Transcription
In the wake of the most recent occurrences of police brutality in the United States and the subsequent outrage against these actions, a common refrain has been repeated in the discourse: "Police brutality is not getting worse; police brutality is just getting filmed." An argument could be made that police brutality is getting filmed and getting worse, as the more recent militarized police have an even greater arsenal at their disposal. But the greater point remains salient: police brutality, oppression, and profiling, particularly in black communities, is now an irrefutable fact, though many apologists for the police still desperately attempt to refute it.
Nonetheless, it has become more challenging for the United States, particularly white people in the United States, to ignore the problem when it is captured on video with such regularity. Feigning ignorance requires a greater effort, quite literally closing their eyes. Watching more and more people wake up to the reality that black communities face every day is heartening, but at the same time, it is disappointing how long it took for this revelation, this acknowledgment in white communities in the United States. Many people, having entirely different experiences with the police, could not seem to take the victims of police brutality, oppression, and profiling at their word. Unable to reconcile this with their experiences, many people dismissed these incidents as the work of "bad apples" rather than a consistent pattern.
Redlining and segregation have divided predominantly white communities from minority communities, granting white people in the United States only one option for insight into the black experience: popular media. The 1990s was the golden era of black sitcoms: *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air*, *A Different World*, *Martin*, *Roc*, *Living Single*, *Hangin' with Mr. Cooper*, *The Wayans Bros.*, and a host of others. The premises of the series varied. *Martin* is a series about a radio show host and his relationship with his girlfriend and a virtual wife. *A Different World* is a series about a group of university students. *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air* is a series about a well-to-do black family and the titular relative from Philadelphia who disrupts their lives.
Nearly all of these disparate series have a commonality, though, and that is the characters' relationship with the police. These sitcoms often comment on the police's antagonistic behavior toward them, sometimes humorously and casually when it is not the main focus of the episode, and sometimes more pointedly when it is. Examples of the former are often divided into ignorance or hostility. This commentary is relatable, even comical, for black audiences all too familiar with police ignorance and hostility. Here are two examples of casual references to the police as either ignorant about black communities, families, and individuals, or hostile to black communities, families, and individuals. They are both from the very same episode of *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air*: "LA, man, if I want to get my head cracked, I can star in the next Rodney King video. Happy Kwanzaa!" For white audiences, this commentary is instructive, illuminating, or at least it should have been.
90s sitcoms are not mirror images of reality, but they display situations and relationships meant to be relatable and therefore appealing to its target audience. Because of this, the relationship between the police and characters on predominantly black sitcoms is remarkably different from the relationship between the police and characters on predominantly white sitcoms. This should have been a tip-off to white audiences in the 90s who watched both. In an episode of *Home Improvement*, Brad is caught vandalizing a building, throwing rocks through windows. The police officer tells his parents that no charges will be pressed against Brad. He is brought home safe and sound and suffers no real legal consequences. This is an experience that might be relatable to the predominantly white target audience of the series, but it would not necessarily be relatable to a black audience. Police are far more likely to engage, harass, arrest, and become physical with young black men than any other demographic in the United States.
Even today, in the midst of greater understanding about indisputable facts surrounding this behavior, apologists for the police try to fight back against what white Americans are only now starting to accept. They will claim racial profiling, police harassment, over-policing, and brutality only occur more in black communities because "that's where the crime is." Without actually looking at how much the data is skewed, bogus statistics without context, like blacks do half the violent crime and such. The context is this: black people are incarcerated at a rate seven times higher than white people for the same crime, with a significantly higher probability of being convicted. Furthermore, black communities are over-policed, meaning there are far more arrests. And if the response to this is to repeat, "that's where the crime is," then you already know what the answer to that is, and the context that skews the data and the argument becomes circular. White encounters frequently portray their encounters with the police as either helpful or, at worst, inconvenient. That's not to say that the police are not dangerous to white people; they are simply more likely to be dangerous to black people.
Apologists for the police will claim that more white people in the United States are fatally shot by the police than black people, but this is also skewed data without context. In the U.S., there are approximately 191 million white people and 42 million black people. That means there are 4.55 times more white people than black people. In 2019, there were 371 white people taken out by the police. If all things were equal, relative and proportionate to the amount of white people to black people, 82 black people would have been taken out by the police. However, the number is actually 235 black people. That means that a black person is almost three times as likely to be taken out by the police than a white person. It is not proportional. Ignoring per capita and statistical analysis to find the result you want is intellectually dishonest. Credit to Jolly Good Ginger for doing the mathematics.
This rate of over-policing and greater likelihood of a confrontation with the police becoming physical or even lethal is why the relationship between the police and white people, and the relationship between the police and black people, feel so different in their communities because they are. There is always some deflection from police apologists and racists, usually bringing up "black on black crime" to distract from the topic. The truth is that anyone is more likely to be harmed by someone who lives near them, and since black communities and white communities are segregated, the most likely perpetrator of a black victim is also black, but the most likely perpetrator of a white victim is also white. Nobody ever shouts "white on white crime," even though it is just as true. This is because police apologists and racists don't care about the context of statistics; they care about deflecting from irrefutable statistics that they find inconvenient. To summarize, the police are a danger to everyone, but they are consistently more likely to be a danger to black people, and that is why they are portrayed differently in sitcoms with white casts and sitcoms with black casts.
90s white sitcoms not only portrayed a different relationship with the police, they also had police officer characters as part of the main cast. On *3rd Rock from the Sun*, Don, the police officer, is one of the Solomon family's closest friends and has an ongoing romantic relationship with Sally. On *Everybody Loves Raymond*, Robert, the brother of the titular character, is a veteran police officer. On *Frasier*, Martin is a retired police officer and arguably the audience's everyman character. Black sitcoms from the 90s generally did not have police officers as part of the main cast, with one notable exception.
In an episode of *Friends*, Rachel is pulled over and has an expired driver's license. The situation ends up being only a mild inconvenience for her, a common occurrence for a white driver. For a black driver, this interaction often goes differently. In this early episode of *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air*, Will and Carlton are doing a favor for a family friend by driving his car to Palm Springs. A police officer pulls over their car and eventually arrests them under the groundless suspicion that they were driving a stolen vehicle. The situation is eventually resolved, but Carlton comes out of the experience learning nothing. He believes that the police were entirely in the right to pull him over.
Carlton has, up to that point, lived a sheltered life. Will, previously living in West Philadelphia, tries to inform Carlton that they were pulled over for "driving while black" and not because, as Carlton suggests, they were driving too slowly. Carlton's father, Phil, is reminded of the first time he was stopped and leaves Carlton to contemplate what really happened. Carlton, without realizing it, is repeating police apologia: that the police were only doing their job and that they had every right to pull them over. The fact that Will and Carlton were not car thieves is not the point. Instead, the point is that the police pulled them over in the first place without cause. They identified Will and Carlton as black, saw an expensive car, and on those facts alone, concluded that there was cause enough to pull them over and question them.
Racial profiling is the use of race to determine which drivers to stop for minor traffic violations and the use of race to determine which pedestrians to search for illegal contraband and questioned about their presence, particularly their presence in predominantly white neighborhoods like the suburbs. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, defining racial profiling as relying solely on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion can be problematic. This definition, found in some state racial profiling laws, is unacceptable because it fails to include when police act on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion in combination with an alleged violation of all law. In other words, even though the officer may have clearly targeted Will and Carlton due to their race, due to the "solely" definition of racial profiling, if the officer claims they were pulled over for driving suspiciously, any accusation of racial profiling will be dismissed. If a police officer sees cars mildly speeding all the time but is far more likely to pull over black drivers, the "solely" definition of racial profiling protects him.
Laws and regulations against racial profiling often do not include discriminatory omissions. This is another example of over-policing: how black people in the United States are stopped, harassed, and arrested more frequently than white people for committing the same actions. Over-policing, meaning focusing law enforcement far more on black communities than necessary, creates the aforementioned inflated statistics. These inflated statistics are then used as evidence in support of continued over-policing. Over-policing is a cycle that creates the skewed evidence it needs to perpetuate itself. The episode of *Fresh Prince* makes no excuses for the police whatsoever and frames Carlton's defense of the police as naive, even dangerous to himself. White audiences who say things like, "Well, they must have been doing something wrong," or "Well, they shouldn't have been speeding," or any other knee-jerk, unexamined defense of profiling and harassment, can have their naivete thrown back at them through Carlton, who is clearly framed as wrong. He is not, however, framed as unsympathetic, as he is still the victim of racial profiling and police harassment, whether he initially realized it or not. The episode ends with Carlton contemplating what just happened to him, something he may have to reconcile with his previous rock-solid belief that the system works.
In an episode of *Martin*, the titular character calls a plumber to fix his toilet. Martin needs to go to work and leaves his friend Cole to watch over his apartment during the day. When Martin returns, he discovers that the plumber has collapsed. Cole and Martin are concerned because they're two black men in an apartment with a deceased white man, and they don't even know what happened. Research into overturned wrongful convictions has proven that black Americans are far more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than white Americans. According to Michigan State University, black prisoners who were convicted of murder are about 50% more likely to be innocent than others convicted of that crime and spend longer in prison before exoneration. Furthermore, data shows that convictions that led to murder exonerations with black defendants were more likely to involve misconduct by police officers than those with white defendants. Cole is right to be concerned about the plumber and the fact that he was alone in the apartment when the plumber collapsed. Eventually, Martin's friend Tommy, Martin's girlfriend Gina, and Gina's friend Pam learn what happened. The mood shifts from concern about what the authorities will think to concern about getting this wrapped up so they can attend a basketball game. It's still a comedy, after all.
Martin is unable to get the police to respond to his emergency after waiting for hours. He calls the police again but this time pretends to be a white person in hopes they will treat him better. The police are dubious and ask him a series of questions to prove his whiteness, and it's actually very funny. 90s black sitcoms engaged in this kind of gallows humor about their own oppression all the time.
With one notable exception, on the criminally underrated sitcom *Roc*, we see perhaps the most unflinching and confrontational take on the police's relationship with the black community from 90s sitcoms. *Roc* is a garbage man living in Baltimore. To make extra money, Roc accepts an offer from his brother Joey to paint an apartment. While Roc is out buying a tool for the job, he is stopped on the sidewalk by police officers who suspect him of being a burglar. Roc was caught "walking while black." According to the New York Times, in Baltimore, a city that is 63 percent black, the Justice Department found that 91 percent of those arrested on discretionary offenses like failure to obey or trespassing were African-American. Blacks make up 60 percent of Baltimore's drivers but account for 82 percent of traffic stops. Of the 410 pedestrians who were stopped at least ten times in the five and a half years of data reviewed, 95 percent were black. The police officers, unconvinced by Roc's story, arrest him with little, if any, cause.
The sitcom makes it abundantly clear what is happening. When Roc is locked up, Roc turns to the black police officer, who was thankfully a help: "My brother, nothing. What makes this interaction so important is that this sitcom recognizes the tension between black civilians and black police officers who assist in the oppression of black communities." Roc, infuriated that he has been arrested on trumped-up charges, says, "This doesn't matter what we do because just when you think maybe things are getting better and we don't have to put up with this stuff anymore, hey, whack you over the head to remind you nothing's changed." Haywood then says, "That's a good thing, man. I mean, because we all need a dose of reality." "No, not this kind of reality. This shouldn't be reality." Roc's story eventually checks out, and he is freed, a highly optimistic ending to what could have been a life-changing event had it happened in real life. When he is let go, even after it is clear he has done nothing wrong, a white police officer tells Roc that he will be keeping an eye on him. When Roc returns home, it's still not over; it's only the end of his story, not the end of the story of the police's relationship with black communities. Roc hears a siren in the distance and says nothing. "Well, you should sue for false arrest." "Oh, come on, Pop. We saw that video when Rodney King them four cops got off. What makes you think anything's gonna happen to Pop?" "Pop, Joey, I just wanna put this thing behind me, okay?"
90s black sitcoms generally did not portray white police officers as helpful, and sometimes portrayed black police officers as, at best, complicit. With one notable exception, an outlier to this pattern, *Family Matters* stars Reginald VelJohnson as a black police officer, and the series consistently portrays both Sergeant Carl Winslow and the police in general as altruistic. Unlike some other black sitcoms, *Family Matters* was immensely popular among white Americans as well, owing to its ABC TGIF lineup placement as much as its milquetoast, non-confrontational humor. "Urkel-mania" swept the suburbs for years. It's hard to describe to someone who wasn't there just how ubiquitous Steve Urkel was in the 90s.
The only time *Family Matters* confronts the police is a season 5 episode in which Carl's son Eddie is racially profiled. However, the episode takes the "bad apples" position, suggesting that this is an uncommon occurrence and that the police are ultimately a force for good in the black community. When Eddie objects and tells Carl that police have quotas to fill, his father strongly denies this, despite the fact that police officers routinely set productivity goals, which is merely euphemistic and a means in which to subvert laws prohibiting quotas. When Carl confronts the officer who profiled his son, he says that he will file a report on him, presenting this to the audience as a solution. In the real world, the culture of police brotherhood will almost certainly protect such an officer. Police officers who receive frequent complaints and hold records proving consistent offenses against civilians are generally permitted to continue as officers unless it becomes a public relations nightmare, and even then, it's not a sure thing.
When the confrontation is over, Carl even tells his son how proud he is to be a police officer. When Eddie speaks of quotas, Carl defends the police. When Carl confronts the veteran cop, Carl defends the police to the rookie cop, and when Carl wraps everything up, he defends the police once more. If the episode's "bad apples" politics are not transparent enough, the title is literally "Good Cop, Bad Cop." At a time when black sitcoms were referencing Rodney King and bluntly saying, in no uncertain terms, that police harassment is a vulnerability to every black American, *Family Matters*' take on the subject is noticeably weak, perhaps even to the point of being detrimental, and arguably the least confrontational of them all. One could argue that at least the series broached the subject, even if they did not stick the landing, but it's galling watching this episode right after the *Roc* episode.
90s black sitcoms warned us about the police's antagonistic relationship toward black communities a long time ago, and it's a shame that decades of tragedy and recordings are what it took for more people to take this seriously. It would have been nice if everyone had just watched that episode of *Fresh Prince* and got their hearts right, but that's not a realistic expectation. There is so much societal pushback against accusations of police misconduct in the United States that most people watching very special episodes of their favorite sitcoms from the 90s are not going to suddenly change their minds. Maybe these episodes helped a little; art can be very powerful, but clearly, more needs to be done. Besides that, I have a lot more to say about the police and specifically police abolition, but I set it all back in April in a video essay uploaded shortly before the killing of George Floyd. Even now, as this misconduct is irrefutable, people still try to refute it. They tell us that someone being knocked over and having his head cracked open did not happen and that he only tripped. They tell us that when protesters tossed tear gas back at the police, it's assault with a deadly weapon, but when the police shot that weapon at protesters in the first place, it was not a deadly weapon. I don't know how all this ends, but going back to the status quo is now unacceptable, and if we're really being honest, it has been unacceptable for a very long time. Name two Barry Manilow songs: "Mandy" and "Copacabana." And "Mandy."
[Applause]