Representing parts of St. Louis County where Michael Brown grew up, Missouri State Rep. Clem Smith (D-85) always found it odd that white cops were driving hours from far-flung places to patrol black neighborhoods.
“It sort of hit me one day,” Smith tells UPTOWN. “Why are they going through all of this for a $12-an-hour job?”
It’s a fairly common phenomenon in and around St. Louis. In certain parts of Smith’s district, 95 percent of a community could be African American, yet over half the first responders will be white. The reality has forced a discussion since Michael Brown’s death and the ensuing chaos, with many black elected officials, community activists and residents looking a bit more closely at their local police and fire rescue teams.
That worries Smith, a keep-it-hundred legislator who’s been pushing hard for real political change since it all hit the fan in Ferguson, Mo. Annoyed that protest organizers have not yet staged a recall election to immediately replace the small black city’s white mayor and nearly all-white city council (something the Show Me State law explicitly offers on a gold platter), Smith wonders out loud if many white St. Louis-area cops are in it for the passion of public safety…or in it because it’s like playing Call of Duty where “you can live out your fantasy.”
“Remember the look in some of those guys’ faces when they were confronting protesters?” asks Smith describing those sticky, violent August summer days last year along Ferguson’s West Florrisant Avenue. “A lot of us do. A lot of these cops had a wild look in their eyes like they were really amped up. Like ‘wow—this tear gas and these military grade weapons have been on the shelf gathering dust for years. And now, finally, we get to use them!’”
The racial demographics of public safety personnel in places like Ferguson pose complex and compelling questions about much more than just police brutality and excessive use of force. It’s a paradoxical cause-and-effect dilemma between the need for police departments to staff up and an ideal world where they hire people who look like the communities they protect.
Of course, Ferguson revealed that while the field of law enforcement has talked itself up as a universally proud purveyor of “community policing,” that’s not really the case in many situations. Like the St. Louis suburb, there are black communities across the nation patrolled almost exclusively by white cops. In Ferguson, the city is about 70 percent black—but, the police force is over 90 percent white. In Cleveland, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed in a playground by police who stupidly mistook his toy gun as the real thing, the city has a black mayor and a black population that’s nearly 54 percent—yet, the police force’s racial ratios are all out of whack to that: only 25 percent black, and 65 percent white.
But what’s much more striking is how the nation’s political map appears to inform that to a large degree. White cops patrolling black neighborhoods in places like New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland and elsewhere make daily commutes from very white places. Hence, it contributes to a disastrous recipe where white police officers are rather detached from black communities and view them within the prism of routinely hostile interactions.
“The biggest problem is that white officers don’t understand the black experience,” argues retired Oakland, Calif. police officer Horatious Petty who is now a board member of the National Black Police Association.
Brooklyn Borough president Eric Adams agrees. “Here in New York, we’re made up of five boroughs,” Adams, himself a former black NYPD officer explains.
“And I’m concerned that too many of our officers who patrol those boroughs don’t live in them. Instead they commute from Long Island or other counties. They should live where they patrol.”
In the New York state legislature, lawmakers such as current U.S. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), pushed aggressively for that. “Residency requirements incentivize officers to protect the communities they police,” Jeffries tells UPTOWN. “One of the great tragedies of the police officers who died in Brooklyn is that they were living and raising families in Brooklyn. These are the type of officers we want.”
Exacerbating that problem is the fact that many of the white officers are commuting from congressional districts and communities that, for the most part, look entirely like them, limiting the degree of positive interface with African Americans.
“I believe in the fundamental that a city is better off when a police force lives in that city,” says former New Orleans Mayor and current National Urban League President Marc Morial tells UPTOWN. As mayor, Morial pushed for what he called ‘domicile ordinances’ or residency requirements for police and fire employees.
“As a matter of course, domicile ordinances are generally a good thing. You keep payroll in that city, tax revenue in that city.”
As a new year brought in a fresh 114th Congress, observers see an increasingly polarized political landscape shaped by huge pockets of red and shrinking blue as Republicans have dramatically expanded their numbers in the House of Representatives and retaken the majority in the Senate. Closer examination will find seas of very white Republican Congressional districts surrounding heavy concentrations of African Americans in urban cores or, now, situated in suburban rings as city gentrification rapidly displaces people of color.
Since Trayvon Martin’s fateful encounter with zealous gun-toting neighborhood watch guy George Zimmerman, it’s these same Republican districts or communities where either unarmed black men have been gunned down or the white men who’ve killed them—mostly police officers—hail from. And the states where these tragedies occur just so happen to have majority white Republican or conservative elected officials dominating the political institutions that run them.
There have been six widely publicized killings of unarmed black men over the past two years: Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner. Four of those killings—Martin, Davis, Crawford and Garner—happened in Republican-held Congressional districts with majority white populations.
Five of those killings—Martin and Davis in Florida; Crawford and Rice in Ohio; and Brown in Missouri—happened in states with GOP majorities in state legislatures. Four—Martin, Davis, Crawford and Rice—happened in states with Republican governors. The two killings that occurred in districts represented by black members of Congress—Brown and Rice—were committed by white males living in Republican and largely white districts. Take Trayvon Martin. Killed in a gated Sanford, Fla. community in 2012, Martin was staying with his father at the time, who lived in the majority white 7th Congressional district represented by Rep. John Mica (RFL). Up until Florida state Republicans captured huge majorities in the state’s legislatures—capturing the power to redraw the political map to their favor—the district was long held by Democrats. Jordan Davis also lived in Florida and was shot by a white man who happened to be armed that night during a deadly encounter at a Jacksonville, Fla. gas station. That was in Rep. Ander Crenshaw’s (R-FL) 4th Congressional district—but, interestingly enough, Davis’s killer was from Brevard County in Florida’s 8th Congressional district represented by Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL). John Crawford, shot and killed by white police officers at a Beavercreek, Ohio Walmart, was in Rep. Michael Turner’s (R-OH) 10th Congressional district at the time. Michael Brown was shot and killed in majority black Ferguson, Mo. in black Rep. Lacy Clay’s (D-MO) 1st Congressional district. But the city is controlled by leftover post-white flight politicians in a district that is 45 percent white (just a GOP redistricting panel away from being turned into a majority-white pick-up for Republicans).
Officer Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Brown, was commuting every single day to Ferguson from the 94-percent white Crestwood, Mo. – a place where the black population is just 1.6 percent. It’s also represented by conservative Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO) in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional district. Tamir Rice, 12 years old, was tragically shot in Cleveland, Ohio in then Congressional Black Caucus chair Rep. Marcia Fudge’s (D-OH) 11th Congressional district. But, the troubled white police officer who killed him hailed from nearby Independence, Ohio where the population is 0.4 percent black. That’s also in Rep. David Joyce’s(R-OH) 14th Congressional district. And there was Eric Garner who died in a chokehold in Staten Island – a 70 percent white community that is also New York City’s lone Republican district and is widely-known as a residential destination for first responders. That district was represented by controversial Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), who had already announced he was resigning his seat after pleading guilty to federal tax evasion charges by the filing of this story.
Again, 50-year old Walter Scott joins the growing list of unarmed black men shot by trigger-happy white police. This time, it’s in South Carolina. And as striking as the various tragic technical similarities to other shootings are the political ones: it’s another grisly shooting (this time fully caught on tape) of racial dimensions in a Republican district. North Charleston is the third largest city in the state of South Carolina, but it’s also among the larger cities in former disgraced Governor and now Rep. Mark Sanford’s (R-SC) district. Before, it was Rep. Tim Scott’s (R-SC) district until he became the first black Senator elected to a Southern state since Reconstruction. While all signs show the 48% black town won’t explode into another Ferguson, the political landscape may be, once again, indicative of a larger issue in American political polarization that is exacerbating the nation’s race problem.
While the correlation is not as blatant, the pattern is worrisome enough to consider how the divisive state of modern American politics has created a de facto state of racial segregation whereby the complexion of communities is determined by political affiliation, representation and ideological leaning.
Redistricting plays a large role in that. A generations-old political game in which both political parties on the state level bitterly negotiate the shape, size and demographic composition of legislative and Congressional districts, redistricting is as complicated and obscure as it is antiquated. Yet, it is arguably the most consequential element of a political Game of Thrones, playing a large role in expanding the GOP’s majority in the House from 234 in the last Congress to 247 currently.
“There is no doubt that the last round of redistricting showed us that political polarization and packing or fracking and Balkanization of black and white votes is taking us down a bad path,” argues Morial.
“I’ve always had a concern about turning this process over to these Blue Ribbon redistricting commissions because they can be as polarized as possible.”
Still, some legal experts disagree there’s a relationship between redistricting and racial animus.
“I’m quite skeptical that the two are connected,” Loyola Law School, Los Angeles professor Justin Levitt tells UPTOWN. “I’m skeptical that there’s a connection between them that’s as tidy as noting that the killings happened in majority-white congressional districts.
“It may well be that police are not residents of the communities they police, and that’s a very real problem. But Congressional gerrymandering doesn’t have much to do with that—members of Congress have vanishingly little responsibility for local law enforcement. County or municipal government is going to drive police practices (including recruiting, hiring, and assignment policy).”
UC Irvine’s Rick Hasen, a redistricting expert, agrees. “On the other hand, I do think that there is a real connection between low voter turnout in communities like Ferguson and the role of the police,” Hasen adds.
“With increased voting in local elections, residents can have more input into the political process generally and about the role of the police in the community in particular.”
Congressman Jeffries is cautious, as well, on the question. “The polarization that emanates from gerrymandered districts in America should be confronted,” adds the Congressman. “But there are many different factors that contribute to the racial tensions that exist, including the legacy of Jim Crow and segregation that we’ve been forced to overcome.”
Several members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat (including those representing districts where unarmed black men were shot), were contacted by UPTOWN for their views on this question. With the exception of Jeffries, all declined.
“That’s a very, very thorny and tricky question few want to be on record talking about,” says one former senior Congressional aide talking on condition of anonymity. “In a big way, redistricting ensures their political survival.”
But the Urban Institute’s John Roman observes that “you get very homogenous districts—that’s the point, that’s what they are trying to achieve.” “So you get neighborhoods that are entirely black, neighborhoods that are entirely white because voting patterns reflect racial composition so closely.”
Both parties use it to maximum effect when they can. Neither is innocent. In Democratic-controlled Maryland, for example, observers point to some of the most ridiculously-designed Congressional districts in the country. But since the early ’90s, Republicans have been particularly skillful at accumulating power at the state level as a way to craft power for the federal level. Many longtime political observers attribute consistent Republican control of the House since 1994 to that process. More power in state houses means more leverage to create GOP districts. More GOP districts typically means more like-minded white residents packed into the same community and sharing the same political ideologies, miles away from any constructive or meaningful cultural interaction with people of color. As Republican strategists creatively engineer lasting majorities, they may be underestimating or completely ignoring the impact it has on race relations. Given the very competitive dynamics of politics and the urge to win at all costs, missing those finer social or cultural details is, to a degree, understandable. But the active isolation of groups from one another through what amounts to political landscaping can take an ugly turn for the worse when dealing with public safety.
“It’s a lot less simple than just where people live,” Jason Johnson, a political scientist at Hiram College, tells UPTOWN. Johnson explains that today’s Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis are the result of second wave “massive resistance” that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.
“First you just had oversegregation. But once you had the conservative white populations starting to realize that these municipalities were gaining sizeable black populations and becoming a major political force, then there were specifically targeted efforts to make mayors, police, fire and medical services less black and under greater control of white patronage.”
“Redistricting and racial animus are absolutely connected, especially when considering the level of ideological purity in these districts,” says former NAACP president Ben Jealous, now a partner at Kapor Capital. “It encourages a type of politician that’s not interested in the common good, but is engaged in political narcissism. If you’re a Republican or Democrat in a politically and culturally heterogeneous district, you go the extra mile to understand and be sensitive to those diverse interests. We have to encourage that.”
Jealous, who once oversaw national voting registration and advocacy efforts for the nation’s largest civil rights organization, describes Congressional districts that are typically gerrymandered or clustered according to race. He believes these communities are oftentimes more segregated than they’ve been before, especially in the Rust Belt states, pointing out how the death of Crawford happened a short distance away from House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) doorstep.
“We have this resegregation of our communities followed by the re-polarization of our politics and policies. That leads to a stagnation of the process towards achieving equal protection under the law.”
Does that mean we need to just abolish redistricting? “I don’t think we need to abolish redistricting, because if you have a district full of farmers, you need a farmer who understands farmers,” says Johnson. “But, I don’t think redistricting should be controlled by a political process or majority in the state legislature. It needs to be done in a different way.”
“The redistricting process in states has been the most undemocratic thing that’s happened in the United States,” counters Roman. “It’s polarizing. It leads to a lot of the events that we’re talking about. You don’t see this kind of racial segregation in other countries with diverse populations and you don’t see these shootings happening on this scale.”
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran political strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for UPTOWN Magazine. He is also Washington Correspondent for The Philadelphia Tribune and a frequent politics contributor to The Root. He can be reached @ellisonreport.