Cops vs Lawyers: American Civil Liberties Union

Image by Granger Davis

Interview by Mike Conway

The City of Richmond recently found its culture of street crime under intense media scrutiny. Headlines spoke nightly of "Richmond’s renewed state of gang violence." But in all memory, blocks in the 948's were always hot. Inspired by the hype, citizens lobbied for a state of emergency: curfew, checkpoints, perhaps the National Guard—drastic stuff. Luckily, it was ruled a "bad idea."
It all begs the question "how far would folks go for security?" We spoke with both Richmond's Public Affairs Officer, Lieutenant Mark Gagan, and the North Cali ACLU's Police Policies Director Mark Schlossberg about emergency states and so-called "gang violence." Here's what Director Schlossberg told us...

Is declaring a state of emergency the right way to go?
No. It strikes me that a lot of communities plagued by violence generally have underlying problems that give rise to violence. Those problems include lack of economic opportunity, poor schools, and generally unstable environments. It doesn’t take a lot to see that people want to look for something more. In order to address the issues that give rise to violent crime, you need to look at those underlying problems. Law enforcement alone will never be able to solve problems of gang violence without a broader social approach to those underlying causes. You can’t solve criminal problems with a purely law enforcement approach. Police officers can’t enforce jobs, they can’t enforce schools, so they can’t enforce broader stability.

How are police identifying gangs and gang activity?
Without talking about a specific community, [detecting gangs] ties into the issue of racial profiling where officers will view certain members of a community as more likely to be a gang member, more likely to be a criminal. Then you get disproportionate interactions with law enforcement. And even if they don’t rely [solely] on race, they may use it in combination with other factors. [However] police should investigate gang activity like they investigate any criminal activity. You employ all the kinds of investigative tools that you do generally.

How do you discern between gangs and civilians?
Community policing and outreach is important. [But] community policing is only effective when you have the trust of that community. And if law enforcement stops people of color at higher rates, it undermines that trust and ultimately makes it more difficult for police to solve crimes. There needs to be strong accountablity systems to make sure that if there is police misconduct, that it’s dealt with swiftly and a community can have confidence that its police department is held to high standards.

What tools are officers given to develop this approach to gangs?
Police are like everyone else. They’re drawn from a society that has a problem with race. When you get people from society generally and you give them the power of the badge­­—in some instances you put them in a police department that traditionally has had problems with race—then those attitudes are reinforced through discussions and comments. That’s not to say that police officers are constantly thinking “There’s somebody who’s African American; I’m gonna pull them over.” But if you have unconscious bias, you’re gonna probably pull over more people of color. It’s a problem of law enforcement, but it’s clearly a problem of race and society that goes way beyond that.

Parting thoughts: what’s to be done?
Richmond has a police commission that is really a de-fanged entity. The Police Commission in Richmond really needs to be strengthened in a way that allows more open access to records, and that gives the commission more power to give policy recommendations. Generally, police departments and police unions resist independent oversight. The police unions have a powerful lobby in Sacramento because they have a lot of money and their endorsement is valuable. In the last 15 years, not one proactive police accountability measure passed in the legislature. Yet there have been several measures that have whittled away at police accountability.