What’s Wrong with America?
By John Dorschner
“We can’t expect the police culture to differ from our national culture of which they are only a part…. The cops will never be any better or worse than we are. And they reflect our values. Including the covert ones.”
That’s the conclusion of Tom Petersen, who has been on the front lines of Miami’s racial divide for more than half a century: First as a VISTA volunteer, then as an assistant public defender, then in the state attorney’s office, rising to be the chief administrative assistant for Janet Reno. From 1984 to 1989, he took a leave of absence from Reno’s office to run an experiment in public housing projects trying to lower crime rates. He was appointed to the circuit court in 1989 and assigned to the juvenile division. He took senior status in 2000 and taught sociology at the University of Miami. He retired completely in 2016.
When I asked him what he thought of the national eruption that has followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, his thoughts drifted way back, with “a sense of deja vu not only going back to the 1980 disturbance/riot (there has always been the semantic issue: those sympathetic to the events use the word ‘disturbance’, those who are critical use the word ‘riot’ — I was taught that many years ago) — but equally to the 1968 disturbance (choice of descriptive reflects my politics), which I was as much or more involved in than the 1980 events….
When the Looting Starts, The Shooting Starts
“In late 1967, when Chief Headley announced his ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts,’ I had just passed the Florida Bar and began my job as the first Public Defender in Juvenile Court (required by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1967 Gault decision giving indigent juveniles the right to counsel). I remember it clearly because [Headley’s] policy was directed at the perceived wave of black juvenile crime at the time (similar to the same phenomenon in the mid-1990s that brought the wave of transfers of juveniles to adult court and the other get-tough on crime laws of the Clinton era). I was the only attorney for the juveniles, so I represented all those (black) kids as well as those arrested during the 1968 disturbance the following summer.
Police Using the N-Word in the Courthouse
“In late 1967 juvenile court had just integrated Youth Hall the prior spring and caseworker caseloads were still segregated: black kids had black probation officers and white kids had white ones. Schools in late 1967 were just beginning to integrate (thirteen years after Brown !!). I remember Judge Sidney Weaver, one of the four judges, calling black probation officers “boy” and that causing a protest by black staff. And in that context the police treated black kids consistently differently than white kids and the n-word was used liberally by cops around the courthouse quite liberally.
“All of that goes to show that in my mind the racist elements of ‘police culture’ that we saw in the 1980 events.” [Petersen is referring to the five Miami cops who went on trial for the killing black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie or covering up the way he died. Their acquittals on all charges sparked riots that killed 18 and did $100 million property damage.]
The 1980 events “pretty clearly still lingers forty years later — at least in Miami can be identified and documented as overt and prevalent in 1968. Only twelve years elapsed between 1968 and 1980. The same police, or their younger peers, were [still] part of the Headley culture.”
Racism Becoming Less Overt
“As the civil rights movement brought societal change, the racism became less overt. I remember specific cops who regularly used the n-word in 1967 no longer using the word by 1972. But they were the same cops.
“And that judge stopped calling black probation officers ‘boy.’ It occurred to me that for much of the juvenile (and criminal) justice system the impact of the civil rights movement was… semantic.
“Does it follow that an entrenched and quite overt racist ‘police culture’ which became subtle and covert by 1972 might still linger in 2020? I think it can because the ‘police culture’ really is a reflection of our larger societal culture and I really think that we are currently seeing clearly that racism remains an unresolved, albeit covert, part of our larger culture. As long as our society condones racism, police culture will reflect the larger culture of which police are only one component….
“I had come here as a VISTA Volunteer in 1966 and was thoroughly familiar with those inequitable and really terrible conditions. When I went back to work in the public housing projects in the late 1980s, conditions had not changed much at all.
We Haven’t Moved Forward at All
Today, 30 years later, we have not yet resolved the educational, economic or social inequities that existed in 1968 or in 1980. And I don’t think that our national culture or our desire or commitment to reach that resolution has really moved forward at all. And as I listen to Trump proclaim himself our law-and-order President, I fear we are regressing.
“We can’t expect the police culture to differ from our national culture of which they are only a part. As long as they both remain linked to 1968 and 1980, I don’t think it should come as a surprise that these incidents will continue to recur. Sadly.”
Note: Tom Petersen was a major asset in giving me a perspective on Reno’s office for my book on the 1980 McDuffie calamity: “Verdict on Trial: The Inside Story of the Cop Case that Ignited Miami’s Deadliest Riot.” It’s available on Amazon.
