I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

by Matt Taibbi

“How do we ensure…that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?” they wrote. In the end, Kelling and Wilson weren’t sure. Their conclusion was that they just had to hope it wouldn’t turn out that way.

Hope. Is. Not. A. Strategy. Disturbing that the fates of so many people of color when it came to their interactions with police boiled down to the hope that cops wouldn’t be neighborhood racism valets (despite previous evidence to the contrary).

Kelling, unwittingly perhaps, had set in motion a massive government program that would be warped from the beginning by a chilling syllogistic construct: New Yorkers who are afraid of crime are already victims. Many New Yorkers are scared of black people. Therefore, being black is a crime.

throughout the life of the program, black and Hispanic residents made up 80 to 90 percent of all stops (usually closer to 90 percent), in a city where they made up roughly half of the population. This disparity echoed an earlier bizarre statistic showing that 90 to 95 percent of all people imprisoned for drug offenses in New York in the nineties were black and Hispanic, despite studies showing that 72 percent of all illegal drug users in the city were white. Clearly a certain form of discretion was being exercised.

Another recurring theme in these stories is that while the cases often begin as unplanned murders and assaults committed in heat-of-the-moment situations by working-class cops, they end as carefully orchestrated cover-ups committed in cold blood, through the more ethereal, polished, institutional racism of politicians, judges, and attorneys.

On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap. On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect toward authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair.

To continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies; one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.

From the proverbial thirty thousand feet, modern America has for some time now seemed integrated, especially the big cities. But if you take a closer look, walk from one block to the next, you’ll discover that traditionally white enclaves like Lincoln, Nebraska, are actually more diverse, at the neighborhood level, than places like Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Baltimore.

The civil rights movement, legislation, and milestone court decisions of the 1950s and ’60s produced remarkable changes and ended or ramped down centuries of explicit, statutory discrimination. But real integration was not one of the accomplishments.

The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.

For ages now New York has been at the center of every innovation in institutional racism, from redlining to blockbusting to the “war on crack” to mass incarceration to Broken Windows.