Race panel discusses recent African-American deaths, grand jury decisions

Professors applauded the protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s deaths in recent weeks, and clarified the practices and legal processes that help explain their deathsand the lack of indictment in a panel discussion on Thursday.

Associate Professor of African American Studies Naomi Murakawa, Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs Kim Lane Scheppele and sociology professor at the Institute for Advanced StudiesDidier Fassin were on the panel.

Fassin noted the significance of public discussion and protests that have occurred in past weeks that he contrasted with the “moral anesthesia” typical of the United States.

“The most remarkable fact is that, for the first time for many years, the death of a black man has not remained buried in the news and public consciousness,” Fassin said.

Fassin offered three major observations about the response to Brown’s and Garner’s murders: that the wave of protests is a rupture in the indifference to what police call “justifiable death,” that recent protests have been almost exclusively peaceful, and that the response is national, crossing color lines and social classes.

Fassin also discussed how racial criminalization compares in other nations, comparing this incident to an incident in December 2005 in France in which two innocent black men were brutally killed by police after a theft had been committed in an area close to where they were walking. He said that, following the incident, massive protests took place, a state of national emergency was declared, and that at the time, one of his colleagues expressed that this sort of event would never happen in the United States, where black lives are lost every day without the public taking notice.

Scheppele discussed the prejudice present in grand juries, noting that federal juries failed to bring an indictment in only 11 out of 162,000 federal cases in 2010, and that this is to be expected because grand juries only hear the one-sided account of the prosecutor. She said that this trend of almost always indicting cases is reversed whenever the defendant is a police officer, in which she said juries are inclined to not indict.

Grand juries are typically presented with the charges they are supposed to apply, Scheppele explained, but in Brown’s case, no charges were set forward — only the Missouri law stating that a police officer is justified in using deadly force if an individual poses significant threat to the officer or others.

Scheppele said that Missouri state law was largely responsible for Brown’s shooting. Although the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in Garner v. Tennessee to shoot fleeing persons who carry no immediate threat, she said, Missouri never changed their laws and permits officers to shoot just to effect an arrest.

In Garner’s case, Scheppele said that she questioned whether the grand jury was ever told that chokeholds are not permitted by the New York Police Department.

Murakawa said that there is an inequity of incarceration rates between white and minority groups, noting that, of every 100,000 incarcerations, 2,300 are accounted for by African-Americans and 947 by Latinos, orders of magnitude greater than the numbers seen in peer nations.

Murakawa added that current suggested reforms to improve policing will likely be unsuccessful, and that she doubted that the national task force to review policing practices would enact any change. She said that she critiqued the study that came out last week on demilitarization of local police, which concluded the tools being given to police officers are working very well and now there needs to be a database to track tools and more police reports.

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“They’re creating an administrative apparatus around police militarization,” Murakawa said, adding that this was just added bureaucracy, and not reform.

Although she noted that the suggestion for body cameras on police officers might be somewhat more promising,she said that sherejected the guidelines against racial profiling because they will reinforce racial and ethnic profiling along lines of nationality on the grounds of addressing security threats.

Murakawa also said that she applauded the protest efforts of students at the University.

“To the more than 500 students who walked out and died in, your actions start to become the anecdote to the poison on this campus,” Murakawa said.

The discussion, entitled “No Indictment, No Justice?” took place at 4:30 p.m. in McCormick 101 and was sponsored by the Pre-Law Society in collaboration with the Black Leadership Council, the Black Men’s Awareness Group and the Program in Law and Public Affairs.