The Problem is Police Culture

Social pressure in law enforcement dehumanizes minorities even among black cops

I finally forced myself to watch the Tyre Nichols videos so I could write this. Now, I just want to throw up.

The brutality of the ferocious beating of Nichols was almost incomprehensible, with a level of barbarous violence that would make some Mafia enforcers blanch. What we are witnessing is a group of men who have lost any sense of humanity, where viciousness and savagery were so accepted that none of them feared they would face consequences for this crime. Each felt confident that no one there, all sworn to uphold the law, would turn them in for breaking the law.

As soon as murder charges were filed, and after the release of the videos, those commentators dead-set on denying institutional racism within law enforcement settled on a predictable response: The five Memphis officers who beat Nichols were black. So, everybody who talks about racist cops knows nothing. In fact, a commentator on Fox News attributed the level of violence to the fact that the officers are black, casually using a racist trope to deny racism.

All these reactions demonstrate is that none of these commentators know anything about the decades of research about police brutality. While increasing the representation of minority officers can have an impact on police violence against black communities, not only is it minimal, but often non-existent. Rather, the research shows, it is the social and institutional pressures and groupthink of the racist system of law enforcement, rather than just the race of the officers, that leads to the dehumanization of minorities. Officers get approval and support from colleagues when they accept the institutional mindset; those who don’t are ostracized. In fact, this pressure to be part of the group - or what researchers call “organizational socialization” - can lead to greater violence against minorities when black officers are involved: Some studies have found that increased racial representation is in fact positively associated with harsher law enforcement toward black residents. And it is so much easier to beat a man to death as he is calling for his mother when you’re training and work environment has led you to view him as not quite human.

One of the most recent studies, from University of Chicago last year, found that hiring black officers can result in a small decrease in violence against minorities. But as the number of black cops in one force approaches 15%, that difference disappears. In Memphis, the number of black police officers is 14%.

“One potential reason explaining why increased racial representation in police forces can be linked to harsher law enforcement practices toward minority residents is the influence of organizational socialization,” the study says. “Considering the effect of organizational socialization, it is possible that minority officers enforce laws against minority residents even more harshly than non-minority officers do in order to avoid suspicion from their peers that they are more lenient toward minority residents…the influence of organizational socialization may lead officers to commit wrongdoings, which can also partly explain potential discriminatory treatment by minority police officers against minority residents.”

The pressure to be “one of the guys” stems from the strong pressure to behave in accordance with their colleagues’ values since solidarity and loyalty are so highly valued within police organizations. “Minority police officers who are socialized within this organizational context, therefore, tend to place their loyalty to the dominant organizational goal, which encourages behaviors such as strict law enforcement, over potential individual interests of advocating for minority residents.”

Even the level of arrests after police inflict violence is statistically linked to the race of the suspect, regardless of the race of the officer. Research from 2020 by scholars at George Washington University found that “both Black and White officers are less likely to arrest White civilians in use of force encounters.”

De Lacy Davis, a retired New Jersey police sergeant who formed Black Cops Against Police Brutality while still an active police officer, wrote in a 2021 study of the impact of the institutional demand for loyalty to other cops on minority members of police forces. He wrote that black officers can “feel under pressure to avoid being seen as showing leniency, loyalty, or favoritism toward Black suspects and consequently overcompensate by being more aggressive during encounters with Black people.”

While still on active duty, Davis, who is black, said that he came to know internal police racism firsthand. “I experienced some forms of maltreatment at the hands of both Black and White officers. I also witnessed external racism—unwarranted violence, misconduct, and discourtesy by police against Black civilians of varying ages. Consistent with the research that found no improvement in the quality of police and civilian encounters when more Blacks were hired, this violence, misconduct and discourtesy were perpetrated by both Black and White officers.”

The Nichols beating quickly raised comparisons to the 1991 attack on Rodney King by four officers with the Los Angeles police. That was the first case of police brutality that was captured on video by a witness. King, who had been evading police trying to stop him on suspicion of drunk driving, survived the assault by four white police officers, who were cleared of state criminal charges. Two of the officers were later convicted on federal charges of conspiring to violate King’s civil rights; two - including one officer who testified that his colleagues had gotten wildly out of control that night - were acquitted. The officer who abandoned the groupthink and testified about the excessive violence, Theodore Briseno, later said that he was shunned by fellow police for failing to stay aligned with the story of the other defendants.

But there is a lot about the King case that differs from Nichols. Despite the brutality of the attack on King, the viciousness of the Nichols beating far exceeds it. That is likely why King survived while Nichols died. Also, the King case was four white cops on one black man. 

A better comparison might be the 1999 case of Earl Faison, a black man and aspiring rap producer who was beaten by five cops; within an hour of his arrest, he was dead. Faison was unarmed and innocent of any crime. The five officers just suspected that he had been involved in the shooting death of police officer Joyce Carnegie. Faison had been stopped in a case of mistaken identity despite the fact he looked nothing like the description of Carnegie’s killer. Of the officers who beat him, four were white and one was black.

Faison was not even the first black man pursued that night in what was deemed by one activist as a “blue rampage.” Faulty information about a car at the scene led an African American man to contact De Lacy Davis, the black officer who had already formed Black Cops Against Police Brutality. The man told Davis stated he was not the shooter but feared other cops might kill him because of the flawed details about the car. Davis spoke with a superior, went to pick up the suspect, handcuffed him and brought him safely to the station. There, he followed procedure and had him photographed, showing the condition of the man when he arrived at headquarters. 

Davis’s by-the-book approach professional approach to the arrest enraged other members of the department:  A White male captain later called me into the detective bureau and proceeded to question me as if I were the suspect,’’ Davis later wrote. “It appeared that I had violated an unwritten practice in law enforcement which is to pressure the suspect into a confession or to falsely claim that he gave one. I didn’t comply with groupthink. Frustrated, the captain ordered me to submit a report immediately. 

My exercise of tactical restraint in this highly volatile situation became a point of consternation rather than applause; and members of the taskforce were attempting to convince another captain at the county prosecutor’s office to have me prosecuted for interfering with their case. Fortunately, she refused to allow any charges to go forward against me. It was later determined that the Black male suspect who surrendered to me was not involved in the murder of the police officer. 

The police were angry that Davis had followed the rules and not beaten up a suspect who proved to be innocent. Faison, who was arrested a few hours later, was not so lucky. Unfortunately, Faison’s beating took place before police cameras and the ubiquity of cell phone video, so - unlike with Nichols - no one saw exactly what the officers did. But the evidence established that Faison had been kicked, punched while handcuffed in the back of a police car, and was shot in the face with pepper spray at close range while the handcuffed man was lying in a police station stairwell. The station was the same one where Davis had set off rage for failing to beat up a different innocent man. The five officers - four white men and one black - were later convicted of depriving Faison of his constitutional rights.

Both the Faison and Nichols case underscore what experts already knew: Just bringing in more black cops doesn’t lessen the unnecessary violence inflicted on minority communities by the police. The entire system is poisoned, rotted away by poor recruitment and training, and a mindset worsened by the militarization of police that officers are in a war against civilians. 

How to fix it? The question has been asked thousands of times in hundreds of ways. We know the solution, but the politics just won’t allow it to be implemented. Too many conservatives have adopted the impulsive reaction that violence by cops isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s manly, tough, the kind of approach heroes on television and movies employ. But the solutions advanced by the loudest liberals - defund the police, severely restrict officers’ ability to engage in policing - is just as uninformed, and backfires by undermining real efforts at reform.

Softer approaches to law enforcement have enormous amounts of research worldwide that shows their efficacy. Community policing, demilitarization, and training in de-escalation and diversity, is dismissed by some conservatives as so much unmanly fluff, the idea of “woke” liberals. The “defund the police” advocates also often push it away, arguing that law enforcement in this country is beyond repair.

Until we start listening to the experts, repair probably is impossible. It feels good to scream, to tweet, to rage, but that does nothing to protect the next innocent victim of police violence. We have a choice: Do what other countries have proven works or continue to live in the hellhole of brutality brought about by law enforcement’s descent from policing to acting like an occupying force.