He enrolled in my seminar on law and society as a graduate student. Being in his 50s, he was an unusual enrollee, but his experiences could not have been more relevant to such a course. He was a long-serving, full-time police officer in the oldest police department in the nation, the Boston Police Department, and he had patrolled some of the city’s highest crime rate districts. He was also African American, serving in a city long troubled by racial animus. This animus was
especially evident in the 1970s hostilities around the effort to use busing to integrate students in the city’s public schools, and later appeared in the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989-90, in which Stuart–who was white–framed a black man for the murder of Stuart’s wife, whom he himself had killed.
I will call the police officer “Hal,” not his real name. Because the seminar combined undergraduate students with graduate students, every week I asked the grad students to come to my office after class to further discuss the day’s assigned topics with me. Walking to my office after one seminar meeting, Hal offered that he really loved the reading we had been discussing in class. The reading by an eminent sociologist of law had argued convincingly that, everywhere and always, law enforcement has come down more punitively on members of lower status groups than on those of higher status groups, even if the offenses were the same.
As we entered the office I asked Hal why he loved the reading. He answered, “Because (the author) is right,” he replied. That alone was very interesting to hear from an experienced police officer. But I wanted to delve further, so I presented Hal with a scenario. I said, “So if you confronted a young black male who had committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor), and later a young white male who had done the same thing, would you be more likely to arrest the black male and take him in, and more likely to take the white male home to his parents or give him a warning and let him go?” And Hal said, “Yes.” I asked why so, and he replied, “Because that is what the community wants.” Continue reading “Whither Racism in the Land of the Free”
