Ferguson, MO and some words of great wisdom from my friend

[VanGoghRocks]

The following magisterial piece was penned by my friend Chuck Leigh, who is Bishop of the Catholic Ecumenical Communion (a parish in Tampa, Florida):

Maintaining the Status Quo

To understand what is happening in Ferguson, one must look at the reality of the poor through different eyes. While some cities are worse than others the basic reality is the same throughout the county

In an upscale neighborhood, if somebody breaks into your house, you call the police with the expectation that they will help you and perhaps make things better. In a poor neighborhood, if somebody breaks into your house, you do not call the police because your expectation is that they will make things much worse. You find another way to deal with the problem. You call friends and neighbors or take matters into your own hands, perhaps even with a weapon. This vast difference in expectations between an upscale neighborhood and a poor one has very little to do with the inclinations of the people living in those neighborhoods; most people just want to feel safe and secure. The difference in expectations has much more to do with how the police are experienced in each of those environments.

Think about it for a moment. Police are not social change agents. They function as stabilizers. The purpose and function of the police is always to maintain the status quo. If you're blessed by the status quo, then the police are perceived as benign or even beneficial. The promise of the police is to restore your sense of order to your settings. If the status quo is harsh, oppressive and nearly hopeless, then one perceives the police as an instrument of oppression and evil because they do not remove the harsh, oppressive and hopeless elements from the circumstances. The police remove people from the circumstances in order to restore equilibrium. The threat, rather than promise, of the police in poor neighborhoods is that someone important to you will be arrested. In an upscale neighborhood, the police protect property; in the poor neighborhood, they look for suspects.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the police themselves have similar perceptions. The police see the harsh, oppressive and nearly hopeless poor neighborhood and those who live in it as a single reality. The people and the poor environment are not clearly distinguished. With a few notable exceptions, the police see the people of the inner-city as potential enemies of law and order who must constantly be watched, monitored, and controlled—in a word, suppressed.

The police are not subtle in the ways they enforce the suppression. The police differ from any other inner-city gang mainly by having greater firepower and the vast support of the state. The police use urban tactics they would never think of using in the suburbs. It is not unusual for them to draw their guns and put them against the heads of ordinary citizens with very little or no provocation. It is quite common for them to break into a citizen's home, and then swear under oath that they saw a criminal fleeing into the home. But these are really minor indignities compared to the real and lasting damage done to ordinary citizens in the inner-city.

When an inner-city arrest is made for some infraction, real or imagined, it is more common than not for the police to overcharge the defendant. “To overcharge the defendant” is to pile up many additional charges so as to overwhelm the defendant's ability to defend in court. Usually a poor defendant is represented by an overworked public defender. It is not unusual for the public defender to only have two or three minutes to speak with the defendant before that defendant goes in front of the judge. Public defenders carry a huge caseload, and they try to dispose of as many cases as possible right in the beginning by plea-bargaining. Poor defendants know this and they also know that, if they go to trial with five or six or more charges, it is most common for the jury to split the difference and find them guilty on maybe half of the charges. Juries are not made up of poor people. They are consistently made up of middle-class participants. Juries almost never include a poor person who understands the realities of the inner-city. It is very nearly impossible for a poor defendant to be tried by a jury of his or her peers. When a poor person finally comes before the judge for sentencing, it is the common practice of both the police and prosecutors to make numerous hideous allegations that have nothing to do with the charge. These allegations are made simply to vilify the defendant.

The real tragedy comes after an inner-city resident is dragged into the judicial system. For the rest of his or her life all the charges made against him or her remain on their record to be viewed both by the police, who are then more likely to arrest them, and by the prosecutor and judge, who are then more likely to send them to prison. After being arrested, whether or not convicted, an inner-city resident is almost guaranteed a stay in prison sometime during their life. That record also effectively precludes the poor defendant from any sort of upward economic mobility. It condemns them to low-paying or no jobs for the rest of their life. Can it be any wonder that a man or woman who wishes to care for their family has very little choice but to actually engage in real criminal activity? Thus the original charge becomes self-fulfilling criminality.

Follow this course of suppression: intimidating tactics when arrested; piling on charges; inadequate defense; plea-bargaining; jury tried by non-peers; gratuitous vilification by prosecution; sensationalist reporting by media ; persistent police record that leads to joblessness; and, except by the intervention of grace, the necessity of engaging criminal behavior in order to survive. For poor people, this course of suppression is routine.

Now, when one chooses to live in solidarity with the poor, it seems only reasonable that one should share in all the realities of inner-city life. To call on the people of God in the inner-city to refuse to accept and to rebel against the oppression that is their daily life leads to an unavoidable protest against the status quo. The call of God becomes an unavoidable challenge to the guardians of that status quo, the police.

This challenge is the difficult legacy dressed up nicely in popular Christianity. But Jesus was executed by the police action of his day in the same way in which Pilate executed 10,000 poor Jews upon arriving in Palestine. Jesus invited his disciples, saying “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. (Mark 8:34) The saying is itself a scandal; so it is spiritualized until it means the opposite of actually giving away one’s life. To live among the poor in God’s name is to suffer with the poor at the hands of those who find the way of God too inconvenient for their privilege and prosperity. “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11-12)

Throughout my ministry, I have watched how the mechanisms of society maintain the status quo and that those mechanisms are the enemies of the gospel. As Paul says, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and spiritual forces of evil. (Ephesians 6:12) But I always imagined that the ministry could protect me from the worst abuses of suppression that people in the parish actually suffer. That has been my illusion. When the police entrapped and arrested me with a physical takedown, pointing their guns at my head, fear grabbed a hold on me in a way I have not known since Vietnam.

My own present legal entanglements are not unusual for somebody that lives in the inner-city. Actually I'm much better off than most of the people I serve. I'm not represented by a public defender but by a private lawyer. He was able to have the original 12 misdemeanor counts filed against me reduced to one because that one count was simply repeated 12 times. While this reduction makes common sense, it challenges police and prosecutors in their practice to exaggerate charges.

Of course I won't even mention that, after two months of rigorous investigation and several efforts at entrapment by undercover police agents and confidential informants, only one misdemeanor charge could be mustered against me. As with most people in the inner-city, the charges in the media had nothing to do with the misdemeanor count for which I am before the court. But as with other poor people they become the basis on which one is judged and ultimately convicted. This might be called the court of common opinion, but it is an opinion manufactured by the media. It is an opinion that is subject to no scrutiny or verification. The media seldom have to take back the lies it has been given to repeat.

For a priest who services the poor the ultimate test of his solidarity would be to be treated like the poor. I suppose I really ought to be pleased and honored to be treated as one of the poor God so loves, but like the poor I often feel oppressed and indeed abandoned.

I hope and pray that my arrest and treatment by the police might help just a few people to understand the desperate plight of the poor in our very own country. I hope it might move people of goodwill to bring an end to the daily oppression in the inner-city. The time has long since passed to change, not maintain, the status quo of the poor.

[brer cat]

1. Thank your friend

for a very thoughtful addition to the Ferguson situation. Understanding is needed on many levels.

K&R

[VanGoghRocks]

2. For some reason, Chuck's words really opened my eyes to how the poor and

people of color experience the police, almost completely differently from the way I was brought up to perceive them (until I hit college and thereafter):

Police are not social change agents. They function as stabilizers. The purpose and function of the police is always to maintain the status quo. If you're blessed by the status quo, then the police are perceived as benign or even beneficial. The promise of the police is to restore your sense of order to your settings. If the status quo is harsh, oppressive and nearly hopeless, then one perceives the police as an instrument of oppression and evil because they do not remove the harsh, oppressive and hopeless elements from the circumstances.

[brer cat]

3. Right.

I had never viewed in quite that way before. It is a thought-provoking piece of writing.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, VanGoghRocks.

[TheKentuckian]

5. Important post! Thank you.

[immoderate]

6. Hmm...

--imm

[countryjake]

7. K&R!

[Laelth]

8. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[bigtree]

9. rec

. . . thank you for providing this perspective.