Obama’s Ferguson Commission a Joke

By Bruce A. Dixon Managing Editor, BlackAgendaReport.com | Last updated: Mar 12, 2015 - 12:04:40 PM

Why Liberal Proposals and ‘Solutions’ Don’t Cut It

President Barack Obama talks with the National Association of Police Organization’s Top Cops in the Roosevelt Room of the White House May 12, 2009. Vice President Joe Biden is standing at left. Photo: White House Photo/Pete Souza

The report from Barack Obama’s “Task Force for Twenty-First Century Policing” the official White House response to widespread public disgust at the unpunished police murder of Michael Brown is out. And it contains—wait for it—a lot less than meets the eye. The task force is composed of 3 police chiefs, 2 of them African American, a head of one of the 50 state agencies responsible for training and certifying cops and their shops, four of corporate America’s and the administration’s favorite nonprofit organizations, and a couple academics, one a former Clinton and Obama assistant attorney general and the other a Yale Law School “social psychologist.”

The gist is that everything will be OK if we can just “build trust” between cops and communities by adopting better rules of police conduct, hiring more Black and Brown cops, making them parts of the communities through “non-enforcement strategies” like coaching basketball leagues, moving slowly toward “independent investigations” of excessive force complaints, and encouraging police to act a bit less like occupying armies. Tracey Meares, the task force’s social psychologist, calls this approach “proceduralism.” It’s been the credo of the liberal wing of America’s police establishment for some time.

Proceduralism assumes the problem is a relatively few bad, corrupt, brutal and racist apples among cops, who are inadequately trained, ineptly supervised, and somehow led to act like occupying armies by the absence of proper guidelines and leadership.

The truth, however, is that we live in a class society, where a tiny fraction controls all the wealth, and through private media monopolies, literally owns and controls the public conversation. Bipartisan policies are lowering wages, shrinking or eliminating the public sector and the commons, expanding poverty, making millions to drop out of the workforce. Liberals and conservatives together have called the world’s largest prison system into existence to contain and discipline elements of the largely Black and Brown population for whom America will not provide education, housing, health care or jobs.

By marking and stigmatizing the class of people it interacts with as “undeserving losers,” the police and prison state perform the vitally important function of justifying the vast inequities of life in neoliberal America. Hence the culture of cops, prosecutors and beyond portray aggressive and brutal police and prosecutors as a kind of thin blue line standing between polite, law abiding society and chaos. The crucial role prisons have in legitimizing injustice and inequality is at the center of the demand many are raising to abolish the institution of prison altogether.

But back to the president’s task force, what might actual, substantial real-world reforms that begin to roll back the prison state actually look like? If the president’s commission were not a mouthpiece for liberal cops, DOJ consultants and their favorite nonprofits, their recommendations might have included proposals such as:

Decriminalizing drug use, homelessness, sex work and mental illness, so as to take armed and violent cops out of many of the situations in which they brutalize and murder civilians;

Removing all financial incentives police departments now have to make low-level drug arrests and ending the use of confiscated assets by police departments;

Federal legislation to require police departments to report all cases of excessive force against civilians and funding for the Department of Justice to gather and maintain those statistics. Right now the only figures on police killings are assembled by private entities;

Curbing police and prosecutorial misconduct by means including the establishment of special prosecutors to go after district attorneys and cops;

Granting automatic reparations in the form of monetary settlements, medical, housing and tuition assistance to the families of the falsely convicted;

Immediate banning of the imprisonment of juveniles with adults and the swift phasing out of juvenile prisons in favor of healing, educational and therapeutic institutions.

Instituting meaningful education, self-improvement and skills programs for all those confined in prisons and jails, and decent health care for all those in the nation’s prisons and jails;

Stopping the racist profiling and roundups of immigrants and the legislation that requires it.

Abolition of mandatory sentences for various offenses and requirement of racial and ethnic impact studies before passage of laws creating new felony offenses;

Full transparency in the fines and punishments levied upon inmates in prisons and jails;

Subsidizing visits and phone contact between the incarcerated and their families on the outside, as family ties are one of the main determinants of successful integration of ex-prisoners into society, such as it is.

Real change that rolls back the prison and police states won’t come from residency requirements, or cops on bicycles or more training, or meetings with police in neutral territory or any of the other task force recommendations.

If the Obama White House ever wanted to change this stuff, ever intended to limit much less roll back the police and prison state, they wouldn’t have waited till their last 600 and some days in office and when they don’t control either house of Congress. The report is fluff. President Obama, the CBC and the rest of the Black political class are prepared to give and receive praise but not to take political risks for the class of people victimized by the police and prison state which liberals as well as conservatives helped create. They will hail the task force’s empty recommendations as a great step forward, just as they heap empty praise on outgoing and incoming Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch as champions of the poor and oppressed, though neither has ever sued a corporation or defended a poor person in court against imprisonment, eviction or dispossession.

21st century policing, according to Obama’s post-Ferguson task force, will look a lot like the 20th century. For some time we can expect to see more Eric Garners, more Trayvon Martins, more prison hunger strikes and more Fergusons. Get ready for it.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report and an information technologist living and working in Marietta, Ga. He’s also a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

The Final Call