History lesson

Aundré Herron has been both a prosecutor and a trial lawyer, as well as a professor of law and a civil-rights activist. She also has appeared in documentary films about the death penalty (she’s actively opposed) and is—dig it—a stand-up comedian on the side.

“I’m not going to tell any jokes tonight,” she warned a large group gathered in Chico State’s Bell Memorial Union Friday (Jan. 30) for the annual meeting of the Chico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, “because I’m not getting paid.”

Instead Herron, the keynote speaker at the event, gave a remarkable history lesson as a way of “trying to find a useful, meaningful way to talk about the crisis in policing” as manifested in the police killings of two unarmed black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the assassinations of two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

Her lecture seemed tailored especially to the large number of students attending. They were members of the student branch of the ACLU, the Wildcat Civil Liberties Union. Herron said she was gratified to see so many young people standing up for civil liberties.

Echoing the philosopher George Santayana, who famously said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” she said we needed to understand “the lessons of history, to look through the prism of history, to understand what’s going on today.”

There was a time, she said, not so long ago, when a black man or youth was lynched every day in this country. “The killing of people of color with impunity … is part of this country’s DNA … It’s no accident that we’re not seeing police shootings of rich white men.”

The deaths of Officers Liu and Ramos at the hands of a deranged man speak to the failure of our mental-health system, she said. “If the mere fact of wearing a uniform is sufficient to lead to deaths, we’re in trouble as a country.”

And if those in uniform can cause the death of a man doing no more than selling loose cigarettes, as happened to Garner, it’s really bad, she added.

The militarization of domestic police forces so evident in the media coverage of the Ferguson protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, along with the proliferation of commando-style SWAT teams that are being used for tasks as mundane as serving warrants and low-level drug busts, suggests that “we are in danger of becoming a police state,” Herron warned.

“And yet despite all this weaponry … more people are killed here than in any other developed nation.” A recent article in the Economist magazine stated that police officers in the United States kill one person every day, she said.

It’s all about the dominant white culture exercising control, Herron insisted. People of color, she pointed out, account for 30 percent of the population, but 60 percent of those in prison. African Americans are 14 percent of drug users, but 37 percent of those convicted of drug crimes, and they get hit with longer sentences.

So what to do? Herron asked. She had several suggestions.

• First, we must recognize that police work is dangerous and difficult and important. And the police must acknowledge that their job is to serve and protect. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and the police are not above the law. “We have to work together.”

• We need comprehensive criminal-justice reform, and we need to stop overpolicing. “Eric Garner should not lose his life over selling cigarettes.”

• The police need to get behind gun control and use their political muscle to ban weapons of war from the streets.

• The police need more mental-health training to be able to recognize mental illness and know how to respond. By the same token, cops on patrol need regular respite from their demanding and sometimes dispiriting jobs.

• They must be required to wear body cams and expected to tape every encounter.

• The review of officer-involved shootings should be taken from the police and given to disinterested parties.

Most important, we all must treat each other with dignity and compassion, Herron said. “You might be through with history, but history isn’t through with you.”