Dear friends,
On top of the president’s agenda when he met with the mayor yesterday was gun violence and crime:
Biden and Adams have pushed a muscular approach for addressing an uptick in violent crime in the U.S. during the pandemic, with the president dropping a sweeping anti-crime blueprint last summer that called on Congress to earmark $300 million for local police departments to hire more cops.
Adams, for his part, released his own public safety plan last month, replete with stipulations for beefing up the NYPD, including by reintroducing a modified version of the department’s controversial plainclothes units, which were disbanded in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
In the absence of national gun control legislation, federal efforts to eliminate ‘ghost guns’, the illegally trafficked weapons that cross state lines, are welcome.
But the description of A and B taking a beefed-up and muscular approach to violence reminded me of something that Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander discussed in their chapter, “Fear,” in The 1619 Project. They show how even the weight of evidence does not deter the impulse toward policing as the ‘solution’ to violence.
The Kerner Commission Report, published in 1968, concluded that the urban uprisings in Black communities were caused by poverty, lack of employment opportunities, poor housing conditions, severe segregation, and unrelenting police brutality and harassment.
The Commission’s analysis and recommendations made clear that the problem was not one of Black lawlessness, and Alexander and Alexander note that
many white people were in denial about the true causes of Black uprisings, but Black people were not.
Read Practicing Abolition, Creating Community from Project NIA, with text by Benji Hart and illustrations by Emma Li.
Instead, white people and the leaders they elected failed to see the political nature of mob violence, simply because the mob was composed of Black people.
When Black rebellions swept our nation, they were cast as deviant, criminal, and irrational.
Without addressing the “root causes of Black despair,” the society made “racial inequality a permanent feature of American life.”
And that brings us to the present difficulties.
In recent years, politicians have defended mass incarceration on the grounds that ‘getting tough’ on crime was what Black people wanted — in other words, that Black fear, not white fear, drove the phenomenon. This is a partial truth. Desperate to address rising crime rates largely caused by the disappearance of work in segregated, ghettoized communities, some Black people have, over the years, supported and advocated for mandatory minimum sentences and other harsh policies. Other Black people — including civil rights activists and organizations — have strenuously opposed crime legislation that propels mass incarceration.
Alexander and Alexander stress that there are multiple perspectives with the Black community. And then they quote an opinion piece that ran in the New York Times in 2016, by Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and Vesla M. Weaver, in which the authors point out that it’s not just that demands to invest in education, jobs, housing, and drug treatment were ignored:
It’s that some elements were elevated and others were diminished — what we call selective hearing. Policy makers pointed to Black support for greater punishment and surveillance, without recognizing accompanying demands to redirect power and economic resources to low income minority communities.
Alexander and Alexander characterize this selective hearing as a pattern that traces back through the history of American race relations,
driven by chronic fear not just of Black people — because similar responses can be found in post-colonial dealings with other racial groups and Indigenous communities — but, more deeply, of what true justice might require.
Read the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s response to Adams’s Blueprint to End Gun Violence.
Inform Eric Adams of the dangers of selective hearing.
What might true justice require? Well, at a minimum, it would mean that Black people would have the same chance as other Americans of surviving an encounter with the police.
But the officer who killed Laquan McDonald in Chicago in 2014 has been released for ‘good behavior’. McDonald, a Black teenager, was shot 16 times as the officer pursued him. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse, McDonald was presumed both guilty and dangerous.
The officer was sentenced to 81 months of prison time for killing McDonald, and he served less than half his sentence. In Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s statement yesterday, she acknowledged that this is not true justice.
“I understand why this continues to feel like a miscarriage of justice, especially when many Black and brown men get sentenced to so much more prison time for having committed far lesser crimes. It’s these distortions in the criminal justice system, historically, that have made it so hard to build trust.”
One of the saddest news stories I’ve read in a while reported the death of a sixth grader in Tennessee on Christmas Day; he was hit by a stray bullet from outside in his home.
As part of his school’s anti-violence initiative with the Memphis PD, Artemis Rayford learned about legislation permitting people 21 and over to carry a weapon without a permit or handgun safety training. He wrote a letter to Tennessee’s governor to express his concerns:
We have been discussing the effects of TN’s new permitless handgun carry law on our city and communities. It is my opinion that this new law will be bad and people will be murdered.
Ten years ago, Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida, eating candy while Black.
Support the Dream Defenders, youth activists in Florida who are organizing for true justice and an end to gun violence and mass incarceration.
CORRECTION:
Although I sent a message to New York State’s Budget Director before asking you to do the same, it took an unusually long time to bounce back. I spent a ridiculous amount of time being a detective, to figure out the correct email address, but the message bounced back again. It’s clear that we’re not meant to communicate directly with him.
So, please ask the Governor to relay our message to Robert Mujica about Fair Pay for Home Care. We get to educate two people at once!
with love,
L