February 18
GUEST: Michael Sussman, former Trial Attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and former Assistant General Counsel for the NAACP, talks about reforming police policies as well as his long career fighting racism and discrimination.
Attorneys and residents criticize police reform process
Most white people have not worried too much about the police. That is unless they have been part of a political group not favored by the rich elite and their powerful corporations. Those who have marched against US wars in Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq know the nation's police a little better. So do various animal rights advocates who have been targeted as domestic terrorists. Those questioning US wars in Latin America know how the nation's top cops, the FBI, operate to spy on and entrap activists. So some whites know what law enforcement abuses can be like.
But living as a Black person in America is a whole different story. Just walking down the street can get you killed. A broken taillight can get you beaten and hauled off to jail. Many cops are deeply racist, full of pent up rage agains people who don't look like them.
There is an interesting book called The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War. This well researched work explores Tammany Hall, Wall Street, and the origins of anti Black prejudice in the NYPD. The Democratic Party of the 1840s relied on stoking anti Black hatred among the waves of newly arrived immigrants, mostly the Irish. Wall Street encouraged this prejudice because Black and white abolitionists of the day threatened the newly created fortunes based on Southern cotton and slave labor. Much of the actual kidnapping of freed Black citizens were done by the Irish police, not to mentioned the periodic assaults on Black businesses. The NYPD was Wall Street's enforcer, and the whole system was run by an utterly corrupt Tammany Hall. Police in this country have a long history of racially based violence.
Michael Sussman has spent his career exposing and winning compensation for the victims of police crimes. But good civil rights lawyers are simply not the answer. We have to completely reconfigure what police do in our society. The police must simply stop serving the very rich, and become part of the communities that they are hired to protect.
