BLACK AND BLUE

Why Does America's Richest Black Suburb Have Some Of The Country's
Most Brutal Cops?

No one had to warn Prince Jones about the police department in Prince
George's County. The cops in Maryland's second most populous county
had a reputation for turning routine traffic stops into Rodney King
incidents sans video camera. Jones had told friends about his fear of
the P.G. County police, and, according to them, Jones had even been
pulled over and searched for drugs once before by a P.G. cop (who
found none).

Jones' fear of police didn't match his profile. He was a Howard
University student, a father, and a man of faith who never hesitated
to dispense a religious aphorism to friends. He was also a fitness
freak and personal trainer at Bally's Total Fitness. After leaving
Howard, Jones became engaged to the mother of his child and planned
to join the Navy. The son of a radiologist, he could have been a
poster boy for middle-class black America.

So for the past few months, Jones' family and friends have been
asking how he ended up slumped over the steering wheel of his Jeep
Cherokee, a few blocks from his fianc=E9e's home in Virginia, with four
bullets in his back courtesy of a P.G. County police officer.

The official police account is that the shooting was a surveillance
operation gone bad. In the early morning of Sept. 1, thinking they
were trailing a suspect in a theft of an officer's gun, undercover
narcotics detective Carlton Jones (unrelated) and a superior trailed
Jones 15 miles from P.G. County, where he lived, through Washington,
D.C., and finally into Fairfax, Va., where the two officers
separated. Both officers were in plain clothes and unmarked cars. As
Carlton Jones tells the story, Prince Jones, apparently discovering
he was being followed, rammed the detective's car three times,
forcing the officer to open fire in fear for his life.

But for those close to Prince Jones, the police account is simply an
attempt to cover up a cold-blooded murder. Though it is within
protocol for police to operate outside of their jurisdiction, a
mistaken identity shooting is not. Neither is claiming to be a cop
while raising a gun without a badge, which Carlton Jones did by his
own admission. Perhaps most troubling is the profile of the suspect
police claimed to be looking for---a stocky, 5-foot-6-inch man with
dreadlocks. Jones was 6-foot-4-inches and slender, sporting closely
cropped hair.

In over 30 years as Commonwealth attorney for Fairfax County, Robert
Horan had never charged a police officer with a crime. After
investigating Jones' death, he declined to break with tradition.
Jones' death, which is still under internal investigation by the
Prince George's County Police Department, sparked a minor furor at
Howard University. Students marched on the Justice Department to
demand a federal investigation. The controversial shooting rang out
nationally as Al Sharpton promised to lead a march on P.G. County.
The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial asserting that "the
ultimate wrong was done to an innocent man." Even presidential
candidate Al Gore dedicated a moment of silence to Jones.

=46or those who'd followed the news in the county over the past few
years, Jones' killing was only the latest in a string of suspicious
shootings, murders, and beatings that had occurred at the hands of
P.G. County police officers. Jones was the 12th person shot over a
14-month period in the county. Five of those 12 died. Two other men,
who were not shot, died in police custody.

The violence perpetrated by the P.G. cops is a curious development.
Usually, police brutality is framed as a racial issue: Rodney King
suffering at the hands of a racist white Los Angeles Police
Department or more recently, an unarmed Timothy Thomas, gunned down
by a white Cincinnati cop. But in more and more communities, the
police doing the brutalizing are African Americans, supervised by
African-American police chiefs, and answerable to African-American
mayors and city councils. In the case of P.G. County, the brutality
is cast against the backdrop of black America's power base, the
largest concentration of the black middle class in the country.

A bedroom community of the nation's capital, Prince George's county
is the only suburban county ever to become richer as it became
blacker. According to the Census Bureau, the county, which is 63
percent black, had a median income of $47,000 in 1997, more than
double the median income for African Americans and almost $10,000
more than the median income for whites.

Beyond economics, P.G. County's African-American residents boast a
formidable amount of political power. The county executive, the
state's attorney, and the chairman of the county council are all
black, as are 41 percent of the police officers, including the one
who killed Prince Jones. With political and economic clout have come
all the trappings of opulence once denied African Americans. And in
some ways, Prince George's shows integration taken to its most
extreme, perhaps perverted, end---black people with the inalienable
right to drive the same luxury cars, buy the same sprawling houses,
and be just as apathetic as America's white elite.

Even with the death of Prince Jones, a native son of the black
bourgeoisie, there has been very little outcry from the county's
leadership. "I have yet to be contacted by any constituent who had
anything to say about [Prince Jones' death]," County Councilmember
Walter H. Maloney (D-Beltsville) told The Washington Post shortly
after Jones' shooting.

Police brutality may help Al Sharpton garner a spot on "Rivera Live,"
but the black uppercrust sees little point in putting the police on
trial here in Prince George's County, or anywhere else in the nation
for that matter. Like their white counterparts, African-Americans
will countenance a few police thrashings if that's the price of
keeping their Jags from getting jacked.

=46amous Blue Beatdowns

In the folklore of urban black communities, tragic encounters with
the police assume mythic proportions. For Detroit, there's Malice
Green; in New York there's Abner Louima. Jones is the closest P.G.
County has to a police-brutality martyr. But even before his death,
the county could boast a healthy cross-section of shootings,
maimings, and thrashings that would easily make the Blue Beatdowns
Hall of Fame.

Police department officials assert that much of the controversy is
the result of media hype. They say complaints against the department
hit a 16-year low in 2000. In that same year, the department had only
five shootings, a figure which compares well with neighboring
Montgomery County's five police shootings and Washington D.C.'s
seven, and is a 15-year low for P.G. county.

Still, neither of its neighboring jurisdictions has strung together
so many questionable incidents the way Prince George's County has in
recent years. It's hard to ignore the stories of people like Elmer
Clayton Newman, who died last year after suffering two cracked ribs
and a broken neck while, or after, being arrested. The officers who
took custody of Newman, who was high on cocaine at the time, claimed
Newman injured himself by repeatedly banging his head into a wall. No
officer was charged in the case.

There's also 19-year-old Gary Albert Hopkins Jr., an unarmed college
student, who was shot in 1999 by Officer Brian C. Catlett at a fire
station. The police contend that Hopkins was reaching for another
officer's gun when Catlett fired to stop him. After eight witnesses
testifying before a grand jury directly contradicted the police
version, Catlett made history by becoming the first police officer
ever indicted in the county. Yet the parade of witnesses was
ultimately not enough---Catlett was acquitted in February of this
year.

Or again, there's Freddie McCollum, who in 1997 was stomped, beaten,
and had a police dog unleashed on him in his own home. McCollum lost
his right eye as a result of the drubbing. Police claimed his
injuries were the result of his tumbling eight feet with two officers
when the floor collapsed. Only McCollum, however, was injured. A jury
didn't buy that explanation, and McCollum won a $4 million judgement
against the county.

This litany of brutalities reads like a Quentin Tarantino
interpretation of the Keystone Kops. And despite the lack of criminal
prosecutions of cops---P.G. County has never convicted a police
officer in a brutality case---the county's dark comedy has cost its
taxpayers plenty. As of the end of last year, the county had been hit
for no less than $6 million in damages for police misconduct. The
trend was serious enough to draw federal attention. In November, the
Justice Department decided to investigate the police department for
patterns of brutality and misconduct.

Despite trouble serious enough to bring in the Justice Department's
big guns, the county elite has treated the issue with indifference.
"I think a lot of the citizens would like to not have to come out and
deal with this," says Edythe Flemings Hall, president of the local
NAACP chapter. "Although it's very clear that there are people with
great individual wealth, we aren't ready to marshal our social
capital to get into a big dog fight. Many of those in Prince George's
County really are living pretty comfortable."

Rich, Black, and Apathetic

When I came to Washington, D.C., to attend college, one of my first
lessons came from a couple of local cats who warned me about the
cops. They weren't talking about Washington's blue, but Prince
George's County's. I was told that if I wanted to be famous, I should
go to Prince George's County and run a few red lights.

The reputation of Prince George's cops has changed little over the
past 20 years, even as the county's demographics have shifted
dramatically. During the days when Prince George's County was
lily-white and voted George Wallace for president, Prince George's
cops were well known as thugs. "The force was known as a bunch of
cowboys who rode roughshod over citizens," says the NAACP's Hall.

Commander, Bureau of Patrol Gerald M. Wilson asserts that the
department has exorcised its old demons, but that years ago its
reputation bordered on Third-World. "Basically my recollection is
that people said `PG cops, don't mess with them,'" recalls Wilson.
"You wanted to avoid them at all costs. [If stopped] you would just
stick your license through the window."

Perhaps the closest the county has come to community mobilization
over police conduct was in the case of Terrance Johnson. In 1978, the
15-year-old Johnson and his older brother, Melvin, were taken into
custody by Prince George's County police. At the station, Johnson
alleged that he was beaten by a police officer, at which point he
snatched the officer's gun and shot him and another officer as he
attempted to flee.

Johnson did 17 years for murdering police officers James Brian Swart
and Albert M. Claggett IV. The case polarized Prince George's black
and white communities. In 1995, Johnson was paroled to much fanfare
in the black community, which had sympathized with and even lionized
him for defending himself against what they perceived as corrupt and
brutal police. (The cheers fell silent when Johnson later shot
himself after a failed robbery attempt in Hartford County, Md.)

In hindsight, the complexity of Johnson's case did not make him the
best face for a campaign against police brutality. Perhaps this
explains why the county's fledgling black bourgeoisie wanted little
part of the controversy. The same year that Johnson killed two cops,
the NAACP attempted to march on the county seat, claiming that they
would draw 1,000 protesters. but gathered only 60, much to the dismay
of then-chapter president Sylvester Vaughns. "Expecting a thousand
people is not a hell of an objective," demurred Vaughns.

But apparently it is in Prince George's County, where at times the
community seems to have felt more ire against the activists than the
police. The county's NAACP has been the most consistent force in
opposing police brutality, and yet it has frequently been dissed and
dismissed as irrelevant. Some of this reflects broader problems for
the organization on the national level, as well as internal strife
within the local chapter. But a large part of it seemed to be that
Prince George's black community was demonstrating the complexities of
that very integration which the NAACP had for so long championed. As
the community's affluence grew, its political agenda changed.

Prince George's County's black elite had for the most part attained
their goals of becoming property owners with the same rights as all
Americans. The fact that they were black was, at most, a minor
inconvenience.

Black Power Outage

Prince George's County may have virtually no appetite for protest,
but this isn't especially unusual among the nation's black elite. A
few years ago, The Washington Post ran a Pulitzer-prize winning
series which revealed that the District of Columbia's Metropolitan
Police Department had shot more people than any other big-city
department in the country.

In consequence, the police made substantive changes, with the help of
the Justice Department. The city has implemented non-lethal-force
technologies, such as pepper spray, which it says will help reduce
the number of fatal interactions between police and community members.

The changes seem to have worked. Since these new strategies were
implemented, shootings resulting in death or injuries have dropped by
78 percent over two years, according to the department, with the
number of deaths dropping from 12 to one. The number of times
officers have fired their weapons, either accidentally or
intentionally, has declined by 48 percent. And the crime rate has not
risen under this lighter touch.

The clear beneficiaries of these improvements were the city's black
citizens---most of those shot had been black. But in a city where the
mayor and much of the city council is black, and which houses one of
the most storied enclaves of old black money, most of the outrage
that helped spur these changes came from a small group of
activists---not from political leadership. Even The Washington Post
was surprised by the lack of letters to the editor. Of course the
District is not unique in this regard.

In New York, too, the high-profile murder of Amadou Diallo and the
subsequent acquittal of the officers involved has evoked little more
than angry rhetoric in the city's formidable black community. Beyond
Sharpton's invective, black political, civic, and business leaders
have not flexed their collective muscle, and there has been no change
in the department's policies. In the Ramparts scandal in Los Angeles,
it was not the fury of the community that put the police department
under fire, but the sloppiness of some very crooked cops.

At those times when African Americans have loudly confronted the
issue of police brutality, they have frequently turned it into an
employment issue, singling out the lack of minorities within various
police departments as the root of the problem, rather than the
behavior of the officers overall. The hiring strategy is an outgrowth
of old-school Civil Rights and Black Power movement logic, which
argues that African Americans will be more sympathetic to issues
facing minorities than whites in the same jobs will be. When applied
to law enforcement, the logic seems especially potent, given the
history of black America's interactions with the police. It was the
fallout from the Rodney King explosion that produced Willie Williams,
the first African-American police chief in the history of the LAPD.

By such logic, affluent, black Prince George's County should have
virtually eradicated police brutality. But this presumption ignores
many of the nuances of African-American identity. In black America,
race and ethnicity don't trump other things like class, gender, or
sexual orientation, arguably because black identity is not just seen
as an object of pride, but still as an obstacle to be overcome.

Indeed, outside of Prince George's County, the fault lines in the
"minority representation" argument are causing tremors where you'd
least expect them---in minority communities. Already, many big cities
are evicting the first wave of black mayors, for whom race was a
campaign bonus, and replacing them with white ones. Ditto for law
enforcement: Los Angeles still has a black police commissioner,
Bernard Parks, yet the city is currently embroiled in one of the
biggest corruption scandals in the department's history.

The diversity approach is not completely flawed. Police brutality is
an issue fraught with racial implications, if only because most of
the victims are black, and black officers on the street may mitigate
racial tension. But diversity in police departments is not a cure-all
for brutality as long as African-American officers are bred on the
same stereotypes as their white colleagues. As Jesse Jackson has
noted, little old white ladies aren't the only people clutching their
pocketbooks at the approach of a group of black males.

"I get more requests for police support than I get complaints," says
Rep. Albert Wynn. "I get far more inquiries about how we can get more
police out on the streets. People are very concerned about police
brutality, but they're also concerned about safe streets and that
issue can't be lost."

The situation in P.G. County suggests that police brutality is not
the product of racism alone. Police forces are paramilitary
institutions which by their very nature are prone to abuse of
power---the psychological dynamics so dramatically illustrated 20
years ago by Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford in his study of prisons.
Using student volunteers, Zimbardo showed convincingly that ordinary
people put in positions of authority within a criminal justice
setting would behave brutally as a way of controlling others. It was
the circumstances which brought out the worst in people, rather than
specific defects in the individuals themselves. Abusiveness, in fact,
seemed the default position.

That's why, argues Ronald Hampton, executive director of National
Black Police Association, diversifying police departments like P.G.
County's won't make them any less violent. "Not if we are going to
send [black officers] through the same training academy that [white
officers] have been going through all along. The policies and
practices will change when the philosophy changes. Why do we think
that if we hire more blacks and women, that if we send them to the
same institution, that things will change?"

Of course, some in Prince George's may not have a problem with the
current "philosophy," so long as it stays in the county's poorer
areas, where affluent black residents are just as likely as white
ones to think the victims of police brutality have it coming.

"We expect that African Americans in power will do something
different, especially as it relates to lower-income black people,"
says Alvin Thornton, a professor of political science at Howard
University and a resident of Prince George's County. "But the other
part is that in many ways black people are no different than whites.
There is a certain impatience with crime, and when police pounce on
people there is some understanding."

Bad Odds

A few weeks after Prince Jones was killed, Howard University held a
memorial. Those who spoke asked for God to fill their hearts with
forgiveness for the officer who'd taken Jones' life. Friends of Jones
spoke of his religious zeal and their deep belief that he was at
Jesus' side. Several of them ended their eulogies in tears, as did
university president Patrick Swygert, a man not known for public
displays of emotion.

Perhaps the most poignant address came from Jones' mother, Mable
Jones. While she sprinkled in a few words of rhetoric, Jones was much
more concerned with the present than the afterlife. She asserted that
her son's murder was a wake-up call. "It might be that God had a plan
for me to move out of my comfortable suburban practice and speak
out," she said, according to the Washington City Paper.

But her assertion stands in sharp contrast to the reality of Prince
George's County, a place where no one is looking to be Al Sharpton.
The truth is, the black middle class is not that much different from
the white one. Just as affluent white people aren't too interested in
the plight of poor whites, neither are affluent blacks especially
concerned with their brothers in the ghetto---in fact, they may be
even more eager to distance themselves from the ghetto than white
people are trying to to distance themselves from the trailer park.

But as much as affluent blacks want to believe that money and power
can insulate them from the effects of racism in this country, it is a
delusion. White rich people might risk landing in a trailer park
because of a bad turn of the economy, but the odds aren't nearly as
high as those of a black middle-class man becoming the victim of
police brutality, as Prince Jones so terribly discovered. Prince
Jones so terribly discovered.