Rash of violence spurs difficult conversations on ‘black and blue’ divide

Hundreds gathered in front of town hall on Monday night for a vigil for peace and tolerance. (Michelle Stark photo)

An explosive week of violence and unrest has reignited a national dialogue on race and policing in this country, and the conversations are happening right now, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns — including here in Canton.

Tensions reached a fever pitch late last week after the fatal police shootings of two black men — Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota — followed by a horrific sniper attack in Dallas that claimed the lives of five police officers and injured eight others.

The Dallas gunman, identified as 25-year-old ex-Army Reservist Micah Johnson, reportedly told authorities during a lengthy standoff with police that he was upset about the shootings of Sterling and Castile and wanted to kill white people, especially white officers. Additional acts of violence against police officers were reported in Tennessee, Missouri, and Georgia, and hundreds were arrested over the weekend as protesters clashed with officers in cities ranging from Baton Rouge to Rochester, New York.

In many other locales, however, the scene was peaceful and subdued, including in Boston, Washington, D.C., and here in Canton, where hundreds of residents gathered in front of town hall on Monday night to remember the recent lives lost and reaffirm the idea that “every life counts.”

The vigil, which was organized by Police Chief Ken Berkowitz, emphasized peace, tolerance and unity as officers and town officials stood side by side with residents of diverse backgrounds.

Speaking to the Citizen via telephone on Saturday, Berkowitz said his officers felt “numb” in the wake of the Dallas slayings but he expressed full confidence in the job that they are doing and echoed the remarks of Dallas Police Chief David Brown, who applauded the “brave men and women who do this job under great scrutiny [and] great vulnerability.”

“Are they human? Do they have room for improvement?” Berkowitz said, referring to the law enforcement community in general. “Yes, but I see cops doing a very, very difficult job and they have millions of interactions yearly and the vast, vast majority of them go smoothly yet are never reported.”

Berkowitz also repudiated the notion that police officers as a whole are racially insensitive, suggesting that it is part of a “false narrative” perpetuated by the media, activist groups, and politicians who “rush to speak before having all of the facts.”

“I personally haven’t seen it,” Berkowitz said of the animosity between the black community and law enforcement. “In fact, I would say I feel more appreciated now than I’ve ever felt in my career, and I honestly believe that there’s no time in this country’s history that residents needed us more.”

Crisis of Confidence?

As a young Haitian immigrant growing up in the Boston neighborhood of Mattapan, Ernst Guerrier was taught that “police are just not our friend.”

Now a successful attorney and law professor, Guerrier said he no longer holds such a belief, having met and interacted with too many good police officers over the course of his life and career, including Chief Berkowitz, whom he counts as a close personal friend.

At the same time, Guerrier said it is impossible to ignore the “multiple things that have happened” to people of color at the hands of law enforcement, including the recent shootings. He also acknowledged that the perception among many people of color, particularly young black males, is one of distrust and suspicion of police.

According to a recent nationwide Gallop poll, a whopping 70 percent of black respondents indicated that they had very little or no confidence in the police, and the gap between the confidence of whites and nonwhites has only widened in recent years, according to Gallop.

Whether or not this is largely a matter of perception or reality remains a matter of great debate. However, the Citizen also found a clear pattern of distrust in speaking with a number of young men of color, all of whom are Canton High School graduates.

Stefano Barros, 27, said he has a few friends who are police officers but remains skeptical of law enforcement in general. Barros, who now lives in Harlem and works for a nonprofit assisting inner-city youth with the college application process, said there have been too many instances of police brutality and wrongful deaths involving black men and women for him or anyone else to ignore.

Barros, who rattled off a dozen names just off the top of his head, remembers being in fifth grade at the Kennedy School and hearing about the shooting death of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx, and it “terrified” him.

“‘Reach slowly for your wallet,’ ‘Speak politely,’ were a few things that I knew I’d had to do, just in case I crossed paths with the wrong officer. I was in fifth grade thinking like that, and I had every reason to. It’s spiraled since then. Oscar Grant was restrained and was killed ‘by accident’ by a police officer. Philando Castile was shot reaching for his wallet. Anything could happen.”

Manasseh Remy, a former classmate of Barros at CHS, said he feels like a second-rate citizen despite having a “squeaky clean record” and admittedly finds it hard to empathize with police, noting that the “threat on [his] life is greater than [his] appreciation of civic duty.”

“I look very much like all of the victims we are mourning for,” he said. “If I was in their positions I believe it is clear I wouldn’t have made it out either.”

Another respondent, a 29-year-old Canton resident who asked not to be identified by name, described his interactions with members of the Canton PD as “cordial” and “positive.” However, when traveling in unfamiliar places, he feels as though he has far more to think about than the average white citizen.

“I make sure to conduct myself in a manner that will not have me stand out more than I have to,” he said. “For example, I am mindful of my clothing — limited baggy clothes, hoodie off if I am wearing one — limited and clear mannerisms, and I match my tone and volume of my voice with the immediate environment.”

As for the recent violence, he strongly condemned the killings in Dallas but also expressed outrage over the shootings of Sterling and Castile, which he said are “not isolated incidents.”

“This country is now based on trending hashtags for the next victim who dies at the hands of select police officers who should be deescalating violence but seem to add to violence,” he said. “Some regions of the country are worse than others, but it is a larger scale issue of our Justice Department and how they protect and serve their respective citizens.”

Deon Cameron, who grew up in Canton but now lives on the north shore, shared similar sentiments and said he knew from a young age that blacks were treated differently — and with greater suspicion — than their white peers. He noted that there were numerous times during his teenage years when he felt like a victim of prejudice, including instances where he was followed or searched by police despite not doing anything wrong.

Now a husband and a father, Cameron said he recently had a talk with his daughter about prejudice, and while he tried to make it “as empowering as possible,” it saddened him to have to tell a young girl that she will be treated differently in her life because of the color of her skin.

“My daughter is 11 and she understood exactly what I was saying,” he said. “She already knew, unfortunately.”

Cameron said black Americans have become almost desensitized to the discrimination that they experience in their daily lives, and yet he also made it clear that he does not “hate the police.”

“I’m a realist and I just can’t generalize them in that way,” he said. “We are all aware that if there’s a crime being committed and it’s an emergency issue we know that we can count on the police to help us. But that’s not the issue we are debating; the issue is regular interactions with us and sometimes it seems like the way we are treated is just wrong.”

All of the young men interviewed for this story also agreed that the issues between police and the black community are merely a symptom of a larger problem in this country, namely institutional racism.

“I believe it stems from white peoples’ overall lack of appreciation of the black phenotype,” said Remy. “They think we’re ugly, dehumanize us, and subsequently treat blacks as ‘lesser than’ … They only see what is represented on TV and perpetuated in the news. And that is going to make someone racist.”

“We see it daily — in the disproportionate number of black males in jail and in the heightened number of black girls being reprimanded in school,” Barros added. “It’s displayed through the treatment of the ‘heroin epidemic’ now versus the vilification and prosecution of blacks and Latinos during the ‘crack era’ in the 1980s … At this point, if you’re denying the fact that racism is a problem in this country, you’re choosing to ignore the pain with which people of color live, and that makes you a part of the problem.”

Working toward solutions

At a community forum on police and community relations held last spring at Canton High School, Chief Berkowitz confidently told the assembled audience that he is passionately in favor of body cameras because he is proud of the conduct of his officers and has seen virtually nothing in his 23 years as an officer that he wouldn’t want to share with the public.

Police Chief Ken Berkowitz shares remarks with the crowd. The children were invited to stand on the steps during the vigil. (Michelle Stark photo)

The forum, entitled “Black and Blue: Teen Lives Matter Too,” was the result of a collaboration between the CPD and Canton Families Embracing Diversity (CFED) and featured exercises on implicit bias and an eye-opening demonstration on deadly use of force that illustrated the split-second decision making that’s required in a life-or-death situation.

During the presentation, Berkowitz also expressed his wholehearted support for many of the initiatives that citizens have been calling for — from more de-escalation training to further diversification of the police force.

As for the statistics that suggest that a black American is far more likely to be shot by a police officer than a white American, Berkowitz acknowledged that the facts are “staggering” and said it is something that he has given quite a bit of thought to. At the same time, he said those statistics pale in comparison to the frequency and severity of black on black crime, which he said is “plaguing this country” and deserves every bit the attention and coverage that matters of police and race relations seem to receive.

Guerrier, who presented at the forum along with Berkowitz, also made a point to praise the Canton Police Department as well as the Canton Public Schools for tackling these issues head on.

“Across the board,” said Guerrier, “everyone agrees that community policing is the answer, and it’s exactly what we’re doing now — having small groups, police officers in basketball leagues, in baseball leagues, interacting with the community. We know the more education a police officer has, the less likely he or she will be confronted with an issue like this.”

Barros, coincidentally, offered up many of the same suggestions that were highlighted at the forum and that are already being implemented by the CPD, including in-depth trainings on biases and community policing programs to build relationships between officers and neighborhoods.

“I know that there are many officers that work like this,” Barros said. “Unfortunately, I know there are many officers that don’t and their presence is destructive, and sometimes deadly.”

Ultimately, Chief Berkowitz said the best thing the CPD can do is focus on itself and on being the best department that it can be.

“We can’t control what goes on everywhere else; we can control what goes on in Canton,” he told audience members at the forum. “I can’t be with everyone of these guys at 3 in the morning when they stop a car on [Route] 138 … but we can set the tone. We can give everybody as much training and try to do nights like this to try to get everybody on the same page.”

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