Apartheid. USA 1988

February 14, 1988:

There are 19 000 police departments in the United States. There are 12 black police chiefs in cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington and Houston. There are 42 000 black police officers in America, 35 000 of which are members of the National Black Police Association. In interviews with the Times, the nation's black police officers said that conflicts and ambiguities that arise from being ‘black in blue’ can be humiliating and demoralizing. ‘When the white guys finish work, they go home to their white neighborhoods and the black guys go home to the black community,’ said Ronald Hampton, a black Washington police officer who lives in a predominantly black section of the nation's capital. Another black officer in Washington said: ‘You may be their partner on the job, but the minute you are off duty, it's a different story. It's like you'll find a bunch of white cops hovering in the locker room snickering at something - then when you walk in they stop. Now, what are you supposed to think?’

Despite such problems, most of those police officers interviewed said that their jobs were satisfying and that they believed that there were opportunities to advance. The black officers also overwhelmingly expressed to the Times the belief, that regardless of personal likes, dislikes, or prejudice, white officers would come to their aid and that they would aid white officers. All share the view that the relationship between black officers and black communities,

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where the black police officer sometimes is regarded as ‘a traitor’ and is often even shunned, has improved in recent years. This is in part because of attempts by black police officers to control the high incidence of crime in black neighborhoods. ‘We are tied to the black community by this umbilical cord,’ said Ronald Hampton. ‘We can't sever it, because we have a commonality, and that is our color. We know that if we take off our uniforms, whites would treat us the same as they do other blacks in Anacostia,’ a predominantly low-income black community in the Districk of Columbia.

‘On the one hand we are asked to think of ourselves as being blue, not blacks,’ Sergeant Donald Jackson of the Los Angeles Police Department told the Times. ‘I had one fellow-officer, who was white, tell me that if he calls blacks niggers it shouldn't offend me because I am blue, not black.’ But when Mr Jackson began to speak out against such racial slurs, first to superior officers and then to the local news media, he said he was virtually ostracized by whites in the department.

In his book ‘Black in Blue: A Study of the Negro Policeman,’ Nicolas Alex wrote, ‘The black policeman can never escape his racial identity while serving in his official role. He attempts to escape his uniform as soon as possible after his tour of duty. He avoids the friends of his youth in order to avoid learning of their criminal behavior. He does not socialize with white cops after duty hours. In short, he is drawn into an enclave of black cops and becomes a member of a minority group within a minority group.^217.

217. The New York Times, from a report by Lena Williams