Brutality and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community is rampant, Mallory et. Al |
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+Mallory, Christy, Amira Hasenbush, and Brad Sears. Law and policy expert at UCLA school of law, specializing in policies impacts on LGBT people "Discrimination and harassment by law enforcement officers in the LGBT community." The Williams Institute (2015). |
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+Discrimination and harassment by law enforcement based on sexual orientation and gender identity is an ongoing and pervasive problem in LGBT communities. Such discrimination impedes effective policing in these communities by breaking down trust, inhibiting communication and preventing officers from effectively protecting and serving the communities they police. While a patchwork of state, local and federal laws provides some protection against certain forms of discrimination, there is no nationwide federal statute that comprehensively and consistently prohibits discrimination based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. ∂ This report presents research demonstrating that LGBT individuals and communities face profiling, discrimination and harassment at the hands of law enforcement officers. Data from a wide range of sources show that such harassment and discrimination is greatest for LGBT people of color, transgender persons and youth. Key findings include: ∂ The 9.5 million LGBT Americans are a part of every local and state community, and part of the diverse communities that law enforcement seeks to engage to develop stronger community support and trust. ∂ The United States has had a significant history of mistreatment of LGBT people by law enforcement, including profiling, entrapment, discrimination and harassment by officers; victimization that often was ignored by law enforcement; and discrimination and even blanket exclusions from being hired by law enforcement agencies. The Department of Justice recently summarized this history of discrimination against LGBT people in its brief to the United States Supreme Court in Windsor v. United States. ∂ Discrimination and harassment by law enforcement officers based on sexual orientation and gender identity continues to be pervasive throughout the United States. ∂ • For example, a 2014 report on a national survey of LGBT people and people living with HIV found that 73 of respondents had face-to-face contact with the police in the past five years. Of those respondents, 21 reported encountering hostile attitudes from officers, 14 reported verbal assault by the police, 3 reported sexual harassment and 2 reported physical assault at the hands of law enforcement officers. Police abuse, neglect and misconduct were consistently reported at higher frequencies by respondents of color and transgender and gender nonconforming respondents. ∂ A 2013 report focused on anti-LGBT violence that occurred in the previous year found that of the LGBT violence survivors surveyed who interacted with police, 48 reported that they had experienced police misconduct, including unjustified arrest, use of excessive force and entrapment. Additionally, police officers accounted for 6 of all offenders reported by respondents; of offenders who were personally unknown to the victim, police made up 23. ∂ A 2012 report examining the interactions of law enforcement with Latina transgender women in Los Angeles County found that two-thirds of the women reported that they had been verbally harassed by law enforcement, 21 reported that they had been physically assaulted by law enforcement, and 24 reported that they had been sexually assaulted by law enforcement. ∂ A 2011 study that reported findings from the largest survey of transgender people to date found that 22 of transgender respondents reported that they had been harassed by law enforcement because of bias; and 6 reported having been physically assaulted by an officer. Additionally, nearly half of respondents (46) reported being uncomfortable seeking police assistance. |
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+Overpolicing of LGBTQ+ communities creates a lack of trust in the police which decreases trust, and hurts these communities. |
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+Mallory, Christy, Amira Hasenbush, and Brad Sears. Law and policy expert at UCLA school of law, specializing in policies impacts on LGBT people "Discrimination and harassment by law enforcement officers in the LGBT community." The Williams Institute (2015). |
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+∂ For decades, the LGBT community has been subjected to entrapment, discrimination, harassment, and violence by law enforcement. Recent research indicates that such mistreatment of LGB people, and especially transgender people, is still ongoing. Tensions between law enforcement and the LGBT community can hinder effective policing in several ways. ∂ First, when communities are persistently targeted, profiled and harassed by law enforcement, trust will be lost between the police and the communities they are supposed to protect. For example, a recent study asked gay and bisexual identified men to report how helpful they thought that police would be if called in response to an intimate partner violence incident involving gay or bisexual men. Forty percent of respondents indicated that they believed that contacting the police in such a situation would be unhelpful or very unhelpful, and 59 reported that police would be less helpful to gay or bisexual men experiencing intimate partner violence than to heterosexual women. 120∂ Second, lack of trust due to fear of discrimination, harassment, and violence likely discourages LGBT citizens from working in cooperation with law enforcement. Community willingness to engage with law enforcement is helpful to effective policing, which may seek to combat crime and improve the criminal justice system by involving the community in crime control strategies. For example, the federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant program has stated goals of “establishing and implementing innovative programs to increase and enhance proactive crime control and prevention programs involving law enforcement officers and young persons in the community,” 121 and developing “programs designed to increase the level of access to the criminal justice system enjoyed by victims, witnesses and ordinary citizens.” 122 Such innovative programming and access to the justice system are hindered when law enforcement is unable to build trust within the communities it serves. ∂ Third, when communities lack trust and positive interactions with law enforcement, individuals within those communities will likely not come forward to report crimes that they have been a victim of. For example, a 2013 report on hate violence against LGBTQ and HIV- affected communities found that only 56 of survivors reported such incidents to the police. 123 A 2012 report on intimate partner violence in the LGBTQ and HIV-affected communities found that of the 17 of intimate partner violence survivors who reported information about interacting with the police, 54 said that they reported such incidents to law enforcement. 124 This both prevents the effectiveness of policing and puts individuals and communities at risk of continued victimization. ∂ Fourth, law enforcement departments that are hostile towards LGBT citizens are most likely unable to meet the needs of the members of their communities, even if individuals do report crimes to the police. For example, research has found that police officers often will not understand how to react to reports of intimate partner violence between same-sex couples and will therefore arrest the partner who is surviving the abuse or both individuals. A 2012 national report on intimate partner violence in LGBTQ and HIV-affected communities found that among those people who reported intimate partner violence to the police, 28 of the time, the survivor was arrested instead of the abuser. 125 Officers also will sometimes arrest survivors of homophobic or transphobic assaults rather than the attackers. For example, in 2011, CeCe McDonald used deadly force to defend herself against transphobic attacks against her and her friends.126 Despite having injuries that may have demonstrated that she was acting in self- defense, she was arrested on the scene and charged with two counts of second degree murder. 127 Additionally, as mentioned above, over a third of crime victims in Lambda Legal’s survey of LGBT people and people living with HIV reported that their complaints to the police were not fully addressed. 128 When police officers exhibit explicit or underlying homophobia and transphobia, they will not be able to support and help the communities they are supposed to protect and serve. |