The Practice of Negation
When I retired from the police department, my colleagues organized a retirement ceremony. All in all, a nice gesture. I received many heartfelt hugs and congratulations. One of the traditions when an officer retires is to provide photographs on four cardboard planks: a blank page, a photograph of the officer at the beginning of a career, a photograph of the officer at the end of a career, and another blank page. Fellow officers sign their names and write sentiments on the blank pages, high school yearbook style. It was fun to compare the before and after photographs, to remark about how officers had changed over the years, how they had gained weight, lost hair, turned gray, and had acquired wrinkles.
My folder only had one photograph, the one of me as a rookie.
The practice of negation is a human compulsion, a way for the mind to move through unpleasant experiences, to ignore uncomfortable information, or to deny culpability for injustice.
Negation happens when people try to suppress complaints about systemic injustice, when they work to uphold tradition to avoid inclusion, when they try to defer action to avoid the painful process of redress, and when they inhibit progress or needed change to preserve their own comfort.
Negation allows systemic failure to acknowledge the significant disparities in our criminal justice system regarding how African Americans are incarcerated at rates six times higher than for white Americans. Though African Americans are only 13% of the population in the United States, they constitute 40% of all people held in prison and 43% of all death row inmates.
Is this because the African American community is more heavily policed? More closely watched? More often the focus of 911 calls?
A What Would You Do video compiled by ABC’s John Quiñones depicts a bicycle theft, a startling example of this higher level of vigilance when it comes to African Americans. White people ignore white suspects, easily rationalizing their behavior, but they more immediately intervene when a black suspect is trying to take the bicycle.
Check it out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuNRg
And might this hypervigilance about African American males in particular affect how police officer judge situations, causing them to perceive a threat quicker than they might when encountering white people?
We live in a country where people walk around openly armed with assault rifles (mostly white men), going to stores and restaurants to exercise their 2nd Amendment Rights, but when someone saw John Crawford III carrying a toy BB gun in an Ohio Walmart, they assumed he had ill intent, as did the police officer who shot and killed him.
The officers who shot Tamir Rice, rushed up to him before determining what he actually had in his hand, a tactical disaster that negates proper training and proficient police work. I can’t understand why they didn’t approach more cautiously, why they didn’t engage him from a safer distance, why they didn’t give him a chance to drop his Airsoft replica. Perhaps they had already decided what was going on, taking the calling party’s statements at face value, which any experienced police officer knows can be a dangerous practice.
The murder of George Floyd stands out as a particulary disturbing crime of negation. Officer Derek Chauvin ignored Mr. Floyd’s pleas for mercy, didn’t recognize his despair, and let him die beneath his knee, and the three accomplices, the police officers who were there assisting Chauvin either did not recognize Chauvin’s cruelty or did not have the courage to intervene to prevent a crime in progress, placing their affiliation with Chauvin above their sworn duty to protect life. They demonstrated how George Floyd’s life did not matter to them.
Negation assumes that since we’ve had an African American president we no longer have racial divides in the United States. In reality, though, since President Obama took office, his very citizenship has been questioned, his motives demonized, and his agenda challenged and dismantled at every possible turn by a sectarian congress determined to make sure he cannot succeed. I think many people from minority communities can identify with that dynamic. They know what is going on, about how people who are not cisgender, straight, white men need to work twice as hard for half the credit.
Negation fails to acknowledge the institutional racism that has plagued the United States since the very beginning. Not long before I retired I became ensnared in a debate with a former colleague about the supposed benevolence of the majority of slave owners in the Antebellum South. He asserted that most owners treated their slaves well, coming just short of saying that slavery was a benevolent institution. He said the stories of abuse were often exaggerated by abolitionists for political purposes. Of course, he insisted he wasn’t a racist.
Negation fails to understand that there is a disconnect between police officers and the communities they serve, that criminal justice and social justice have the same ultimate goals: to prevent the strong from exploiting the weak, to ensure the safety and harmony of all communities, and to protect the vulnerable from harm. Law enforcement is not a tally sheet, a numbers game, or a competition. Law enforcement is a human service, and police officers should be well educated about the condition of humanity in all its diversity.
With this understanding, I have support the Black Lives Matter movement, acknowledging the real emphasis of the movement isn’t to say Black Lives Matter MORE but that Black Lives Matter ALSO, that their lives have impact and importance, that they should be afforded the same opportunities as anyone else, the same consideration, the same respect from those in authority whether a cop, a judge, or a politician.
I have been participating in conversations about how to reform the criminal justice system, emphasizing that police agencies need to focus on educating officers about human diversity, bias detection, the dangers of profiling, deescalation techniques and conflict resolution. I have championed community policing, an approach that employs collaborative methods rather than adversarial approaches to law enforcement.
After all, in a democracy, all citizens should be able to communicate their needs and concerns while expecting officers to respond in good faith, but the reality is that most police agencies do not emphasize the importance for police officers to learn the communities they patrol, the necessity of collaboration, and the need to develop working relationships with the citizens they serve. Instead, they are encouraged to take as many calls, make as many stops, take as many reports, and arrest as many people as possible because these statistics are easy to measure and quantify.
Often, as in Ferguson, Missouri, municipal governments fund themselves on the prolific issuance of tickets and citations, bench warrants, and jail fees. These tactics amount to a systematic exploitation of underprivileged citizens who have difficulty paying these tickets, who face mounting debts and hard choices between feeding children or paying off tickets, of taking off work to go to court (missing a day’s pay) or relying on luck, hoping they won’t be stopped. But of course, they always get stopped, arrested, and jailed, criminalized because of poverty.
Negation makes it easier to ignore how minority communities are more likely to be impoverished, that minority communities are more likely to have less access to education and opportunity, that they have less resources, less time, less freedom, and fewer options.
Negation makes it easier for people to enjoy their privilege, to pretend they really do value all lives while they vote to cut taxes, continuing to dismantle the social safety net. They underfund public schools, creating charter systems and school-choice vouchers that in essence create a new system of school segregation. They oppose the expansion of health care coverage, creating an underclass more vulnerable to disease, more likely to suffer debilitating mental health problems, and less likely to live long enough to reach the age of life-expectancy. Negation fails to acknowledge that poverty kills.
Negation takes away the first promise in our beloved Declaration of Independence. Without life, there is no liberty, no pursuit of happiness, and that is the whole point of Black Lives Matter.
The lone rookie photograph on my retirement day reminded me of my former privilege, some of which benefits me even today. It also reminded me of the ideal situation in our society: that status of cisgender, straight white males. The failure of my command and colleagues to see me as Paula, to acknowledge how I have evolved as a person, as a woman — over 14 years of a 22 year career — is a deliberate negation, an act of negation in the name of their own comfort, the bedrock upon which people build systems that benefit themselves more than others. Also, in this microaggression, my former profession told me that two-thirds of my career did not matter.
Oh, the pain of a whole lifetime written off as a life that does not matter.
