February 23, 2023 • 31 mins
In the first of a two-part series, Host Ramses Ja speaks with activist, author, and community leader Dr. De Lacy Davis. Davis is the founder of Black Cops Against Police Brutality and is the author of " Black Cops Against Police Brutality: A Crisis Action Plan."
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Black people are two times more likely to be killed
by the police even when there are no other obvious
circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of
deadly force reasonable. According to Mapping Police Violence dot Org,
when examining data around police violence and outcomes of police killings,
twenty two data reports that, in addition to being two
(00:20):
times more likely to being killed for absolutely no reason,
studies and data analysis demonstrate that black people are on
average at least three times more likely to be killed
by police in comparison to our white counterparts. With the
recent killing of Tyree Nichols and other high profile killings
by police across the nation, also been reignited for urgent
(00:41):
police accountability and reform, regularly delivering his expert inside and
information to help assess and solve problems relative to policing
and justice reform, having appeared on many notable programs including
News One Now with Roland Martin, Nightline, c SPAN, oprah MSNBE,
and the CBS Morning Show. Today's guest is a community
(01:03):
policing educator, author, humanitarian and justice advocate, as well as
a former New Jersey police sergeant of twenty years. Founding
Black Cops against Police Brutality in nineteen ninety one and
authoring what has been referenced as the How two Book
of Setting Up a Plan against Police Brutality in your
Community and title Black Cops Against Police Brutality, a Crisis
(01:25):
Action Plan, recognized by human rights activist, social critic, and
comedian Dick Gregory for his courage, his wisdom, and his soul.
Most recently completing his doctoral degree examining the factors relating
to police officers shooting unarmed black mails. Doctor de Lacy
Davis has dedicated his life advocate for those mistreated by
(01:46):
law enforcement and to ensuring that people of color are
afforded equal rights under the Constitution. Here with us to
share his perspective on the killing of Tyrene Nichols, to
further discuss the history an evolution of policing in America
and why it is that cops are killing instead of protecting.
We have retired sergeant, community policing educator, author, humanitarian and
(02:09):
justice advocate, founder of Black Cops Against Police Brutality, Doctor
de Lacy Davis. I am Maggie b. Nowen, and this
is a Black Information Network daily podcast with your host
ramses Jaw, Doctor Davis. Welcome to the show man. How
you doing. It's a pleasure to meet you, brother. I'm well,
(02:32):
thank you and thank you for having me on the show.
In peace to the family. Oh, I appreciate that, and
I can assure you the pleasure is mine. Around here,
we have, as you can imagine, conversations that often touch
on police brutality, police shootings, police misconduct, and rarely do
(02:54):
we talk with someone who is so informed, who has
the direct experience and can provide the level of insight
that we believe that you can saw. Again, the honor
and the privilege is ours here on the show. So
let's do this. Let's get our listeners acquainted with you.
What we do is we start at the beginning, share
(03:15):
a bit about yourself, your upbringing, and what led you
to your career path. So I'm going to start and
reverse my career path was started. I wanted to finance
my music career. I believe it was going to be
a great job. I figured I could buy one family
a three family house. I would use one floor to
pay the mortgage, I'd use another rent to put in
(03:38):
the bank, and another rent to pay for studio time.
And I did exactly that and it took me all
over the world. So I was twenty three years old.
I started the plan at about nineteen and it worked out.
And so I'm a musician, so of course I think differently.
My upbringing. I grew up in New Jersey. I grew
up or I didn't know I was poor until I
got to college at Drew University, when I got called
(03:58):
the inn word for the first time. So I realized
I was a poor and I didn't know that. There
about seventeen eighteen hundred students on the campus, and about
seventy of us were black and brown. Of the seventy
that were black and brown, about forty of us were
poor kids. So we were chased to the train station
leaving the campus and Drew Universities in Madison, New Jersey,
(04:19):
which is one of the richest counties in New Jersey,
Mars County. And so they were chasing us to the
train station, cussing us out, throwing bottles at us. So
that was my indoctrination at the academic level. Growing up
in Newark, I was a baseball player. I figured I
was gonna play pro ball all my life. I played
baseball from nine years old all the way to college,
(04:39):
and of course that's where I had my dreams snuffed
out at college, and so I went to Catholic school.
I went to public school. My mom told me in
the eighth grade, because I've always had a gift of gab,
if you will, she said, listen, you are not going
to go to that high school two blocks from the house,
because they're gonna beat you down and kill you because
you shut up. You won't shut up, and you talk
too much. So you've been to figure out how to
(05:00):
get into a Catholic school, a private school, or learn
how to draw, sing, or do something that would get
you into one of the magnet schools and Arts high school,
which is it's actually the first performing art high school
in the United States, is in North New Jersey. So
six months before graduating the eighth grade, I started teaching myself.
Had a draw. I went and searched the neighborhood to
find if there was any art majors who went to
(05:21):
Art Tide living in my neighborhood, only to find out
there were two living on my block, and one of
the best graphic artists and illustrators who's in this country
lived on my block, Howard Simpson and I'm Leon Biased
and so they were seniors. There were juniors when I
was trying to take the test, and they started coaching me.
And I went to the library every day for six
months to study, and I lo and behold. I was
(05:43):
one of one hundred students who got in for art
that year at Art High School, and I enjoyed art.
It was I'm a creative, as I know, and I
see the world through a very different lens, and that's
kind of how I've moved. However, after my first year
year at Art, tire had a B plus average into
my major. But I hated drawing every day and I
had art the first period every day and I hated it.
(06:06):
So I said, well, the music people travel. I want
to travel like but you're not a musician. I said, well,
I need to figure that out. So you know what
I did. I went to the library where the lies
are buried and I started studying music. I could play
kongas because I'm a self taught percussionist, which is what
I do professionally as well, and I started translating playing
the kungas to playing drums and reading music and I
(06:29):
was successful there. I got straight as in music and
music theory. Had no formal training, but I know I
didn't have the vocabulary then, but I know now that
it's in our genes, it's in our coding. You just
have to activate the drum in the African gene and
it will come to life. And so I've been all
over the world traveling, playing music. And so what I
(06:49):
wound up doing is using the I used travel and
my skills and the arts I'm to learn to teach,
to travel and to share. And so that's pretty much
gets me to college where I had that shocking cultural experience,
but it awakened me. I didn't truly awaken as an
African until traveling to Ghana, West Africa in nineteen ninety four.
(07:14):
I went from Panafest with a group out of called
Africa North and let me but go back. And I
was ninety four and ninety three. I was fortunate enough
to I founded Black Cops Against Police Batality in nineteen
ninety one. By nineteen ninety three, I was one of
several organizations. I was one of several organizations in the
Malcolm X Commemorative Celebration Committee. One hundred and fourteen organizations
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would come together every year to celebrate the life of
Malcolm X and sister Betty Shabaz would come to town.
And so this particularly year, I was in my twenties
and folks knew I was a police officer and I
was trying to develop my consciousness, and they said, well,
why don't we let that young brother be one of
the four co chairs. And you know the community, I
was there with nationalists and black panthers and just folks
(07:59):
maddest hells, and they didn't want me to be one
of the four. Laham who's from People's Organization for Progress
in Newark, said to give him a shot, and so
they gave me a shot. Now, Larry Ham was the
youngest person in United States of America to serve on
a board of education. At the age of seventeen, he
was appointed to the Board of Education in Newark, New
(08:20):
Jersey by then Mayor Ken Gibson. And so I had
seen him at my school in my junior year. He
was a speaker, and he gave me his phone number,
which I memorized to this day. And Larry's about ten
years older than me, but he opened the door and
that led to a lot of things. So I got
to meet Sister Betty Shabaz. Every year right up until
the year before her death, I spent time with her.
So I've spent time with Sister Betty Shabazz, Queen mother
(08:42):
Winnie Mandela, Dick Gregory al Shark, and Minister Fire Cohn,
Ben Chavis our village and so a Miry Baracca, the
late playwright. And so those are the folks who poured
into me, Doctor Adelaide Sandford. So as a young man,
I've had there's in the village. So I come from
an African paradigm and I raised my child and my
(09:05):
adopted children that way because I recognize that's the only
thing that kept me saying it kept me balanced, but
it also kept me in the midst of struggle inside
of law enforcement. So now you got a taste of
who I am. Well, that's quite a story, and I
think that it jives with kind of the path that
you're on right now. It's that's a very rare story.
(09:30):
I'd imagine in law enforcement someone who is culturally aware
and also making an effort to bridge some of the
more visible gaps, at least insofar as black folks are concerned.
So those are some powerful names and associations to have
and in functioning in that capacity, I'm sure it was
(09:52):
difficult on both sides. So let's let's fast forward a bit, yes,
you know with well, actually, you know what, Before we
fast forward, let's do this. Let's talk about the roots
and the origins of law enforcement and how it has
evolved into the institution that it is that it has
(10:16):
become today so that we can accurately frame the circumstances
we're dealing with today. So let's talk about the history
of law enforcement as you know it. So law enforcement
in this country starts out as a gang of white boys, right,
just white men, as a mob running around the country,
(10:37):
capturing three black people and enslaved black people, right their
slave catchers, their posses, as we saw in the West
and the Western movies that they've romanticized for us, But
they're actually folks who point themselves on the law. In
the order. Even in the colonies, you had what was
called or considered the watchman, where every body man had
(11:02):
to agree that they would watch the community and make
sure that people were safe, and they would do the
call every hour they had the light and all of that,
and so it begins to evolve, and so around the
sixteen hundred, sixteen twenties, thirties, you get formalized policing as
we would know it coming in Charleston. You see it Charleston,
(11:23):
South Carolina, one of the Carolinas, and you also begin
to see it in Boston. And so now we're formalizing
the police department. And now they're formally slave catchers in
the South and union busters in the North. And you
see that even where they're grabbing free so called free
black people, men and women, they're dragging them back into
(11:46):
the South and putting them into enslavement. We saw the
movie Twelve Years of Late. Yeah, that's an example of it.
And so, but what happens in eighteen twenty nine. The
Metropolitan Police Department is formalizing London, England by Sir Robert Peel,
which is why the cops were referred to as bobbies,
and he had nine Peeling Principles, and we began to
(12:07):
see some of that infused into the police departments here
in the United States. But by this time, again they
had already been organized before Peel had come along, and
Peel had cut his teeth relative to the Metropolitan Police
by what they were doing with the Irish and the
United Kingdom was doing in Ireland to the Irish people.
(12:29):
And so all of that comes along and now we
see formalized police in the United States. They're beginning to
organize other departments other places or organizing, and you have
what we have as the patrol approach to things. They
become specialized as they moved through the progressions. But you've
got patrol, uniform patrol people walking the beat, the cop
walking the beat. And then we see I think we
(12:52):
see the race wars in this country around the nineteen twenties.
You see huge uproars in this country in terms of
our racial violence. And of course we cannot forget that
we're also dealing with now not so much the posse,
but we're dealing with a posse or gang mentality. Because
then we got the ku Kuk Klan riding, right, So
(13:14):
we got the night riders in the South, they're riding.
So you've got a civil rights movement, but you've got
a clan movement that is also the police. And I
want to be clear about that, right, You've got folks
in sheets and hoods, but they're also police officers and
judges and the bankers and the folks in the community.
And I want to be very clear that that mindset
(13:34):
has not changed very much, at least not in my
experience and not in my communicating with people around this
country and around the world, because when I talk to
some of my relatives in the South, they still, without
saying it, speak as though they understand their place. My
grandmother was born nineteen oh one died nineteen eighty two,
the youngest of ten children, and all of her aunts
and uncles were enslaved. I am the fifth generation of
(13:56):
my family. Professor Gable Day born eighteen eighteen got eighteen
ninety five, and so for him to be called professor
in the eighteen hundreds, when being black and literate was
a crime, clearly he was educated. And so I recognize
the lineage of my family and the responsibility that I
have to that lineage. And so when I get to
(14:18):
joining a police force, I joined for the only reasons
I told you, to finance a music career. But within
five years I fall in love with black and brown
people and move and moving in a direction of protecting
and serving the community. You are absolutely correct. It was
incongruent with everything that I was expected to do when
I joined the force. We are here today with retired sergeant,
(14:41):
community policing educator, author, humanitarian and justice advocate, founder of
Black Cops Against Police Brutality, doctor de Lacy Davis, discussing
the killing of Tyree Nichols by the Memphis PD, the
history and abolition of policing in America, and why it
is that cops are killing protecting. So let's go with that.
(15:05):
There's a lot of us, myself included, we can see. Well,
let me make sure I say this right. I do
have some friends who are police officers. I'm not so
close minded as to think that police officers are not
human beings underneath their uniforms. But being honest with myself
and my experience, a lot of us know the I guess,
(15:31):
the experience of witnessing or being victim of police violence,
police and justice this sort of thing, right, So, we
were very familiar with the side of the equation, but
we are less familiar with what it's like to be
a police officer, much less a black police officer. And
(15:53):
this is something that perhaps you can give us insight into.
So talk us through what that's like, what reconciling things
mentally what it's like to be on the streets in
a black body enforcing the laws and often I'm sure
poorer and minority communities. What has your experience been like
(16:13):
having to walk that path? I think to give context
to it, we must understand that black people are not
a monolith, right, But we go from Clarence tom Ass
to Minister Farrakhan, and so therefore we have all in between.
And so as a black police officer, there are several experiences,
and I can simply share those that I'm familiar with,
but we have that are like mine. I did a
(16:35):
T shirt when you had a graphic artist to a
T shirt for me that I called it Ghetto Soldier
one forty five, and so half of it had dreadlocks
and saggy pants and timberland boots and a T shirt
and that something else, maybe some music in the background,
and the other half had the police uniform. Because it's
this split, Dubois calls it in nineteen oh three. He
(16:59):
calls it the double consciousness, the two nous, the one
in which you, as a black man, are being forced
to see your black self through white eyes and walking
with that, and what that does to you and to
your Spirit coach in twenty twenty refers to it when
she studies the police officers in Ferguson, Missouri. Black police officers,
(17:23):
they call it double marginality, where you now have these
built intensions between your relationship or your representation in a
racial group and your representation in an employment group, and
how they're competing with each other. Sure, both of those
have been true for me and my journey. And I
can tell you that I joined the force in nineteen
(17:43):
eighty six. By nineteen ninety one, pre Rodney King, I
sat with my family and said, I'm going to start
an organization and it could get me killed because the
cops I work with, even though I work in the
blackest police department in the state of New Jersey, in
the blackest city in the state of these negroes are
going to be there my first people that I'm gonna
(18:04):
have to fight with. Yeah, and I'm not asking you
to die with me. I'm asking you to support my
decision to put myself in the firing line. And my mother,
and I'm a mama's boy who was a man, said
I'll stand with you. And every protest I've ever done,
my mother stood with me in nineteen ninety seven, when
Sharpton and Martin the Third called the March on Washington
(18:24):
around boycotting police practices. I brought busloads down and I
was there, and so was my mother and my family.
In ninety five, when Minister called for the million man
march on October sixteenth, nineteen ninety five, I brought six
busloads down and I was one of the product of the
the delegation with Larry Ham again, we brought up something
like one hundred and fifty busses from from New Jersey
(18:46):
and the New York area. And so the experience has
been and for me it's been grounding because all of
those things I talked about exposed me to doctor Malana Karenga,
where he would come and do the Quanza in NewYork
every year. But because I had been to Ghana with
Donald Tucker at the time, who was an assemblyman, and
I was one of the younger people that they had
(19:07):
taken to Donna, I had an opportunity to meet with
doctor Karenga and get permission to do a pre Quanza
celebration because I thought, as a black police officer, I
needed something to ground me to the black community. Now
I still lived in Newark. I still live in York
by choice. They sell drugs on every corner except for
the four where I own a home and the four
where my parents home is. Because when I walked down
the street, I'm speaking to the brother or sister who's slinging.
(19:29):
I'm asking him to do a few things. Give me
the same respect you want me to give you. Don't
sell in front of me, don't go hand in hand
with in front of me. And I won't let cops
abuse mishos or put drugs on you in front of me.
That's a fair exchange. And so we've been able to
do that some fifteen twenty years now. But doctor Karenga
gave me permission to do the quanza, and so every
year I did a pre Quanza celebration for twelve or
(19:52):
thirteen years. And what I said to my colleagues is
that you have got to identify with your blackness first,
and if you're unwilling to, you're gonna be treated like
everyone else because it is the officer oversea mentality. It
is a slave mentality. And one of the things I've
often said is I have to fight the slave in
me every day when I put that uniform on. And
that's just the truth of the matter. Because the easier
(20:13):
path is to go along to get along. You know.
The speaker Thomas Todd in the nineties used to say
that when they want one, they send one to get one,
and then there is your brother assistant the corner saying
I get them for your boss. And so you have
to fight that urge because what happens. I'm often I
would associate a black police officer with a drug dealer
in the black community. They're both trying to get theirs, right.
(20:34):
I one of the things that I had to do
and do with my colleagues was to make sure that
I did not get addicted to the overtime money. Right.
And so these are the challenges that as a black
police officer not necessarily mean, but as a black police officer,
the struggle that goes on so here I am. The
only requirement to take this job is that I'm a citizen.
I'm at least eighteen years of age, I got a
(20:56):
high school diploma or a ged and you're going to
give me the most money I ever had in my
entire life. Eighty thousand, ninety thousand, hundred thousand, dollars, and
you want me to speak up when I see something
going wrong. No, I'm gonna see no evil, hear no evil,
and speak no evil, because in my hearder hearts, I
know that I've gotten an inferior education, and my hearder hearts,
(21:18):
I know that what I might be watching is wrong.
But I don't want to lose the opportunity to be
different from them, because the other ring goes on inside
the force. Now, those officers who speak up, and I
can name some across this entire country, those who came
before me, those who are stronger than me, and in
brothers and sisters right. The National Black Police Association was
founded in nineteen seventy two. I was a baby at
(21:40):
that point, but it was founded by black men and
women who understood then what we're talking about now. And
some of them are still living, and I'm in touch
with many of them. I recognize that we had to
find something to anchor us in our community, and so
for me, it was the quansa celebration, but it was
also fighting what we call cns US nigro syndrome. Black
(22:01):
people in positions of authority more concerned with doing a
white thing than doing the right thing, and in that instance,
the white thing was going along to get along. In
nineteen ninety eight, I believe we shut down the New
Jersey Turnpike after they shot the three brothers from New
York in the van the state troopers in New Jersey.
So it was an officer, a white officer, who gave
me the manual that they were using to train state
(22:23):
troopers to say, look for the signs of Jamaica. Look
for the symbols on the cars of the Jamaican flag.
This is where you're finding people transporting drugs up and
down the ninety five corridor. So the struggle for a
black officer is like I got I've been assaulted twice,
rag top cut off my car, and my car damaged
at the police lot at an officer grabbed me by
(22:45):
the next one day at the Black Officers meeting, got
me from behind, snatched me up off my feet and says,
if this was twenty years ago, we would have killed
you by now because you're a trader to the profession. Wow.
So I understand what my colleagues are going through and
those who think the way I do. On the West Coast,
we got Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey retired LAPD. She's all over
(23:06):
the media. Conscious thinker Reddick Hudson in Missouri Saint Louis, Missouri,
who founded the National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice,
Reform and Accountability. We're founding members since twenty fifteen, but
he identified twenty five officers across the country who've all
done this kind of work that I'm doing. So we're
a forerunner in that we were able to get a
(23:27):
national and international platform. But black people have come long
before me who fought for this kind of change, and
their voices have simply been muted, especially black women. I
have always maintained that the revolution, as Malcolm said, would
not if gil Scott Heron said, would not be telefied,
but it will be black women leading it because what
I've found is that the black women, not that we
(23:48):
don't have abusive black women, because we do, but we
know from research and from my experience, is that women
shoot less, said less brutal. And so then I said,
then whyn't we bring them all women on the force?
Why would we have fuel women? It's not more women.
I also recognize that our black women can lead to
charge and can find the testicular fortitude that my brothers
do not have. Stand up and call a thing a thing.
(24:09):
Talk to him, yes, sir, Wow, okay, guns blaze and
well said, Well said sir. So you know, um, you're
talking about, um, you know, having this organization and kind
of being affiliated with these many other people who have
(24:31):
their various organizations around the country. UM, I'm sure that
a lot of data comes your way, a lot of
things that you have to make sense of, make heads
or tells of. UM, So talk to us about some
of the studies you've done or encountered and what you've
learned about the impact that a police officers race, or
(24:52):
years of service, or a place of residence has on
their decision making when it comes to how they handle
different suspects. So those variables that you just talked about
are actually the variables in my research study and my
dissipation police use of force examining factors relating to police
shooting unarmed black males. And what I did was I
took a firearm simulated at police officers train on and
(25:14):
I identified four scenarios out of about nine hundred that
I had to go through. And I use a North
Jersey police department which I can't name, and about thirty
six police officers. I'm all black, white, Asian, one identified
as black white whatever that means, male and female. The
youngest was about twenty something, the oldest about sixty something,
(25:35):
and most of them uniform patrol. Now what I was
looking for. One scenario was that I had was a
domestic dispute between a white male, white female. She had
a baby in her arms and they were fighting over
the baby, and she pulled a gun open fire on him.
The second scenario was a white male stealing a bike
when the officers it would bike cutters, a wire cutters.
Than when he was trying to cut the chain, the
(25:57):
officers came and pulled out on him, and he pulled
a gun out his back pocket to fire at the officers.
The third scenario was a older black man driving a car,
but he had two young black men, one in the
front seat passenger seat one in the back, and as
they were pulled over, the driver got out of the car,
but the passenger and the front seat pulled a gun
and open fire on the officers. And the fourth scenario
(26:18):
was Trayvon Martin that it was a scenario where it
was a black mail with a hoodie on looking into
the windows of a suburban home. What I expected, and
that was my null hypothesis. My expectation is that people
would shoot that young man because he advanced on the officers.
But of the thirty six police officers, only one shot him.
So it actually did not support my hypothesis and my
(26:39):
hypothesis that the officers race, age, years of service in
place of residence impacts their decision to shoot or not
shoot in that instance. And so although it did not
support it, there certainly research out there by others that
have supported it. So the earlier research used on computer
screens to shoot not shoot, and so of course the
criticism is that that's not a realistic approach to studying
(27:02):
police officers shooting or not shooting because they use a
gun right where in my case we used the real
guns that were modified with laser and OC spray modified
with laser. There's also studies out there that came just
before my studies that suggests I think Friedell and Lois
James and others, they suggest that there's what's called under
vigilance that when a white officer encounters a black suspect
(27:25):
that because they're concerned about the political fallout, they actually
hesitate and don't shoot as frequently because they're concerned about
what might happen. I struggle with that analysis. But that's
some of the research, and then there's research all in
between that, and it's mixed research that says, yes, a
geographic area does have an impact on an officer's decision,
(27:46):
and so one of the ways. And when I first
introduced it to my dissertation committee, my chair, who was older,
Caucasian female nun, said, well, I don't see where that's relevant.
I said, well, I could understand you've been in a convent.
That makes sense that you might not see its relevant.
But I live in a hood and that makes sense
to me that it is relevant. So she said, well,
you're gonna have to convince me, and so I did.
(28:07):
And what I said towards that I would like you,
for the next two or three weeks to go to
any street in your community that's Martin Luther King, Boulevard Street, neighborhood,
or drive, and then I want you to tell me
what the street looks like geographically relative to all the
other streets in the neighborhood. And very often and been
variably Martin Luther King Street, wherever you are in America,
(28:29):
is one of the worst streets that we have in
our community. And it seems interesting. And so there's research
out there that suggests that the geometric frameworks and the
symmetry and the architecture impacts how people see the community.
And so if I come to a community where I've
never been amongst black, brown, poor, marginalized people, I begin
(28:53):
to see you through the lens that Dubois talked about
of double consciousness if I look like you, or through
the other lenses that the media shapes and frames in
that we have that criminals are black and brown, the
overuse of welfare is black and brown. The people I
should fear are black and brown. But Ivan Bowski, Michael Milken,
(29:15):
they come in and they steal the banks with all
the junk bonds and take everything out the community, and
nobody recognized them because they got suits and ties in
a briefcase. So the reality is that and this is
why we hear people talk about black on black crime
as though the research doesn't support the hypothesis or the notion,
and the fact that white people kill white people, agents
(29:36):
kill Agians, Hispanics Killerspanics, and blacks kill black. But we're
the only ones to get a category all to ourselves.
Why because it feeds a larger narrative. And that is,
as I've heard said often, what do you do with
your former slaves and their children where you no longer
have any use for them, what do you do? Well,
(29:58):
we will let them play two black quarterbacks for the
first time in the history of the NFL, will let
them play in the championship game this coming weekend, right,
and we're gonna make hay about it. The reality is,
let's not make hay about having two black quarterbacks. And
I like Mahomes and I like Jalen Hurds. The reality is,
let's talk about why we haven't had one before now,
because the greatest quarterbacks have been black. So what are
(30:21):
the barriers to they're getting in? What are the systems
that are in place that doctor Francis chrest wells and
talks about in the Keys to the Colors the Isist papers, Right,
she says, there's non people area activities that are governed
by racism in white supremacy, and we need to either
get inside those institutions and reform them, or we need
to tear them down and rebuild them so that they're
fairing just for everyone in their economics, entertainment, education, labor, law, politics, sex, war,
(30:43):
and religion. And so just pick any one of those institutions,
and all of them oppress us. It is not accidental
that people come here with nothing in their pockets but
lent and a dollar bill, a dollar and a dream,
and they make themselves millionaires. And they say, well, what's
wrong with this lazy negro who's been here forever? And
it's nothing wrong with the negro. What the problem is
that all your institutions are designed to hold down a negro.
(31:06):
And then when some of these super negroes become super negroes,
they forgot that they were negroes, right, And so they
look back on us and say, what's wrong with you?
Pull yourself about the bootstrap. But I remind people all
the time that you cannot come here blacker than a
thousand beautiful midnights and end up with a child like
me light bright, damn near white, unless somebody's putting cream
in the coffee and loving it. And it's not just
mister McDonald. This concludes part one of our two part
(31:29):
conversation with retired Sergeant Community policing, educator, author, humanitarian and
justice advocate, founder of Black Cops Against Police Brutality, doctor
de Lacy Davis. Check in with us tomorrow for Part
two with your host Rams's jaw right here on the
Black Information Network Daily podcast
Black people are two times more likely to be killed
by the police even when there are no other obvious
circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of
deadly force reasonable. According to Mapping Police Violence dot Org,
when examining data around police violence and outcomes of police killings,
twenty two data reports that, in addition to being two
(00:20):
times more likely to being killed for absolutely no reason,
studies and data analysis demonstrate that black people are on
average at least three times more likely to be killed
by police in comparison to our white counterparts. With the
recent killing of Tyree Nichols and other high profile killings
by police across the nation, also been reignited for urgent
(00:41):
police accountability and reform, regularly delivering his expert inside and
information to help assess and solve problems relative to policing
and justice reform, having appeared on many notable programs including
News One Now with Roland Martin, Nightline, c SPAN, oprah MSNBE,
and the CBS Morning Show. Today's guest is a community
(01:03):
policing educator, author, humanitarian and justice advocate, as well as
a former New Jersey police sergeant of twenty years. Founding
Black Cops against Police Brutality in nineteen ninety one and
authoring what has been referenced as the How two Book
of Setting Up a Plan against Police Brutality in your
Community and title Black Cops Against Police Brutality, a Crisis
(01:25):
Action Plan, recognized by human rights activist, social critic, and
comedian Dick Gregory for his courage, his wisdom, and his soul.
Most recently completing his doctoral degree examining the factors relating
to police officers shooting unarmed black mails. Doctor de Lacy
Davis has dedicated his life advocate for those mistreated by
(01:46):
law enforcement and to ensuring that people of color are
afforded equal rights under the Constitution. Here with us to
share his perspective on the killing of Tyrene Nichols, to
further discuss the history an evolution of policing in America
and why it is that cops are killing instead of protecting.
We have retired sergeant, community policing educator, author, humanitarian and
(02:09):
justice advocate, founder of Black Cops Against Police Brutality, Doctor
de Lacy Davis. I am Maggie b. Nowen, and this
is a Black Information Network daily podcast with your host
ramses Jaw, Doctor Davis. Welcome to the show man. How
you doing. It's a pleasure to meet you, brother. I'm well,
(02:32):
thank you and thank you for having me on the show.
In peace to the family. Oh, I appreciate that, and
I can assure you the pleasure is mine. Around here,
we have, as you can imagine, conversations that often touch
on police brutality, police shootings, police misconduct, and rarely do
(02:54):
we talk with someone who is so informed, who has
the direct experience and can provide the level of insight
that we believe that you can saw. Again, the honor
and the privilege is ours here on the show. So
let's do this. Let's get our listeners acquainted with you.
What we do is we start at the beginning, share
(03:15):
a bit about yourself, your upbringing, and what led you
to your career path. So I'm going to start and
reverse my career path was started. I wanted to finance
my music career. I believe it was going to be
a great job. I figured I could buy one family
a three family house. I would use one floor to
pay the mortgage, I'd use another rent to put in
(03:38):
the bank, and another rent to pay for studio time.
And I did exactly that and it took me all
over the world. So I was twenty three years old.
I started the plan at about nineteen and it worked out.
And so I'm a musician, so of course I think differently.
My upbringing. I grew up in New Jersey. I grew
up or I didn't know I was poor until I
got to college at Drew University, when I got called
(03:58):
the inn word for the first time. So I realized
I was a poor and I didn't know that. There
about seventeen eighteen hundred students on the campus, and about
seventy of us were black and brown. Of the seventy
that were black and brown, about forty of us were
poor kids. So we were chased to the train station
leaving the campus and Drew Universities in Madison, New Jersey,
(04:19):
which is one of the richest counties in New Jersey,
Mars County. And so they were chasing us to the
train station, cussing us out, throwing bottles at us. So
that was my indoctrination at the academic level. Growing up
in Newark, I was a baseball player. I figured I
was gonna play pro ball all my life. I played
baseball from nine years old all the way to college,
(04:39):
and of course that's where I had my dreams snuffed
out at college, and so I went to Catholic school.
I went to public school. My mom told me in
the eighth grade, because I've always had a gift of gab,
if you will, she said, listen, you are not going
to go to that high school two blocks from the house,
because they're gonna beat you down and kill you because
you shut up. You won't shut up, and you talk
too much. So you've been to figure out how to
(05:00):
get into a Catholic school, a private school, or learn
how to draw, sing, or do something that would get
you into one of the magnet schools and Arts high school,
which is it's actually the first performing art high school
in the United States, is in North New Jersey. So
six months before graduating the eighth grade, I started teaching myself.
Had a draw. I went and searched the neighborhood to
find if there was any art majors who went to
(05:21):
Art Tide living in my neighborhood, only to find out
there were two living on my block, and one of
the best graphic artists and illustrators who's in this country
lived on my block, Howard Simpson and I'm Leon Biased
and so they were seniors. There were juniors when I
was trying to take the test, and they started coaching me.
And I went to the library every day for six
months to study, and I lo and behold. I was
(05:43):
one of one hundred students who got in for art
that year at Art High School, and I enjoyed art.
It was I'm a creative, as I know, and I
see the world through a very different lens, and that's
kind of how I've moved. However, after my first year
year at Art, tire had a B plus average into
my major. But I hated drawing every day and I
had art the first period every day and I hated it.
(06:06):
So I said, well, the music people travel. I want
to travel like but you're not a musician. I said, well,
I need to figure that out. So you know what
I did. I went to the library where the lies
are buried and I started studying music. I could play
kongas because I'm a self taught percussionist, which is what
I do professionally as well, and I started translating playing
the kungas to playing drums and reading music and I
(06:29):
was successful there. I got straight as in music and
music theory. Had no formal training, but I know I
didn't have the vocabulary then, but I know now that
it's in our genes, it's in our coding. You just
have to activate the drum in the African gene and
it will come to life. And so I've been all
over the world traveling, playing music. And so what I
(06:49):
wound up doing is using the I used travel and
my skills and the arts I'm to learn to teach,
to travel and to share. And so that's pretty much
gets me to college where I had that shocking cultural experience,
but it awakened me. I didn't truly awaken as an
African until traveling to Ghana, West Africa in nineteen ninety four.
(07:14):
I went from Panafest with a group out of called
Africa North and let me but go back. And I
was ninety four and ninety three. I was fortunate enough
to I founded Black Cops Against Police Batality in nineteen
ninety one. By nineteen ninety three, I was one of
several organizations. I was one of several organizations in the
Malcolm X Commemorative Celebration Committee. One hundred and fourteen organizations
(07:37):
would come together every year to celebrate the life of
Malcolm X and sister Betty Shabaz would come to town.
And so this particularly year, I was in my twenties
and folks knew I was a police officer and I
was trying to develop my consciousness, and they said, well,
why don't we let that young brother be one of
the four co chairs. And you know the community, I
was there with nationalists and black panthers and just folks
(07:59):
maddest hells, and they didn't want me to be one
of the four. Laham who's from People's Organization for Progress
in Newark, said to give him a shot, and so
they gave me a shot. Now, Larry Ham was the
youngest person in United States of America to serve on
a board of education. At the age of seventeen, he
was appointed to the Board of Education in Newark, New
(08:20):
Jersey by then Mayor Ken Gibson. And so I had
seen him at my school in my junior year. He
was a speaker, and he gave me his phone number,
which I memorized to this day. And Larry's about ten
years older than me, but he opened the door and
that led to a lot of things. So I got
to meet Sister Betty Shabaz. Every year right up until
the year before her death, I spent time with her.
So I've spent time with Sister Betty Shabazz, Queen mother
(08:42):
Winnie Mandela, Dick Gregory al Shark, and Minister Fire Cohn,
Ben Chavis our village and so a Miry Baracca, the
late playwright. And so those are the folks who poured
into me, Doctor Adelaide Sandford. So as a young man,
I've had there's in the village. So I come from
an African paradigm and I raised my child and my
(09:05):
adopted children that way because I recognize that's the only
thing that kept me saying it kept me balanced, but
it also kept me in the midst of struggle inside
of law enforcement. So now you got a taste of
who I am. Well, that's quite a story, and I
think that it jives with kind of the path that
you're on right now. It's that's a very rare story.
(09:30):
I'd imagine in law enforcement someone who is culturally aware
and also making an effort to bridge some of the
more visible gaps, at least insofar as black folks are concerned.
So those are some powerful names and associations to have
and in functioning in that capacity, I'm sure it was
(09:52):
difficult on both sides. So let's let's fast forward a bit, yes,
you know with well, actually, you know what, Before we
fast forward, let's do this. Let's talk about the roots
and the origins of law enforcement and how it has
evolved into the institution that it is that it has
(10:16):
become today so that we can accurately frame the circumstances
we're dealing with today. So let's talk about the history
of law enforcement as you know it. So law enforcement
in this country starts out as a gang of white boys, right,
just white men, as a mob running around the country,
(10:37):
capturing three black people and enslaved black people, right their
slave catchers, their posses, as we saw in the West
and the Western movies that they've romanticized for us, But
they're actually folks who point themselves on the law. In
the order. Even in the colonies, you had what was
called or considered the watchman, where every body man had
(11:02):
to agree that they would watch the community and make
sure that people were safe, and they would do the
call every hour they had the light and all of that,
and so it begins to evolve, and so around the
sixteen hundred, sixteen twenties, thirties, you get formalized policing as
we would know it coming in Charleston. You see it Charleston,
(11:23):
South Carolina, one of the Carolinas, and you also begin
to see it in Boston. And so now we're formalizing
the police department. And now they're formally slave catchers in
the South and union busters in the North. And you
see that even where they're grabbing free so called free
black people, men and women, they're dragging them back into
(11:46):
the South and putting them into enslavement. We saw the
movie Twelve Years of Late. Yeah, that's an example of it.
And so, but what happens in eighteen twenty nine. The
Metropolitan Police Department is formalizing London, England by Sir Robert Peel,
which is why the cops were referred to as bobbies,
and he had nine Peeling Principles, and we began to
(12:07):
see some of that infused into the police departments here
in the United States. But by this time, again they
had already been organized before Peel had come along, and
Peel had cut his teeth relative to the Metropolitan Police
by what they were doing with the Irish and the
United Kingdom was doing in Ireland to the Irish people.
(12:29):
And so all of that comes along and now we
see formalized police in the United States. They're beginning to
organize other departments other places or organizing, and you have
what we have as the patrol approach to things. They
become specialized as they moved through the progressions. But you've
got patrol, uniform patrol people walking the beat, the cop
walking the beat. And then we see I think we
(12:52):
see the race wars in this country around the nineteen twenties.
You see huge uproars in this country in terms of
our racial violence. And of course we cannot forget that
we're also dealing with now not so much the posse,
but we're dealing with a posse or gang mentality. Because
then we got the ku Kuk Klan riding, right, So
(13:14):
we got the night riders in the South, they're riding.
So you've got a civil rights movement, but you've got
a clan movement that is also the police. And I
want to be clear about that, right, You've got folks
in sheets and hoods, but they're also police officers and
judges and the bankers and the folks in the community.
And I want to be very clear that that mindset
(13:34):
has not changed very much, at least not in my
experience and not in my communicating with people around this
country and around the world, because when I talk to
some of my relatives in the South, they still, without
saying it, speak as though they understand their place. My
grandmother was born nineteen oh one died nineteen eighty two,
the youngest of ten children, and all of her aunts
and uncles were enslaved. I am the fifth generation of
(13:56):
my family. Professor Gable Day born eighteen eighteen got eighteen
ninety five, and so for him to be called professor
in the eighteen hundreds, when being black and literate was
a crime, clearly he was educated. And so I recognize
the lineage of my family and the responsibility that I
have to that lineage. And so when I get to
(14:18):
joining a police force, I joined for the only reasons
I told you, to finance a music career. But within
five years I fall in love with black and brown
people and move and moving in a direction of protecting
and serving the community. You are absolutely correct. It was
incongruent with everything that I was expected to do when
I joined the force. We are here today with retired sergeant,
(14:41):
community policing educator, author, humanitarian and justice advocate, founder of
Black Cops Against Police Brutality, doctor de Lacy Davis, discussing
the killing of Tyree Nichols by the Memphis PD, the
history and abolition of policing in America, and why it
is that cops are killing protecting. So let's go with that.
(15:05):
There's a lot of us, myself included, we can see. Well,
let me make sure I say this right. I do
have some friends who are police officers. I'm not so
close minded as to think that police officers are not
human beings underneath their uniforms. But being honest with myself
and my experience, a lot of us know the I guess,
(15:31):
the experience of witnessing or being victim of police violence,
police and justice this sort of thing, right, So, we
were very familiar with the side of the equation, but
we are less familiar with what it's like to be
a police officer, much less a black police officer. And
(15:53):
this is something that perhaps you can give us insight into.
So talk us through what that's like, what reconciling things
mentally what it's like to be on the streets in
a black body enforcing the laws and often I'm sure
poorer and minority communities. What has your experience been like
(16:13):
having to walk that path? I think to give context
to it, we must understand that black people are not
a monolith, right, But we go from Clarence tom Ass
to Minister Farrakhan, and so therefore we have all in between.
And so as a black police officer, there are several experiences,
and I can simply share those that I'm familiar with,
but we have that are like mine. I did a
(16:35):
T shirt when you had a graphic artist to a
T shirt for me that I called it Ghetto Soldier
one forty five, and so half of it had dreadlocks
and saggy pants and timberland boots and a T shirt
and that something else, maybe some music in the background,
and the other half had the police uniform. Because it's
this split, Dubois calls it in nineteen oh three. He
(16:59):
calls it the double consciousness, the two nous, the one
in which you, as a black man, are being forced
to see your black self through white eyes and walking
with that, and what that does to you and to
your Spirit coach in twenty twenty refers to it when
she studies the police officers in Ferguson, Missouri. Black police officers,
(17:23):
they call it double marginality, where you now have these
built intensions between your relationship or your representation in a
racial group and your representation in an employment group, and
how they're competing with each other. Sure, both of those
have been true for me and my journey. And I
can tell you that I joined the force in nineteen
(17:43):
eighty six. By nineteen ninety one, pre Rodney King, I
sat with my family and said, I'm going to start
an organization and it could get me killed because the
cops I work with, even though I work in the
blackest police department in the state of New Jersey, in
the blackest city in the state of these negroes are
going to be there my first people that I'm gonna
(18:04):
have to fight with. Yeah, and I'm not asking you
to die with me. I'm asking you to support my
decision to put myself in the firing line. And my mother,
and I'm a mama's boy who was a man, said
I'll stand with you. And every protest I've ever done,
my mother stood with me in nineteen ninety seven, when
Sharpton and Martin the Third called the March on Washington
(18:24):
around boycotting police practices. I brought busloads down and I
was there, and so was my mother and my family.
In ninety five, when Minister called for the million man
march on October sixteenth, nineteen ninety five, I brought six
busloads down and I was one of the product of the
the delegation with Larry Ham again, we brought up something
like one hundred and fifty busses from from New Jersey
(18:46):
and the New York area. And so the experience has
been and for me it's been grounding because all of
those things I talked about exposed me to doctor Malana Karenga,
where he would come and do the Quanza in NewYork
every year. But because I had been to Ghana with
Donald Tucker at the time, who was an assemblyman, and
I was one of the younger people that they had
(19:07):
taken to Donna, I had an opportunity to meet with
doctor Karenga and get permission to do a pre Quanza
celebration because I thought, as a black police officer, I
needed something to ground me to the black community. Now
I still lived in Newark. I still live in York
by choice. They sell drugs on every corner except for
the four where I own a home and the four
where my parents home is. Because when I walked down
the street, I'm speaking to the brother or sister who's slinging.
(19:29):
I'm asking him to do a few things. Give me
the same respect you want me to give you. Don't
sell in front of me, don't go hand in hand
with in front of me. And I won't let cops
abuse mishos or put drugs on you in front of me.
That's a fair exchange. And so we've been able to
do that some fifteen twenty years now. But doctor Karenga
gave me permission to do the quanza, and so every
year I did a pre Quanza celebration for twelve or
(19:52):
thirteen years. And what I said to my colleagues is
that you have got to identify with your blackness first,
and if you're unwilling to, you're gonna be treated like
everyone else because it is the officer oversea mentality. It
is a slave mentality. And one of the things I've
often said is I have to fight the slave in
me every day when I put that uniform on. And
that's just the truth of the matter. Because the easier
(20:13):
path is to go along to get along. You know.
The speaker Thomas Todd in the nineties used to say
that when they want one, they send one to get one,
and then there is your brother assistant the corner saying
I get them for your boss. And so you have
to fight that urge because what happens. I'm often I
would associate a black police officer with a drug dealer
in the black community. They're both trying to get theirs, right.
(20:34):
I one of the things that I had to do
and do with my colleagues was to make sure that
I did not get addicted to the overtime money. Right.
And so these are the challenges that as a black
police officer not necessarily mean, but as a black police officer,
the struggle that goes on so here I am. The
only requirement to take this job is that I'm a citizen.
I'm at least eighteen years of age, I got a
(20:56):
high school diploma or a ged and you're going to
give me the most money I ever had in my
entire life. Eighty thousand, ninety thousand, hundred thousand, dollars, and
you want me to speak up when I see something
going wrong. No, I'm gonna see no evil, hear no evil,
and speak no evil, because in my hearder hearts, I
know that I've gotten an inferior education, and my hearder hearts,
(21:18):
I know that what I might be watching is wrong.
But I don't want to lose the opportunity to be
different from them, because the other ring goes on inside
the force. Now, those officers who speak up, and I
can name some across this entire country, those who came
before me, those who are stronger than me, and in
brothers and sisters right. The National Black Police Association was
founded in nineteen seventy two. I was a baby at
(21:40):
that point, but it was founded by black men and
women who understood then what we're talking about now. And
some of them are still living, and I'm in touch
with many of them. I recognize that we had to
find something to anchor us in our community, and so
for me, it was the quansa celebration, but it was
also fighting what we call cns US nigro syndrome. Black
(22:01):
people in positions of authority more concerned with doing a
white thing than doing the right thing, and in that instance,
the white thing was going along to get along. In
nineteen ninety eight, I believe we shut down the New
Jersey Turnpike after they shot the three brothers from New
York in the van the state troopers in New Jersey.
So it was an officer, a white officer, who gave
me the manual that they were using to train state
(22:23):
troopers to say, look for the signs of Jamaica. Look
for the symbols on the cars of the Jamaican flag.
This is where you're finding people transporting drugs up and
down the ninety five corridor. So the struggle for a
black officer is like I got I've been assaulted twice,
rag top cut off my car, and my car damaged
at the police lot at an officer grabbed me by
(22:45):
the next one day at the Black Officers meeting, got
me from behind, snatched me up off my feet and says,
if this was twenty years ago, we would have killed
you by now because you're a trader to the profession. Wow.
So I understand what my colleagues are going through and
those who think the way I do. On the West Coast,
we got Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey retired LAPD. She's all over
(23:06):
the media. Conscious thinker Reddick Hudson in Missouri Saint Louis, Missouri,
who founded the National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice,
Reform and Accountability. We're founding members since twenty fifteen, but
he identified twenty five officers across the country who've all
done this kind of work that I'm doing. So we're
a forerunner in that we were able to get a
(23:27):
national and international platform. But black people have come long
before me who fought for this kind of change, and
their voices have simply been muted, especially black women. I
have always maintained that the revolution, as Malcolm said, would
not if gil Scott Heron said, would not be telefied,
but it will be black women leading it because what
I've found is that the black women, not that we
(23:48):
don't have abusive black women, because we do, but we
know from research and from my experience, is that women
shoot less, said less brutal. And so then I said,
then whyn't we bring them all women on the force?
Why would we have fuel women? It's not more women.
I also recognize that our black women can lead to
charge and can find the testicular fortitude that my brothers
do not have. Stand up and call a thing a thing.
(24:09):
Talk to him, yes, sir, Wow, okay, guns blaze and
well said, Well said sir. So you know, um, you're
talking about, um, you know, having this organization and kind
of being affiliated with these many other people who have
(24:31):
their various organizations around the country. UM, I'm sure that
a lot of data comes your way, a lot of
things that you have to make sense of, make heads
or tells of. UM, So talk to us about some
of the studies you've done or encountered and what you've
learned about the impact that a police officers race, or
(24:52):
years of service, or a place of residence has on
their decision making when it comes to how they handle
different suspects. So those variables that you just talked about
are actually the variables in my research study and my
dissipation police use of force examining factors relating to police
shooting unarmed black males. And what I did was I
took a firearm simulated at police officers train on and
(25:14):
I identified four scenarios out of about nine hundred that
I had to go through. And I use a North
Jersey police department which I can't name, and about thirty
six police officers. I'm all black, white, Asian, one identified
as black white whatever that means, male and female. The
youngest was about twenty something, the oldest about sixty something,
(25:35):
and most of them uniform patrol. Now what I was
looking for. One scenario was that I had was a
domestic dispute between a white male, white female. She had
a baby in her arms and they were fighting over
the baby, and she pulled a gun open fire on him.
The second scenario was a white male stealing a bike
when the officers it would bike cutters, a wire cutters.
Than when he was trying to cut the chain, the
(25:57):
officers came and pulled out on him, and he pulled
a gun out his back pocket to fire at the officers.
The third scenario was a older black man driving a car,
but he had two young black men, one in the
front seat passenger seat one in the back, and as
they were pulled over, the driver got out of the car,
but the passenger and the front seat pulled a gun
and open fire on the officers. And the fourth scenario
(26:18):
was Trayvon Martin that it was a scenario where it
was a black mail with a hoodie on looking into
the windows of a suburban home. What I expected, and
that was my null hypothesis. My expectation is that people
would shoot that young man because he advanced on the officers.
But of the thirty six police officers, only one shot him.
So it actually did not support my hypothesis and my
(26:39):
hypothesis that the officers race, age, years of service in
place of residence impacts their decision to shoot or not
shoot in that instance. And so although it did not
support it, there certainly research out there by others that
have supported it. So the earlier research used on computer
screens to shoot not shoot, and so of course the
criticism is that that's not a realistic approach to studying
(27:02):
police officers shooting or not shooting because they use a
gun right where in my case we used the real
guns that were modified with laser and OC spray modified
with laser. There's also studies out there that came just
before my studies that suggests I think Friedell and Lois
James and others, they suggest that there's what's called under
vigilance that when a white officer encounters a black suspect
(27:25):
that because they're concerned about the political fallout, they actually
hesitate and don't shoot as frequently because they're concerned about
what might happen. I struggle with that analysis. But that's
some of the research, and then there's research all in
between that, and it's mixed research that says, yes, a
geographic area does have an impact on an officer's decision,
(27:46):
and so one of the ways. And when I first
introduced it to my dissertation committee, my chair, who was older,
Caucasian female nun, said, well, I don't see where that's relevant.
I said, well, I could understand you've been in a convent.
That makes sense that you might not see its relevant.
But I live in a hood and that makes sense
to me that it is relevant. So she said, well,
you're gonna have to convince me, and so I did.
(28:07):
And what I said towards that I would like you,
for the next two or three weeks to go to
any street in your community that's Martin Luther King, Boulevard Street, neighborhood,
or drive, and then I want you to tell me
what the street looks like geographically relative to all the
other streets in the neighborhood. And very often and been
variably Martin Luther King Street, wherever you are in America,
(28:29):
is one of the worst streets that we have in
our community. And it seems interesting. And so there's research
out there that suggests that the geometric frameworks and the
symmetry and the architecture impacts how people see the community.
And so if I come to a community where I've
never been amongst black, brown, poor, marginalized people, I begin
(28:53):
to see you through the lens that Dubois talked about
of double consciousness if I look like you, or through
the other lenses that the media shapes and frames in
that we have that criminals are black and brown, the
overuse of welfare is black and brown. The people I
should fear are black and brown. But Ivan Bowski, Michael Milken,
(29:15):
they come in and they steal the banks with all
the junk bonds and take everything out the community, and
nobody recognized them because they got suits and ties in
a briefcase. So the reality is that and this is
why we hear people talk about black on black crime
as though the research doesn't support the hypothesis or the notion,
and the fact that white people kill white people, agents
(29:36):
kill Agians, Hispanics Killerspanics, and blacks kill black. But we're
the only ones to get a category all to ourselves.
Why because it feeds a larger narrative. And that is,
as I've heard said often, what do you do with
your former slaves and their children where you no longer
have any use for them, what do you do? Well,
(29:58):
we will let them play two black quarterbacks for the
first time in the history of the NFL, will let
them play in the championship game this coming weekend, right,
and we're gonna make hay about it. The reality is,
let's not make hay about having two black quarterbacks. And
I like Mahomes and I like Jalen Hurds. The reality is,
let's talk about why we haven't had one before now,
because the greatest quarterbacks have been black. So what are
(30:21):
the barriers to they're getting in? What are the systems
that are in place that doctor Francis chrest wells and
talks about in the Keys to the Colors the Isist papers, Right,
she says, there's non people area activities that are governed
by racism in white supremacy, and we need to either
get inside those institutions and reform them, or we need
to tear them down and rebuild them so that they're
fairing just for everyone in their economics, entertainment, education, labor, law, politics, sex, war,
(30:43):
and religion. And so just pick any one of those institutions,
and all of them oppress us. It is not accidental
that people come here with nothing in their pockets but
lent and a dollar bill, a dollar and a dream,
and they make themselves millionaires. And they say, well, what's
wrong with this lazy negro who's been here forever? And
it's nothing wrong with the negro. What the problem is
that all your institutions are designed to hold down a negro.
(31:06):
And then when some of these super negroes become super negroes,
they forgot that they were negroes, right, And so they
look back on us and say, what's wrong with you?
Pull yourself about the bootstrap. But I remind people all
the time that you cannot come here blacker than a
thousand beautiful midnights and end up with a child like
me light bright, damn near white, unless somebody's putting cream
in the coffee and loving it. And it's not just
mister McDonald. This concludes part one of our two part
(31:29):
conversation with retired Sergeant Community policing, educator, author, humanitarian and
justice advocate, founder of Black Cops Against Police Brutality, doctor
de Lacy Davis. Check in with us tomorrow for Part
two with your host Rams's jaw right here on the
Black Information Network Daily podcast
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