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Nonfiction

Three New Books Discuss How to Confront and Reform Racist Policing

Dallas Police Chief David Brown at a prayer vigil for five officers killed by a sniper, July 8, 2016.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

CALLED TO RISE
A Life in Faithful Service to the Community That Made Me
By David O. Brown with Michelle Burford
Illustrated. 255 pp. Ballantine Books. $28.

POLICING THE BLACK MAN
Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment
Edited by Angela J. Davis
321 pp. Pantheon Books. $27.95.

CHOKEHOLD
Policing Black Men
By Paul Butler
Illustrated. 304 pp. The New Press. $26.95.

Black people have never been truly safe in America. Police brutality and the use of excessive force have been enduring features of our history. Today social media has allowed us to make our collective vulnerability newly visible to the general public. Not since the civil rights era, when images of police officers beating peaceful protesters made the nightly news, have we engaged in this level of national conversation about racial inequality. With formal segregation behind us, the racism that pervades our society has pooled in the criminal justice and law enforcement strategies that developed in the wake of Jim Crow. We police black and brown citizens and lock them in cages like no other country in the world.

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Three new books lay out an alternative path. In “Called to Rise,” by the former Dallas police chief David O. Brown, we learn how a black law enforcement officer ascended the ranks and reformed the department, helping to make the entire city safer. “Policing the Black Man,” edited by the activist and law professor Angela J. Davis, brings together 11 essays from scholars and criminal justice practitioners who offer forward-thinking policy suggestions. And in the most readable and provocative account of the consequences of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” the law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler argues that our society must be completely remade in “Chokehold: Policing Black Men.”

Brown, who is best known for his handling of the shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers by a sniper in July 2016, believes “we will make progress only when we set aside our assumptions and really start listening to each other.” He admits he didn’t always think this way. When Brown was a patrol officer in the 1980s, he ascribed to the dominant approach: “Put the criminals in jail, and let God sort them out.” In the 1990s, the Dallas police chief at the time assigned Brown to a community policing program. Brown had been “a cop who gloried in locking away villains,” but his “instincts had slowly shifted,” and he began to see the value in having police officers “connect with the people they served.”

In 2010, Brown became police chief, and he had his officers go door-to-door to meet the people they were charged with protecting, attending homeowners association meetings and block parties, hosting basketball games and offering counseling sessions at local schools. (He also lost his 27-year-old son that year, to police gunfire. His son, who had bipolar disorder, was killed after fatally shooting a bystander and a police officer.) Brown’s approach, based not on arrest numbers but on police-community engagement, led to a historic decline in Dallas’s crime rate between 2010 and 2015. Brown retired in 2016, after he noticed an uptick in the crime rate, which he attributes to budget cuts that led to staffing shortages.

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Although Brown offers us one of the most impressive models for community policing, his view begins to look idealized in light of the racist practices described by Paul Butler in “Chokehold.” “Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do,” Butler writes. “The police, as policy, treat African-Americans with contempt.” Like Brown, Butler admits that he was once an active participant in this system, a prosecutor who “sent a lot of black men to prison” and “defended cops who had racially profiled or used excessive force.”

While Butler urges us to rethink the purpose and function of policing entirely, a number of the essays in Angela J. Davis’s anthology suggest that the historical tension between low-income residents of color and the police charged with protecting them can be addressed with training programs. In one of the most popular of these programs, known as procedural justice, policemen are taught that if they treat people with dignity, respect and fairness, they will build trust and gain legitimacy. Meanwhile, implicit bias training encourages officers to recognize the set of racial assumptions they carry but do not consciously control. These measures can also save lives. As Yale Law School’s Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler put it in their essay, the more trust communities have in the police, the more likely they are to report crime, provide testimony and help “to hold offenders accountable.”

Barring fundamental legal reforms, however, these programs can have only a limited impact. Indeed, much of the discussion in “Chokehold” and “Policing the Black Man” highlights the impact of major Supreme Court decisions of the last 50 years, including ones that supported racial profiling and deemed statistical evidence of racial disparities insufficient to prove a “discriminatory purpose” on the part of police officers or the courts. As Jin Hee Lee and Sherrilyn A. Ifill, both from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, point out in their contribution to Davis’s book, “the courts function in a distorted reality that only recognizes racial discrimination in a specific and distinct form: overt racial animus by a specific actor.” The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution has largely failed to extend African-American citizens protection from police abuse and sentencing disparities.

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Lee and Ifill suggest that hope might lie in pursuing “a more effective body of equal protection and anti-discrimination law.” Butler, however, remains skeptical of incrementalist measures. “Liberal reforms, such as anti-discrimination laws, have not brought long-term change,” Butler writes in “Chokehold.” “Civil Rights laws have helped stigmatize discrimination but have barely blunted its effect.” He demonstrates that when citizenship rights are extended to African-Americans, policy makers and officials at all levels of government historically used law and incarceration as proxy to exert social control in black communities. Black Codes, convict leasing and Jim Crow segregation followed Emancipation; overpolicing and mass incarceration followed the civil rights movement. “In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform — we must think of transformation,” Butler writes. “The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew.”

For Butler, remaking America entails abolishing both prisons and the conditions of segregated poverty that increase the likelihood of criminal justice supervision. Butler cites a study from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice estimating that 40 percent of the nation’s prisoners could be released without compromising public safety. This alone would save taxpayers $200 billion over 20 years, freeing up new opportunities for resources and outcomes. He suggests those funds could be used to hire 327,000 new public-school teachers, or to create jobs for low-income citizens who often have no options for survival outside of the informal economy. And since nearly 80 percent of people in prison suffer from drug addiction or mental health issues, Butler thinks it wise to reallocate funding from police departments and correctional authorities to community health care.

If the prospect of this level of structural change sounds impossible or rash, at the very least we can heed the insights the public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson provides in “Policing the Black Man.” Stevenson looks to South Africa, where a series of truth and reconciliation hearings followed the end of apartheid, and Germany, where citizens are encouraged to visit the sites of Nazi concentration camps and reflect on the history of the Holocaust, as examples of the kind of historical reckoning we must also commit to as a nation. For it is only by fully confronting the traumatic and contradictory currents of American history that we can begin to change course. Past abuses must be repaired so that safety and justice can exist for us all.

Elizabeth Hinton, a professor of history and African-American studies at Harvard, is the author of “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Equal Protection. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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