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Do you believe them now? Black New Yorkers have been telling us for a very long time, for decades, but we didn’t listen. We’ve excused police misconduct as “not knowing the whole story” or the work of a few “bad apples.” But now we’ve all watched, or at least read about, the excruciating, slow-motion street execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis. What those officers did is not new, just new to us. It seems that this one has finally broken the dam.
If we have another few weeks of these protests, all of those bad apples will get shaken out of the tree. We’ve already seen police pepper spray a young man in Kansas City for talking, shove an old man down in Salt Lake City, another in Buffalo and a gang of them terrorize two college students in Atlanta. And then they lie. There was no gun in Atlanta, the young man in Kansas City was not engaging in “protest-related” crimes, and the man in Buffalo was not someone who “tripped and fell.”
Here in the city, we’ve heard someone express a desire over police radio to “shoot those” maternal fornicators. We’ve seen several officers drive into a crowd, another yank off a young man’s facemask and pepper-spray him, another appear to make a white power hand sign, some take protesters’ bicycles, a large group of them repeatedly shove compliant people already walking away, and many covering their badge numbers.
It’s not enough for good cops, who are the majority, to do no wrong; we need them to stand up to those who do wrong, and for the rest of us.
So yes, we need to stop the police murdering, brutalizing, humiliating, disrespecting, degrading and ignoring black people. But that’s a low bar, and it turns out that policing just produces, over and over again, the most vulgar manifestations of racial inequality. There is a lot of quiet bias that we don’t see dramatized on video: segregated schools, economic inequality, segregated neighborhoods and poorer health outcomes.
Black New Yorkers told us the reality we didn’t want to hear in July 1964, when a white police officer shot and killed a slight, 15-year-old black boy outside of his school. Young James Powell, 5-foot-6 and 122 pounds, supposedly had a knife, and even though Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, 6-foot and 200 pounds, had four commendations for disarming men armed with guns, Gilligan said he had no recourse but to shoot the boy twice.
A mostly white (21 out of 23) grand jury agreed, the white police chief agreed, the white PBA president agreed and the white mayor agreed. Many black New Yorkers did not. Demands to arrest, or at least suspend, Gilligan were rebuffed, and police met demonstrations in Harlem with heavy force, including beatings from the Tactical Patrol Force, the since-disbanded combat squad. These confrontations quickly degenerated into six nights of fighting and looting across Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, deemed the “Harlem Riot.” Similar situations followed over the next month and a half in Rochester, Chicago, Jersey City, Paterson and Philadelphia.
Government and police officials blamed Communists. Really. Civil rights leaders blamed poverty, discrimination and intransigent political leadership. The rage in America’s urban cities continued to explode every summer for the rest of the decade.
Ultimately, the federal government’s Kerner Commission report in 1968 agreed with them. But we had no use for it, here in the land of opportunity and individual responsibility, where we sink or swim on our own merits.
A lot must have changed since then, since things just get better over time, while we weren’t paying attention, right?
In 1964, the city’s schools were highly segregated. Today, the city operates one of, if not the most, segregated public school systems in the country.
In 1964, the city’s neighborhoods were highly segregated. Central Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were 95% and 70% black, respectively. Today, New York City remains one of the most residentially segregated cities in the country.
In the early 1960s, black New Yorkers earned about 60% of what white New York families did. As of 2016, black men earned 60% of what their white counterparts did. Black women did a little better, bringing in 70% of what white women did. And that was before the economy fell off a cliff.
So yes, we need to clean up policing. But we also need to destroy the structural inequities that keep black people lesser than. Black Americans have done all the work. It’s up to us. Will we actually do it this time?
Hayes is an urban historian in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “We Are Home: New York City, Racial Inequality and the Long, Hot Summers.”