Two New York City Cops Are Killed; Our Local Bishop Speaks

Just over two weeks ago, we posted commentary here [directly below] on the grand jury decisions in the Ferguson and Staten Island police brutality cases not to indict the police officers who killed two presumed criminals they were trying to arrest.  The demonstrations against the police have continued since then, mostly in New York, but also in other cities.  It all came to a head this past Saturday afternoon when a man drove from Baltimore to Brooklyn and proceeded to shoot to death two cops sitting in their patrol car.

We were thinking perhaps that our blog post, in which we advocate efforts to offer preventive help to, and lift up, people in low-income, high-crime areas, skipped too many steps or missed the point of the demonstrations altogether.  They were, after all, anti-police demonstrations, not necessarily outbursts from demoralized people about their own seemingly powerless states of life.

Whatever the real goal, the situation got way out of hand and led to the deaths of two ordinary cops doing a routine patrol job on a Saturday afternoon.  They were not taking any actions and, as it happens, they weren't even white.  One, named Wenjian Liu, is the son of immigrant parents from China.  The other, Rafael Ramos, is Hispanic.  Officer Ramos was hardly a violent man; he was due to graduate later that very afternoon from a program that trains lay chaplains for public service in crisis times just such as this.

Feelings are heavy today in Brooklyn.  The 84^th Precinct, the officers' station, is our local precinct, the station house four blocks down the street from where we live.  We just now returned from adding some flowers to a growing collection at the front door of the building.

Brooklyn is in the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.  Our Bishop, Lawrence Provenzano, happened to have been in Brooklyn yesterday, making a long-scheduled visit at a parish in a neighborhood not far away.  Afterward, he visited the scene of the shooting at Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant and talked to local police and to the people of that community.  Then when he got home last night, he wrote to the clergy of the Diocese; the letter is posted on the Diocese website.  His own pain is palpable and he urges a second look.  Listen to some of what he says.

At Myrtle and Tompkins, I stood and talked with police officers, people on the street and residents standing on stoops or in the doorways of the Tompkins Houses. The police officers talked about their fears and those of their families. They talked about being accustomed to dealing with critical situations - homicides, rapes, domestic disturbance, robberies, but not being able to rationally deal with "their own" being murdered.    At Myrtle and Tompkins people talked to me about being scared by all the killings, the rhetoric all around them, and now the possible negative reaction in the community following the murder of the two officers.

It became clear to me today that regardless of what happens next; what organizing goes on, what investigations are launched, programs developed and rhetoric shared, the church . . . must not engage in grandstanding, instigating, organizing, or even marching any longer.  People are scared, hurt, confused and bewildered.  The place of the church in all of this is not to seize the moment to be relevant or for that matter prophetic.  Our place in all of this for right now is to incarnate peace - peace in language, peace in program, peace in attitude and peace in church.

I am calling upon the clergy of the diocese to be agents of peace in the neighborhoods and communities we serve.  Our young people need some assurance and security. Our young people of color need to know that we will stand with them, that we will protect and guide them in sensible and responsible ways. They need to know that we will teach them how to stand up for their rights and stand with them when those rights are violated without resorting to violence.  Those who serve us and protect us need to know that we do not wish them harm and that we see them for who they are and aren't. The police need to know that we are allies with them in service to the community.

. . . . I am asking that we strive, and teach and practice peace and peacemaking. I am asking us to put the needs of our young people, their families and communities first. Violence cannot be a response to violence. Hatred must be remedied by love - love incarnate, made real by those who are called to be the Body of Christ.

. . . .

May Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos rest in peace.  May their families know the comfort and mercy of Jesus. And may the people of our communities find and know peace.

We are struck by the strength of our Bishop's words.  And there are more in his full text.  As we work for peace in our cities, perhaps our own suggestions for fostering more education and encouraging business opportunities in low-income neighborhoods aren't too far-fetched after all.  They're long-run, to be sure, but these situations will keep cropping up and need to be tackled at the base.  We'll be following up soon with some more specific ideas along these lines.

Meantime, may you all enjoy peace – and joy – for Christmas and for many days after. 

Ferguson, Staten Island and Moving Forward

On November 25, Barbara Crafton posted the following comment on the Geranium Farm Facebook page [1]:

FERGUSON
Discouraged and sad about yet another young black man who won't grow old, yet another set of parents who won't see grandchildren, yet another town torn apart. And another missed chance for all of us.

Or is it missed? We still have a chance to learn a better way. But first we must admit that we need one. And that means we must listen to one another, and not leave the room when someone says something that we don't like, muttering something snide about "playing the race card." Newsflash: we are ALL playing the race card, all the time, and most of us don't know it. None of us can opt out of this deadly game. 

But we CAN decide how we will play. Truth or a comfortable lie? A desire to understand or an insistence on remaining ignorant of realities other than the one we ourselves inhabit. 

We have no grounds for despair, and no right to it. Not as long as we're still alive.

We were intending to add some of our own commentary to this about moving forward from here.  Those thoughts originated as an extension of the article we posted two weeks ago about lower labor force participation and how that condition might be corrected.  That problem may be different from the racism questions Barbara discusses, but the two may have similar answers.

Then, Wednesday, to our surprise, a grand jury in Staten Island, New York, declared that it would not indict another white policeman for his fierce action against still another black man he was trying to arrest.  This one is closer to home, quite literally.

We live at the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge.  On that afternoon of December 3^rd, we had occasion to cross the street right at the entrance to the Bridge, at about 5:15PM, roughly two-and-a-half hours after the grand jury's decision became known.  There were police everywhere.  A block or so on up a hill toward Brooklyn Heights, a group of police vans and cars was parked next to a park.  The cops, fortunately, were standing around idly because right then they had nothing to do.  I chatted with one of them in a nearby diner, and he told me that, in contrast, his colleagues elsewhere in the city were plenty busy.  Indeed, that was the time when the "die-in" at Grand Central Station was going on.  The next day, after a night of demonstrations around the city, heavy, visible police presence remained in our local neighborhood and, I assume, elsewhere around the city.

Unlike Ferguson, these New York City protests seem non-violent; hardly any property has been damaged and we've not heard of any significant injuries.

We do hope the judge in the Staten Island court will accede to the prosecutor's request and release some of the grand jury records.  Through various press reports and conversations, we have come to understand, though, that Eric Garner was actively resisting arrest, which makes the policeman's actions look less overdone than the video of the incident alone might indicate.  Also, we learned that the senior police officer in Daniel Pantaleo's patrol unit that day was a sergeant who is an African American woman.  At the same time, our point here is not to make judgments either way on this whole unfortunate mess.

Our point is to talk about the kinds of actions that might address some of the underlying problems.  Why are those black men so desperate that they robbed a convenience store or sold unlicensed cigarettes.  Why are their communities less well off than surrounding towns or neighborhoods.  We've found two specific approaches; they're long-term actions, not immediate responses, and they're meant to lift up people in lower-income neighborhoods, regardless of race.  These themes seem to fit Barbara Crafton's broader perspective described in her Ferguson comments.

First, we've just become acquainted with a group in Atlanta called Operation HOPE.  Perhaps some of you already know them.  The founder is John Hope Bryant, an associate of Andrew Young; one of the board members is Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Operation HOPE works in schools in low-income areas to help students learn about legitimate banking and business activities.  In a recent book on his work[2], Bryant explains that the people who live there have entrepreneurial talents and leanings; it's just that their businesses concentrate on illegitimate activities like drugs – or in Mr. Garner's case, selling unlicensed cigarettes on a street corner.  So Bryant wants to shift them to more fulfilling work; he talks about a young man who took a notary public exam and then set up a portable notary business.  He talks about three young men who set up a cleaning and yard-work business in his own community.  Then Operation HOPE works with banks to set up regularized financial services in these neighborhoods; bank managers go into schools and explain standard banking to students, so they know there is an alternative to check-cashing outlets and loan sharks.  SunTrust Banks in Atlanta is one of the main supporters and participants in these efforts, as are other financial institutions.

We've also just become acquainted with Nicole Baker Fulgham.  Dr. Fulgham is founder of The Expectations Project, an organization that seeks to further education reform and narrow the academic achievement gap by enlisting particular contributions from churches and people of faith.   She will appear in January at Trinity Institute at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York.  She has written Educating All God's Children describing the need for this work [3].  We are still reading the book, and the early pages document ways poverty handicaps educational efforts.  Intriguingly, Dr. Fulgham comments on the transformation of the population of the southern California city where she lived from mainly African American to Hispanic; as that shift took place, she explains, the African-American leaders in the school system were hesitant to yield their governance positions and influence to the incoming Hispanic population even as it became the majority in the community.  Thus, as Barbara Crafton commented, we can all be racists in one form or another, even if we believe we want to be anti-racist.

How hard is this?

At least we can see some ways forward here, which address at least two issues at once.  We can perhaps ease inequality by lifting up the bottom groups and helping them learn to generate their own growth.  We can limit crime by showing people fruitful, legal ways to make money.  And we can encourage participation in the real labor force, not the shadow economy.  The drawback, of course, is getting versions of Mr. Bryant's and Dr. Fulgham's programs in place in the vast number of locations where they are needed.  That takes time, but maybe if we can all look forward to something constructive, then fewer people will feel the need to stage a die-in in Grand Central Station or – this evening – in the intersection in front of Brooklyn's Barclay Center sports arena.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Geranium-Farm/114108345295703

[2] John Hope Bryant,  How the Poor Can Save Capitalism.  San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.  2014.  Operation HOPE's website is www.operationhope.org.

[3] Nicole Baker Fulgham, Educating All God's Children.  Grand Rapids, MI:  Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Company.  2013.  See the Facebook page of the related organization, The Expectations Project: https://www.facebook.com/TheExpectationsProject/timeline