My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

The law applies equally to everybody.

If that were true, my first contention is that the big players on Wall Street who caused the financial meltdown in 2008 (at public expense while amassing vast personal fortunes) would be suitemates at a Club Fed by now.

These people, no matter the degree of fraud they committed and the lives they upended, seem to have a veneer of untouchability due to their designer suits, expensive haircuts and collective power to cripple the economy. We will never see them kneeling on a curb in handcuffs.

The enormity of what they did is practically an abstraction; I’ll focus on something most people can picture easier.

What would equal application of the law look like? An obvious example is that people in prison for drug offenses would reflect the overall population, because rates of drug use and dealing are similar across race and ethnicity. In a fair world, less than 30 percent of the people who have gone to prison for drug offenses in the U.S. would be black or Hispanic.

What is that statistic in reality? Seventy-five percent.

There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that blacks are arrested for drug crimes at much higher rates than white people. In Minneapolis, from 2004 to 2012, a black person was over eleven times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person was. Again, usage rates are pretty much the same between blacks and whites.

Among other minor offenses, blacks were six times more likely than whites to be arrested for vagrancy, and nine times more likely to be arrested for disorderly conduct. Black youths were over 16 times more likely than white youths to be cited for loitering or curfew violations.

What it boils down to is that the justice system serves as a de facto system of social control for minorities. In other words, some populations are policed more than others.

Once a person has a felony record, there are serious repercussions beyond serving one’s sentence, including being cut off from many meaningful social and economic opportunities. The impact of this on communities of color, especially due to the “war on drugs,” has been devastating.

Unmasking this method of social control is the central purpose of Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” She points out that in some urban areas, half of black men between 18 and 35 are under the supervision of the criminal justice system.

Alexander quotes the observation of a law student from the University of Chicago who went on a police ride-along in the city: “Each time we drove into a public housing project and stopped the car, every young black man in the area would almost reflexively place his hands up against the car and spread his legs to be searched. And the officers would search them. The officers would then get back in the car and stop in another project, and this would happen again. This repeated itself throughout the entire day. I couldn’t believe it. This was nothing like we learned in law school. But it just seemed so normal — for the police and the young men.”

This behavior seems more like what one would witness in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-controlled territory, not in a present-day American neighborhood.

But many people choose to see high minority incarceration rates as the result of poor individual choices alone, and they dismiss protests against selective policing practices as a “false sense of entitlement.”

Policing truly is one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs in the United States. People in uniform meet social problems head on, and 121 law enforcement personnel died on the job last year.

Law enforcement is also one of the most power-wielding careers. Police make decisions that can easily have life-altering consequences for people, whether officers are assisting or arresting them.

Can we appreciate the job police do, yet listen to people who argue reasonably that some situations can be handled better in the future? Can we express gratitude for police service to our community, yet present evidence that systemic discrimination exists?

Yes, we can move past an “us vs. them” or “good guys vs. bad guys” way of looking at things. Nearly everybody has good intentions and everybody makes mistakes. This is true of police as well as the public they serve. People, even if they’ve messed up, should be treated humanely.

I’m so pale white that doctors assume I’m anemic, and I’ve only had positive interactions with law enforcement. I’ve been treated with respect and served quickly. Always.

But it’s not good enough to say everything is OK as long as things are OK for me. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” His call to peaceful action is still as relevant as ever.

 

Albert Lea resident Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.