I Used to Like the Police--Until I Stopped Working For Them

The television show Girl From Uncle, one of America's first female law enforcement protagonists, was the bomb when I was growing up.  Stephanie Powers was the coolest woman on the planet, as far as I was concerned. I remember pretending to have a Walkie-Talkie (sounds funny, now, doesn't it, given smart phones), talking loud enough so my colleague, Donald, another kid with a vivid imagination, could hear me through his own device around the corners of the neighborhood houses where we'd hide out, going after our invisible prey. I'm not sure what we held in our hands. It wasn't Walkie-Talkies.  It might have been cardboard candy boxes. Who knows.

Back then in 1966, my family and I were living on 41st Street, close to downtown L.A., where, one evening, I sat outside on my grandparents' porch with my friend, watching the flames from a local riot nearby light up the sky a deep orange. I didn't know what was going on. Apparently, it was a left-over remnant of the Watts riots, a release of pent-up anger of the infamous mostly White police control over a poor Black community.

My family hailed from a college town in Ohio, a bastion of interracial marriage and co-ed education, and were thrust into an all Black environment, something quite alien to the six of us kids. Our new peers in L.A., thought we were from England because of our mid-Western accents, and we found them to be a rowdy for our Northerner bookworm tastes. But I knew to love my black brethren, because we were all living under a yoke none of us asked for.

For many years I did play de facto real life "detective" as an attorney for the federal government, where I learned close hand how law enforcement works.  Or doesn't work. I left when I realized that I was feeding into a system that was propagated to pursue only the most vulnerable, not the most criminal.  Drug dealers were being set-up for capture while corporations were getting away with untold criminal acts; monied interests were untouchables, their schemes too difficult to comprehend.  So, I took an interest in white collar crime cases.  Ironically, notwithstanding my biases against the rich and infamous, my work led me to assist in prosecuting Africans, which I felt duty-bound and compelled to do because Americans were being bilked out of millions of dollars.

I had become the go-to person for handling international inquiries concerning Nigerian organized white collar crimes. I had created a task force among federal government agencies to tackle those letters from Nigeria--you know--the ones from "Prince Okoye," inviting the recipient to provide bank account numbers and permissions to deposit alleged millions into the lucky American [sucker's] bank accounts.  Those letters were called "419" in Nigeria, and advance fee fraud here in the U.S.  From rocket scientists to retirees, the American victims' love of money caused them to conspire with faceless Nigerians with the smarts to know Americans' obsession with being rich. 

My work had garnered me an Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy, an appointment by United States Attorney General Janet Reno, which allowed me to live in the UK for a year.  My thinking was that by isolating Nigerians from other Blacks in the diaspora, law enforcement would learn how to distinguish them from other Blacks, instead of painting all of us with the same brush stroke. It was a burden for all Blacks to be responsible for every other Black persons crimes, because the only definition of a suspect might be that s/he was "Black."

Publicity wasn't stemming the tide of Americans who were "corralled" by the Nigerian scammers. When I suggested that prosecutions of Americans for being co-conspirators (aligning themselves with individuals who were conspiring to secret money away from coffers in Nigeria to the U.S.) would be a good deterrent, that fell on deaf ears. The inference in the push-back was that law enforcement did not want to have to prosecute White people.

Criminals were criminals, I thought.

Not in America.

Criminals are Black, in America.  We are drug dealers, thieves and sexual predators, a perception drilled into the American conscience by Hollywood.  Are Blacks innocent of all those negative labels? No more so than any other group or nationality. But, like cowboys on horseback killing Indians, back in the day (well, centuries ago), going after Black people is today's bloodsport; only the horsepower is an automobile.

The people in law enforcement with whom I worked were good people, overall.  They carried out their duties diligently. They believed in their mission.  I was never treated with any disrespect. In fact, I was feted by the government agencies with whom I worked.

The problem with American law enforcement is that those tasked with investigating and nabbing criminals are trained to do only that.  They are not trained in the bigger picture history, or in other techniques and methods--only those missions championed by their own. They are like guard dogs whose job is to find the culprit, and are rewarded with a dog biscuit in the end: a bonus, a promotion.

When I worked with Scotland Yard, I was impressed with their level of investigatory research. They knew they were dealing with people, and they sought to learn who those people were. Their charts and graphs of operations were truly phenomenal (before computer technology could create sophisticated graphs).  I can't say the same for law enforcement in the U.S, because I was an attorney, as opposed to an agent, so I wasn't one of them, and never learned their operational tactics and techniques. But the Secret Service agents were eager to learn from Scotland Yard, and we traveled there and Nigeria. One White agent, Tom Johnston, was exceptionally engaged in understanding Nigerian crime and, eventually, used my policy paper for a class he taught at a local college in Georgia. He had a heart attack after returning to the US on a family emergency, after traveling on assignment in Nigeria to work closely with Nigerian police.

Mind you, I worked for federal law enforcement, which has a more amorphous mandate than going after bad guys on the street. The agents I worked with all had college degrees, as was required for the types of cases they were investigating. My focus was white collar crime, sophisticated crimes by highly intelligent and charismatic suspects who, under the guise of business, would take your home from under you (sound familiar?).  That Nigerians were as sophisticated as the average American businessman was a real quandary for law enforcement, and they didn't know what to do about it. This was before the terrorist attacks when America was still innocent, gullible, and without much knowledge of international crime except for the Mafia and Mexican drug lords.

When I asked for and was denied leave without pay to finish my report, after seeking three additional months to complete my assignment, I left the government and completed it. I believed my research was more important to the British and U.S. government than my being employed. I had several recommendations that I offered, but know not which, if any, were implemented. The essence of my paper was that the whole world shows acts of criminality; we must come to grips with our own criminal pasts before we accuse another people of being perpetrators. 

Since leaving law enforcement in the late 1990s and witnessing what's happened to the world post-2001, when the World Trade Center towers were struck down, I'm at a loss to explain what has happened to our country. The attack on New York has had an indelible blow to the greatness of our crime-fighting apparatus. Instead of preventing the occurrence of the attacks, we unleashed our angry bulldogs on the world, suspicious of anyone who is foreign-looking, foreign-sounding, and non-Christian.  The militarization of our police, untrained in warfare, but given the powerful tools to wage it, has created a police state in our own country that has made Americans afraid of those sworn to protect. This professor's compelling essay explores the phenomenon of private funding of police as a new development in explaining our current problems.

And given the rash of news of minorities under siege, it would appear that our own police have taken sides and believe that we Blacks are the terrorists among us.  So the local police are the new investigators of all things suspicious. Forget that this weekend is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, where a White terrorist killed Americans on our soil -- it is still the brown-skinned who have scarred the American psyche.

I am neither male nor White, but I know that for centuries, they have grown up believing they are the good guys. This facile explanation of American crime-fighting, "good guys versus bad guys" is also a problem. When people are reduced to those descriptions, there are bound to be consequences.  What happens when the prosecutors are the bad guys? What happens when the police or agents are the criminals who, until the advent of the smart phone, have gotten away with it and live their lives among us as upright citizens?

Official NRA Police Target

This country has always hunted Black Americans, as slaves, and not only in the South:

[A] legally sanctioned law enforcement system existed in America before the Civil War for the express purpose of controlling the slave population and protecting the interests of slave owners. The similarities between the slave patrols and modern American policing are too salient to dismiss or ignore. Hence, the slave patrol should be considered a forerunner of modern American law enforcement.

http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing


The moral of the story is that there is no race immune to criminality.  But for Blacks in America, we all hope to not be stopped by the police. It is easy to see how a Black man's instinct would be to run, because chances are he will be beaten, shot or strangled to death--while handcuffed.

Better to die a free man than in custody.

This link is not necessarily an endorsement, but definitely gives us food for thought: http://www.thrivemovement.com/our-justice-system-fails-protect-your-rights

Ferguson Says Forget Due Process--A Secret Jury Trial is More "Cop-Aesthetic."

Mike Brown, "the demon."

The grand jury proceeding in Ferguson Missouri is a metaphor for the country's continued biased [mis]application of the rule of law where both Black American victims and/or perpetrators are concerned: the hell with due process--the facts are more important.

Nowadays, it is the facts that prevail--no matter the procedure used to draw them out.

The Supreme Court has long since destroyed the 4th Amendment, the erstwhile rule to prohibit unlawful search and seizure.  So the principle of protecting citizens from an out-of-control police is gone. Now it's a "rules-be-damned-I-know-you-did-something-wrong," legal system. It might appear that I want criminal perpetrators to get away with their conduct, but that could not be further from the truth. 


So, lest you think me a hater of government and the police, my work history is my disclaimer: I worked for law enforcement for 11 years, first as a federal immigration attorney, then as an ivory tower international criminal law attorney. I was never in the court room. I worked with U.S. prosecutors and foreign governments to bring fugitives to their nations' courtrooms for trial. I helped the Secret Service and the FBI bring criminals "to justice," in the United States.

Furthermore, I detest criminals in general. For instance:

I don't like drug dealers.

I don't like white collar fraudsters.

Let me also declare that I really, really, really, don't like pedophiles (a subplot of my upcoming novel) and in a parallel universe I wish we could burn them alive; but on this earth in the here and now, I am a pacifist and don't believe in the death penalty.

We learned about grand jury proceedings in law school, and I remember my shock at how flimsy the process appeared to be.  Basically, it's just a way to make sure the police aren't too crazy when they bring criminal cases to their superiors. They put a panel together to look at evidence and confirm that the prosecutor has or does not have probable cause--in essence, a legitimate reason to move forward with a case.

They decide whether there is enough evidence to bring forward a case.

Let me say it another way to let this sink in:  the grand jury is supposed to look at the evidence and answer the following question put to them by the prosecutor, "Do you think this police officer's or detective's case is strong enough for me, as an attorney, to go forward, to bring charges against this defendant--FOR A JURY TO DECIDE his guilt or innocence?

Let me break it down even more:   Let's say you're making a cake. What are the ingredients to determine whether one can make a cake: flour, eggs, milk, baking powder/soda, sugar...  is that enough to make a cake? Ta-da! That's probable cause.

Now, nobody knows if the cake is truly going to taste good, but... it's the ingredients that count. Is that enough to make a cake? Again, it is the trial jury who will decide if it tastes any good.

Grand jury proceedings are usually pro forma:  the prosecutor presents his case, brought by the police (or detective) who created the case, and the grand jury says, yes or no, we think you have enough evidence to prosecute - to take the case to a full criminal proceeding.  To indict is to charge.  Not try the case.  That's what a full criminal proceeding is about.  A criminal proceeding is when the lawyers sit on opposite sides of the courtroom and they get to make their client's case. In the case of the police, they are supposed to make the case for the PEOPLE of the jurisdiction in which they work, in this case, Ferguson, Missouri, a city that happens to have a Black majority. In Missouri, a grand jury of 9 must agree to put forward an indictment -- NOT TO CONVICT. TO INDICT.  We won't address the implications of the serendipitous (for Officer Wilson) make up of the jury right now.... there were 9 Whites and 3 Blacks. Do the math. 

In Ferguson, however, something different happened than happens in most grand juries:  the prosecutor was going to prosecute one of his friends, a fellow member of law enforcement. So, instead of deciding whether there was enough evidence to go forward, the grand jury proceeding turned into an investigation into why Michael Brown deserved to die. The prosecutor explained why it was perfectly all right to kill the teenager:

1. Mike Brown stole some cigars from a liquor store.
2. Mike Brown was big like Hulk Hogan.
3. Mike Brown looked like a demon.

Those are reasons for disliking someone.  Not killing him.

There's only one person who, conceivably, may have had a right to kill Mike Brown: the liquor store owner, to protect his property. Yes, the owner backed down, too, on the video, when Mike turned to him, using his girth to prevent him from doing anything to stop Brown from leaving the store with his cigarette contraband.  But the police officer, who might have had a right to shoot, had no right to kill.  Period. He had a right to maim, a right to impede; he could have shot him in the shoulders, in the knee caps, in the pelvis, or even in the foot. But he had no right to kill--considering that his menacing assailant was unarmed.

Unarmed.
UN-armed.


But, in the case of the Ferguson prosecutor, the standard changed because his "brother," a police  officer, Darren Wilson, was the one being scrutinized like a criminal.  Where the mythical police officer that should have arrested Darren Wilson would have said to the prosecutor, "I think we need to arrest this police officer because he's going around shooting people that he fears are a physical threat to him."

That didn't happen.  It was okay to shoot Mike Brown, because in the eyes of law enforcement, Mike Brown represents everything wrong with Black American youth: they wear their pants down, walk around like they own the joint, and are petty thieves. Of course, Wall Street got bailed out $700 billion dollars for bilking Americans out of their hard-earned money, and what happens to them?
They get a raise.

Had I met Mike Brown, I might have thought he was a jerk for taking those cigarillos, but I would never wish him death.  But a lot of hateful Americans feel otherwise: he deserved to die and got his comeuppance because he was a "bad person. " Imagine how many people would "deserve to die" for being bad people:  at the risk of being investigated for my opinions, let's just say that many politicians would not be holding office today if being a good person were the standard for whether they continued to live on this earth.

The United States legal system is derived from the British, who devised a system whereby the King could keep people "in check" in their communities by granting grand juries the right to assemble and decide to file charges against criminal wrong-doers far from the King's or Queen's watchful eyes. These people supported the Crown, obviously. Nothing has changed in the purpose of the grand jury here, in the U.S., except that we don't have Kings and Queens. We have authority in the form of the local police, who are supposed to be the stewards of peace and tranquility in our communities.  The grand jury generally supports the police.

Police who prosecute.

The grand jury is supposed to rubber stamp the police's abilities to go after a criminal suspect, and arm them with the power to arrest and bring them to justice.  The British system acknowledged this fact. In an article entitled, "Abolition of the Grand Jury in England," Chief Clerk of the Bow Street Magistrates, Albert Lieck, explained:

Originally the grand jury, in criminal procedure, were the informants.  They told the King's judges what crimes had been committed in their venue, or neighborhood as the better Saxon word has it. In exceptional times and places their refusal to find true bill defeated tyrannous prosecution, but if history instead of vague sentiment be our guide we shall realize that such happenings were exceptional, and that to talk of the loss of a great safeguard of personal liberty is to talk nonsense.

Translation in American English: grand jury prosecutions were almost, without a fault, in favor of the police, allowing a case to go to trial, and the exception was very rare. 

Now, take away Darren Wilson's uniform, and Mike Brown's menace to car-driving society (he drew Officer Wilson's attention because he had the audacity to be walking down the middle of the street).

That didn't happen here. A man who should have been given a public audience to publicly make his case for why he killed a Black teenager--was spared the embarrassment of being made accountable, to look jurors in the eye, instead of a sympathetic grand jury. 

The British abolished the grand jury in 1933.  Always late to the party, the U.S., might need to do the same. Why should we  countenance a system of secrecy, of laissez-faire evience-gathering, which ultimately impacts upon the liberties of Black accused and Black victims who are allowed to be killed with police impunity, by officers like Darren Wilson, who said he would kill Mike Brown again if he had to. 

RIP Mike Brown.  You may have stolen a pack of cigarillos, but your life was stolen from you, in a heinous way. And the world knows now that our democracy has grave flaws--with headstones for Black people.  I'm not sure when things will ever change.  Will it be once there are no more Black people to arrest, because the grand jury will put us all in jail, or will it be once we are all killed by grand juries like the one that justified Mike Brown's murder?

This is why I will always support the existence of the federal government.  The Department of Justice must come forward and address this horrible wrong.

This is not a Happy Thanksgiving, America.