As a white man, I deplore the non-stop murder of black people by police all over the country, north and south. It hardly seems accurate to equate death with livelihood-disruption so central to bullying in the workplace. Some comparisons, however, need to be made.
First, it’s only a “few bad apples.” That’s what police defenders inevitably claim. They use fractions to justify. Remember fractions from grade school arithmetic? Number of cop killings of black people divided by the total number of police nationwide, or number on the force in a single city. The conclusion: the vast majority are “good.”
This is the wrong calculus. The issue is death and murder. It doesn’t matter that only a few are caught on film. [What is the frequency of abuse of authority when not filmed?] Any deaths are significant. We should not be tolerant of any unjustified murders. And the murders seem to always occur when the victim was either doing nothing (running, sitting in a car, playing in a park, sleeping at home in bed, living in own apartment) or something not terribly wrong (selling loose cigarettes, stopped for a broken car light, believed to pass a counterfeit $20 bill). It’s not about numbers or prevalence of bad murdering cops. It’s about murdering cops, at all. That number needs to be zero. There is no acceptable, tolerable, decent level of murders of unarmed and innocent black people.
In America, sanctity of life is a privilege for whites.
Regarding workplace bullying, the same lame defense is proffered by employers as defenders of murdering police. There are only a few bad folks. OK, then fire them, cleanse your ranks. But they don’t. The truth is that bullying is systemic. It is sustained through years of rewarding the a-holes by supportive executives and administrators. It’s not the bad apples, it’s the whole barrel. HR and managers made that barrel and get very defensive when there are calls for change. They dig in their heels to defend the most outrageous, immoral and unethical behaviors. No one on the “winning” side, the ones with organizational power to control the lives of others, will voluntarily give up the advantage. Laws don’t make them. So bullying continues unabated.
And so it is with policing. It’s the whole rotten profession — from self-selection by white supremacists and aggressive gun aficionados who choose to be cops, to misdirected training that treats the pubic as uniformly menacing and dangerous and civil rights as mere nuisances, to the escalating militarization (recruits risk death if they actually chose the military, why not police paramilitary work?), a corrupt legal system that convicts innocents to appease vote-hungry district attorneys (if professionals, why make them politicians?), judges who want to appear tough to get re-elected (really? elections for judges, too?), ending with the world’s largest prison industry run, in many states, by private vendors who get paid by the number of prisoners held.
When academic critics deplore the entire criminal justice system, that’s what they mean. It all seems incomprehensibly complex. But that’s the “barrel” in which the “few bad cops” dwell and prosper.
The short-term focus after each cop murder of an innocent black person is on changing policing. That’s one small part of the larger system, but those changes never seem to take hold. Minneapolis reportedly had adopted “reforms.” After George Floyd’s filmed murder with knee to neck torture leading to death, several southern city sheriffs and police chiefs deplored the action. To date, I have not seen the police union president come forward to defend its four members. [I love unions. Argue for more unions. Hate unions that do not advocate for their members. Police unions are the exception when they vigorously defend members who obviously murder. Unions have to have an ethical compass.]
The second comparison I make is that for a few more years whites comprise a numerical majority in the U.S. Sooner than racist whites like to acknowledge, America’s majority ethnicity will be Hispanic. It’s the end of an era for some with exciting new power for ascendant Hispanics in the future. Instead of embracing the future, politicians, focused solely on their elections, play the anti-Hispanic mantra to appeal to whites whose power is waning. In other words, societal denial of changes afoot is the norm. We also deny catastrophic climate change in our near future. [Maybe when humans are extinct, the earth can heal. She lived well before humans and will do so after we have self-destructed.] We deny being part of the world and think isolating Americans is even possible and stupidly that it is a good thing. Denial is an American way of life. [See the profound comparisons made by Bryan Stevenson below.]
We deny cops disproportionately aggress against blacks who have always represented a statistical minority of the population. We deny that COVID-19 disproportionately infects and kills poor, underinsured people more than rich people with access to good nutrition, less stress and access to healthcare throughout their lives. We deny that inequality shortens lives. Note that pandemic-triggered stock market fluctuations were gamed by investors so they have gained $500 billion while 40 million Americans lost their jobs.
Societal, legal and employer denials abound about abusive workplace conduct. Bullying and aggression is what built this nation. It’s true revolt separated us from England, but the Founders were creatures of the Enlightenment. They aspired to the concepts (not really actualized) of equality, liberty and freedom. No new law for bullying needed, it is already illegal. Not so. Workplace nondiscrimination laws are very narrowly defined and omit 80% of mistreatment cases. Without laws, employers need not craft policies to comply. Not so. Employers pay a huge, though unmeasured, price for tolerating abuse within the ranks at the hands of the few. We are back where we started. There is no amount of non-physical workplace violence that should be tolerated, deemed acceptable or necessary, or normalized.
Bryan Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, begun . His work to exonerate innocent people sent to prison for crimes they did not commit was the basis for the 2019 movie Just Mercy and the HBO documentary True Justice.
