Episode 6: Guns and the Criminal (In)Justice System

About this Episode

Episode 6 of (Re)Search for Solutions takes a hard look at how in some cases, communities, especially communities of color, are harmed by efforts claiming to be in service of stopping gun violence. We look at one of the most well-known examples of discriminatory policing, “Stop and Frisk,” and how these types of ineffective practices become legitimized.

Sonali interviews Ekow Yankah, a Professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, and Sarah Lustbader, a public defender in New York City, about criminal law and policing as they relate to gun violence. Iesha Sekou, the CEO and founder of Street Corner Resources, also paints a picture of the profound effects gun violence has on communities.

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Additional Resources

Screen Shot 2021-05-02 at 11.33.39 AM.png — Ekow Yankah on "Race Relations, Civic Bonds & U.S. Criminal Procedure"

download (2).jpeg — EVC DOcumentary: *Cops Aren’t Colorblind*

Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans

NY TImes: BLACK MOTHERS
ARE THE
REAL EXPERTS
ON THE TOLL
OF GUN VIOLENCE

Transcript

Sonali (Narration)

Before beginning this episode, we want to provide our listeners with a brief content warning. While every episode of (Re)Search for Solutions discusses the issue of gun violence, there are graphic descriptions of violence in this episode, as well as a bit of strong language.

We also want to acknowledge that as the trial of Derek Chauvin just concluded, and with the very recent police murders of 20-year-old Daunte Wright, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo, among so many others, that you, our listeners, may not be in a place to engage with this episode right now and in this moment. And that is entirely okay. In the meantime, our team is dedicated to continuing to have the difficult, but highly necessary conversations about different forms of gun violence; and gun violence perpetrated by police is gun violence.

Indeed, we are reminded again and again that it must be confronted. When, “getting guns off the street,” becomes a reason, an excuse, for more harmful and invasive policing, policymakers who claim to have communities’ best interests in mind align themselves with perpetuating racist police violence and the travesty of this country's ongoing legacies of inequity and injustice. We hope that this episode, in some small part becomes a part of the discourse around how we can actually begin to make our communities safer.

Iesha Sekou

We need to make gun violence an important issue and we need to have real conversations. And so for a long time, people didn't want me to come in the room, because I would have these conversations. And people don't want to feel this, like “oh, she gonna come in talk about the dead kids.” Damn right, I'm gonna come in and talk about the dead kids…. Yeah. Because we need to keep our kids alive.

*Intro music fades in*

Sonali (Intro Narration)

(Re)Search for Solutions is a series where we cover research related to pressing issues in our world today. During this season, we're focusing on the unexpected and creative ways that researchers are looking at solutions to the persistence of gun violence. I'm Sonali Rajan, a professor in the Department of Health and Behavior studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, working with the Media and Social Change Lab.

*Intro music fades out*

Sonali (Narration)

On this episode of (Re)Search for Solutions, we take a hard look at how, in some cases, communities, especially communities of color, are harmed by efforts claiming to be —at least in part —in the service of stopping gun violence. We also explore how community-based approaches which often don't involve these policies and policing practices can be more effective methods of reducing gun violence.

Professor Ekow Yankah

My name is Ekow Yankah. I'm a law professor at Cardozo Law School where I teach a range of subjects, tort law, for example, about accidents. But in particular to our conversation, I teach criminal law, which is the law of substantive law of crime, right. What makes certain things a crime? What makes murder, murder? First degree murder? second degree murder? I teach criminal procedure, which is the law of policing. When can the police stop you? When can the police search you? When can the police shoot you? And then I teach philosophy, which is the area where I write and try to bring all these subjects together. So, I tend to teach subjects that are straddling questions of political obligation and criminal law. So why do we have the obligations we do to follow the law? Why do we —what do we owe each other? And then how is that reflected in the way we police each other?

Sonali (Narration)

When looking at how criminal law takes shape within urban communities, one of the most well-known examples of discriminatory policing is stop-and-frisk, which is the practice of detaining, questioning and or searching civilians on the street who police officers suspect may have guns or other contraband. To get a better understanding of where these types of practices start, how they're legitimized, and whether or not they work, we talked to Ekow about the history of stop-and-frisk.

Ekow

Starting at the very beginning, stop-and-frisk comes into our language in a famous case, one of the most famous constitutional law cases, called Terry v. Ohio. It's a 1968 case. It's quite a remarkable case, actually. I don't want to go on too long about it, but it's a case where an Ohio police officer spots two men in the middle of a downtown, nice-ish area of Ohio and he thinks they're behaving strangely. They keep going up to a store window —one at a time, by the way. One goes to the store window, checks it out, comes back, talks to his friend, the other goes to the store window checks that they do this something like 10 times; over 10 times.

He decides —this officer, Officer McFadden was his name —decides that they're casing the joint. They're going to commit a daytime robbery, he's decided. And so, he's going to do something about this. The two men then walk away, and they meet up with a third man. And they're talking. And Officer McFadden inserts himself in the midst of these three men and he says something quickly, like, “I'm a police officer, who are you?” He asked for their identification… The words are a bit lost to history. They answer in some way that's unsatisfactory to McFadden and so he grabs them, spins them around, slams them against the wall, and he frisks them. And he does, in fact, find guns on them.

So already, you can tell the story’s loaded, right? Depending on your point of view, Officer McFadden is either this brave officer who has inserted himself and stopped a potentially dangerous daytime robbery, taking on three men by himself. On the other hand, if you look at it from a more suspicious view, Officer McFadden, with very little evidence, has just grabbed and accosted three men, slammed them against a wall, and decided that he's going to search them, right.

The Supreme Court then inspects this case under our fourth amendment; that's the constitutional amendment that governs stopping, stop and search, stop and frisk, search and seizure. The Supreme Court actually says some really interesting things. To be fair, there were people who actually feared that this case would be found to not be a search at all; that people would say, “No, what police officers do when it's not a full strip search, or full arrest doesn't count.” That's not what the court said. The court said, this is a search, this can be a really intimate, disturbing and humiliating search. It can be searching under your clothes, touching your groin, inserting their hand in your —the court recognizes that this is loaded. But then the court also goes on to say, but officers have to be able to do this. Officers, if they know that somebody —excuse me, if they have reasonable suspicion (this is the first time the court can use this language) within reasonable suspicion that somebody is armed, then they can use this power of stop and frisk to not arrest them, right? Not strip them, but to make a light intervention to stop and frisk them for the purposes only of determining whether or not they have a weapon on them.

The court then actually also says something interesting. It says, “we understand that this brings to the fore certain questions that are unavoidable. In particular, the harassment of Negroes by police officers.” And then, in a stunning line, the court says, ”but even if that's true, there's nothing we can do about it.” Right. And so, this story brings just perfectly the fore all the things that are loaded, suspicious and difficult about stop-and-frisk, in that, you know, these two Black men are stopped by a police officer, the court says, “Officer McFadden did the right thing. He's an experienced officer. It would have been poor police work for him not to act on his policing instincts.” But when asked when asked, they said, “Officer McFadden, you stopped them because you knew they were casing the joint, right? You've seen this behavior before, you’ve stopped daytime robberies before?” He said, “actually, no.” He had never stopped a daytime robbery before. It was just his set of suspicions, worries, and the race of the people involved —which is too often ignored where the court was trying to wrestle with how to put limits on stop and frisk. Ultimately, as you know, this becomes, instead of a small policy about police officers searching people when they have articulable reasons to know they're armed, a grand social policy that at its height search something like 650,000 young men, mostly black and Hispanic.

*Musical Interlude*

Ekow

So the stop-and-frisk rates just cannot be emphasized enough. The stop-and-frisk rate captured weapons at some incredibly low level right, sometimes under 1%. Indeed, the amazing thing is, though, 90% —let me say that again —90% of the people who were stopped and frisk in New York City, were black or Hispanic men. 90%. Very rarely were guns found on the people were stopped and frisked. And in fact, very rarely were guns on anybody stopped and frisked, but there was a slight uptick for white men who were stopped and frisked. And I assume that's because the white men who were stopped and frisked were actually doing something suspicious. And even then, we hardly ever found guns. What we did was we criminalized a whole group of people, and threw criminal records in their way for the rest of their lives for very little benefit.

Sonali (Narration)

Sarah Lustbader, a public defense attorney here in New York City, also shared broader perspectives about stop-and-frisk and the ways in which policing practices are frequently ways to systematize racism, among other forms of discrimination.

Sarah Lustbader

The research that I have read, and it just does comport with my experience in talking to clients, is that people don't carry guns because they're violent, or criminal, or bullies. They carry guns because they don't feel safe. And so, when you condone, and in fact promote, this kind of aggression and degradation against people day in day out, you’re not making them feel safer. And you're not making it any less likely that they're going to do things to ensure their own safety, if they've been told by all the authority figures in their lives, that not only are they not going to look out for their safety, but in fact, they're going to imperil it every day.

I was lucky enough to, to work on the preliminary injunction hearing in the stop-and-frisk case in federal court, and I did a direct examination of one of our plaintiffs. And while he was on the stand, he told the court, “yeah, you know, I just don't leave my house really anymore. If I don't, if I don't have to leave my house, I don't leave my house.” Like, I just don't know what anyone's thinking by instilling that kind of fear in people, unless we've just totally given up. But I think that's the point. The idea is for people to feel fear, and not to feel safe.

A very small percentage of any of the stops during the stop-an- frisk era in New York unearthed any contraband whatsoever, and an even smaller percentage got a gun. So as far as efficacy goes, stop and frisk was just not effective.

Ekow

I think there are two things that are going on here. The one is, we are willing to police —even things that do need policing —we're willing to police them in poor Black and brown neighborhoods in ways we would never police them elsewhere, right? I mean, and we've seen this across the country. We see what happens when white militia men declare themselves to be, you know, the guardians of some space and line neighborhoods with guns. They are not policed in this way, right? Suddenly, we respect their constitutional rights. But in a poor Black neighborhood, we're just happy to, you know, just use quite violent and dangerous, and frankly, counterproductive, policing —policing that makes the neighborhood lose faith in what policing is about, right. And there's lots of evidence that over-policing in this way, actually, eventually is so toxic that it increases crime rates. But the second thing is, if we're serious about getting guns off the streets, we need to think about how we're going to do it in ways that mean we're all in it together.

Sarah

With police, and with policing, you're sort of dealing with gun violence WAAY too late. Like not even a little too late, like waaay, way, way too late. These are people who are already like, failed by society a million times. Guns are already all over the place. There's no opportunity for like advancement, education, healthcare. But you know, austerity measures have robbed communities and sort of stripped them bare. And then when one of those outcomes is increased gun violence or disproportionate gun violence, then you say, well, individual responsibility, it's your responsibility. That's absurd! It doesn't even make sense logically, let alone pragmatically speaking, or morally speaking. So, at least with the Cure Violence models, I think that they get a little bit closer to a couple steps back.

Sonali (Narration)

Just now, you heard Sarah mentioned the Cure Violence model. This model aims to stop the spread of violence by using community based public safety methods typically associated with disease control. We spoke with Iesha Sekou, the CEO and founder of Street Corner Resources, a Harlem based organization which uses the Cure Violence model to provide support, care and resources to make real change in communities all over New York City.

Iesha Sekou

So, Street Corner Resources… I don't remember exactly what year we actually started, but I know that we applied for our 501(c)(3) in 2005. But the kind of work that I've always done —because I come from an activist household —and so we always had people in our family that was, especially my mother, who always had people come to us that she was helping. So, this whole thing of helping spirit, service, came from my mother. And so Street Corner Resources is kind of born out of that. It was never a time, that I can remember, that we didn't help, right? But when I formalized it and said, “you know what? I'm going to start my own organization” was somewhere around there. But the work was always kind of constant.

There was a 13-year-old that was killed. His name was Scotty Scott. He was killed on 140th street, somewhere right over near where we have a space now. And he was shot in the head for what they call ass betting: betting with no money. And they shot him in the head and killed him. And that was like, even though I had been doing the work, that was like a real commitment point for me.

So, Street Corner Resources now has a Cure Violence contract. We're part of the mayor's office to prevent gun violence. Also Mock J., the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, and we follow the Cure Violence model. And so that Cure Violence model is used all across the country. I follow it, sometimes not to the letter, because there's no cookie-cutter way of dealing with this violence. The cure the Cure Violence model —Gary Slutkin is the name of the guy who came up with this, right? Dr. Gary Slutkin came up with this model or way of treating violence.

And so, it's believed that if you treat this just like any kind of infection —just like we're in this pandemic, with the Coronavirus —if you begin to treat it in the areas that it's in, where it is most dominant, where the violence is most dominant. And you begin to treat that area and treat that area and figure out ways for it to be better treated, right, just like we're doing with the Coronavirus, trying to figure out when people should, you know, be in places and all of that kind of thing. Same thing with violence. It's very similar. It's looking at those hardened areas where people have been taking each other's lives, and looking at what's there, what may be causing the violence, who in that community can help to stop the violence and interrupt and act as what we call “inroads people” in the community that can help to make change, and also make an assessment of what resources are missing that helps to foster violence because they don't have this. So, one of the things, when I read the model, and I’ve been to all of these conventions and everything, and I believe that it's a great model, but I believe that we can get stuck in a model. Because if you treat everything the same way, but those things may not apply to the situation at hand, you missed really treating it properly. Right? Not every broken leg has to be amputated.

Sonali (Narration)

It's so important to remember why we're seeking to implement gun violence solutions. When we spoke with Iesha, she took a lot of care to paint a picture of how gun violence has affected her community. While many see sweeping policy changes and reforming police practices as solutions to this complex crisis, most people who have the power to legislate reform and propose solutions have very little personal experience with this issue. In fact, one could argue that the sanitized ways of talking about gun violence keep people from being uncomfortable —they simply don't get us anywhere. Iesha makes it a point to discuss the very dark and heartbreaking realities of gun violence, reminding us of the urgency of finding solutions to this issue.

Iesha

Because you know, the political thing is one, these people don't know anything about gun violence. Because they might show up at the vigil and take a picture and leave. They are not emotionally, spiritually, physically invested until gun violence shows up in their house. You understand? Or their nephew. And then I get the call from the one who didn't have time to talk about this. I asked one that I remember, to write a letter for me so that I could get the Cure Violence contract and he was a politician. And his chief of staff said, “you need to know your politics.” People's kids are dying. (pause) You understand? I ain't got no time for no politics. This is, this is real.

So, I think that because they've been painting this fake picture and this safe discourse around gun violence, you know, ‘cause it's safe to say “guns,” you know? And “we need gun control.” And “we need to create policy.” Yeah, I did that whole policy thing. I was marching in Washington; I spoke on the steps of the House of Representatives — all of that. That didn't do anything. Some of those same bills are still sitting.

How can we have better conversation about it? People have to be honest about what this is about. There's no pretty way to talk about the kid who got shot in the head and his brain matter is on the sidewalk and it will be there in the morning if nobody takes a bucket and wash it off. Or the kid who was shot in the crowd and the brain matter went on all over everybody that was around. Right. We need that. The stuff that makes you squint like you just did. People need to hear that. People need to hear about how the woman… I think this was a couple of years ago, on 132nd Street. Excuse me. She said her son to the store. Took him a long time she was like “what’s wrong?” We're they are standing over him and she comes down, he was shot in the head, and she's trying to hold her son's head together. He was still breathing. Under a tree. And it was like, you know, kind of like a summer night going into fall. And all I remember is how she was holding her son's head like, for the ambulance to come. People gotta hear that. That's the reality of gun violence. That's what gun violence looks like, you understand?

So these funeral directors have become experts, especially in poor communities at making gun violence, the victim of gun violence, look excellent at the funeral. Because that's how many bodies they take care of. And that's the request of the family: “Can you make it so we have an open casket?” How do you have an open casket and the top of the head is blown off? You understand? You put a hat on. So you’ll see these kids at funerals now with hats on. Four-year-old Lloyd Morgan. I think that's been probably about seven years, eight years ago.. Was shot in the head four years old, at a basketball game. Right. That's, that's why we have to tell the stories —you see that? You feel it? Because people if you dress this up too much, people don't feel it. It's a piece of paper, sitting on somebody's desk, waiting to become law. Right. This is the reality. It should make a mother cry. This woman had to bury her son with you know, those top hats like the guy in the circus wears? The nice top hat? She buried her four-year-old son in a top hat. Because see that she wanted to have open casket so that they could see her baby.

So the discourse, the conversation —I tell people don't talk to me if you don't want to hear, because I'm going to tell you the truth.

*Musical Interlude*

Sonali (Narration)

In an effort to reconnect all that we talked about with ideas about criminal law and policing, we asked Iesha about how policing plays a role in her work. She discussed a need for police to have a deep investment in the communities that they serve. Ekow and Sarah also share sentiments about the need for resources and to reimagine public safety within communities of color.

Iesha

I'll tell you what's happening now with Cure Violence in New York City. So, we've been prompted, I think in the beginning they said, “oh, well, you all have to develop” —really at first it was that we didn't have the relationship with the police, because that's how you stay credible, right, and how you keep trust. So now it's all about police reform and changing relationships. So, we do have, I've always had a relationship with them, I lived in the same community in the confines of the same preset for… oh God, about 40 years. So, I saw the commanders come and go, I go to the precinct council meetings. I'm active in the community. I do national night out and take kids to perform. I've done that for years. So, this is not new —developing relationships. But I also am an activist. And the side of that is, is that when they're wrong and when the behavior does not work for the community, I'm going to say something. And particularly, I feel like I need to say something because the people who are policing our communities don't come from here. They don't sleep here. They don't have to wake up here. They don't have to go to the supermarket. So, they create behavior that only during the time that they're working, they practice that behavior that doesn't work for a community that they leave. So, there's no investment. And we have to have investment. And I think that's one of the reasons why the policing does work because they don't see us one, as community. They don't see us as a community. They see us as some people that need to be monitored and policed and told what to do. They come to cook outs and pour water on people's grills. And that could be the last food that they have. Oh, it's been some crazy stuff. You know, they want the grills cut off at 5:30. Like people, they don't go to other neighborhoods and do that to people.

Sarah

I don't think that that safety is, is the goal. And I also think that one thing people don't focus on enough people hear a lot of stories about, as they should, they hear a lot about police violence. And police violence is real and it's traumatic and it's part of the day to day life of some Americans, but not all Americans. I don't think people know just how degrading police can be when they're committing no acts of physical violence whatsoever. I don't think… I think people would feel very differently about police presence in any community, if they knew the way the cops talk to my clients. If you were on your way to an appointment, if you were on your way to anything, and someone stopped you, and you said, “excuse me, like, I'm not doing anything wrong, I need to go.” And they said, like, “where the fuck do you have to be?” “You know, don't look at me like that. Don't look at me at all.” If this happened to you on a regular basis, you know, how would you feel about authority? And how would you feel about the government? And how would you feel in general? I don't think that we can do this to people and call it safety.

There's also sort of like a game theory element to it where it doesn't make sense for any one person to just unilaterally disarm, right? I think plenty of people in all sorts of communities would be happy if there were no guns at all. But given, you know, things being as they are, it doesn't make sense to just say, “okay, well, we I'm out but you guys can all have guns.” I think that you have to deal with the problem in a way that's not one by one in order to make anybody feel safe and in order to disincentivize people in a real way, from gun ownership. I think if you really invested in communities and tried to make young people feel safe in underserved communities, and give them a sense of opportunity and possibility, the way that white suburban people have, you would see a lot more people turning sort of away from gun ownership.

Ekow

There's something that does anger me about this idea that, “well, you know, these communities are already vulnerable. They're crime ridden. So why don't we just police them in this way that's oppressive and cruel. And why don't we police them in ways that we would never…” I mean, are there communities out there who are clamoring to be policed this way? No! They're not, right? Even communities where people want an increased police presence, they don't want every young black man slammed up against the wall and frisked. There are affidavits of young men who were frisked 12 times in a week, sometimes more. You know, day after day after day, right?

And there's something… I don't doubt that the advocates of stop-and-frisk actually want safety. Or at least most of them are people who actually want less gun violence. I do think it's easy to see these young black men and just think of them as the cost of doing business in a way you would never accept if it was in your neighborhood or if it was your child. You would never watch your son slammed up against a hood and think, “oh, there's nothing else we could do.” When it comes to wealthy neighborhoods and people with political power, we find better ways of policing. When it comes to communities of color, we shrug and our imagination collapses.

*Outro music fades in*

Sonali (Closing Narration)

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of (Re)Search for Solutions. Tweet us your thoughts about the episode using the hashtag #R4S - we'd love to hear from you. That's hashtag R, the number 4, S.

This episode was produced by Azsaneé Truss, Joe Riina-Ferrie, Sonali Rajan and Lalitha Vasudevan. It was edited by Azsaneé Truss, with the help of the (Re)Search for Solutions team. A special thank you to Professor Ekow Yankah, Sarah Lustbader, Iesha Sekou, and Abdul-Kareem Mouhammad for their partnership in creating this episode. If you’d like to learn more about Iesha and Street Corner Resources, or to make a donation to support their amazing work, please visit scrnyc1.org.

Our music is Research Area by Poitr Pacyna and can be found on shockwave-sound.com. You can find us online at researchforsolutions.com and you can listen to our next episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Google Play.