TAL - Cops See it Differently, Part Two

Summary: In this second half of a two-parter, This American Life continues to look at how racial bias affects police departments around the country. The first story is about a Florida department gone mad by arrest quotas, and in the second they look at how Las Vegas is trying to take on racial bias head on.

Upshot: Following on the heels of last week's very strong episode, TAL does a good job of examining this thorny topic. A must listen for This American Life fans.

Full review after the jump:

This is a topic that I find fundamentally fascinating, and TAL producer Robyn Semien illustrates the difficulty of understanding this topic from a lay perspective right from the get-go. She starts the episode by sitting down and watching with a friend who is also white police officer (Semien herself is black) the viral video of Eric Garner being detained by police for illegally selling cigarettes, while suffering from a soon to be fatal asthma attack. I have to admit, I've never watched the video. I've got a very weak stomach for the sight of human suffering, unless that person is Jim Cramer, in which case I can watch and re-watch this video all day long. 

This man is human toilet paper.

But while Semien and most other people watch or even listen to the video, a video that has several police officers holding down a man as he frantically gasps that he "can't breathe", a man who shortly thereafter dies from asphyxiation (my own personal phobia), it's hard to see what the police were thinking beyond general cruel thuggery. But when Semien's police officer friend watches the video, all she sees is a man resisting arrest, a man who needs to be detained, and officers who are simply doing their job. In fact, the only give she gives from her stance is admitting that Eric Garner might not have been lying when he shouted that he couldn't breathe.

This is the disconnect that I think most of us face when we hear about cop violence towards citizens. As detailed in the previous episode of TAL, the world that cops exist in on a day to day basis is so drastically different from the one that we exist in, that it can be impossible to see things from their point of view. They operate in a world where they continually confront the absolute worst in humanity. The police shuttle from one crisis to the other, dealing with people at their lowest and most desperate moments. And of course it often becomes a negative feedback loop: the worse reputation the police get with a community, the worse the citizens treat the police officers, and vice versa. 

In this episode's second and last story, Semien and co-producer Sean Cole visit the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and speak with Brett Brosnahan, a police officer who has had personal experience confronting his own biases in a life and death situation. He was one of the first officers to respond to a shooting of two other police officers. The suspects had already run off by the time he had arrived, and immediately he came up with a mental picture of a "cop killer": a black, or possibly hispanic young man. When it became clear that the suspect had fled into a crowded Walmart and was shooting up the place, he immediately switched his mental picture to a white lone man, because that's the type of people he associated with mass shootings. Once inside, through all the confusion, he almost overlooked the second shooter: a white woman who he only recognized as a gun"man" when she was four feet away. (she missed, he shot her in the shoulder, though she eventually committed suicide)

This story of a police department and officers taking earnest steps to confront their bias was a refreshing blast of cool air compared to the first story which details the nightmarish story of a police department so absurdly corrupt that it might make Kafka blush.

Alex Saleh

It all starts in Miami Gardens, a mostly black Miami suburb, and Alex Saleh, a convenience store owner who as part of a push from the new sheriff, agreed to have his store be a "Zero Tolerance Zone", i.e. a zone where police would be hyper vigilant. This apparently, also made it a place where police could just barge in and arrest people for "trespassing" whenever they felt like it. Even arresting people who actually worked there.

Saleh's employee, Earl Sampson, a young black man, was so routinely arrested for "trespassing" at his employment (according to this article in the Miami herald he was stopped 258 times, searched 100 times, and arrested and jailed 56 times) that Saleh installed video cameras all over his shop to document the police abuse. When he tried to address the problems through the official channels, he was further harassed and intimidated.

Further investigation found out that this wasn't an isolated incident. Police officers were stopping and arresting people all over the small city for mostly minor offenses that mostly involved "looking suspicious". This included detaining children for riding bicycles and playing tag.

While certainly race came to play in this last story, as a department of overwhelmingly white police officers ran an overwhelmingly black town like a warden runs a prison, to me the story was more of unchecked power and bureaucracy than it was necessarily about race relations, as the previous episode the closing story were so pointedly about.

Also, while the story was fascinating in the "how crazy can this get" kind of way, I was a little frustrated by the lack of explanation about how and why this happened. It presumably wasn't from a lack of trying, as reporter Miki Meek did an admirable job of ruling out hypotheses: the arrest quotas weren't used to get lucrative federal grants and they weren't used as ways of impressing either the city council or the general populous. Moreover, the police chief seems to have completely checked out of his position, spending most of his time on the golf course than running his department. Everyone from the officers, to the mayor either feign ignorance or pass the buck. But the lack of an explanation for what caused the corrupted system is mildly disappointing. But, again, the story is so eye otherworldly that it's definitely one of the better TAL stories in recent memory.

Final words: Torey Malatia wants you to know: "Oh, yeah. I like black people. Umm... I like black men. I don't have anything against them."