Last weekend, a Black woman walking her dog at the North Avenue Beach had a troubling encounter with a Chicago police officer.
The incident took place after midnight when the lakefront area is officially closed, prohibiting dog walking, and it was filmed both by the woman,whose name is Nikkita Brown, and bystanders. Those brief videos, released to the news media by an attorney representing Brown,who was not arrested, appear to show the officer and Brown getting into a physical altercation that, at one point, involved the officer making a grab for her cellphone.
The attorney, Keenan Saulter, claimed racial profiling on the grounds that there were also white people in the area whom the officer did not approach. The videos do not provide a lot of context, and history teaches us footage can be used selectively or otherwise not reveal the whole truth. But the incident was enough to spark an investigation by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot chose her words carefully, saying she was “quite disturbed” by what she saw, and Chicago police Superintendent David Brown said that the officer involved had been placed on administrative duties pending an investigation.
Some Chicagoans will see this as a clear case of racial profiling. Others will say the woman was not supposed to be there, which is true, and the officer was doing his job during a tough summer in a city on edge. Some will say it is too hard to tell from videos released by an attorney with much to gain and will want to wait for a full investigation.
But on the face of it, most citizens likely will see this as a minor incident in the long, troubled history of the Chicago Police Department and Black Chicagoans.
Certainly not something rising to the level, say, of a police shooting. Maybe not something worth an editorial.
But the work of the economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. says otherwise. In his paper “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” published in 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy, Fryer argues that his data shows that Black people are no more likely to be the victims of extreme police use of force, as in being shot and killed, than other racial groups. But when it comes to what Fryer calls “nonlethal” uses of force, he argues that citizens of color are vastly more likely to have such an encounter with police use of force, and, crucially, that remains true even after controls for other factors, such as what the citizen is actually doing at the time, are factored in.
Fryer is famous but controversial and has detractors on both sides of the political divide. Some scholars dispute his findings, and, although once the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, he was suspended for two years from Harvard University in 2019 following allegations of sexual harassment, which he denied. Fryer was reinstated in July 2021 after completing required training “on sexual harassment, boundary setting, and power dynamics in the workplace during his suspension,” according to the Harvard Crimson, though he’ll still be barred from holding advisory or supervisory positions for another two years.
Fryer’s work is nonetheless useful in the wake of this incident because it makes the argument that what happened at the lakefront does matter, even if there was fault on both sides and even if the citizen was wrong to be in a closed park.
There is ample evidence, Fryer found, that the daily drip of encounters with police force is what makes people of color distrust police, and he offers empirical evidence that people of color are right when they claim that they are being singled out on racial grounds in the kinds of incidents that don’t typically make the newspaper.
To put it another way, what happened this past weekend is important because it contributes to the kind of mistrust of the police that leads to other bad things, such as increased tension and an unwillingness to help the police solve crimes. Get that right, his work suggests, and other bigger problems that require cooperation between police and the policed might be easier to solve.
Another way to look at this is through the simple lens of customer service. Even when a customer is wrong, a smart business owner does not tolerate even minor levels of abuse by a staffer, lest the customer depart the encounter with a bad impression of the business. Reputation is important in future interactions.
While we appreciate the stresses of the job and the unfairness of some of the relentless criticism, CPD certainly could move more in the direction of courteous service, and its leadership could impress upon rank-and-file officers the importance thereof in the big scheme of things.
You might think of this as the flip side of the “broken windows” theory of policing, which argues that by not tolerating minor crime, police help prevent more serious infractions. What if that were applied to police officers themselves?
By not tolerating the minor incidents of aggression, major improvements in trust could happen. Fryer’s work argues that this is far more important than focusing on the relatively few incidents of serious use of force, the ones that occupy almost all of our civic debate on the topic, precisely because they offer the best opportunities for political grandstanding.
Discussions over police reform, and the reduction of the insufferable gun violence endemic to this city, are surely the most important conversations Chicago needs to have at this moment.
Attention understandably goes to the horror of a citizen shot by a police officer, but there is real evidence not only that the daily drip of encounters with a police force does profound damage to how people of color view the police, but that those seemingly minor incidents actually then make it harder to keep killers off the streets of our city.
It’s an issue in drastic need of immediate attention, beyond the usual screaming from different sides of the political divide.
