|
 |
FBI
Law Enforcement
& Community: Bending the Lines Toward Safety and Justice
James B. Comey, Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, IL
October 23, 2015
It’s great to be back at the place I called home for three years.
I graduated in 1985, which may seem like the 1800s to you, but to me it
does feel like yesterday.
When I first walked into this building, I felt that same sense of fear
and anxiety and anticipation that I think all first years share—that
“Am I smart enough to be here?” feeling.
But I also felt excitement and anticipation. For me, law school was a
time of joy and hope. Joy in learning my way around the law—learning
how to orbit a problem and to ask myself hard questions and to be asked
hard questions. Hope that I could be of some use, to be part of the
greater good—to make the world a little bit better.
That sounds idealistic, I know. But I think all law students are
idealistic in some sense.
We all share a fascination with the law, and an idea of what it could
be, and what it should be … how it can protect civil rights and civil
liberties, the notion of keeping people safe and righting what is wrong.
I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with my law degree but my
hope was to find a job that would allow me to make a difference in some
way. This school gave me the confidence and tools to serve people who
needed help.
At the time that this school was my home, the South Side was my
community. The neighborhood was one place I would go when I needed a
break from the pressures of this place.
Back then, I played a lot of basketball, maybe too much basketball. In
1983, my second year of law school, I became the only white player in
the Ogden Park Basketball League at 65th and Racine. My teammates joked
that I integrated the league, which I guess is true.
They weren’t so much focused on integration as on winning, and they
knew you can’t teach height. “He can’t jump but he sure is tall.”
The next season, I brought the second white player ever.
And with a group of guys who played the game beautifully, I was lucky
enough to be part of a championship team.
Like my law professors and my fellow law students, my teammates helped
me to see life through different eyes. We had different histories and
different perspectives, but we all just wanted to play the game we
loved for a few hours.
In 1985, as I was getting ready to leave Chicago, we all started to see
ominous changes in the neighborhood that weren’t good.
It was when crack cocaine began to spread like cancer, in Chicago and
across America. Kids were shooting kids in turf battles over the sale
of cocaine, innocent people were caught in the crossfire, and violent
crime and homicide rates began to rise dramatically.
It was the beginning of a period during which American cities—and
minority neighborhoods in particular—experienced historic and horrific
levels of violent crime.
It was a time when I chose to start my career in government trying to
be part of doing something useful—a choice I’ve never regretted. And
one that I would encourage all of you to consider, no matter what kind
of public service you might pursue, for at least part of your career.
* * *
Now, all these years later, I fear we are facing another wave of
violent crime and homicide, and our communities are once again in
trouble. And the trouble is complicated, layered, and painful.
I imagine two lines: one line is law enforcement and the other line is
the folks we serve and protect, especially in communities of color.
I think those two lines are arcing away from each other, at an
increasing rate.
Each incident that involves real or perceived police misconduct drives
one line this way. Each time an officer is attacked in the line of
duty, it drives the other line this way.
I actually feel the lines continuing to arc away from each other,
incident by incident, video by video, more and more quickly.
And that’s a terrible place to be.
And just as those lines are arcing away from each other—and maybe
because they are arcing away—we have a crisis of violent crime in some
of our most vulnerable communities across the country.
Here in Chicago, just last month, more than 50 people were shot in just
one weekend. The next weekend, the numbers rose even higher. An
11-month-old boy was shot in the hip. His mother and grandmother were
shot and killed right next to him.
In cities across the country, we are seeing an explosion of senseless
violence.
These people aren’t just numbers or blips on a screen. They are parents
and children and friends. They are young people who could have done
more with their lives.
And this not a time for: “Not my neighborhood, not my problem.”
When that kind of violence becomes part of our everyday existence,
everyone pays a price. And it will take everyone to make it right—to
make sure those lines start to arc not away from each other, but toward
one another—toward a better understanding of what we all need from one
another, and how we can get there together.
My Work as a Prosecutor
Let me start by telling you a little bit about my time as a prosecutor.
After leaving this great place, I worked in the late 1980s and 1990s as
a prosecutor.
I worked alongside many in law enforcement who were trying to save
lives.
Many in law enforcement in New York City—where I worked then—believed
we were destined to have a structural level of violence of more than
2,000 murders each year. Two thousand was simply the baseline level of
violence that we had to accept. The job of law enforcement was to try
to push the carnage down toward 2,000.
That was so wrong.
Last year, 328 people were murdered in New York. That is still 328 too
many, but it is a number that was unimaginable 25 years ago.
When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1990s, that
city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of
violent crime.
But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most
part, white people weren’t dying; black people were dying.
Most white people could drive around the problem. If you were white and
not involved in the drug trade as a buyer or a seller, you were largely
apart from the violence. You could escape it.
But if you were black and poor, it didn’t matter whether you were a
player in the drug trade or not, because violent crime dominated your
life, your neighborhood, your world.
There was no way to drive around the violence that came with the drug
trade and the drug trade was everywhere in your neighborhood. And that
meant the violence was everywhere.
The notion of a “non-violent” drug gang member would have elicited a
tired laugh from a resident of Richmond’s worst neighborhoods.
Because the entire trade was a plague of violence that strangled
Richmond’s black neighborhoods. The lookouts, runners, mill-workers,
enforcers, and dealers were all cut from the same suffocating cloth.
Whether they pulled the trigger or not, those folks were killing the
community.
Like so many in law enforcement in the 1980s and 1990s, we worked hard
to try to save lives in those Richmond neighborhoods—in those black
neighborhoods—by rooting out the drug dealers, the predators, the gang
bangers, the killers. Of course, we also worked “up the chain” to lock
up big-time dealers all the way to Colombia.
But we felt a tremendous urgency to try to save lives in the poor
neighborhoods of Richmond.
We worked in part through a program called “Weed and Seed.” We worked
hard to weed those neighborhoods by removing those who were strangling
it, so that seeds could be planted to allow good things to grow and to
fill that space.
The dream was that, someday, maybe kids could play in the parks and old
folks could sit on the porch and watch those kids play.
As we did that work, I remember being asked why we were doing so much
prosecuting in black neighborhoods and locking up so many black men.
After all, Richmond was surrounded by areas with largely white
populations. Surely there were drug dealers in the suburbs.
My answer was simple: We are there in those neighborhoods because
that’s where people are dying. These are the guys we lock up because
they are the predators choking off the life of a community.
We did this work because we believed that all lives matter, especially
the most vulnerable.
But the people asking those questions were not the black ministers or
community leaders in the poorest neighborhoods. Those good people in
those bad neighborhoods already knew why we were there locking up
felons with guns and drug addicts with guns.
They supported it because they, too, dreamed of a future of freedom and
life for their neighborhoods. Those leaders and ministers were the
seeders, who hoped to grow something in the safe space created by our
weeding—something that would be healthy and that would last.
Seeing Reality Clearly
Over the last two decades, in most places in America, what was only a
dream 25 years ago has come true.
Kids of all colors went to school in 2014 in an America with
historically low crime. And just that term—“historically low”—doesn’t
quite capture how the world has changed between 1990 and 2014.
I was born in 1960 into a more violent America than we had in 2014. We
haven’t been in such a good place for more than 50 years.
In 2014, grandparents—especially in minority neighborhoods—could sit on
the porch, watch the kids play, and remember the bad old days when the
gang bangers and drug dealers ruled the roost. They remember what it
was like, even if so many Americans can’t, because so many Americans
were lucky enough not to have experienced it.
To achieve a historically peaceful America—especially in the hardest
hit neighborhoods—a whole lot of young men went to jail, especially men
of color.
Folks can debate—and should debate—causes of the decline in crime, but
surely serious people can agree law enforcement contributed
significantly to saving neighborhoods and lives by the thousands. The
work of law enforcement helped get us to 2014, a place most people,
especially law enforcement, thought impossible.
Reasonable people can also disagree about whether sentences were too
long. And I think there is some really good work going on right now in
law enforcement, at the prosecutorial and judicial levels, and all the
way up to Capitol Hill, to address federal sentences, to be more just,
and that’s good to do. There is no doubt that unaddressed drug
addiction was a root problem of many who were locked up for property
crimes or other non-violent offenses. But we should debate sentencing
reform with a fair and honest understanding of history and avoid
language that distorts reality.
Nobody “disappeared” from Richmond or New York or Detroit or L.A. in
the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, case by case, bad guys were arrested,
prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced. They didn’t “disappear”; they
were removed from their neighborhoods to state and federal prisons,
where they received the protections of the Constitution and where
family and friends could visit them.
There is no doubt that each of those convictions and jail terms was in
some sense a tragedy. There is no doubt that the pain and impact for
families left behind was enormous and lasting. There is no doubt that
many were left feeling they were forced to choose safety over justice.
But each time a predator or drug dealer was moved from the street to
prison, that neighborhood got a little better.
And it didn’t happen “en masse.”
Each drug dealer, each mugger, each killer, and each felon with a gun
had his own lawyer, his own case, his own time before judge and jury,
his own sentencing, and, in many cases, an appeal or other
post-sentencing review. There were thousands and thousands of those
individual cases, but to speak of “mass incarceration” I believe is
confusing, and it distorts an important reality.
And we must stare hard at reality if we are to make good decisions.
That work added up to a very large number of people in jail, especially
young men of color. But, then, there were a very large number of young
men of color involved in criminal activity in America’s cities and in
America’s most desperate neighborhoods.
Each arrest and each prosecution represented a failure on multiple
levels of society, and there are many reasons for those failures,
stretching back many, many years—frankly, all the way back to the
beginning of this country and even before that.
But the pulling of those many weeds, as painful as that was, allowed
churches, schools, community groups, and parents to plant seeds that
have grown into healthy neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that are free and
alive in 2014 in ways that were unimaginable 25 years ago.
We cannot lose sight of that.
A problem we face today is that nobody speaks for those who have not
been victimized by crime in recent years because those “victims” don’t
exist. There are tens of thousands of people who were not murdered or
raped or robbed or intimidated because crime dropped in our country.
The victims don’t exist, so they can’t form a constituency, they can’t
talk to the press, they can’t talk to Congress.
There are millions of people—people of color—who in 2014 enjoyed their
lives and their neighborhoods in ways that were impossible in 1990.
They were not trapped in their homes, putting their children to sleep
in bathtubs to keep them safe from stray bullets, so they are not here
to participate in this important discussion.
They were out living.
Somehow we need to imagine their voices in the current debate about
justice in this country as we strive to make ourselves more just.
Although we have come far as a nation, we still have weed-choked
neighborhoods.
We heard the voices of real live victims in August in northwest
Arkansas, when the FBI and our partners sent hundreds of agents and
officers into the predominantly black town of Blytheville to arrest
drug dealers who were suffocating the community and overwhelming local
police.
As our SWAT teams stood in the street following the arrests of the
defendants—70 of them, nearly all of whom were also black—they were met
by applause, hugs, and offers of food from the good people of that
besieged community.
Those are the voices that we have to hear. Those are the voices we
cannot forget.
Of course, we also need to hear the voices of those who have been
incarcerated and their families. We need to strive to punish
effectively and reintegrate more successfully. We need to deal with the
issues of addiction and demand for drugs that we have failed to
adequately address for generations.
Yes, it is true that young men of color have long been dramatically
over-represented among both homicide victims and killers. But it is
also true that white people buy and use most of the drugs in this
country—and the white peoples’ demand for drugs drives the drug trade
that is destroying black neighborhoods. It’s a problem our society
simply must not drive around.
* * *
And, of course, we need to improve the way we police.
As I said in a speech I gave earlier this year at Georgetown
University, there are hard truths that we in law enforcement need to
see clearly. Only by looking hard at ourselves can we improve and
really connect with the people we protect.
But as we struggle to reexamine our criminal justice system—which
surely must be done because it surely can be more just—I hope we don’t
lose sight of how we got here.
Perhaps it is true, as someone once said, that the only thing new is
the history you don’t know.
Yes, we put a whole lot of people in jail, but over that same period,
our cities were transformed.
Lives were saved; lives that matter enormously.
We cannot forget that as we try to get better.
Rising Violent Crime Rates
Part of being clear-eyed about reality requires all of us to stare—and
stare hard—at what is happening in this country this year. And to ask
ourselves what’s going on.
Because something deeply disturbing is happening all across America.
I have spoken of 2014 in this speech because something has changed in
2015. Far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year
than in many years. And let’s be clear: far more people of color are
being killed in America’s cities this year.
And it’s not the cops doing the killing.
We are right to focus on violent encounters between law enforcement and
civilians. Those incidents can teach all of us to be better.
But something much bigger is happening.
Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides
and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase.
These are cities with little in common except being American
cities—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando,
Cleveland, and Dallas.
In Washington, D.C., we’ve seen an increase in homicides of more than
20 percent in neighborhoods across the city. Baltimore, a city of
600,000 souls, is averaging more than one homicide a day—a rate higher
than that of New York City, which has 13 times the people. Milwaukee’s
murder rate has nearly doubled over the past year.
And who’s dying?
Police chiefs say the increase is almost entirely among young men of
color, at crime scenes in bad neighborhoods where multiple guns are
being recovered.
That’s yet another problem that white America can drive around, but if
we really believe that all lives matter, as we must, all of us have to
understand what is happening.
Communities of color need to demand answers.
Police and civilian leaders need to demand answers.
Academic researchers need to hit this hard.
What could be driving an increase in murder in some cities across all
regions of the country, all at the same time? What explains this map
and this calendar? Why is it happening in all of different places, all
over and all of a sudden?
I’ve been part of a lot of thoughtful conversations with law
enforcement, elected officials, academics, and community members in
recent weeks. I’ve heard a lot of theories—reasonable theories.
Maybe it’s the return of violent offenders after serving jail terms.
Maybe it’s cheap heroin or synthetic drugs. Maybe after we busted up
the large gangs, smaller groups are now fighting for turf. Maybe it’s a
change in the justice system’s approach to bail or charging or
sentencing. Maybe something has changed with respect to the
availability of guns.
These are all useful suggestions, but to my mind none of them explain
both the map and the calendar in disparate cities over the last 10
months.
But I’ve also heard another explanation, in conversations all over the
country. Nobody says it on the record, nobody says it in public, but
police and elected officials are quietly saying it to themselves. And
they’re saying it to me, and I’m going to say it to you. And it is the
one explanation that does explain the calendar and the map and that
makes the most sense to me.
Maybe something in policing has changed.
In today’s YouTube world, are officers reluctant to get out of their
cars and do the work that controls violent crime? Are officers
answering 911 calls but avoiding the informal contact that keeps bad
guys from standing around, especially with guns?
I spoke to officers privately in one big city precinct who described
being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high,
taunting them the moment they get out of their cars. They told me, “We
feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like getting out of
our cars.”
I’ve been told about a senior police leader who urged his force to
remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral
video.
So the suggestion, the question that has been asked of me, is whether
these kinds of things are changing police behavior all over the country.
And the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know whether this explains it
entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the
explanation is a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement
over the last year. And that wind is surely changing behavior.
Part of that behavior change is to be welcomed, as we continue to have
important discussions about police conduct and de-escalation and the
use of deadly force.
Those are essential discussions and law enforcement will get better as
a result.
But we can’t lose sight of the fact that there really are bad people
standing on the street with guns. The young men dying on street corners
all across this country are not committing suicide or being shot by the
cops. They are being killed, police chiefs tell me, by other young men
with guns.
Lives are saved when those potential killers are confronted by a strong
police presence and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close “What are you
guys doing on this corner at one o’clock in the morning?” policing. All
of us, civilian and law enforcement, white, black, and Latino, have an
interest in that kind of policing.
We need to be careful it doesn’t drift away from us in the age of viral
videos, or there will be profound consequences. If we are not careful,
we will lose the space in American life to talk about criminal justice
reform—to focus on recidivism and re-entry and sentencing reform—and to
talk about effective police interactions with civilians, all of which
are essential.
In a way, those conversations are a welcome luxury, made possible by
the fact that—as of 2014—we have a violent crime rate we haven’t seen
in 50 years. If what we are seeing in America this year continues, we
will be back to talking about how law enforcement needs to help rescue
black neighborhoods from the grip of violence.
All lives matter too much for us to let that happen.
We need to figure out what’s happening and deal with it now.
The Need for Better Data
One of the ways to get a better handle on what’s happening in our
communities is through more and better information.
“Data” is a dry word, but we need better data. And people tend to tune
out when you start to talk about it, but it’s important, because it
gives us the full picture of what’s happening.
It’s what smart people use to make good decisions all over the country
in all walks of life, and in all kinds of work. It saves lives in
medicine by equipping doctors in Chicago to know whether they are
facing local food poisoning or a national epidemic.
I’ve been pressing for more data for a couple of months now, and I will
continue to do so.
Data related to violent crime and homicides. Data related to
officer-involved shootings. Data related to altercations with the
citizens we serve, and attacks against law enforcement officers.
The good news is after a few months of discussions, law enforcement
leaders see it as I do and I am optimistic we will get our country the
data we need to better understand crime and policing.
It may take us a few years to get there, to get all American law
enforcement reporting through the National Incident-Based Reporting
System, which is a rich source of data. But the good news—or bad news
depending upon your perspective—is that I’m here for another eight
years and I will continue to push for this kind of vital information.
And maybe most of all, we need to remember this isn’t just data.
These are lives; these are families.
These are not just complex criminal issues; they are complex social
issues, as old as our country.
We need better information to make better decisions.
We need everyone working together to find solutions, armed with facts.
* * *
I wanted to meet with you today because this is not just a law
enforcement challenge. And it is good that we have heard from President
Obama, and from the Attorney General on this issue. And Monday, I’m
going to speak to 10,000 police chiefs from across the country about
these same issues. But this isn’t just a law enforcement challenge.
It is your challenge.
It is our collective challenge—as lawyers, as concerned citizens, as
Americans.
Because these are our communities. These are our neighbors, our
children, our friends—our street corners and schools and public parks.
We want them to be safe; we want them to thrive.
And when drugs and gangs and gun violence start to rip our communities
apart, we cannot just drive around the problem.
We must force ourselves to do the hard work. We have to weed where we
must and seed wherever we can.
We all need to talk and we all need to listen, not just about the easy
things, but about the hard things, too. About the state of our
communities, the state of policing, and the state of our relationships.
These conversations will be bumpy and difficult. Because people are
challenging. And perspectives can be difficult to change.
We must find a way to bend these lines toward each other.
And here’s the good news: It’s hard to hate up close. It’s hard to hate
someone once you sit and stare into their eyes and start to understand
where they’re coming from, and why they feel the way they do.
We have to get up close if we are to bend these lines. We must start
seeing one another more clearly.
We have to resist stereotypes. We have to look for information beyond
anecdotes. And we must understand that we need each other.
Our lines—law enforcement and civilian—are best when they travel
together and lead us all toward safety and justice.
Thank you for what you’ve done and what you will do. I look forward to
the conversation.
|
|
|
|
