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From: Jasper
Date: 1/1/01
Time: 1:36:28 AM
Jean,
Yes, you are catching on. An ambitious, articulate, African-American can rise to remarkable heights in this country simply by showing his or her face and towing the company line. White politicians would never get away with the racist things you hear black ones saying all the time. The less integrity he has the easier it is for him to make it--but that's probably true with everyone.
The cops shooting black people left and right in Detroit are black and white. But whether their supervisors are black or white they rally around the blue every time.
Bill Gates AND Willie Wilson did everything in their power to protect Mark Fuhrman and his buddies Parks isn't even looking at the cliques of white racist cops in the Police Protective League. He has done nothing to investigate the disappearance of an UNKNOWN NUMBER of Fuhrman's records - which is like refusing to look at an unknown number of votes in an election. The police have admitted to "thinning" Fuhrman's records for "administrative" reasons (whatever that means). But we know he was one complaint short of being included in the Christopher Commission's list of problem officers. And we know that Jarvis Bowers, the man Fuhrman put into a chokehold for jaywalking and threatened to kill was not included in his record. We know about Bowers only because Jeffrey Toobin's wife worked with him.
So, what are we left with here? We have a white racist cop who boasted of participating in the murder and framing blacks and Hispanics with other white racist cops. We have this guy as an elected leader in a police organization characterize as a "bastion of white supremacy." We have a scandal focusing on black cops who are charged with murdering blacks and Hispanics and belonging to black gangs. And we have leadership in the LAPD and in the DA's office that's trying to keep that focus as narrow as possible.
Whatever the problem is, it has to be structural and it has to go back a long way. You wouldn't have that many bad cops in that department if they didn't serve a useful function for the people responsible for hiring and firing them. It would not surprise me if officers like Perez and Mack were recruited specifically to be the kinds of cops they proved to be. --Jasper