The core problem of policing in Oakland, as in some other cities, is a lack of trust between the Black community and cops. We hear this over and over again from critics such as Carroll Fife and Cat Brooks. Black people, they say, don’t trust the police, and that trust will never be established until OPD reforms itself, or is forced into reform according to conditions set down by police critics including Fife and Brooks.
The problem is that, like Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, police reform is something that can never truly be accomplished. One of Zeno’s paradoxes is that of the Achilles and the Tortoise. In a race, the Tortoise is given a slight head start. Logically, Achilles can never catch up to the Tortoise, because by the time he reaches the Tortoise’s latest position, the Tortoise will have crawled a little further. No matter how fast Achilles runs, he will always lag behind the Tortoise.
Here in Oakland, police critics demand reform in all sorts of areas: The use of force. Discrepancies in stops. Allegations of “humiliating” or disrespectful treatment. And so on. Until all these things are successfully resolved, the critics say, the Black community can never trust cops. But these things are impossible of being resolved. If someone feels they’ve been treated humiliatingly, then that feeling becomes proof that the police have not reformed themselves. If Black people are stopped out of proportion to their percentage of the population, then that proves that the police are racist. If a cop is compelled to use force to defend himself or others, that’s proof that cops are out of control. The police, in other words, can never catch up to the Tortoise of “reform” because reform is constantly redefined as “doing more than you’re doing now.” And more can always be done, obviously.
Do Black people themselves have some role to play in trusting the police? I would argue in the affirmative. The sense of mistrust of law enforcement in the Black community is not, of course, universal. From what I see, most Black people value the police and, in fact, we learn from polls that Black people in Black neighborhoods by sizable majorities desire more police, not fewer, in order to protect them and their loved ones. The problem is that a relatively small number of anti-police activists keeps picking at the scab that’s trying to heal over police-Black relations. They keep the infection hot, and they unfortunately have the ear of a media whose mantra is “If it bleeds, it leads.” This media is constantly on the lookout for confrontation, for civic clashes, for protests, which the media can blow up. Send two people to picket anything—the Mother Theresa Foundation for Protecting Puppies—and news media will send a camera crew and treat the incident as if it were Dr. King on the Selma March.
All this implies a very real responsibility of the part of the Black community: to do their part in healing relations with cops. I do realize that many Black individuals are working very hard to achieve this. At the same time, all communities—Black, White, Gay, Jewish, Muslim, what have you—should strive to rid themselves of extremists in their midst, who claim to speak for them but who in reality speak for nothing except their own political and financial ambitions. We expect, for example, the Muslim community to police itself of extremists, but for some reason we exempt other communities from the same obligation. Why should vast numbers of the Black community in Oakland not rise up in protest of Cat Brooks? If I were Black, I would. As a Jew I have certainly spoken out against the peculiar form of apartheid that Israel’s rightwing government imposes on Palestinians. Is it too much to ask of Oakland’s Black community to assist in the healing process by telling Ms. Brooks and Ms. Fife that they’re out of line when they stoke resentment of law enforcement?
Steve Heimoff