Private: 'Formation' and Beyond

by Tom Nolan, Associate Professor of Criminology, Merrimack College; 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department

*This post is part of ACSBlog's Symposium Recognizing Black History Month.

The condemnation and trolling on social media was swift, strident and predictable.  Beyoncé had created a sensation during the Super Bowl 50 halftime show in the performance of “Formation,” her foray into the fracas involving national law enforcement and social justice activists, commentators, and observers who have sharply interrogated the police narrative in deadly force incidents in which men, women and children of color have been killed by the police. In her performance and the accompanying music video, Beyoncé castigated law enforcement for recent ethical and tactical lapses, from the “McKinney Pool Party” to Ferguson, Katrina, Chicago, and beyond.  That this rebuke was accomplished so artfully, wondrously, and cleverly infuriated certain elements of white America so much so that #BoycottBeyonce necessarily emerged as a Twitter hashtag, as did a call for a protest march on the National Football League Headquarters in New York City.  According to the Washington Examiner: “Members of the National Sheriffs' Association meeting in Washington turned their backs on Beyoncé during a Super Bowl halftime party, angered the NFL allowed her to sing a song they consider anti-police.”           

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Robert Rialmo, a white Chicago police officer who is in his 20s, has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the estate of Quintonio LeGrier, an African American teenaged college student who Rialmo shot and killed on December 26, 2015. Rialmo also shot and killed an innocent bystander, 55 year-old Bettie Jones, while firing at LeGrier. Rialmo claims in his lawsuit that LeGrier’s actions (that quickly led to his death at the hands of Officer Rialmo) caused Rialmo “extreme emotional trauma.” Trauma that in some alternate universe mitigates the fatal trauma inflicted on the person of Quintonio LeGrier with the six rounds fired into his body by Rialmo. Extreme emotional trauma, indeed.            

Perhaps this novel legal strategy in attenuating the exposure and culpability of police officers in the shooting deaths of African American teenagers might be considered by former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot and killed 17 year-old Laquan McDonald on October 20, 2014. Maybe the 16 shots that Van Dyke fired into McDonald—even firing into his back as he lay lifeless on the pavement—caused Van Dyke similar “extreme emotional trauma.”             

What we are seeing far too often in the American criminal justice system generally and in law enforcement specifically is the nascent emergence of a “police victimization” mindset in a “War Against Cops” narrative, a fictive construction that too often places the political interests of the police in diametric opposition to the tangible and critical needs of the communities they police in ways that are counterproductive and inimical to achieving community cohesion and safety.              

Consider what has too often become lost in the ongoing tension between the #BlackLivesMatter movement and law enforcement in the United States: The due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution are unequivocal in requiring that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.”  Yet those engaged in domestic law enforcement operations, particularly in communities of color, too often believe that the “process” that plays out in the streets of our communities supersedes the mandates of the Constitution.            

The exoneration and vindication that prosecutors and juries unfailingly (at least until relatively recently) grant to the police when they kill unarmed African American men, women, and children confirm the duality of the Constitution and criminal justice system: The police may occasionally make costly mistakes, but if the cost is the life of a black man, woman, or child at the hands of a white police officer, the cost is one that the criminal justice system is prepared to bear. In the eyes of many, that is exactly what has caused the justice system to become criminal.           

There are some reasons to be at least cautiously optimistic regarding criminal justice reform, as it appears to be a priority for bipartisan legislative action in the Congress.  And as I (a white professor) tell my students—future criminal justice practitioners and leaders—#BlackLivesMatter, in some iteration, is here to stay and will be a permanent and prominent feature of the system of criminal justice that has failed too many.           

DeRay Mckesson, a prominent leader and activist in the #BlackLivesMatter movement has announced a run for mayor of the city of Baltimore.  Mckesson is one of but ten people followed by Beyoncé on Twitter (and she has 14.2 million followers).  “Formation”: It’s Black History Month 2016.