Hiring Black and brown officers is not a silver bullet for police reform. Here’s why. | Calavia-Robertson

As a white Minneapolis police officer firmly pressed his knee on George Floyd’s neck, another police officer — a Black man — did nothing to stop him. The rookie officer, Alex Kueng, instead held Floyd’s back as he lay on the ground crying for his mother and struggled to breathe.

Kueng’s own siblings have condemned his behavior on that fateful day. His sister, who joined protests calling for her brother’s arrest, has said that as a Black man who “knows right from wrong,” her brother should’ve intervened.

But the truth is, there are other Kueng’s on the force. He’s far from the only officer of color who’s failed to act in the best interest of another person of color while on duty.

In New Jersey, we’ve seen it play out in other less egregious but still shocking incidents.

In Perth Amboy, a sergeant who’s said to be Latina, last year actually escalated a situation involving a group of young Black and Latino bike riders. She appears in a video that’s racked up more than 5 million views arguing with a Black teenager she decided to detain for riding his bicycle without a 50-cent license tag. How many kids in the suburbs had a license tag on their bikes?

And in a more recent viral video, an Elizabeth police officer, who is Black, was in January recorded shouting obscenities and threats at a person he told he’d “whoop” and “bust open.”

Hiring more Black and brown officers is clearly not the silver bullet many think it is. It won’t completely reform policing or make people in over-policed communities suddenly feel safer.

Yet every time there’s a viral incident in which white police officers are seen berating, beating, or even shooting Black people — or as recently happened in Bridgewater, practicing racial profiling by breaking up a fight between two teens and cuffing only the Black teen while the lighter-skinned teen watches comfortably from a couch — one of the most common collective public laments is, “if only there were more Black police officers, if only there were more Latinos, more Asians, more officers of color…if only, then maybe…”

Then maybe things would be different. But just maybe.

I wholeheartedly agree that it is imperative for police departments across America to reflect the diversity of the communities they protect. And I know that’s not even close to happening now because research shows that in 99 of the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, there are more white police officers than white residents. The same is true in New Jersey, where town after town has mostly white departments but growing Latino, Black and Asian communities.

But I also know that injecting more color into police departments where so often blue is the only one that truly matters, can’t be the answer to solving everything.

After all, “racism, and especially anti-Blackness, is deeply embedded in the very structures and cultures of the criminal justice system,” and that of course, includes law enforcement, says sociologist Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice and faculty director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management.

Police officers, regardless of their ethnoracial background, and no matter their previous allegiances, through training and socialization on the job often “become tools in this system of oppression,” she said.

For those who fail to “become properly socialized,” and try to end racism and police brutality against people of color, there are severe roadblocks: stigma, sanctions and, sometimes, even dismissal.

That’s why Smith said, representation alone is not enough “to dismantle, much less disrupt, this institution of racial domination.” For residents of Black and brown communities the presence of Black and brown officers is sometimes nothing more than “cold comfort,” she said.

Cariol Horne, a former Black Buffalo police officer who was fired in 2008 for intervening when a white colleague attempted to choke a Black suspect, is a prime example. It wasn’t until last April and after winning a lawsuit, that Horne, months shy of being eligible to receive her full pension, was finally told she’d receive it.

Neal Mack, the Black man involved in the incident, told “CBS This Morning” that the white officer choked him while he was in handcuffs. “Cariole Horne said, ‘You killing him… and she reached over and tried to grab his hand around my neck.” This is what we hope for when we get so excited about representation.

The only Black officer in the Hanover Police Department said he was “pushed out” by the racist treatment he faced from fellow officers just less than a year after joining. In a 2019 lawsuit against the township and police department the officer, Jason Jones, said his colleagues said slavery never existed, told him a Black suspect must’ve drunk alcohol because “you know how your people are,” and used the N-word.

According to the lawsuit, Jones said when he raised his concerns to his superior, he was told to put them in writing. Once he did, he says he received a preliminary notice of dismissal and was later suspended without pay.

Jones’s story is not hard to believe when you consider the disproportionate discipline faced by Black officers: An Indiana University study found “a consistent pattern of racial differences in the formal recording of [officers’] disciplinary actions in three different major metropolitan cities.”

The study showed Black officers were more likely to have recorded cases of misconduct, despite a lack of a difference between Black and white officers in the number of allegations made against them.

I’m sure the experiences of Horne, Jones and even Kueng, are not what they hoped for when they decided to become police officers. Kueng’s mother told The New York Times her son thought “diversity could force change” in a police department long accused of racism. He thought he could “bridge that gap in the community” and “change the narrative” between police and the Black community.

We all know how that turned out.

Daysi Calavia-Robertson may be reached at dc****************@************ia.com. Follow her on Instagram at @presspassdaysi or Twitter @presspassdaysi.

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