Deliver Us from Evil
By Patrick Anderson
We need to recognize evil when we see it, to call it evil, to make it unprofitable, to render it unthinkable as public policy.
Deadly police actions have dominated recent conversations and have resulted in much political dis course regarding the need for criminal justice reform. In some cases, police actions have led to civil unrest. Such overwhelming public attention and reaction to criminal justice practices are rare. When massive attention to police and prison practices occurred in the 1930s and 1960s, significant policy changes and new laws resulted. 1 This may be another time in which society will make real and welcomed efforts to reform criminal justice issues. It will not be easy.
As a criminologist, police trainer, consultant and expert witness, I have been very involved in attempts to reform, improve and reinvent criminal justice practices since the 1970s. Through the years I have found a great many criminal justice professionals to be outstanding, morally upright and highly motivated good people. Most of us who came into the academic field of criminology in the 1970s were motivated by our personal professional experiences in the field and a deep desire to change the system. We wanted to make the world a better place to live.
We knew from personal experience that although better training of personnel was imperative, the wrong per son trained was still the wrong person. Criminal justice attracts some practitioners who are motivated by power, authority and racial or other biases.
Criminal justice education and training have expanded to encompass virtually every aspect of police and corrections work. Many state laws passed in prior decades established mandatory training, minimum standards for police practices and other improvements. Yet the call for more and better training today is loud and appropriate.
Civil liability lawsuits filed against
police and corrections in federal courts resulted in significant improvements and banned egregious behaviors like the fleeing felon rule, dangerous police pursuits and forms of police brutal ity. Court decisions punished agencies which failed to establish custody suicide prevention, substance abuse screening, proper supervision of prisoners and much more. 2 In general, criminal justice professionals and scholars have consistently called for significant reforms and warned about
the harmful effects of “get tough on crime” policies and practices of the past decades such as mandatory minimum sentences, policing, aggressive patrol, transferring children to adult courts and especially the war on drugs. 3
Now those dire predictions and warnings have become painfully realized as video evidence of things that have been going on for a long time have come to the attention of more people. The harmful effects of mass incarceration are becoming increasingly evident. Hence the current flurry of interest in police/community relations and the police use of deadly force and mass incarceration.
For many Americans, primarily white people, criminal justice is outof-sight and out-of-mind — a sub ject of interest in novels, movies and television shows, the purview of good people using whatever means neces sary to control the behaviors of bad people. Privileged citizens are exposed to the inner workings of criminal justice primarily when a loved one is caught up in the system, which for most white Americans is relatively rare. Then, when one brushes up close and personal to the system, white folk usually raise questions which lead to unsatisfactory answers. For our African American and Hispanic and poor white brothers and sisters, the truth of criminal “justice” has been well known for a long time. If it is true that one should watch neither sausage nor laws being made because one would lose the taste for sausage and lose respect for laws, the same sentiment is often true when one experiences the inner workings of American criminal justice. If you doubt that, spend some evenings at the booking desk of your county jail or some mornings at arraignment court.
But the current attention to police shootings, deaths resulting from choke holds, deadly tactics used to subdue and transport prisoners is beyond anything in recent memory. I had thought decades ago when the grainy images of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were shown on television, the result would be signifi cant public outrage. But after police investigators, prosecuting attorneys, and finally a jury declared that the actions of the police were “justified” and “appropriate,” my thinking was proved to be misguided. I remember teaching that even if such actions of some criminal justice practitioners are deemed justified and appropriate by another part of the criminal justice system, that does not change the fact that those actions are wrong.
Now, however, the high definition cellphone images of numerous deadly police encounters have dominated social media and television programs giving the lie to previous claims that instances of alleged police brutality and other misconduct have been overstated, manufactured or mischaracterized. Citizens in poor neighborhoods have told stories of similar instances of police actions for decades, but only now with the irrefutable pictures have such stories been widely believed outside those poor neighborhoods. Good police and other criminal justice professionals are embarrassed and dismayed, but not surprised, at the horrible and inexcusable actions of their fellow officers which have come to light.
The result, much like in the 1930s and 1970s, is a loud call for better trained and supervised police officers, a renewed emphasis on rehabilitation, revision of draconian sentencing laws, more pervasive use of video cameras, dismantling the war on drugs, and all sorts of improved social conditions for America’s disadvantaged. Each of these things has merit. Americans’ reliance on bureaucracies, legislatures, judges and communities to make things better is good, and all the prescriptions to heal the social sickness endemic in criminal justice are necessary and timely.
But where is the moral outrage, the sense that whether or not criminal justice practices are deemed “justified” or “legal” is not the issue? Behaviors we have witnessed are evil — no matter what the law, or custom or practice call them. Evil. Moral judgements have wrongly undergirded criminal justice practices. The war on drugs, the death penalty and mass incarceration have all been justified by moral voices from the church. It is time for a new moral imagination that renders such things unthinkable.4
In North Carolina, the Reverend Dr. William Barber, a black pastor, instituted “Moral Mondays” a couple of years ago. These were days which led to hundreds of people gathering at the
state capitol to make the moral point that injustices underlie certain legislative actions. He makes a moral argument, not a legal or political one.5
Too often, agents of moral values rely on legal arguments, judicial decisions, legislative solutions and social remedies when the real ground on which systemic injustice thrives is moral ground. It is on the moral ground where words like evil take root and have weight. Bad police still shoot fleeing felons, despite Supreme Court rulings and lawsuits. Bad police practices still allow persons to die unnecessarily in custody despite laws and policies designed to prevent that. Police departments such as those in Baltimore and Philadelphia have
learned that it is easier and perhaps cheaper to accept a jury’s decision in a wrongful death suit against its police or detention practices, pay the judgement and continue to do wrong than it is to truly reform custom and practice. The courts and legislatures are sometimes ill-suited to remedy the deep issues which undergird injustice.
When a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy pistol is shot and killed by rogue policeman in mere seconds after arriving on his playground, it is evil. For a street corner black man, selling single cigarettes to other poor people who cannot afford to purchase a full pack, to be strangled by police officers and killed is evil. For more young black males to be incarcerated in America’s prisons than matriculated in America’s colleges is evil. For a man who foolishly chooses to run from a police officer after being pulled over with a busted tail light to be shot eight times in the back and killed by a police officer is evil. For hundreds of
innocent persons to be incarcerated in prison, some to be sentenced to death, after faulty investigations, prosecutorial misconduct and mandatory minimum sentencing is evil. For children to be left behind while mothers in need of substance abuse treatment are caught up in prisons and locked away from their children for years is evil.
Where have we been, we god-fearing Christians? Where is our theological imagination when it comes to issues of justice? How have we permitted the misery of dark-bodied and poor white persons to be used for corporate profit? How have we sat by and watched millions of our fellow citizens be denied housing, employment and the right to vote forever because of long-ago crimes for which they have paid their debt to society? What have we done while justice has been meted out unjustly and unequally? We are the church of Jesus Christ who came to bring release to the captives….what are we doing?
Jesus prayed and taught his followers to pray, “Deliver us from evil.” We need to recognize evil when we see it, to call it evil, to make it unprofitable, to render it unthinkable as public policy. We need to work where God’s moral center is – in the hearts of people. Legislation, policies, judicial rulings all need to change. But the real change that is required is to satisfy the call of Isaiah, to “…let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never failing stream!” This is change that comes from a place of morality.
1 See Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, 1931 the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
2 See Patrick R. Anderson and L. Thomas Winfree, Jr. Expert Witnesses: Criminologists in the Courtroom, State University of New York Press, 1987.
3 See Patrick R. Anderson and Risdon N. Slate, The Decision-Making Network: An Introduction to Criminal Justice, Carolina Academic Press, 2011.
4 Dr. Stephen G. Ray, Jr., Neal F. and Ila A. Fisher professor of systematic theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
5 See www.revwilliambarber.com
