Trayvon Martin and Leslie Prater’s lives – and deaths – will be
explored and remembered at the inaugural Ida B. Wells Lecture Tuesday,
March 7, at the University of Delaware. The lecture is named for Ida B.
Wells, an investigative journalist and early civil rights activist.
Entitled “Black Mothers and Police Violence,” the event is structured
as a conversation with Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, and Prater’s
mother, Loretta Prater. Fulton is the author of Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story. Prater is the author of Excessive Use of Force: One Mother’s Struggle Against Police Brutality and Misconduct.
In 2004, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Leslie Prater suffocated when
four police officers pinned him to the ground face down for several
minutes, with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. Prater became
unresponsive and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. The medical
examiner declared his death a homicide.
In 2012, in Sanford, Florida, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was fatally
shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator. Martin was
unarmed but Zimmerman claimed that he had acted in self-defense.
Zimmerman was charged with murder in the second degree, but acquitted on
all counts after claiming self-defense. After this verdict, protests
spread across the U.S.
Earlier this month, UD professors of Women and Gender Studies Angie
Hattery and Earl Smith, who have researched and written extensively
about police violence against Blacks, sat down to discuss the upcoming
lecture and the issue of police violence against Blacks. The
conversation took place just days after the funeral of Tyre Nichols, an
unarmed Black man who was fatally beaten by Memphis police officers
after a traffic stop. Five officers have been indicted on felony charges
of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping,
official misconduct and official oppression.
The research overwhelmingly demonstrates that police violence
disproportionately impacts Black and Brown people, said Hattery.
African-Americans are 3.5 times more likely than whites to be killed by
officers when the victim was not attacking or did not have a weapon,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice. Another study, published in the
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, indicated that
the numbers of Black, Indigenous and People of Color killed in police
shootings from 2015 to 2020 was consistent enough that it should be
recognized as a “public health emergency.”
Conceivable solutions to this crisis run the gamut. Many pundits
point to the need for improved police recruitment, training, and
supervision. While Smith recognizes that the institutionalized police
culture is in dire need of reform, he argues that we need to look at the
root causes of police violence against Blacks.
“It is long-standing structural inequities that lead to the continual
deaths of Blacks by the police and others in authority,” said Smith.
“In our books and throughout our research, we work to connect the
dots, to demonstrate that policing of Black bodies is not an isolated
event,” said Hattery. “It comes from a history of white supremacy. You
have to address the fact that Black bodies have been policed since the
moment they arrived on the continent. It also comes from a history of
redlining, of racial restrictive covenants, of housing segregation.”
Racial segregation was built through zoning, through racial violence,
through white flight and later urban renewal, noted Hattery. White
neighborhoods enjoyed public and private investments while Black
neighborhoods were historically overlooked by governments, banks and
developers.
As researchers at the Urban Institute have noted,
contemporary residential patterns still reflect those that existed
decades ago. Black and white Americans, on average, don’t live in the
same kinds of neighborhoods. There are vast inequities around crime
rates, job opportunities, poverty, school quality, access to health
care, exposure to pollution, access to open spaces, even access to
retail establishments.
Hattery talked about the riots that took place in Baltimore in 2015
after the death of Freddie Gray from a neck injury suffered while in
police custody. The subsequent torching of a local CVS pharmacy made it a
symbol of the rioting that erupted in that city after this Black man’s
death.
“As protests unfolded, and images of burned-out stores being looted
flooded our television screens, commentators — almost always white —
expressed shock and outrage that Black people were destroying their own
communities,” said Hattery.
“They asked why would Black people in Baltimore or Ferguson or
Minneapolis or Seattle burn the only stores in their neighborhood. But
what none of the talking heads asked is why there was only one store in
these neighborhoods.”
Smith and Hattery’s 2018 book Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives are Surveilled and How to Work for Change
examines surveillance and over-policing and the racism underlying these
issues. “The surveillance of Blacks is systemic,” said Smith. “Research
shows this to be the case regardless of geographical location. Whether
you live in the South, the North, the Midwest or the West, if you are
Black, you are more likely to be stopped, questioned and detained by the
police.
“There are divergent policing strategies for predominantly poor,
Black neighborhoods and for predominantly white, middle-class areas.”
Their research, as well as other studies, show that the rate of
traffic stops in Black majority communities is greater compared to
white-majority communities.
“Despite representing just 67% of the population of Ferguson,
Missouri, African Americans accounted for 85% of all traffic stops, 90%
of citations and 93% of arrests in that city from 2012 to 2014,” said
Hattery, citing data from the Department of Justice’s Ferguson Report,
which was issued after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson
police officer. “Loretta and Sybrina write very personal,
heart-wrenching memoirs and what we try to do as social scientists is to
take these and other cases and expose the patterns, such as the
increased likelihood of a Black man getting pulled over for a traffic
stop.”
Although the issue of deep-seated, systemic racism can’t be resolved
quickly, Smith and Hattery offer a number of strategies that they said
could reduce the incidence of police violence against Blacks.
Getting back to true community policing is one step in the right direction, said Smith.
“You don’t put a 21-year-old white male or female with six weeks of
training and a 45 Glock into a community if they don’t have any idea who
this community is,” Smith said. “They are going to come in and
over-police this community. When I was growing up, the police officers
stopped and talked to you. They got to know you and everyone else in the
community. That is what we need to work toward.”
Smith also talked about the dangers of militarizing police
organizations. Police departments nationwide have obtained left-over
military equipment from federal initiatives. Such equipment has included
ammunition, weapons and tactical armored vehicles.
“The problem is, if you have a hammer, everything you see is a nail,” Hattery said.
In 2022, Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), led a group of 10 U.S
senators working to reform these programs, noting in a letter to
President Joe Biden that “militarized law enforcement increases the
prevalence of police violence without making our communities safer.”
Hattery also referenced the need for training so that police officers
can respond appropriately to mental health crises. A 2022 study by the
American Psychological Association found that almost 20% of all calls
to law enforcement involve someone dealing with a mental health crisis.
She also suggested a way to reduce or eliminate traffic stops.
“Why do we have traffic cops who carry guns?” she said. “Why not do
all that with a camera and send someone a ticket? That’s an easy and
implementable strategy.”
