Banning the banned chokehold (op-ed)

During the 2000 presidential race, civil rights organizations demanded a federal ban on racial profiling.  Democrat Al Gore said, racial profiling ran counter to what the United States was all about, and if entrusted with the presidency, ending racial profiling would be the first civil rights act of the 21^st century.  Republican George W. Bush said, we have to do everything we can to end racial profiling, but I don’t want to federalize the police.  Bush won the presidency and issued the first ban on racial profiling in 2003.  Now, I’m going to use the racial profiling ban as a starting point to sympathize with President Trump’s recent executive order banning chokeholds except if the officer’s life is at risk.  Then I’m going to use the racial profiling ban as an ending point to draw a different conclusion.

If you start from 2003 and leap to the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, you’ll conclude America’s police problems got worse. 

America went from banning racial profiling to banning chokeholds after a handcuffed black man died from a white police officer’s knee on his neck.  Immediately following George Floyd’s death, protests and riots erupted across the country.   According to the USA Today, the way the Minneapolis police officer restrained George Floyd is widely discredited by law enforcement experts, but the technique was allowed in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Police Department allowed the use of two types of neck restraints as “non-deadly” force options for officers who received the proper training. (All of the protests should have been centered around eliminating the two neck restraints and the “proper training” to use them.  But George Floyd became the catalyst for what BLM co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, called the new abolitionist movement where police and prisons are no longer weaponized as tools for public safety.) 

If you throw in police shootings of unarmed black men during the past decade, the Ferguson and Baltimore riots, and the fact that George W. Bush didn’t issue the racial profiling ban through an executive order rendering it toothless to his critics, then it would appear President Trump’s going in the right direction by immediately banning chokeholds through an executive order.

Now, if you start from 1980 and end at the 2003 racial profiling ban, you’ll conclude there’s been improvement in policing. 

According to the New York Times in 1980 Los Angeles was under threat of several lawsuits and their police department banned the use of one lethal chokehold – called the bar-arm hold.  Many large police departments followed suit.  They also banned or restricted less dangerous neck restraints.  In 1993, after concerns of a rising number of deaths in police custody over an eight-year period, New York’s police department issued an order banning chokeholds.  The New York ban came as police departments nationwide prohibited various chokeholds.   But the New York Commissioner said, the chokehold ban was not a new policy, but a clarification of a 1985 order that stated chokeholds will not be routinely used except if the officer’s life was in danger. 

New York’s 1993 chokehold ban offered no exceptions.   

New York’s police chief added that New York City has not trained police cadets in the use of chokeholds for at least 10 years.  Professor James J. Fyfe, who studied police brutality, said he had no statistics on how many police departments had chokehold bans, but 15 of the largest police forces had bans in place.  Fyfe added, anything that happens in policing in New York and Los Angeles will be copied by other police departments.

If you look at policing from this direction it went from banning chokeholds to banning racial profiling, and from this direction President Trump’s executive order seems like redundant reform to pacify clueless reactionaries.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 6/24/2020