Nationally, we are in need of strategies to de-escalate the conflicts between police officers and men who are members of racial and ethnic minorities.
This is a problem with a long history. I was 16 years old when I was first immersed in it.
As a high school senior in Banning, Calif., I talked my way into a job at the local office of the county newspaper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Every once in awhile, I mustered my courage and proposed a feature story.
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, I asked my boss to let me interview some of my African-American friends about their reactions. In a quotation in that story, one of my sources pointed out — with intensity and force — the similar patterns of racial discrimination in our hometown and in the towns and cities of the South.
Reading my story, a well-respected Press-Enterprise reporter asked me to put him in touch with my sources. The story he wrote appeared with the banner headline, “Three Young Black Men Tell It Like It Is in Banning.” It featured a striking photo of the three young African-American men, aiming a challenging gaze at the camera and, thereby, at the reader.
The next day, the phone rang steadily in the subscription department, as peevish residents called in their cancellations. And, within another day or two, two of the young men who appeared in the story were arrested for what seemed to be minor offenses.
When my boss came back from interviewing the police chief, he told me that he had seen the photo of the three black men, pinned to the bull’s-eye on the police lounge’s dartboard.
My ambition to write a real news story had initiated a chain reaction I had never anticipated. The articles in the Press-Enterprise put my three young friends in the spotlight, put their photograph on the police department’s dartboard bull’s-eye, and put two of them in jail.
The phrase “teachable moment” did not exist in 1968, and my boss opted not to invent it. He did not assign me to stay on the story, nor did he send me to the police station to inquire into the attitudes, assumptions, stereotypes, and resentments that came together on that dartboard.
Four years later, as a college student in Santa Cruz, Calif., I got a second chance at teachable moments. I happened upon an anti-war demonstration, just when a SWAT team was breaking up the crowd. Moving forward in close ranks, the “peace” officers swung their batons at students who were unarmed and wearing no protective gear.
Watching this from a distance, I was scared to death.
The next day, in a chance encounter, I struck up a conversation with a Santa Cruz policeman. He had been on the SWAT team the day before, swinging his baton at the people in his path. At the confrontation the day before, his uniform, helmet and mirrored sunglasses made it impossible for me to see him as an individual. Getting a sense of the way that this man had felt that his job required him to take actions that he would not have chosen, I saw and heard a human being.
The jobs of police officers are strenuous, draining, anxiety-laden and punctuated with challenges that do not always provide the opportunity for measured reflection. I believe that this difficult occupation can change a person’s character and principles in troubling ways.
My empathy for the young black men in my hometown was instinctual and instant. My empathy for the police officers took a longer time to develop.
As we seek to de-escalate the conflict between police officers and minority men, we will be tested to prove that our empathy can include both groups. I hope we can pass that test.
Patty Limerick is chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado and writes monthly for The Denver Post.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit or check out our for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
