The Thin White Line

If you’re young, dressed casually, and black, it might just be better to be a drug dealer than an honest man. Honor can get you killed.

Patrick Dorismond’s job was to make New York tourists feel safe, patrolling the area near Macy’s in a police-like uniform. But after work last week, a man in plainclothes asked him where to buy drugs. Outraged, Dorismond scuffled with the man-—an undercover cop—-who subsequently shot the father of two dead at close range. Had Dorismond been a dealer, he would simply have been arrested. But his righteous indignation at being targeted as a hoodlum—-no doubt because of his skin color—-cost him his life.

Will white Americans embrace the cause of Patrick Dorismond, or see him as necessary collateral damage in the war against crime? Replace this one man’s name with any of the dozens of people killed in police shootings in America each year, and we get to the crux of the issue of excessive police force—the response, or lack thereof, of the mainstream public. While black and brown Americans reel from the news of each new shooting, most people try their hardest to ignore the racial divide in policing. The “thin blue line” of police protecting Americans from crime has an ugly underbelly: a thin white line of public apathy toward the targeting of black and brown men, often for no worse crime than dressing casually, walking or driving in working-class neighborhoods, or having dark skin.

Make no mistake, this issue crosses all state and local lines. Louisville, KY, is currently riven by the decision to give officers who killed an unarmed black teen awards for “exceptional valor.” The mayor fired the Police Chief who granted the honors, and police countered on Friday by staging a massive demonstration against the mayor. Los Angeles is staggering under the weight of a police corruption and brutality scandal so severe that it may cost the city up to $300 million to settle charges of police shooting, framing and abusing suspects. Even if white Angelinos do not feel the bite of a bullet, their wallets will pay the price. How sad that we have to rely on the enlightened self-interest of money to highlight how police brutality hurts all of us. But nothing else seems to be working.

But the Big Apple is the center of the police brutality issue these days. The city is still reeling from the acquittal last month of the four officers who fired forty-one bullets at Amadou Diallo, leaving a man armed only with a wallet to soak his own stoop in his dying blood. Days after the acquittal, another unarmed black man was shot and killed, and now Dorismond. This latest case highlights yet another critical issue: the targeting of black men in America’s drug wars. African-Americans are 13 percent of the population; 15 percent of those who use drugs; 35 percent of those arrested for drug crimes; and 50 percent of those convicted. Many white users exchange merchandise for money behind closed doors, and even if they buy on the street, their skin color gives them camouflage in a world where cops use dark skin as probable cause. It is what got Patrick Dorismond killed, and what keeps the jails disproportionately filled with blacks and Latinos in a “war on drugs” which is merely a war on urban America.

And therein lies the heart of the problem: police brutality in America really does hit communities of color far harder than others, means far more to some of us because of our race and class. Is white America turning a blind eye, tuning a deaf ear to the sobs and the sighs of black mothers because the streets are safer? In truth, the decline in crime is largely a function of the improved economy. There is absolutely no evidence that the relentless intimidation, persecution, even murder of unarmed blacks and Latinos has lowered the American crime rate. Quite the opposite: it has caused a deep and abiding resentment which could poison American race relations for years to come.

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