Decades of Denial: Policing’s Past Haunts the Present

Nationwide protests Racist discrimination Militarized police These were the characteristics used to describe America during the long hot summer of when riots swept through more than cities They still describe America nowadays as the establishment has responded to protests against racist policing and immigration raids with militarized police forces backed by the Marines and the National Guard It all sounds eerily similar to the America of more than half a century ago when a presidential commission diagnosed the country s complication racism particularly in policing was causing widespread political unrest When a protest becomes that broad-based cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement says Rick Loessberg an urban historian and the former planning commissioner for Dallas County Texas and the author of Two Societies The Rioting of and the Writing of the Kerner Assessment This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam says Loessberg which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the s This is something else that s much much deeper and much more important This week on The Intercept Briefing host Akela Lacy speaks with Loessberg about what America learned and didn t learn from our history of racist policing and political unrest Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen TRANSCRIPT Akela Lacy Welcome to the Intercept Briefing I m Akela Lacy President Donald Trump reported last month that he would end his deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles KSBY In current times the Pentagon publicized that it is withdrawing National Guard troops from Los Angeles KSBW That deployment is now over About National Guard troops Marines were sent to LA during protests over immigration raids last month WDIV The deployment happened despite objections from city agents and California Gov Gavin Newsom AL The news came days after a federal judge ordered the administration to stop indiscriminate immigration raids in LA From masked agents taking people off the streets into unmarked vans to men in military fatigues on horseback stalking through an empty Los Angeles park streets emptied as communities hid in fear of the next raid The images of militarized police and federal agents descending on the inhabitants were striking and strikingly familiar That s because we ve been here before Not just in LA but as a country And that s what we re talking about currently with historian Rick Loessberg who has written extensively about America s great wave of unrest in the summer of That s when more than cities across America exploded in racial uprisings Detroit Newark and dozens of other communities were convulsed by what became known as the long hot summer President Lyndon B Johnson created a commission to figure out what was going on and the resulting description the Kerner Document delivered a devastating conclusion America was moving toward two societies one black one white separate and unequal This pattern of unrest followed by national soul-searching isn t new From police beating Selma civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday in to attacking people protesting police brutality in to shooting striking miners in the back during the Lattimer Massacre of to this summer s protests in LA We ve been here before Joining me this week is Rick Loessberg an urban planning historian and former planning director for Dallas County Texas Loessberg is the author of the book Two Societies The Rioting of and the Writing of the Kerner Account Welcome to the show Rick Rick Loessberg Thank you for having me Akela AL So why are we talking about a overview from What about this is relevant the present day RL Well it doesn t take anyone very long who thumbs through pages to discover that it primarily addresses the same topics that monopolize our conversation this day inappropriate police conduct and equitable economic outcomes and then just a general lack of understanding and awareness and a recognition of past and present discrimination AL The reaction to racist policing was ascertained to be a major cause of the unrest in You could easily say the same thing in current times as far as racist policing Margin czar Tom Homan just mentioned on national TV that it s perfectly fine for ICE to go after people based on their physical characteristics Police have also become more militarized since what we ve seen in and we re seeing the National Guard deployed for far less than it was deployed then Certain of the commission s recommendations have taken shape in protocol as far as diversifying the police But can you certainly fix racism in policing as it expands to all these other agencies and ensnares police and immigration enforcement or removals or is it a feature rather than a bug RL Well any institution any organization is only as good as the people who are in it and who lead it It s obviously a monumental task I think the progress that we ve made since we ve made substantial progress You know people ask me is the glass half full or half empty And I say yes But the reality is if you just look at the last five to eight to years things have changed dramatically and we re seeing things that I know in my lifetime I never thought I would see Things that I have taken for granted that we re America and this just does not happen here that we ve learned from our mistakes and maybe we have learned from our mistakes but that knowledge is not permanent You re right about the militarization of police One of the good things though that has come out of the riots and I believe the Kerner Analysis is they made extensive recommendations about how crowd controls should be done When you go back and you look at specific of the incidents in one of the methods they tried to disperse crowds then was they would literally use live ammunition and shoot over the heads of the demonstrators or the protesters or the rioters Needless to say that was not an effective way and it ended up really just inflaming and making a bad situation far far worse They ve learned from those things Police almost at any medium to large size city level undergo a few sort of crowd-control training when they re in the police academy and they have refresher courses The National Guard when President Trump federalized it a sparse weeks ago and sent it to Los Angeles it did not forthwith go into Los Angeles It took like a two-day refresher unit in riot and crowd control training before they were put into the streets It s also crucial to know that when the president federalized the National Guard he did not have them go in there to quell the disorders They were there to protect federal property and to protect ICE agents They were not there to break up any demonstrations That s not how it was conveyed in the press and that s certainly not how the president portrayed it But those were the orders and those were the orders that were followed AL I m glad you mentioned the orders because while that is what the president disclosed in the order I mean I think you could also make the argument that gives cover to National Guard agents who are there to say Oh well we re only here to protect ICE agents But no matter what the National Guard members are doing while they re there it does have a chilling effect on protest in general Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent RL And that s an major thing that you just mentioned Akela I m not sure that s really gotten a lot of attention in the past The National Guard has been called out to quell disorders when really it looked like things were getting outta hand AL Right RL And with the exception of a handful of times in the s when they re trying to for instance integrate the University of Mississippi it was consistently done with the governor s concurrence Clearly this was not done this time And when you look at the level of violence that was occurring in Los Angeles that first day that caused President Trump to take the attempts that he did it was nowhere near the level of magnitude of violence destruction that has happened or preceded the beginnings of other major riots And I m concerned that if this becomes now the standard operating procedure when a demonstration occurs that a president does not like for whatever reason he s going to federalize the National Guard and send in the Marines AL One other piece of this that I want to ask you about is the demographic change in terms of who we re seeing being the subject of protests participating in protests It s being the subject of aggressive policing We re talking about Latino communities facing ICE raids versus African American communities protesting discriminatory and brutal policing Does this change in demographics shift the dynamics around how police are responding or how the cabinet is framing these protests RL You bring out something that I think is very very fundamental In following the killing of George Floyd we saw demonstrations all over the United States And it wasn t just in the large urban centers like Los Angeles and New York and Boston It was even in Alaska and Montana and places like that where they had demonstrations And I want to make it very clear that a demonstration is not a disorder is not a riot However the president at the time tried to conflate the two and make it sound like it was all over again When you go back and you look at the people who participated in the demonstrations and even in the demonstrations that got out of hand in and compare them to it s vastly different The only thing they really had in common was that the demonstration began in response to particular sort of police case whether it was somebody being arrested in Newark New Jersey in or of program the murder of George Floyd And the same thing that we re seeing in Los Angeles the past month It was in response to a perceived slight by the criminal justice law enforcement system Read Our Complete Coverage Protests for Black Lives When you then look at the people who were participating in they were overwhelmingly Black overwhelmingly male When you look at George Floyd it s almost - Anglo and African American and it s one-third female And when you look at the video clips from Los Angeles you see exactly what you explained Yes it s Hispanic It s also Anglo You also see Asians there And I think when a protest becomes that broad-based cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the s This is something else that s much much deeper and much more crucial AL And even more critical that you have still the deployment of federal law enforcement and the National Guard There was part of the research on the commission that made the argument that the riots were a form of political expression RL Yes They didn t say that specifically in the end but yes there was an internal staff paper that came right out and declared that yes AL You also note that the description characterized events that we wouldn t consider riots as such We saw similar narratives about outside agitators in I want to ask why does this matter What is that idea really suggesting The notion that outside agitators or various conspiracy or someone who isn t really representative of the masses is responsible when we see any expression of populace outrage RL Well prior to or the Kerner Summary you re right All prior studies or reports trying to investigate why did a riot happen whether it was Watts or there had been an earlier Detroit riot in or a Harlem riot in they all had the same conclusion That it was riff raff it was losers it was people who didn t have ties to the region It was troublemakers It was outside agitators as you stated The Kerner Commission to its credit requested to see if that was true or not So they conducted a evaluation of almost people who had been arrested and they looked at their arrest records and their backgrounds and they discovered that they were people who had been born in the society in which they were arrested that veritably stayed in school longer than the average individual in their neighborhood They had an arrest record that was really no different than anybody else in their neighborhood and the greater part of them certainly had a job In short these were the people who are playing the match who are doing what you re supposed to do to get ahead And when you think that these people were trying to do the right thing work hard stay in school stay out of trouble and yet they felt like they d had enough of that because it wasn t working That s very essential and that s very troubling It s not a conspiracy It s not the communist from the s from Russia doing this to us It s not Black radicals and militants either It s us And so when it s us that is being that troubled and is willing to take those initiatives you feel like you have to recognize that Break AL This conversation about how the review s authors defined riots versus protests but more broadly about how we define violence in terms of physical violence against other people versus destruction of property let s say This has colored the debates over the anti-ICE protests and going back to going back decades further to the civil rights movement One argument being How can you police the response to institutional violence being waged by the leadership The other being if you do something like light a cop car on fire you re ruining the optics for everyone else creating this kind of false binary between nonviolent or violent protests You talked about the suppression of one part of the analysis that characterized the unrest including the act the commission considered violent as an expression of political power Can you talk about what the disagreement was there RL President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission at the end of July to investigate why there had been more than riots in the U S that year And what the social scientists concluded was that there was this political bent to the rioting People who were rioting weren t just letting off steam They were concerned that they had no future They had a sense that they had no power And they put that together in a statement and delivered it in December of The assessment was written by selected very very capable individuals but they will openly admit they were sort of inexperienced at that point in their career and they had just either gotten their PhDs or they had just begun teaching at colleges and they were teaching at places like Harvard So these were very well respected accomplished individuals Their writing tended to reflect their youthful exuberance as one of them would say and also the times There was a lot of the power of the people kind of announcement in their draft review And when the senior staff read this it was like Nope can t do it It s just not working As one of the senior staff members notified me first of all he wished it had been better edited If it had been better edited and particular of the rhetoric had been toned down it would ve been a much easier fit Staff members notified me though we were already going out on a limb saying that it was racism that was causing the rioting No other riot review in the th century had made that conclusion before It had consistently been the riffraff And so now we re blaming white society and white institutions We felt like we couldn t go any further and authentically say this was a political protest because then it would look like the country was falling apart AL Even if it was true I mean what do you say to people who say Who cares if people are being turned off Who don t think that it should be a primary concern RL Words do matter They really really do And I was lucky enough to be a part of certain key decision making processes with our county commissioners and got to administer a lot of the major types of programs that the Kerner Analysis recommended And it doesn t take very long to realize words do matter I can t tell you how a great number of times I ve seen a population or a private discussion over a contract over a project over a proposed statute or ordinance and it boils down to words We have to be so mindful of when we re having a conversation about any challenging topic but especially something like race right now You cannot be afraid to say the truth but you need to make sure that you say it in a very straightforward manner If you look at the composition of the commission you never would ve thought they would ve been a group that would ve unanimously concluded that the rioting was a outcome of white racism I go back to one of the things that we can learn from the Kerner Account and the commission that wrote it is These individuals had their disagreements And if you look at the composition of the commission you never would ve thought they would ve been a group that would ve unanimously concluded that the rioting was a upshot of white racism You had a white southern police chief You had a small town Republican congressman from Ohio who never voted for any of the Great Society s social law and only had about two percent of his district being Black He was on the commission You had a senator from Oklahoma Can you imagine a senator from Oklahoma the present day taking any progressive stance You had a self-made millionaire from West Texas who deduced in the bootstrap mentality as much as he concluded in the American flag and apple pie Yet you had that kind of group of individuals who came together and somehow crafted I think the the bulk boldly starkly worded analysis on race in our nation s history And one of the procedures they did that is the way they communicated with each other They had the utmost respect for each other They had their disagreements and they would pound the table but they didn t say well you re a racist And the other one didn t respond by saying you re woke or you re a socialist They chose to emphasize and focus on what they had in common and then work from there And what they chose to do is they chose to emphasize and focus on what they had in common and then work from there And when they did that they determined that again not surprisingly words mattered That it was maybe only a difference in tone or emphasis that they had and I think that s one of the things we have to do here now when talking about race AL The bipartisan consensus that you re talking about a big part of this at least in the book is achievable because these commission members truly visited the cities RL Yes AL You kind of alluded to this but could something like that ever happen in contemporary times Like do members of Congress supporting these ICE raids just need to visit other cities Are we past that point and this is just purely political RL All movements all changes in the wind start at an individual level and it only takes one And when you have and we ll use the Senate as an example when you have such an even split between Democrats and Republicans all it takes is a handful on either side to change the outcome and the same thing would happen in the House as well So yeah that s a very good idea AL You also dig into the influence of riot theory on the writing of the assessment among other disciplines in the social sciences The assessment went out of its way to avoid the appearance that it was condoning the unrest or any form of destruction of property emphasized encouragement for law and order and avoided saying the riots were rational or justifiable even though that belief was shared by specific of the members The window for acceptable forms of protests the scale from like riot to protest has in multiple techniques closed significantly since Like I just think of campus protests against the genocide in Gaza the police response to protests in What forms of civil disobedience or protest does that leave us with RL That s the hard part about protests in general And when you go back and you look at for instance the movements that were done in the s with the Freedom Riders in Martin Luther King s march and the March on Washington how meticulously planned they all were and oftentimes they were confronted with extreme violence yet they kept their composure Related LA Protesters Aren t Inviting Violent Authoritarianism They re Mobilizing to Stop It If you re going to have a demonstration it necessities to be very well planned and orchestrated and led like any organization like any movement so that it doesn t go off in the wrong direction But that s it s easier to say than to do I think AL I really sought to talk about this because I think this is one of the majority of major links to what we re seeing in contemporary times You discussed the debate around the chapter in the overview on Black history in America as being both a preview and a guide to the hysteria over critical race theory and attacks on DEI How are they related RL The commission realized early on that to be able to really reach America and bring about the change that it thought it was needed that it was going to have to explain how far reaching discrimination had been So they went back and they commissioned several of the country s leading American historians One of which was John Hope Franklin who s regarded as perhaps the bulk preeminent African American historian of our time And they required them to put together this chapter on African American history and really what that was in this affair was to what extent discrimination had existed and what had been done to perpetuate it and continue it and what efforts had been made to try to combat it during the time And that became a key chapter Now when the commission staff presented the first draft of that chapter to the commission you got a lot of the reactions that you get in the current era when talking about critical race theory You had comments about How can you say this about Abraham Lincoln He s one of the greatest presidents we ever had and I don t think we re giving whites enough credit in the abolitionist movement and This part of the chapter reads like several sort of political manifesto And again it looked like you were listening in on specific school board meeting in chosen city somewhere The fact though that they were able to work through those comments and concerns just like the ones we hear right now gives me hope that if people have the opportunity to sit down and have a mature conversation about what the facts are and how you can present it That you can present the part of our history that makes us uncomfortable But that doesn t necessarily mean that we hate our country and it doesn t mean that we re embarrassed to be Americans but it s something that we can acknowledge that s who we were once but that s not who we are now AL I think one of the differences at least I mean I wasn t alive in but we re saying critical race theory but really we re using the language of the people who are claiming that anything that talks about racism or Black history is critical race theory using it as a stand-in to set the levels that this is something that we should be worried about It s concerning that years later we re still having the conversations but there s maybe less good faith in the room RL Exactly AL I mean I don t know how to square that RL In a large number of respects what we re hearing in the current era has constantly been there or was there even in the s Now there s more of a national effort to point out these incidents and turn it into more of a protest movement against as you announced the teaching of anything having to do with African American history AL The assessment made a number of recommendations several of which it followed through on Can you tell us what it would look like currently in America if we d followed through on more of those recommendations RL Well if you look at a lot of the accounts written about the statement since everyone laments that it never really was implemented and it perhaps wasn t implemented at a pace and at a scale that the commission desired But when you go down through the checklist and you made a reference that there s almost hundreds of recommendations that it made from the national level to the local level to the private sector a great countless of them were implemented and they were substantial recommendations They weren t minor details They were major reforms Now one of the things that I think a lot of us forget myself included until I had one of the commission staff members point this out to me is that the world s not static And that it s inevitably changing and that even in when the review was disclosed this individual explained me he held the record had already been overcome by events that were occurring A month after the account was circulated Martin Luther King was assassinated Two months after that Robert Kennedy was killed So after that the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia At the end of that month you had the riot at the Chicago National Democratic Convention And that was just for one year And when you think about what the next decade was where you still had the Vietnam War then you had Watergate then you had the vigor dilemma and AIDS and homelessness so various other things began competing for our national focus It s hard to say What would the world be like if Kerner had been more vigorously enacted the first year or two AL All of those issues that sort of I mean not every single one but like homelessness the housing predicament everything all of these things are also tied RL Yes And and again that s what makes this so complex sometimes is that one predicament it s not just isolated it s in conjunction with so multiple other things AL Right RL You know it s not just lack of teaching it s lack of medical care it s lack of adequate housing AL Right RL Just go on down the list AL Thank you for joining us on the Intercept Briefing Rick RL Thank you for having me As we mentioned at the very beginning the description is still so relevant and the last scarce months have pointed that out And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about what s happening now and why AL That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing We want to hear from you Share your story with us at -POD-CAST That s - - You can also email us at podcasts theintercept com This episode was produced by Truc Nguyen Laura Flynn is our Supervising Producer Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief Chelsey B Coombs is our social and video producer Fei Liu is our product and design manager Nara Shin is our copy editor Will Stanton mixed our show Legal review by David Bralow And transcript by Anya Mehta Slip Stream provided our theme music You can advocacy our work at theintercept com join Your donation no matter the amount makes a real difference If you haven t already please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts And tell all of your friends about us and better yet leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us Until next time I m Akela Lacy Thanks for listening The post Decades of Denial Policing s Past Haunts the Present appeared first on The Intercept