Pubdate: Thu, 1 Jun 2001
Source: Washington Monthly (DC)
Copyright: 2001 by The Washington Monthly
Contact:  http://washingtonmonthly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/490

BLACK AND BLUE

Why Does America's Richest Black Suburb Have Some Of The Country's 
Most Brutal Cops?

No one had to warn Prince Jones about the police department in Prince 
George's County. The cops in Maryland's second most populous county 
had a reputation for turning routine traffic stops into Rodney King 
incidents sans video camera. Jones had told friends about his fear of 
the P.G. County police, and, according to them, Jones had even been 
pulled over and searched for drugs once before by a P.G. cop (who 
found none).

Jones' fear of police didn't match his profile. He was a Howard 
University student, a father, and a man of faith who never hesitated 
to dispense a religious aphorism to friends. He was also a fitness 
freak and personal trainer at Bally's Total Fitness. After leaving 
Howard, Jones became engaged to the mother of his child and planned 
to join the Navy. The son of a radiologist, he could have been a 
poster boy for middle-class black America.

So for the past few months, Jones' family and friends have been 
asking how he ended up slumped over the steering wheel of his Jeep 
Cherokee, a few blocks from his fianc=E9e's home in Virginia, with four 
bullets in his back courtesy of a P.G. County police officer.

The official police account is that the shooting was a surveillance 
operation gone bad. In the early morning of Sept. 1, thinking they 
were trailing a suspect in a theft of an officer's gun, undercover 
narcotics detective Carlton Jones (unrelated) and a superior trailed 
Jones 15 miles from P.G. County, where he lived, through Washington, 
D.C., and finally into Fairfax, Va., where the two officers 
separated. Both officers were in plain clothes and unmarked cars. As 
Carlton Jones tells the story, Prince Jones, apparently discovering 
he was being followed, rammed the detective's car three times, 
forcing the officer to open fire in fear for his life.

But for those close to Prince Jones, the police account is simply an 
attempt to cover up a cold-blooded murder. Though it is within 
protocol for police to operate outside of their jurisdiction, a 
mistaken identity shooting is not. Neither is claiming to be a cop 
while raising a gun without a badge, which Carlton Jones did by his 
own admission. Perhaps most troubling is the profile of the suspect 
police claimed to be looking for---a stocky, 5-foot-6-inch man with 
dreadlocks. Jones was 6-foot-4-inches and slender, sporting closely 
cropped hair.

In over 30 years as Commonwealth attorney for Fairfax County, Robert 
Horan had never charged a police officer with a crime. After 
investigating Jones' death, he declined to break with tradition. 
Jones' death, which is still under internal investigation by the 
Prince George's County Police Department, sparked a minor furor at 
Howard University. Students marched on the Justice Department to 
demand a federal investigation. The controversial shooting rang out 
nationally as Al Sharpton promised to lead a march on P.G. County. 
The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial asserting that "the 
ultimate wrong was done to an innocent man." Even presidential 
candidate Al Gore dedicated a moment of silence to Jones.

=46or those who'd followed the news in the county over the past few 
years, Jones' killing was only the latest in a string of suspicious 
shootings, murders, and beatings that had occurred at the hands of 
P.G. County police officers. Jones was the 12th person shot over a 
14-month period in the county. Five of those 12 died. Two other men, 
who were not shot, died in police custody.

The violence perpetrated by the P.G. cops is a curious development. 
Usually, police brutality is framed as a racial issue: Rodney King 
suffering at the hands of a racist white Los Angeles Police 
Department or more recently, an unarmed Timothy Thomas, gunned down 
by a white Cincinnati cop. But in more and more communities, the 
police doing the brutalizing are African Americans, supervised by 
African-American police chiefs, and answerable to African-American 
mayors and city councils. In the case of P.G. County, the brutality 
is cast against the backdrop of black America's power base, the 
largest concentration of the black middle class in the country.

A bedroom community of the nation's capital, Prince George's county 
is the only suburban county ever to become richer as it became 
blacker. According to the Census Bureau, the county, which is 63 
percent black, had a median income of $47,000 in 1997, more than 
double the median income for African Americans and almost $10,000 
more than the median income for whites.

Beyond economics, P.G. County's African-American residents boast a 
formidable amount of political power. The county executive, the 
state's attorney, and the chairman of the county council are all 
black, as are 41 percent of the police officers, including the one 
who killed Prince Jones. With political and economic clout have come 
all the trappings of opulence once denied African Americans. And in 
some ways, Prince George's shows integration taken to its most 
extreme, perhaps perverted, end---black people with the inalienable 
right to drive the same luxury cars, buy the same sprawling houses, 
and be just as apathetic as America's white elite.

Even with the death of Prince Jones, a native son of the black 
bourgeoisie, there has been very little outcry from the county's 
leadership. "I have yet to be contacted by any constituent who had 
anything to say about [Prince Jones' death]," County Councilmember 
Walter H. Maloney (D-Beltsville) told The Washington Post shortly 
after Jones' shooting.

Police brutality may help Al Sharpton garner a spot on "Rivera Live," 
but the black uppercrust sees little point in putting the police on 
trial here in Prince George's County, or anywhere else in the nation 
for that matter. Like their white counterparts, African-Americans 
will countenance a few police thrashings if that's the price of 
keeping their Jags from getting jacked.

=46amous Blue Beatdowns

In the folklore of urban black communities, tragic encounters with 
the police assume mythic proportions. For Detroit, there's Malice 
Green; in New York there's Abner Louima. Jones is the closest P.G. 
County has to a police-brutality martyr. But even before his death, 
the county could boast a healthy cross-section of shootings, 
maimings, and thrashings that would easily make the Blue Beatdowns 
Hall of Fame.

Police department officials assert that much of the controversy is 
the result of media hype. They say complaints against the department 
hit a 16-year low in 2000. In that same year, the department had only 
five shootings, a figure which compares well with neighboring 
Montgomery County's five police shootings and Washington D.C.'s 
seven, and is a 15-year low for P.G. county.

Still, neither of its neighboring jurisdictions has strung together 
so many questionable incidents the way Prince George's County has in 
recent years. It's hard to ignore the stories of people like Elmer 
Clayton Newman, who died last year after suffering two cracked ribs 
and a broken neck while, or after, being arrested. The officers who 
took custody of Newman, who was high on cocaine at the time, claimed 
Newman injured himself by repeatedly banging his head into a wall. No 
officer was charged in the case.

There's also 19-year-old Gary Albert Hopkins Jr., an unarmed college 
student, who was shot in 1999 by Officer Brian C. Catlett at a fire 
station. The police contend that Hopkins was reaching for another 
officer's gun when Catlett fired to stop him. After eight witnesses 
testifying before a grand jury directly contradicted the police 
version, Catlett made history by becoming the first police officer 
ever indicted in the county. Yet the parade of witnesses was 
ultimately not enough---Catlett was acquitted in February of this 
year.

Or again, there's Freddie McCollum, who in 1997 was stomped, beaten, 
and had a police dog unleashed on him in his own home. McCollum lost 
his right eye as a result of the drubbing. Police claimed his 
injuries were the result of his tumbling eight feet with two officers 
when the floor collapsed. Only McCollum, however, was injured. A jury 
didn't buy that explanation, and McCollum won a $4 million judgement 
against the county.

This litany of brutalities reads like a Quentin Tarantino 
interpretation of the Keystone Kops. And despite the lack of criminal 
prosecutions of cops---P.G. County has never convicted a police 
officer in a brutality case---the county's dark comedy has cost its 
taxpayers plenty. As of the end of last year, the county had been hit 
for no less than $6 million in damages for police misconduct. The 
trend was serious enough to draw federal attention. In November, the 
Justice Department decided to investigate the police department for 
patterns of brutality and misconduct.

Despite trouble serious enough to bring in the Justice Department's 
big guns, the county elite has treated the issue with indifference. 
"I think a lot of the citizens would like to not have to come out and 
deal with this," says Edythe Flemings Hall, president of the local 
NAACP chapter. "Although it's very clear that there are people with 
great individual wealth, we aren't ready to marshal our social 
capital to get into a big dog fight. Many of those in Prince George's 
County really are living pretty comfortable."

Rich, Black, and Apathetic

When I came to Washington, D.C., to attend college, one of my first 
lessons came from a couple of local cats who warned me about the 
cops. They weren't talking about Washington's blue, but Prince 
George's County's. I was told that if I wanted to be famous, I should 
go to Prince George's County and run a few red lights.

The reputation of Prince George's cops has changed little over the 
past 20 years, even as the county's demographics have shifted 
dramatically. During the days when Prince George's County was 
lily-white and voted George Wallace for president, Prince George's 
cops were well known as thugs. "The force was known as a bunch of 
cowboys who rode roughshod over citizens," says the NAACP's Hall.

Commander, Bureau of Patrol Gerald M. Wilson asserts that the 
department has exorcised its old demons, but that years ago its 
reputation bordered on Third-World. "Basically my recollection is 
that people said `PG cops, don't mess with them,'" recalls Wilson. 
"You wanted to avoid them at all costs. [If stopped] you would just 
stick your license through the window."

Perhaps the closest the county has come to community mobilization 
over police conduct was in the case of Terrance Johnson. In 1978, the 
15-year-old Johnson and his older brother, Melvin, were taken into 
custody by Prince George's County police. At the station, Johnson 
alleged that he was beaten by a police officer, at which point he 
snatched the officer's gun and shot him and another officer as he 
attempted to flee.

Johnson did 17 years for murdering police officers James Brian Swart 
and Albert M. Claggett IV. The case polarized Prince George's black 
and white communities. In 1995, Johnson was paroled to much fanfare 
in the black community, which had sympathized with and even lionized 
him for defending himself against what they perceived as corrupt and 
brutal police. (The cheers fell silent when Johnson later shot 
himself after a failed robbery attempt in Hartford County, Md.)

In hindsight, the complexity of Johnson's case did not make him the 
best face for a campaign against police brutality. Perhaps this 
explains why the county's fledgling black bourgeoisie wanted little 
part of the controversy. The same year that Johnson killed two cops, 
the NAACP attempted to march on the county seat, claiming that they 
would draw 1,000 protesters. but gathered only 60, much to the dismay 
of then-chapter president Sylvester Vaughns. "Expecting a thousand 
people is not a hell of an objective," demurred Vaughns.

But apparently it is in Prince George's County, where at times the 
community seems to have felt more ire against the activists than the 
police. The county's NAACP has been the most consistent force in 
opposing police brutality, and yet it has frequently been dissed and 
dismissed as irrelevant. Some of this reflects broader problems for 
the organization on the national level, as well as internal strife 
within the local chapter. But a large part of it seemed to be that 
Prince George's black community was demonstrating the complexities of 
that very integration which the NAACP had for so long championed. As 
the community's affluence grew, its political agenda changed.

Prince George's County's black elite had for the most part attained 
their goals of becoming property owners with the same rights as all 
Americans. The fact that they were black was, at most, a minor 
inconvenience.

Black Power Outage

Prince George's County may have virtually no appetite for protest, 
but this isn't especially unusual among the nation's black elite. A 
few years ago, The Washington Post ran a Pulitzer-prize winning 
series which revealed that the District of Columbia's Metropolitan 
Police Department had shot more people than any other big-city 
department in the country.

In consequence, the police made substantive changes, with the help of 
the Justice Department. The city has implemented non-lethal-force 
technologies, such as pepper spray, which it says will help reduce 
the number of fatal interactions between police and community members.

The changes seem to have worked. Since these new strategies were 
implemented, shootings resulting in death or injuries have dropped by 
78 percent over two years, according to the department, with the 
number of deaths dropping from 12 to one. The number of times 
officers have fired their weapons, either accidentally or 
intentionally, has declined by 48 percent. And the crime rate has not 
risen under this lighter touch.

The clear beneficiaries of these improvements were the city's black 
citizens---most of those shot had been black. But in a city where the 
mayor and much of the city council is black, and which houses one of 
the most storied enclaves of old black money, most of the outrage 
that helped spur these changes came from a small group of 
activists---not from political leadership. Even The Washington Post 
was surprised by the lack of letters to the editor. Of course the 
District is not unique in this regard.

In New York, too, the high-profile murder of Amadou Diallo and the 
subsequent acquittal of the officers involved has evoked little more 
than angry rhetoric in the city's formidable black community. Beyond 
Sharpton's invective, black political, civic, and business leaders 
have not flexed their collective muscle, and there has been no change 
in the department's policies. In the Ramparts scandal in Los Angeles, 
it was not the fury of the community that put the police department 
under fire, but the sloppiness of some very crooked cops.

At those times when African Americans have loudly confronted the 
issue of police brutality, they have frequently turned it into an 
employment issue, singling out the lack of minorities within various 
police departments as the root of the problem, rather than the 
behavior of the officers overall. The hiring strategy is an outgrowth 
of old-school Civil Rights and Black Power movement logic, which 
argues that African Americans will be more sympathetic to issues 
facing minorities than whites in the same jobs will be. When applied 
to law enforcement, the logic seems especially potent, given the 
history of black America's interactions with the police. It was the 
fallout from the Rodney King explosion that produced Willie Williams, 
the first African-American police chief in the history of the LAPD.

By such logic, affluent, black Prince George's County should have 
virtually eradicated police brutality. But this presumption ignores 
many of the nuances of African-American identity. In black America, 
race and ethnicity don't trump other things like class, gender, or 
sexual orientation, arguably because black identity is not just seen 
as an object of pride, but still as an obstacle to be overcome.

Indeed, outside of Prince George's County, the fault lines in the 
"minority representation" argument are causing tremors where you'd 
least expect them---in minority communities. Already, many big cities 
are evicting the first wave of black mayors, for whom race was a 
campaign bonus, and replacing them with white ones. Ditto for law 
enforcement: Los Angeles still has a black police commissioner, 
Bernard Parks, yet the city is currently embroiled in one of the 
biggest corruption scandals in the department's history.

The diversity approach is not completely flawed. Police brutality is 
an issue fraught with racial implications, if only because most of 
the victims are black, and black officers on the street may mitigate 
racial tension. But diversity in police departments is not a cure-all 
for brutality as long as African-American officers are bred on the 
same stereotypes as their white colleagues. As Jesse Jackson has 
noted, little old white ladies aren't the only people clutching their 
pocketbooks at the approach of a group of black males.

"I get more requests for police support than I get complaints," says 
Rep. Albert Wynn. "I get far more inquiries about how we can get more 
police out on the streets. People are very concerned about police 
brutality, but they're also concerned about safe streets and that 
issue can't be lost."

The situation in P.G. County suggests that police brutality is not 
the product of racism alone. Police forces are paramilitary 
institutions which by their very nature are prone to abuse of 
power---the psychological dynamics so dramatically illustrated 20 
years ago by Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford in his study of prisons. 
Using student volunteers, Zimbardo showed convincingly that ordinary 
people put in positions of authority within a criminal justice 
setting would behave brutally as a way of controlling others. It was 
the circumstances which brought out the worst in people, rather than 
specific defects in the individuals themselves. Abusiveness, in fact, 
seemed the default position.

That's why, argues Ronald Hampton, executive director of National 
Black Police Association, diversifying police departments like P.G. 
County's won't make them any less violent. "Not if we are going to 
send [black officers] through the same training academy that [white 
officers] have been going through all along. The policies and 
practices will change when the philosophy changes. Why do we think 
that if we hire more blacks and women, that if we send them to the 
same institution, that things will change?"

Of course, some in Prince George's may not have a problem with the 
current "philosophy," so long as it stays in the county's poorer 
areas, where affluent black residents are just as likely as white 
ones to think the victims of police brutality have it coming.

"We expect that African Americans in power will do something 
different, especially as it relates to lower-income black people," 
says Alvin Thornton, a professor of political science at Howard 
University and a resident of Prince George's County. "But the other 
part is that in many ways black people are no different than whites. 
There is a certain impatience with crime, and when police pounce on 
people there is some understanding."

Bad Odds

A few weeks after Prince Jones was killed, Howard University held a 
memorial. Those who spoke asked for God to fill their hearts with 
forgiveness for the officer who'd taken Jones' life. Friends of Jones 
spoke of his religious zeal and their deep belief that he was at 
Jesus' side. Several of them ended their eulogies in tears, as did 
university president Patrick Swygert, a man not known for public 
displays of emotion.

Perhaps the most poignant address came from Jones' mother, Mable 
Jones. While she sprinkled in a few words of rhetoric, Jones was much 
more concerned with the present than the afterlife. She asserted that 
her son's murder was a wake-up call. "It might be that God had a plan 
for me to move out of my comfortable suburban practice and speak 
out," she said, according to the Washington City Paper.

But her assertion stands in sharp contrast to the reality of Prince 
George's County, a place where no one is looking to be Al Sharpton. 
The truth is, the black middle class is not that much different from 
the white one. Just as affluent white people aren't too interested in 
the plight of poor whites, neither are affluent blacks especially 
concerned with their brothers in the ghetto---in fact, they may be 
even more eager to distance themselves from the ghetto than white 
people are trying to to distance themselves from the trailer park.

But as much as affluent blacks want to believe that money and power 
can insulate them from the effects of racism in this country, it is a 
delusion. White rich people might risk landing in a trailer park 
because of a bad turn of the economy, but the odds aren't nearly as 
high as those of a black middle-class man becoming the victim of 
police brutality, as Prince Jones so terribly discovered. Prince 
Jones so terribly discovered.
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