In 1951, Philly’s police brutality was brought to the United Nations. In 2020, are we any better? | Perspective
The George Floyd murder ignited fires this time. But more than 70 years of failure to earnestly address racial inequities like abusive policing fuels the fury.
In 1951, one year after I was born, an interracial group of Americans sent a petition to the United Nations. A core concern: police brutality against black people.
That petition charged the U.S. government with facilitating “genocide” against black people. Among the first “typical cases” of brutality listed in that petition were two fatal shootings by police in Philadelphia. Top federal officials quashed that petition and brushed brutality aside.
Federal government reaction to that petition evidenced a persistent problem in America: failure to forthrightly address abusive policing.
That failure is a reason why far more cities erupted across America recently over abusive policing than the 1967 riots in 25 cities triggered by police brutality. The presidential panel appointed to study those riots — the Kerner Commission — issued a 1968 report with recommendations for changes in police practices. Few cities implemented those reforms.
Abusive policing — from false arrests to fatal shootings — is a systemic fault I’ve covered as a journalist since my first full-time reporter position in September 1975.
That reportage has included disgraceful “firsts,” like in 1979 when Philadelphia became America’s first city where the U.S. Justice Department sued the mayor and top officials for actively aiding abusive policing.
Months after a federal judge dismissed that unprecedented lawsuit on specious legal grounds, I reported on a mini-riot outside a police station in North Philadelphia. That clash arose from a policeman’s fatal shooting of a black teen under suspicious circumstances.
A few years after that riot, I covered another “first” — the first police urban bombing in America — where that police bomb sparked an inferno that killed 11 MOVE members (including five children). Local and federal prosecutors declined to indict any police personnel or city officials involved with that blatant brutality.
While racism is a rancid aspect of abusive policing, biased police practices aren’t exclusive to the avowedly racist.
Yes, Frank Rizzo, the Philadelphia police chief-turned-mayor sued by federal authorities in 1979, had a record of racism. But African American Philadelphia mayor, Michael Nutter, did not.
During Nutter’s two terms (2008-2015), Philadelphia police arrested 27,801 black people for marijuana possession, but just 4,809 whites, despite similar pot usage rates among races according to repeated studies. That arrest disparity arose partly from the stop-and-frisk police enforcement, championed by Nutter, that racially profiled African Americans.
A black police commissioner lobbied current Philadelphia mayor, Jim Kenney, to spurn his campaign pledge to end stop-and-frisk that annually targets thousands of law-abiding black males for harassing police encounters. (Surprisingly, stop-and-frisk removes few weapons from lawbreakers, failing its professed purpose.)
An April court-ordered report on Philadelphia’s stop-and-frisk found “far too many” police contacts lacked proper legal justification. Similar laxity in legal justifications was documented in a University of Pennsylvania Law Review examination of Philadelphia police practices, published in 1952 — months after that genocide petition.
The George Floyd murder ignited fires this time. But more than 70 years of failure to earnestly address racial inequities like abusive policing fuels the fury.
Linn Washington Jr. is a professor of journalism at Temple University. He is a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program who has reported on and researched abusive policing in the United States, Europe, and Africa.