From Washington, D.C. to Washington State, elected officials are bracing for violence this week. They are summoning police and National Guard troops to their newly fortified state houses across the country, as armed demonstrators gather in advance of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The deployments, however, come amid questions over whether law enforcement can be trusted to restrain the extremists who are loyal to outgoing President Donald Trump. On Monday, two U.S. Army National Guard members with alleged ties to right wing extremist movements were removed from the Biden inauguration security detail, the NY Times reported. This comes after the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the lax response by Capitol Police officers which, for many, underscored the nation’s long history of disparate treatment of Black and white demonstrators by police.
In New York City, these fears have escalated over the last year as some officers have hinted at far-right political affiliations. In June, an NYPD officer was caught on video appearing to make a white supremacist hand sign while stationed at a Black Lives Matter protest.
In July, Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants’ Benevolent Association, appeared on Fox News with a coffee mug displaying imagery from QAnon, a right-wing conspiracy theory that Trump is waging a secret war against Satanic cannibals in the “deep state” who are running a global child-trafficking operation. Mullins later claimed the mug did not belong to him. The previous summer, in 2019, Mullins sent an email to NYPD sergeants that included a racist video referring to Black people as "monsters" and public housing as a "war zone."
In August, the Police Benevolent Association, the largest union representing NYPD officers, backed Trump, its first presidential endorsement in 36 years.
"Many times people say that a union like ours, law enforcement groups, give endorsements. Not in the New York City PBA, sir," Pat Lynch, the union’s president, declared at one of Trump’s New Jersey golf clubs, with the president in attendance. "In the New York City PBA, Mr. President, you earn the endorsement and you’ve earned this endorsement. I’m proud to give it."
The NYPD did not respond to repeated requests for interview or comment about what it is doing to identify and root out white supremacist elements on the force.
Some people who have participated in last year’s New York City protests say they believe these ideological leanings explain why the NYPD seems to treat some protests and protesters differently than others.
Robert Goyanes took part in a June 4th Mott Haven event to protest the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a white police officer in Minnesota last May. In a report late last year, Human Rights Watch concluded that NYPD “planned the assault and mass arrests of peaceful protesters,” at the event. More than 260 people were arrested and many were assaulted by NYPD officers.
“The organizers of the protests were Black and the large percentage of the protesters there that day were Black and brown,” Goyanes said. “And I think there's just sort of an obvious connection in terms of how they responded to the protests there versus how they responded to protests elsewhere."
Throughout the summer last year, NYPD officers were caught on camera by reporters driving into, pushing, and whacking Black Lives Matter protesters.
In contrast, officers showed restraint at right-wing demonstrations against COVID-19 restrictions. In October in Borough Park, for example, police made few arrests as hordes of white, Orthodox Jews took over streets and tossed masks into burning garbage.
Listen to reporters Arun Venugopal and George Joseph's radio story for WNYC's Race and Justice Unit:
Even within Black Lives Matter protests, NYPD officers appeared to treat Black protesters more harshly than white ones: A report by the New York Attorney General found that of the 2,087 people arrested during protests from May 28th to June 7th, 44% were white and 39% were Black. But less than 4% of whites who were arrested were charged with a felony, as compared to 16% of Blacks who were arrested.
James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor and an expert on the history of policing, argues this disparate treatment has deep historical roots. Modern police forces grew out of patrols used to track down and subjugate slaves, he explained, and this lineage shapes which protesters are viewed as dangerous, and which are not.
“There's both a sense that Black people are threatening and a sense that the only thing that is going to constrain and restrain them is brute force,” whereas for white protesters, he continued, “at a more unconscious level, [police] just don't perceive those individuals as threatening.”
Pedro Serrano, an NYPD housing officer who grew up in a largely Italian section of the Bronx in the 1970s and ‘80s and is Hispanic, says he learned to fear the Irish and Italian police officers.
"Like them stopping me, throwing me up against a wall, talking bad to me is normal to me back then,” he said. “When I sit back and look at it now. I see how racist it really was.”
The department continued to be plagued by endemic racism in the decades that followed. In 1992, thousands of mostly white, off-duty police officers rioted outside City Hall, as on-duty officers stood by. The mob was there to protest Mayor David Dinkins’ plan for an all-civilian police review board.
Some carried posters portrayed Dinkins, a Democrat and the city’s first African American mayor, as a washroom attendant. Others caricatured Dinkins as a man with a large afro and big lips. Some officers in the crowd screamed the N-word and others broke into City Hall. One of the marquee speakers, Republican Rudy Giuliani, would go on to defeat Dinkins in the next mayoral race. The Giuliani-era brought the introduction of stop and frisk, the controversial NYPD policy resulting in the stopping of hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino men, over the two decades that followed. A federal judge ruled the practice unconstitutional in 2013, which led to a court-appointed monitor to oversee reforms at NYPD -- a monitor that is still in place.
In 2004, after working for years at a meat market in Hunts Point, Serrano joined the NYPD to better support his family. And over the years, he felt as though the racism within the ranks diminished. Of the 36,000 officers in the department, nearly half today are non-white. “More minorities were coming in, things were looking better,” he said.
Still, a whole generation of commanders came up in the NYPD of Serrano’s youth. Last month, an NYPD investigation confirmed that a deputy inspector in charge of countering workplace harassment, James F. Kobel, had posted numerous screeds against Black, Jewish, and Hispanic people on an online message board popular with police. Kobel referred to Black officers as “f-cking animals,” and insulted Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark, who is African American, as a “gap-tooth wildebeest.”
Since the election of Trump and the months of protests that followed the killing of Floyd, Serrano says he has noticed a change in what some of his colleagues are willing to say openly. “They’ll be talking about Black Lives Matter, how they’re disgusted with them,” he said, recounting the kinds of locker room conversations he hears. “And I’ll interject and say ‘Hey um, you realize not every Black Lives Matter [protester] is stealing TVs, right?”
After Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the NYPD announced that it is investigating whether any of its officers participated in the pro-Trump riot. Serrano, who makes clear he is not necessarily against all Trump policies says he thinks the investigation sends a strong signal.
Last week, the NYPD announced that 200 officers would be deployed to D.C. in advance of the Inauguration, to help with security.
Arun Venugopal and George Joseph report for the Race & Justice Unit at Gothamist/WNYC.
