The relationship between blacks and cops is paradoxical to the core. Nobody needs the police more than African-Americans, yet no community harbors greater resentment toward them. The two groups have plenty of opportunity to cultivate this mutual distrust, particularly in the inner city. “We have thousands of kids in these neighborhoods who have had endless contact with cops, who’ve been arrested, who see people get arrested,” says Jonathan Rubin stein, a former Philadelphia policeman and crime expert. Blacks disproportionately commit violent crimes; they are also, disproportionately, the victims. In recent years an increasing number of police departments have implemented community policing programs, in which cops and residents work together to fight crime. But there has been a growing consensus among many blacks that the police can only do so much to impose order; the missing ingredient is self-help. Says Darnell Hawkins, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago: “The alternatives are empowerment from within or destruction from within.”
Long-simmering antagonisms provided the tinder for last week’s unrest. “In every black person, there is an almost instinctual suspicion of the white police,” says the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, pastor of the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem. By the time inner-city kids reach fourth grade, says Chicago priest Michael Pfleger, they view cops with “distrust and fear and, worse, anger.” In every sense, they remain worlds apart. Most cops reside far from the high-risk areas they police-a distance that fosters alienation and smugness. New York Police Commissioner Lee Brown has asked the state legislature for the authority to make city cops live within its borders.
In recent years police departments have taken pains to hire and promote minorities. Major cities with black police chiefs include New York, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington. While some law-enforcement experts believe black cops’ visible presence has helped foster better feelings, skepticism remains over whether they are really different from their white brethren in blue. “Blacks can be more brutal toward blacks than whites are,” says Calvin Rolark, chairman of the Police Chief’s Advisory Council for the District of Columbia. “Their whole personality changes when they become members of the police force.” “In effect,” says Walker, “they join the enemy.”
When cops and blacks clash, many African-Americans feel divided loyalties. “For me it’s always been tough to be a defender of the police,” says the Rev. Imagene Bigham Stewart, who runs a shelter for the homeless in Washington, D.C. “But you cannot live in the inner city without police.” William E. Francis, a black policeman in Houston, embodies the dilemma. Francis, 31, grew up on stories of police brutality, but a steady diet of thefts, murders and assaults in his neighborhood changed his views. “I wanted to make a difference, right some wrongs,” says the 10-year veteran. With more blacks moving into the middle class and beyond, blacks have a greater stake than before in the system; they, like middle-class whites, want the police to protect their person and property.
Community policing seems law enforcement’s best hope for changing the “us-versus-them” mentality. An updated version of the cop on the beat, it involves assigning foot patrols to a particular neighborhood and giving them the chance to become a trusted presence. Hundreds of cities have implemented programs over the last few years with impressive results. New York Commissioner Brown attributes last year’s 4.4 percent drop in reported crimes in his city to expanded foot patrols. But the most important measure of success may be how people feel in their neighborhoods. “Policemen are viewed as partners,” says Newark Mayor Sharpe James, “not members of an occupying force.” Los Angeles, by contrast, offers “the antithesis of community policing,” says Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University professor and national expert on policing. “The department was cool, aloof, disconnected from the community.”
Beyond the burned-out buildings, the Rodney King verdict has done incalculable damage in the ghetto. Since the ’80s, black conservatives have argued that African-Americans should stop blaming their troubles on discrimination and begin bettering their own lot; some now say the verdict in fact proves there is systemic racism and worry that black youth will repudiate the message of self-help. Mark H. Moore, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, suggests that the acquittals strain the contract that exists between police and society to protect its poor as well as its rich. Given the historic animosity between blacks and cops, it won’t be easy to rebuild lost faith; the civil violence last week demonstrated the urgency of that task.
