Since becoming a resident of Little Rock, I’ve increasingly built respect for our chief of police, Kenton Buckner. I have met him personally on several occasions and he strikes me as a man who works hard to do right by the people he serves.
He, however, works in a city, and a state- and a nation- that makes it difficult to do his work. Knowing all we know about the role police plays against black people, I’ve found black law enforcement officers like Buckner fascinating studies of black personhood.
Figures like him and Marilyn Mosby are probably the most interesting test of the American experiment. How does black personhood shape and change a system hostile to its existence? I wrote this piece a few years ago on my old blog contrasting Buckner’s statements with that of the most infamous black law enforcement official in the country. The recent law suit filed by black Little Rock Police Department officers has renewed my interest in the interplay between policing and black personhood.
Police Chief Kenton Buckner of Little Rock is a sincere man who cares about the communities he’s charged with protecting. He attends community panels. He works to make sure Little Rock has crisis responses groups where, in the event of an upsetting public event, key stakeholders in the city are on call to calm tensions and keep peace. He makes sure his department uses social media to engage with younger citizens. Chief Buckner sponsors youth events and is plainspoken as to why; it’s a way to both help reduce crime rates and to connect with the young. For a man who is not a native, he has worked to ingratiate himself with the local community.
He also expresses a degree of cultural awareness that I, personally, am unaccustomed to seeing from police officials. He claims to have asked #blacklivesmatter activists to speak to new recruits during training so that their first encounter with the movement isn’t during a hostile protest. He talks about the importance diversity in the makeup of his police force, stating that “our young people in the academy…bond to where you have black, white, Hispanic and Asians who have different backgrounds so you can see those kinds of things.” In a recent interview with the Arkansas Times, he goes deeper into the nuances of being black:
As an African American who understands our culture, as you can see, I’m an animated person. I’m also loud, to where if me and another brother are standing somewhere and we’re talking, we’re just chewing the fat, but we may be loud and animated in doing so…
In light of the Dallas shootings, he argues that “”When you have your Dallas Moment…you cannot reach out to people who know nothing about you, and have had no contact with you, during the incident. There has to be a preexisting relationship so people will accept your phone call at two in the morning to say ‘Hey, we need help.’ We have those relationships in place, and we continue to build bridges every day.” In a city that is nearly majority black, he makes the argument for cultural competency.
Chief Buckner is choosing the hard road toward police legitimacy. Other black police leaders model an easier way on being black and blue. Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee demonstrates this in his evisceration of #blacklivesmatter. Absent is nuance in dealing with one of America’s oldest minority communities, one which has dealt with an unbroken chain of negative political influence, no matter where they settled in the greatest nation on earth—slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, chain gangs, the denial of the franchise, sharecropping, redlining, denial of earned government services, police brutality, mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and our elected executives calling the melaniated a drug peddling occupying force in his state. My historical listing almost reads as comical. But again—the point of white supremacy as a historical force is that it is not trying to hide itself.
In light of all the gathered research of discrimination, Sheriff Clarke cites the “volatile mix of urban pathologies, failed urban policy that exacerbates inescapable poverty, failing public schools, inadequate parenting” as the root causes of crime. He decries “father-absent homes” as if the household presence of a penis is the greatest crime deterrent law enforcement possesses. His ultimate acknowledgment of the black community reads as a paean to what he calls the “white” community:
Clarke ignores that poor communities, segregated from jobs and other vehicles of advancement, feed on the closest sources of subsistence—themselves. Concentrated poverty encourages cannibalism. Milwaukee, as the New York Times recently argued, may very well be the zenith of this practice in his part of the nation. Yet he chooses to advance his career on the backs of black men and women in lieu of understanding the soul of the nation that permits such wretched conditions to flower. His beliefs allow for no historical introspection, a process that ultimately leads to spiritual renewal.
So I am disturbed when Chief Buckner argues that the “underlying issues that are driving the crime in our city are poverty, low academic achievement, single-parent homes, absentee fathers, substance abuse, mental illness, [and] high unemployment.” The danger in doing police work that it is easy, and often professionally necessary in regards to pleasing all stakeholders, to reach for language that falls in the same milieu as Sheriff Clarke’s. I am not in the habit of questioning the intentions or equality of black men and women who want to police. A citizenry needs its protectors. But we must hold them to higher standards of thought, and not permit them to use the lazy language of pathology and victim blaming when rigorous historical research will do and is widely available.