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How Many Gun Barrels Have You Stared Down?
A wealthy, privileged, Brown alum–who is Black–notes the abiding truth of race in America. No matter how rich you are, no matter where you live, no matter what you do, if you’re Black, you’ll be treated Black.
But I’ll pose his question to the rest of y’all. Any White TMV commenters who come from economically privileged backgrounds, who attended elite universities, who have no criminal records and have committed no crimes, who have a respectable job, who are, in short, among the nation’s top-tier: how many times have you had a gun pointed at you by an American police officer (federal, state, or local?) with threatening intent? My tally is zero.
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31 Responses to “How Many Gun Barrels Have You Stared Down?”
Sorry, I disagree. I grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood (a poor one), and the cops were just generally mean. The job itself is stressful and dehumanizing in those kinds of neighborhoods, and a lot of the stuff that goes on gives a person a different viewpoint on how things work, and what sorts of vulnerabilities one is open to.
Oh, but the direct answer is none, from police. Twice from robbers.
Bellisaurius: Forgive me for asking, but are you White? Because if you are, then your post isn’t at all responsive (the Black person in my post is not from a poor neighborhood, he’s economically quite well off, so presumably he should be facing the cops that patrol neighborhoods like mine, or like Carleton’s).
I have not, but my best friend as a teenager in the 1980s was white, male, and clean-cut, lived in a relatively exclusive neighborhood (Plymouth), and experienced the business end of a police 9mm during a traffic stop in Robbinsdale in 1986.
I offer that in response to your question, not to challenge the general truth that such experience is more common for blacks. But I would once again note the importance of individualizing experiences whenever possible rather than making sweeping general claims about what all blacks or all whites supposedly experience.
It seems we need a tally of say, 20 black and 20 while men with similarly clean cut looks.
I know one thing. If I were staring down a policeman’t gun barrel, I would rather be white than black.
Both of my children during High schoold years witnessed incidents of police harassing black classmates while they, the white kids, were ignored in cases of overboisterous talking/singing in public places.
Twice in the 70s and once in the 00s. In order: once in Sparks, NV for “ID” check at night near the freight yards. That was a revolver. Once in Santa Cruz, CA, at night, talking to my father from a phone booth, for fitting the description of a robber. That cop announced his presence by sticking the barrel in my lower back! That one was a revolver. And finally when I was riding a motorcycle at night in San Francisco and I was boxed in by 3 police cars, again for fitting the description of a robber (tall white skinny guy on black bike w/ white helmet). That was a 9mm semi auto, which was holstered as soon as I was cuffed. No arrests were made, all police officers were White. San Francisco police were extremely polite. They said they needed to know where I was going because I would get stopped again unless they radioed in a pass for me. Went home and counted my blessings.
Women have also crossed the street to avoid walking past me, and locked car doors when they saw me approaching.
And I am a normal looking lawyer! As I kept telling people in law school, its not that easy being a privileged white guy either!
My understanding is the stats for “stops” by police are surprisingly pretty close for people of different races. The big factor is how those stopped feel about the situation. 85% of Blacks called it negative to 35% of whites. I grew up a middle class white boy and have been stopped, had guns pointed at me, been cuffed, placed in a police car, ect. I kept my mouth shut and did what I was told and was always cut loose. I don’t consider it a big deal. I have one particular black friend who would of been throwing a fit about anything half as bad. Sometimes it’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
Bones=
If perceptions are different when accosted by a cop, consider the possibility that blacks also have more to fear from the consequences than whites.
PerceptionS do not even need to come from personal experience. They can come from generation upon generation of experiences.
I really see how averse people are to imagining what it’s like to walk in another man’s shoes, not to mention woman’s shoes.
I find it quite interesting the original poster and all the commenters apparently assume the officer will always be white. Either that or the suggestion is that police of any color are more likely to draw down on a black person. In DC, for example, whites are less than a third of the force.
So to answer the question I think the premise needs to be more clear.
I have stared down a barrel of a gun. I was taking my toddler for a walk in the park. The gun owner wasn’t a cop. He was a thug demanding my wedding rings and wallet.
Dom- What?
I don’t think there are that many racist cops, some sure, but the majority including the black officers? I don’t think so. What I wonder is how of the DWB is caused by not the police officer but the reaction of the person stopped. And Dom I have been in the other persons shoes.
Entropy,
Thanks for noticing that the POV is that the police are always white. I find it strange that this was written by an individual who lived in a county with a black police chief (Chief Moose) and in a county with almost no blue collar or middle class whites. The police in the counties surrounding DC all drive in from the exurbs because they cannot afford to live in a safety neighborhood in places lik e Montgomery County.
Not only are the DC police majority blacks but that neighboring Prince Georges County also has a majority black police department and is one of the most violent, inept police departments around.
OK, can I put a twist on this? How many cops have you been propositioned by? For me: 2, including the one who wrote me up for a ticket in a traffic accident that wasn’t my fault because I turned him down. Fortunately he didn’t have the guts to show up in court and the judge dismissed it since the facts of the case clearly showed that I wasn’t at fault.
My point is that there are a lot of jerks who are cops; that doesn’t mean that they’re the majority though and I don’t fear them. I can understand blacks fearing the cops since particularly in the past, racism and abuse of power was rampant; I don’t think we do a service to ending that though by perpetuating fears. Statistical evidence of continuing abuses is helpful, anecdotal isn’t.
Dave, I think you might be missing a class issue here. Because he’s well off, he’s expecting to get better treatment. I think that caught me more when I first read it, than the racial issue. Perhaps because I’m white, and class has usually struck me as a bigger issue than race in many ways when it comes to police (look at how people pay more attention to a rich person who says the law is treating him badly than a poor person).
In fact, the real problem for blacks may be the fact most people can;t get the idea that they all come from poor, backwards neighborhoods and such, and therefore must be of somewhat shady character (compare their treatment with that of another ethnic group like asians). Even other blacks seem to carry this opinion (which as a child I remember phrased as ‘you need to careful when you’re not in your own hood), as those who pointed out the treatment of other black policemen.
Ooh, I did. I was staying in someone’s house when I was a student in Monsey, New York — of all places — and I set off the alarm and couldn’t remember the code.
Long story short: Yep — right down the barrel. You know what happens? Your hands — they go right up to the sky!
SD and Entropy: Actually, I don’t presume the cop is White. In Joshua Correll’s “shooter bias” experiment, for example, he found that both Whites and Blacks were more likely to see an unarmed Black man as threatening than a White man. That’s certainly very interesting, but it makes my point more salient, not less: even in areas where the police make-up in majority Black, the “Black tax” still applies. What you’re misunderstanding here is that I can talk about Black disadvantage or structural racism without a “blame Whitey” subtext. The late Alan David Freeman articulated “perpetrator-” and “victim-centered” approaches to anti-racism practice. The former looks to find and punish the bad guys, the latter looks to remedy the wrongs done to the target. I’m in the latter camp. I don’t mind punishing bad guys when its necessary to compensate the victim, but its not my primary concern. My primary concern at this point is articulating the harm done to Black people so we can recognize they’re actual status in society and work to remedy it, not orating on how all White people are the devil. You’re projecting.
CStanley: I’ll double-check the data on racial disparities in police stops (disparities in treatment is more difficult to measure), but I’m pretty sure the data backs up the anecdotes. Stories are useful for multiple interpretations of the same data war, or where the data by itself isn’t penetrating the popular consciousness. As for your “proposition” case, I think that proves the exact same thing that I’m trying to show, but on sex rather than race grounds. My proposition tally is zero as well. The idea that a cop might proposition me in an implied quid pro quo is pretty foreign to me, but that’s in large part because I’m a man. Sexual harassment by cops is a serious problem actually, but it is not one generally taken seriously by juries–possibly for the same reasons I outlined here.
Finally, Bell: Again, this is precisely my point. In general, wealthy people are treated better by the cops than poor people (whether this is just or not, another post). But for Black people, being Black subsumes being wealthy. It absorbs class. They are presumptively coded as being threatening. It’s possible to overcome the presumption, but their actions are far more constrained than are those of Whites (the man’s example about not being able to drive his sports car in loose clothing was evocative here, I thought). That’s why I titled the post on my side “It Doesn’t Wash Off”–no matter where you move in the socioeconomic strata, your Blackness will always heighten your risk of maltreatment by the cops than would be received by a similarly situated White.
It’s probably the subject of a separate discussion, but I would like to note that a black cop can be as susceptible to racial bias as a white cop – because racism is systemic, and all cops, white and black, are susceptible to absorbing the prevailing police force culture.
Equally, blacks who manage well in their own lives can begin identifying with successful whiltes and engage in the blame-the-victim gamesmanship with equal gusto. The self hating Jew, for ecample, can be a parogy, but it also contains a kernel of truth.
While one anecdote should not be the basis for sweeping conclusions, it can illuminate a subject far more effectively than a dozen pages of boring statistics.
I have no experience with the actual data, but this seems to be the generally accepted common wisdom. Perhaps you know how much of a disparity in treatment the data actually show – it would be interested to see the figures.
Another point to consider is that on a per-capita basis, blacks commit more murders, for example, than whites. FBI statistics for 2002, for example, show that blacks committed 1.05 times as many murders as whites, even though they only make up 16% of the population. And before anyone accuses me of racism, some have statistically demonstrated this this disparity is mostly, if not wholly, due to a variety of non-racial factors, such a population age, socio-economic factors, etc. These factors are, again, more prevalent in the black community, but do not change the fact that blacks are more likely to commit violent crimes strictly on a per capita basis.
I have no doubt that racial bias enters into the equation and is probably a major factor, but it seems reasonable to speculate that actual crime figures, at least in part, is a driver of the “gun-in-your-face” phenomenon.
It does seem a little strange to attribute the entirety of a pervasive cultural phenomenon (massively greater police concern when interacting with blacks than with whites) to a 5% statistical probability skew about propensity toward violent crime.
Jason, it’s not 5%. To put it another way, the factor for whites is 0.030 and for blacks it’s 0.196 per 100k people – that’s strictly for murder based on 2002 FBI statistics. I don’t have the numbers for other types of crime. This graph may be illustrative.
And for the record, Jason, I never attributed the entirety of anything toward this statistical probably. I only put it out there as a factor to consider. If the reasoning can be shown to be flawed, then I’m more than happy to toss it aside.
Entropy, I see where you’re going. Police work seems highly intuitive (he looked suspicious…, for example), and that means that seeing something often enough (that high crime areas are often black) means that they’ll tend to pull over blacks more often because that’s just where their gut leads them.
On a side, but somewhat related note, there has been a spate of reports in chicago recently about abusive police (a somewhat separate issue, but I don’t think black people would be as angry about the “driving while black” phenomena if the police weren’t often being abusive as well), so it’s getting harder for people who claim “there isn;t a problem with police” to have as much credibility as they used to.
In light of the direction this thread has taken, I cannot cannot cannot more highly recommend Jody Armour’s book Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America. Everything I would say here is argued far more eloquently and completely by Professor Armour in that location.
Bones-
“…caused by not the police officer but the reaction of the person stopped. ”
I certainly agree that the way the one confronted by police acts can affect his treatment. Hopefully, people will become better informed on how best to handle it.
You’re talking about how people act.
I, on the other hand, was talking about how they feel. I suggest that the more fearful one is and the less confident that he’ll come out okay, the harder it is to remember how one ‘should’ act.
On a personal note, in most moments of crisis, I’ve been able to keep a cool head and act decisivley in that vein. On one nagging occasion, however, I compeltely froze, with legs going numb and a complete paralysis of will, Now, I’m left with the doubt about whether or not the next time I have to face a crisis, that ‘freeze” will surface again, and I won’t mangae to do the ‘right’ thing.
While I agree with you in principle, I think that using the same yardstick to judge behavior in all instances does not really refelect how complex reactions are. It’s the judgment part, in particular, that bothers me.
That’s basically it. What I think it does to a certain extent, though, is create a self-fulfilling feedback loop – meaning the police look more critically at black people, and less critically at whites, so “black” crimes are more likely to be discovered, investigated and prosecuted which, in part, keeps the crime statistics skewed, which makes the police more suspicious of black people. It seems to me breaking this cycle is no easy task, particularly when one throws in the very real racism that exists and other root causes of crime which affect demographic groups unequally.
David,
I would love to read that book had I the time, but too many others are on my list atm. I will keep in in mind, however – thanks for the tip.
David,
After reading some reviews and other information on Amour’s book and then rereading your comment I cannot help but get the impression that I’m being viewed as some kind of racist. I hope that is not the case, for it is completely untrue.
Dom-
Hey my feeling is if the cop crosses a line than he deserves the consequences. I was just pondering possible reasons for the vast differences between the perceived situations. To be honest I’m not real sure I care personally. I seem to have victim overload.
Fair enough, David. I agree, too, that the numbers in the stats don’t give the full picture since the way that the situations are handled may still differ and that’s harder to measure. One thought I had about that was to wonder how often people file complaints against officers. For example, to touch back to your anecdotes, do you know if any of the people filed complaints? Although I didn’t file one in my case of ‘sexual harassment’ (gosh, it chaps me to use that term but it does apply nonetheless), I remember considering it and discussing it with my dad (I was a only 19 at the time). I guess I decided to drop it when he backed off by not appearing in court, but in hindsight I almost wish I had gone on record with a complaint in case this was a pattern of behavior for him.
Anyway, if you’re going to do some checking on stats it might be worth looking at complaint stats as well if they’re available.
Entropy,
I think there should be some sort of gentlemanly agreement that if a person is worried about accusations of racism or sexism (as you noted), they should still be considered honorable, and generally have themselves taken at face value.
I think a lot of miscommunication online could be avoided if we had codes of courtesy like that. While there probably would be trolls that would take advantage of it, I think that it would make life a lot more easy-going, and less defensive for most of us. Especially the decent folk who one would want talking about stuff like this.
Entropy: I was making no comment to your views on race relations. I thought of Armour’s book due to his discussion of the “Intelligent Bayensian”: Those who argue that racially disparate treatment against Blacks (by cops or, say, cab drivers) is justified because statistically, they’re more likely to commit crime. Armour unpacks and responds to this argument, so he’s where I would point you to (the other two cases Armour looks at are “reasonable racists”–justifying disparate conduct on the grounds that most other people act in a similarly disparate manner–and “involuntary negrophobes”–justifying disparate conduct due to a particular traumatizing event suffered by the “negrophobe”; say, being raped by a black man).
It’s an excellent book, and not written in a confrontational style at all. I reiterate my recommendation for everyone.
CStanley: Check my most recent post.
David,
That makes sense and I would agree that statistical arguments to “justify” are wrong. I would just like to make it clear that attempts to answer the question “why” should not be taken as justification.
Sure, that’s cool.