On Dec. 31, activists from anti-racist group What’s Up!? Pittsburgh (formerly Whites Working and Healing to Abolish Total Supremacy Undermining Privilege) encountered Pittsburgh Police Chief Cameron McLay at a local coffee shop and asked him to take a picture with a sign reading “I resolve to challenge racism @ work #EndWhiteSilence.”
McLay agreed, and the picture spread like wildfire across social media and stirred controversy across the nation. He was attacked by right-wing pundits and Pittsburgh Fraternal Order of Police President Howard McQuillan for suggesting that there may be racism in the police force. Liberal media and some leftist activists defended McLay as an example of the “good cop” among “bad apples.” The picture effectively shifted the conversation from “Black lives matter” to “not all cops” for a period of time.
Several months have passed. How well has Chief McLay stuck to his New Year’s resolution?
America’s ‘most livable’ city’s police
It is understandable that many would look to the new police chief, chosen by the new “progressive” mayor, Bill Peduto, with hope in the mayor’s promise for a “new day” in Pittsburgh.
While it may not have the widespread infamy of the police departments of New York City or Los Angeles, the Pittsburgh Police Department has its own bloody history.
In October 1995, Pittsburgh police murdered Jonny Gammage, an unarmed Black man, after pulling him over for allegedly driving “erratically” through several almost entirely white Pittsburgh suburbs. Of the five cops involved in the killing, who beat Gammage with flashlights and ultimately suffocated him, three faced charges only for involuntary manslaughter, which were eventually dropped.
Less than two years later, the Pittsburgh Police Department became the first in the country’s history to be taken over by the Justice Department due to pervasive patterns of abuse and corruption. The federal “Consent Decree” lasted from 1997-2002. Federal oversight arguably improved police accountability and relations with the community, but any improvements have long since been undone in the 12 years since the decree ended.
Within the last five years, several Pittsburgh incidents of police brutality have received national attention. Jordan Miles, an unarmed 18-year-old Black student at the city’s performing arts high school, was jumped and brutalized by three white plainclothes officers while walking to his grandmother’s house in 2011. The picture of his beaten face, his
swollen-shut eye and torn-out dreads outraged people across the world.
In 2012, Leon Ford Jr., another unarmed Black motorist, ended up shot five times and paralyzed from the waist down after being pulled over and mistaken for another Black man who had a warrant named Lamont Ford (who himself was killed in a car chase with Pittsburgh police in 2014).
Pittsburgh police were in the national spotlight once again when an officer was caught on video repeatedly punching and slamming to the ground Ariel Lawther, a 19-year-old lesbian, for being too confrontational with anti-LGBTQ bigots at the 2014 Pittsburgh PrideFest.
McLay’s ‘challenge’ to racism
McLay was hired from outside the department to restore community relations and the department’s image after the previous chief, Nate Harper, was sentenced to federal prison for failing to file income tax returns and conspiring to divert checks from the bureau into off-the-books accounts. Hired just a month after Mike Brown’s death brought a militant, youth-led anti-racist movement into the streets, McLay issued a statement that he would aim to be “very visible, very engaged and very transparent.”
The chief has since participated in community meetings in various oppressed neighborhoods in Pittsburgh organized by some faith and community organizations involved with the local movement in solidarity with Ferguson. This has given him the platform to promise reforms such as body cameras and police accountability.
But at a community meeting in December 2014, in response to a question about racism among police officers, McLay explained that police guilty of “bias” (read: racism) and excessive force was only 3-5 percent. He immediately said that this was equal to the number of people in the community “driving drug and gun violence.”
McLay apparently sees no difference between regular people who face charges and prosecution for crimes and cops who often face no charges or are acquitted when they do. The justice system almost always fails victims of police brutality—most of whom come from low-income Black or Latino communities. Both the courts and the police serve the interests of the ruling class. The police maintain order through fear and violence; prosecutions and accountability damage the police’s capacity to maintain that social relation with the communities they occupy, so there is little interest in the courts to pursue that route, as Ferguson officer Darren Wilson and New York City officer Daniel Pantaleo have recently shown us.
In a condescending and moralizing open letter to the community, McLay asked for compassion and understanding to be shown to the police: “When the next ugly incident happens, will we be willing to withhold judgement and control our emotions long enough to give each other the benefit of the doubt? Are we going to work together toward reconciliation? Are we going to work on listening to one another with the intention of compassionate understanding?” The burden of “listening” and “compassionate understanding” isn’t on our communities, however—it is on the police who routinely stymie any attempt at addressing grievances over violated rights from the community and punishing brutal cops.
Even after McLay took the picture with the sign pledging to challenge racism at work, he defended the notorious policy of stop-and-frisk. When asked if Pittsburgh should adopt the policy, McLay responded, “absolutely, absolutely,” but added, “without bias.” New York City’s experience shows how racist stop-and-frisk is in practice: In 2011, Black people comprised 26 percent of the city and were 52 percent of those who were stopped, whereas white people were 47 percent of the population but were only 9 percent of those who were stopped. If stop-and-risk were applied equally to white people, how long would it last without fueling a huge and diverse movement to stop it?
His “anti-racist” sign picture gained much more widespread publicity than his comments soon afterward in support of the racist practice of stop-and-frisk. What McLay did by holding up that sign was confuse a section of the movement who hope or believe that we can reform all the worst aspects of the system if the right individual were put in place. This occurred right in the heat of the local Ferguson movement and led some to believe that this chief would make the difference. It was a very effective method of trying to disarm the movement.
McLay also used the media spotlight drawn to him in the wake of the controversy to attempt to discredit the movement. During a massive march to stop racist wars at home and abroad that had drawn over 1,200 people on Martin Luther King Day, McLay told news media that police worked closely with the organizers and considered the march “a really good collaborative event.” This was an absolute lie. The organizers alone planned the rallies and march route that day. The police did no more than they were legally obligated to do in service to people exercising their right to assemble and speak out.
Police protect and serve the ruling class
The police do not protect and serve poor and working people, especially not the most oppressed in our society. The police protect the system and serve the ruling class against those who have the most reason to rise up and build a new society that works for the people. From slave patrols to strike-busting, from Stonewall, to the border patrol and Mike Brown, we have seen time and time again whose side the police are on in the various struggles we fight for justice and liberation.
What makes the difference is not an individual temporarily placed in charge who says what we want to hear but a loud and organized movement that makes it impossible for the system to go on with the status quo without risking serious upheaval. The fact that individuals come and go but the problems remain over the long term show that the real problem is the system itself.
In the latest example of this, the Department of Justice recently found after extensive investigation that the Ferguson police routinely and overwhelmingly discriminated against and violated the rights of Black residents. Yet after finding the environment to be thoroughly racist, the same DOJ announced that Darren Wilson will not face federal charges for civil rights violations in murdering Mike Brown.
With so many lives lost and ruined and many more lives on the line, we can’t afford to be misled by illusions. We must be clear about who the police are and what they do. Our families, friends or neighbors could provide the next victim we march for if this doesn’t stop now.
