In his first prime-time special since joining NBC News earlier this year, Geraldo Rivera has chosen a made-for-TV subject if ever there was one: Race and the police.
In “Geraldo Rivera Reports: Blacks And Blue,” (scheduled to be broadcast Sunday evening) he offers plenty of facts and compelling visuals. Unfortunately, he fails to offer much hope, a glaring and disquieting omission I will return to shortly.
TV loves conflict and dramatic visuals of people howling, screaming, swinging and shooting at each other. Geraldo finds all that and more in Pittsburgh, where the U.S. Department of Justice has taken over the oversight of day-to-day police operations under a federal consent decree. Responding to complaints by black residents, Janet Reno’s Justice Department stepped in under a little-publicized provision in the crime bill that President Clinton signed in 1994.
You see in this documentary lots of scenes of police hassling black youths on streets and blacks screaming back at police. You see Geraldo biting his lip in apparent grief while a woman tells him how a police officer beat her while she was pregnant. You see officers on duty describing how non-racist they are and how they feel caught in the middle between street criminals and liberal do-gooders who won’t let them do their jobs in the “aggressive” manner they prefer.
In this divide, Pittsburgh is hardly alone, Geraldo shows, by revealing the results of an exclusive NBC poll of blacks and whites across the nation.
When it comes to perceptions of the police, the poll shows the races to be living on different planets. For example, when asked “How often does police brutality occur in your community,” 46 percent of whites said “almost never,” compared to only 21 percent of blacks. Conversely, 41 percent of blacks agreed that “police treat blacks less fairly,” compared to a measly 18 percent of whites.
Those differences in attitudes and perceptions, as Tim Stevens, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pointed out, are based on differences in experiences.
Unfortunately, federal intervention is depicted as having left local feelings rubbed raw and the races still facing each other across an enormous divide. In Pittsburgh, many police and Mayor Tom Murphy are shown as sounding picked on by a “big brother” government in Washington that doesn’t understand the streets of that city.
Stevens responds that law enforcement officers can “suck it up and live with it the way we have been forced to live with brutality.”
Little of that should leave Pittsburghers sleeping any more comfortably at night and it is not their problem alone. Rivera’s report points out that the Justice Department also has taken over the police department in Steubenville, Ohio, and has put the departments in Los Angeles, New York City, New Orleans and Columbus, Ohio, under investigation.
Is there a better way? You don’t hear much about it in Geraldo’s report, but there is. Days before the show, I was in Boston’s black and poor Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods where black clergy, white police officers and city officials and social workers of both races showed me how police, politicians and local residents can replace confrontation with cooperation.
To do that, Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Harvard-trained minister who grew up in Philadelphia’s ghetto, organized other black ministers to approach Boston’s mayor and police department with a deal he called the “nine-to-one,” in the belief that 10 youths get rousted for every one legitimate suspect.
“We’ll help you arrest the one bad apple in the bunch, if you will leave the other nine to us,” he explained. That meant the police would have to cool their “aggressive patrol” techniques. No more rousting black kids for merely “looking” suspicious. In return, neighborhood residents helped police root out suspects instead of helping them to hide.
The older officers were the least enthusiastic about it, I was told, but they went along with it. The result, according to white and black cops alike, is that the streets are quieter and everyone’s job is easier. Meanwhile Boston’s crime rate has fallen faster than just about any other city’s in the 1990s. Juvenile gun-related deaths, a particularly egregious problem elsewhere, fell to zero in 1996.
That’s what happens when local communities replace tension with teamwork. It doesn’t always make dramatic television, but it makes much better cities.
