Fight the Power by Clarence Taylor

Author:Clarence Taylor [Taylor, Clarence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC001000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
Publisher: NYU Press

Conclusion

Accessing why voters had rejected the CCRB, Thomas R. Brooks of the New York Times called the referendum a sign of white backlash and said the PBA’s position originated in police resentment of the city’s civil rights movement. According to Brooks, the police perspective was that once the CCRB went into operation, blacks would have “won another victory, an unjustified one based on unsubstantial claims of police brutality.”49

Brooks’s analysis was correct. Cassese’s racist rhetoric and the PBA campaign, as well as William F. Buckley’s attacks on black leaders, his defense of a “white backlash,” and his blaming blacks and Latinos for rising crime rates in New York City all helped to foster a false narrative that the interests of black people were diametrically opposed to those of whites. Cassese, the PBA, and Buckley depicted black people as dismissive of criminal behavior and black leaders as wanting to gain control of the NYPD because the police stood in their way. Many white New Yorkers subscribed to the view that the CCRB would endanger their lives by handcuffing the police and providing criminals an opportunity to terrorize the city. The overwhelming opposition to the CCRB demonstrates that the PBA’s narrative helped to delegitimize the grievances of black New Yorkers in the minds of whites by characterizing their complaints of police brutality as simply a means of stopping the police from doing their job. The narrative that civilians on the CCRB would give the green light to black criminals appealed to enough of the city’s white electorate to help defeat the proposed board before it was implemented, thus ending in 1966 and for years to come the opportunity for residents to have a voice in determining how the police operated in their communities.

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