PROFESSOR HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. & THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA BETWEEN THE POLICE AND THE POLICED!

PROFESSOR HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. & THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA BETWEEN THE POLICE AND THE POLICED!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July, 24, 2009

“A community gets the kind of police it deserves.”

Novelist Joseph Wambaugh

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During the 1970s, I did police consulting as an organizational development (OD) psychologist from New York City to Miami, Florida down the eastern seaboard of the United States. This was during the push for “law and order” across the United States in the aftermath of the chaotic and traumatic 1960s.

Nine months were spent in Fairfax County, Virginia consulting the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) after a riot occurred in Herndon, Virginia, a community on the outskirts of Fairfax City.

A white FCPD officer had shot and killed a young black man in a convenient store after an altercation between them. The black man was a young tough with an attitude, and the police officer had a problem with him.

One day he spotted the subject driving with an expired license, and chased him to a convenient store. There he attempted to arrest the young man as he was taking a beer out of the cooler, turning to everyone and saying, “Have you seen me driving?”

Exasperated, the police office pushed him hard against the cooler; the young man reacted by grabbing the officer’s nightstick to defend himself, hitting the officer on the shoulder. The officer responded by unloading his service revolver on the subject, killing him. A riot followed.

I would write my master’s thesis on my intervention titled “A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot” (1976).

In that study, I learned that Fairfax County, Virginia was one of the richest counties in the United States, and that more than eighty (80) percent of FCPD officers did not live in the county, policing a jurisdiction outside their socioeconomic identity.

I learned further that the black community of Herndon had been artificially created. Over the years, African Americans had been relocated there from the Washington, DC area. It was now a community of more than a thousand in an otherwise white community. It was also apparent that these relocated families had limited recreational opportunities, other than congregating around a shopping center, which included the convenient store. Add to this the fact that few young people had access to jobs. Of an evening, music would blast from speakers attached to buildings and young people would drive in and out of the shopping center honking their horns and venting their frustrations. Aggravated by this disturbance of the general tranquility, the Herndon community council imposed noise restrictions on the shopping center and curfews on the youth.

It was a recipe for disaster needing only the spark of the white police officer killing the young black man. Spontaneous emotional combustion erupted into rioting, burning down the shopping center, and throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. It was then that I entered the fray, and would spend the next nine months in Fairfax County.

Other incidences occurred over this intervention that pointed to the estrangement between police and the policed. It included many unresolved issues, misunderstanding, and buried contempt. It also involved embarrassing mistakes.

There are rows on rows of impressive townhouses in Fairfax County laid out in monotonously mirror images of each other, in street after street, where only diplomats, lobbyists, consultants, and staff members of Congress and the Federal Government can afford to live, making this foreign territory to the FCPD.

On this one night, a drug bust was attempted by unceremoniously crashing through the front door of one of these townhouses where it was assumed a drug dealer resided. It was early in the a.m., and once through the door a baby was heard to cry, and the police officers knew immediately, they were in the wrong house. It was the home of a young lawyer in the Department of Justice, along with his wife and child. Police had the right house number but were on the wrong street. FCPD was sued and the action created quite a brouhaha.

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This was representative of many forays into the police and the policed culminating in a statistical study of several communities complemented with empirical data accumulated in my consultancy and leading to my Ph.D. dissertation titled, “The Police Paradox: Systematic Exploration in the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed” (1978).

My empirical work included spending three months in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Raleigh Police Department (RPD) of 350 officers threatened mutiny if the police chief was not fired. Another condition of their demands was to be allowed to form a police officers’ union. This disregarded the statues of the State of North Carolina, which did not allow city employees to form a union much less strike.

The situation garnered front-page headlines in the newspaper, and television confrontations between police officers and their chief at city council meetings.

* * *

My OD work in Fairfax County revealed that the police department had swelled from 84 police officers a score of years before to 840 officers, and yet it was operated as if it were still a small department. For example, it hand counted complaints while a computer sat idle although it had officers in the field with computer skills.

The routine expected was that every officer spent his initial years in patrol no matter what his skill base before being reassigned to a more appropriate job. The command staff micromanaged to the extreme, which meant this left many tactical and strategic decisions made too late to have crucial impact.

And then there was the matter of training. The police officers, being from essentially other surrounding counties outside Fairfax, carried the baggage of a contrasting culture with conflicting values, expectations, and perceptions. In a word, there was little sense of ownership or mutual understanding.

* * *

With regard to the Raleigh Police Department, a very human factor surfaced. A favorite of the city manager was the sitting police chief. He was a gentleman with a heart condition and was unable to handle the stress of his job. Rather than retire the chief, the city manager devised a plan. To ensure the chief of police received his maximum retirement benefits, the city manager decided to rotate the three senior majors of the department every four months, allowing them to intercede for the police chief as the department’s operating authority. This went on four three years at which time the police chief died of an heart attack before he reached retirement.

The city manager appointed the senior major of the three majors to the position of permanent chief of police. He then resigned, persuading the city council to appoint his assistant as city manager.

The new police chief, to establish his authority, and reduce the threat from the two majors, appointed one major to head administration and the other community service, both staff functions with little operating power.

Line authority in patrol operations is where power resides in a police department. He appointed his sergeant as a new major to head patrol, and put a captain that was a thorn in his side on permanent nights. It was a fatal mistake as all patrol officers rotated shifts and would be exposed to this captain.

The nightshift captain took full advantage of his opportunity by using his psychopathology to poison the minds of the men against their chief with half-truths, innuendoes, and outright lies. He did this for three years, which proved sufficient incubation to reach fruition culminating in the demands for the removal of the chief, formation of a union, or the threat of mutiny by walking off the job.

It was in uncovering this conspiracy and reporting it to the city council that the air was taken out of the mock rebellion. Once everything was made public in the Raleigh Courier Journal, and this may sound melodramatic but true, the police officers saw how they had been duped and obediently fell back into line. The chief of police, for his part, became more responsive to their needs, the offending captain resigned, and transition to a new chief occurred without incident a few years later.

PROFESSOR HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

Cambridge is a community of scholars with Harvard and MIT among the many academic institutions in the immediate environment. I’ve consulted at MIT and know how rich and privileged this community is, especially when it comes to its most distinguished professors. They may not be as wealthy as some in Fairfax County, but they have influence that stretches across the nation and beyond.

At the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories of MIT, I was introduced to this mindset and culture. Moreover, I was constantly reminded subtly and otherwise that I, from the hinterland of the Midwest, was a species apart from members of this august company. I wrote about this experience in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007). So, I can imagine how incensed Dr. Gates became when confronted by police officers, especially given his work, which, incidentally, is prescient with such expected confrontation and treatment of African Americans.

I know only about this incident from what is written in the newspapers, shown on television, and discussed on such PBS programs as Charlie Rose and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

I mention PBS for reason. It seems obvious that the police officers in question have never viewed one of the many television documentaries of Dr. Gates, or have failed to read any articles or books written by him. He is a professor of African Americans Studies, which of course relates to race. Thus this represents yet another aspect of the great divide between the police and the policed.

* * *

It so happens that I have empathy for Dr. Gates from a personal perspective.

In 1992, while making one of my many trips to Clinton, Iowa to gather material for my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), which was about my preteen years in the 1940s, I literally ran into a similar situation.

I was driving through Nashville, Tennessee on the Interstate, late at night and very tired, when I ran into a detour. I got off, made a wrong turn and found myself in a dingy neighborhood, made even more depressing because the sky was overcast and the moon hidden, making me feel as if I was entering a black hole.

Nervous beyond measure, I was driving slowly trying to get my bearings when an unmarked police car cut me off, another drove up perpendicular to my door, and another blocked me from the rear. Next a blinding light hit me in the face and then a loud speaker hurt my ears, shouting at me, “Step out of the car with your hands up!”

Before I could oblige, as I was paralyzed with fear, my door was yanked open, and I was pulled out of my seat, turned around with my arms stretched over my head, pushed against my car, patted down, spun around and asked what I was doing in the neighborhood.

This was before I was asked for my I.D. Those who know me know that when I am emotionally upset, I stutter. Hard as I tried, I could not speak. No words came out of my mouth. Meanwhile, I was surrounded by plain clothed police officers, which I assumed them to be, being badgered with questions, only getting more and more upset, but finally being able to say, “IIIIImmmm llllooost!”

By that time, they had checked my plates, found the car was not hot, that I was from Florida, and then, finally, asked for my I.D. I have no idea how much time expired but it seemed like an eternity. Then when I was finally able to talk, I did what I always do when upset – I gave way too much information. I told about writing a book, and going to Iowa, and being very tired, and not being able to follow the detour signs, on and on. Finally, one police officer said, “Charley, it's not him!”

During this whole ordeal, I never thought of being hostile or confrontational. It never entered my mind. As rebellious as I may seem in my writing, I’ve always had great respect for authority, at home, in school, at church, at work, and in the military. Perhaps I’d be a better writer if I were less disciplined.

This respect was especially demonstrated in the ten years I worked with law enforcement in the 1970s. Spending thousands of hours with police officers, being exposed to what they have to put up with, and experiencing the telling emotional drain to the job, I could not imagine having that kind of restrain day after day after day. Then again, I see police officers as outsiders like myself, and feel a kinship there.

And, yes, I’ve witnessed innocent people being arrested and jailed for tripping over their own mouths. Former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, Joseph Wambaugh, who turned to writing novels, once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.” I think that is true. If a community is duplicitous, it is going to get suspect law enforcement. If it thinks it is better than the people who serve it, judicious policing will collapse into inappropriate behavior.

What happened at the home of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. the other night is regrettable, and the behavior, possibly on both sides, unfortunate, but inevitable when the divide between police and the policed is allowed to widen.

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