On March 11th, attorney Mike Laux filed suit against the Little Rock Police Department (LRPD) on behalf of several black police officers. In his federal complaint, he charged the department with systemic racial discrimination. Suing for back wages, he argues that the professional advancement of several officers within the department was intentionally slowed until they became “too old” to be considered for promotion.
This follows on the heels of a black police being suspended for talking to the wrong people about a racial matter within the department. Sergeant Willie Davis was suspended for ten days last January due to, on November 2017, going to the Little Rock Black Police Officers Association (LRBPOA) regarding the racial slurs posted by white officer Brandon Schiefelbein.
Schiefelbein had made the post in 2013 toward fellow recruit and officer Brandon Gurley. He apologized via text message to Gurley. Years later, The LRBPOA filed a complain last November to the black chief of police, Kenton Buckner, claiming that Schefelbein’s behavior was typical of the tolerance the department showed white officers. Schiefelbein was fired.
So was Gurley upon the discovery by Schiefelbein’s attorney that he too also said “nigga” on social media. There was no effort to discuss the long historical nuance of the word. Schefelbein was fired because his use of it was considered racist; did the same logic apply to Gurley? The department also justified Davis’ suspension by stating he violated personal policies regarding chain of command. Buckner remained silent on the manner.
The ridiculousness of a black man being fired for using a word white people have no business uttering—and the absurdity of punishing a black man reporting such use using the only way he knew how— shows the difficulty black people have in reforming organizations bent on dominating black personhood. Sergeant Davis is the 2nd Vice President of the LRBPOA. He is a 10-year veteran of the force who felt so stymied by the system he worked within that he went to the only organization dedicated to honoring his personhood for recourse. Given all Davis knew about LRPD, reporting to his organization was the only way he knew to affect change for the better.
According to Laux’s research on a police shooting he investigated earlier in his career, nearly 70% of the LRPD is white. Nearly 90% of all captains are white. 66.7% of the lieutenants are white. The mostly white Fraternal Order of Police is the only police association that Buckner officially recognizes. All of this where about 41% of the policed are black men, women, and children.
Despite having a black chief of police, the profound racial imbalance in leadership and black police representation points to the challenges black people have with being officers of the law. It is the problem chief prosecutor Marilyn Mosby had in Baltimore when trying to find justice for Freddie Grey. It is the systemic challenge Officer Edwin Raymond found when confronting the uneven treatment black folk got from, and within, the New York Police Department. It is the conundrum Sacramento’s police chief Daniel Hahn faces when the officers under his command—with silenced body cameras—blast a black man into bits in the violated privacy of his own backyard. The hunted are never truly allowed into the hunter’s lodge. Even when they own it.
America, mainly for ill, sees its police as a paramilitary force against disorder. It has mainly directed that might toward black people, who Americans wrongly see as agents of entropy. Despite this, black people have flocked toward the blue uniform. We can trace that impulse to the Civil War, where black people donned the blue to midwife the new birth of freedom President Abraham Lincoln prophesied.
Black people did not face suspensions or termination of employment during that halcyon time. Rather, they were killed on and off the battlefield disproportionately. After the war, we did our best to enter the policing forces. We only, however, make up about 13% of all police officers more than a century after emancipation. This trend holds in municipalities like Little Rock, where black people make up nearly a majority of the population. After centuries of striving, there should be more black people and black leaders protecting and making decisions on those policed. Such a world would produce radically different policing outcomes than the one we are confronted with today.
Our current numbers today shows the reluctance the hunters have to be protected by the hunted. Such a relationship would transform policing. Putting more black police on the streets and in positions of command would lead to better community policing; more empathy from the people who have guns, given that they will be policing friends and family members; and better decision making that leads to the preservation of life.
Instead, we are stuck with the current national system where the killers of black men and women walk free after much performative storm. Sometimes they are offered rewards in the hundreds of thousands, or continue to keep their jobs while the families they destroyed mourn. Meanwhile, black police officers who commit the same offences to white people are charged and tried for murder. In such an environment where white mistakes are treated gently and black personhood is punished, is it no wonder that Sergeant Davis went to an organization that honors and respects the opinions he brings forth versus the normal chain of command.
Chief Buckner, as do all black people seeking to reform white institutions, remains constricted by the bylaws of his organization. In an earlier July 14th, 2017 letter he published in response to an earlier complaint from the LRBPOA, he mentioned that 33% of the new officers he recruited were black. 41% of all promotions were black, which he argues shows that “The LRPD is genuinely committed to diversity and being reflective of the community we serve.”
Despite this, the FOP still remains the only officially recognized police association by the Little Rock Police Department. As long as such restrictions on the expression of black personhood remains, the department will continue to punish it as they did with officers Davis and Gurley.