A Colony in a Nation Read online

  CHRIS HAYES

  A

  COLONY

  IN A

  NATION

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  TO KATE, MY SOUL.

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  A

  COLONY

  IN A

  NATION

  I

  When was the last time you called the cops?

  I’ll go first.

  It was a few years ago. I heard a couple arguing loudly on the street outside my apartment. “Arguing” probably undersells it—he was screaming as he leaned over her, his voice punching her ears: “How stupid are you!?! What were you even thinking!?!” and so forth. The argument echoed through the dark in the leafy, affluent neighborhood I live in. Here we are unused to street noise of that particular type. I listened for a few minutes, and then some part of me thought, I know how this ends. So I dialed 911 and told the dispatcher what I was hearing. A few minutes later, from the dark of my apartment, I peeked out the window and saw the swirling blue light of a police cruiser. The car pulled over, and two cops approached the couple. I stopped watching and went to bed. Mission accomplished.

  But whatever happened to that couple? To that woman?

  I have no idea. I thought at that moment, and would still like to think, that I called the cops because I was trying to protect her from a conflict that was likely to end in violence. But maybe I just wanted peace and quiet restored to my peaceful and quiet neighborhood. As much as I told myself in that moment that I was calling the cops on her behalf, I have no idea if she would’ve wanted me to make that call, or if it made her life any better. For all I know, the encounter with the police only made him angrier, and she bore the brunt of that anger in their apartment, hours later.

  Whatever became of her, one thing is clear to me in retrospect. At the moment I called the police, I could not have told you what law was being broken, what crime was being committed. I dialed that number not to enforce the law but to restore order.

  There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there’s a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler’s head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.

  I’ve really felt the latter only once, at the 2000 Republican National Convention. I was twenty-one years old. My then-girlfriend-now-wife’s father, Andy Shaw, a journalist, was covering the convention, and she and I decided to head to Philadelphia, both to see him and to take in the sights and sounds of thousands of Republicans assembling to nominate George W. Bush for president. After a train ride down from New York, we met Andy outside the convention center. Kate and I drew stares from convention delegates who were in country club attire, since we were dressed like the scruffy college students we were. People asked if we were protesters.

  The three of us began to make our way through the multilayered security checkpoints. At the first one, as we put our bags through a metal detector, I suddenly remembered that I happened to have about thirty dollars worth of marijuana stuffed into my eyeglass case in a side pocket of my travel bag.

  Luckily the bag went through the metal detector with no problems, and as I picked it back up, I smiled to myself in relief at my near miss. But then the security line continued, and we passed through another checkpoint, and another. We finally rounded a bend to find yet another group of Philadelphia cops, with another metal detector; worst of all, this group seemed to be rifling through every bag.

  I felt a pulsing in my temples as I watched an officer open the main pocket of my bag and search. Then he opened the second pocket and finally the side pocket with my eyeglass case. He reached in and was about to put it back in when he stopped and gave it a shake, realizing there was something inside.

  He opened it, and his head jerked back in surprise at what he’d just found. He quickly turned his back to me and called over two other cops, one on each side. The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder, huddled, discussing.

  My vision started to peel in at the corners, and I felt briefly possessed. I envisioned running; it seemed tantalizingly possible. Liberating. I could get away before they had any idea who I was or whose bag it was. Did I have anything identifying in there? I must’ve.

  But then, my girlfriend and her father were standing right there, so flight probably wouldn’t work. With tremendous effort, I overrode the impulse. “I think the cops just found weed in my bag,” I whispered to Kate. And then in desperation, searching for someone to fix the situation, or at the very least to absolve me of this idiotic mistake, I walked over to my future father-in-law and blurted out, “Andy, I think the cops just found weed in my bag.”

  The cops continued to confer ominously.

  Andy was confused. “What? Why’d you bring weed?”

  And at that very moment, before I could answer (and really, what could I have said?), the police officer who’d found the drugs put my bag on a table and looked at me, as if to say Go ahead and take it.

  I figured as soon as I reached out and acknowledged the bag was mine, they’d slap the cuffs on. But when I went to grab the bag . . . nothing happened. I picked it up.

  Kate, her dad, and I walked into the convention center together. Her father said, amusedly, “You probably shouldn’t do that tomorrow.”

  Out of morbid curiosity, I went into the first bathroom inside the arena, fished out my glasses case, and flipped it open. Sure enough, the weed was still there.

  This story is one of my better ones. “The time I almost got caught with drugs at the Republican National Convention” is fun to tell because, ultimately, nothing bad came out of it. And with the advantage of hindsight, I can look back and know that even if I had been arrested, it would’ve been no more than an embarrassing hassle. I’m a straight white guy. I was a college student. I had access to lawyers and resources and, through all that, a very good chance of convincing someone that the world would keep spinning on its axis if I pleaded to a misdemeanor and got a little probation, and we all just pretended it hadn’t happened.

  Luckily for me, that harrowing encounter is the closest I’ve come to the criminal justice system. But over the past several years, I’ve spent a lot of time on the ground reporting both on criminal justice and on the growing social movement to change how it operates. And in hundreds of conversations with people in Baltimore, Charleston, Chicago, New York, Ferguson, Dallas, and elsewhere, I’ve had occasion to think about the enormous distance between their experience of the law and my own.

  On a warm October day on the Westside of Baltimore, I stood interviewing Dayvon Love in the parking lot of a public school where he once coached debate. I was there to talk about policing and crime and the trauma of lives lived dodging both with no cover.

  Earlier that year, in April, a young man named Freddie Gray had died in police custody. His death triggered public mourning, calls for official resignations, protests, and unrest. The city was now bracing for the trials of the officers who had been indicted for causing Gray’s death. (None of them would be convicted. Midway through a succession of trials, after a hung jury and a mistrial for one officer and three acquittals, the prosecutor would throw in the to
wel and drop the rest of the charges.)

  Love was a good person to have that conversation with. He speaks with an uncanny and particular cadence that comes from a life steeped in competitive debate. Born poor on the Westside, he discovered debate as a teenager through a program in his school and got hooked. “My initial motivation was that I needed to get into college for free,” he says when I ask what led him to debate. “So I just thought, ‘I am going to get really good at this so I can go to college for free,’ and that’s what happened. But along the way I was able to meet people who helped me think about debate as a broader tool for social justice.”

  Today Love coaches high school debate on the Westside and works as a political activist. His 2008 debating team, composed entirely of black students from one of Baltimore’s most impoverished neighborhoods, won the national championship. Run-ins with police were simply part of life in his neighborhood, Love told me, and no amount of bookishness or respectability was a shield.

  One night his life almost changed. “I was seventeen years old, it was the day of a debate tournament. I’d won first place, and that night I was catching a bus to go to New York to see a friend.” He had met the New York friend through Model UN just a few weeks earlier. On his way to the bus station in the wee hours of the morning, Love and his father were pulled over by police. “They say I match the description of someone who stole a woman’s purse.”

  The police began to search the car. More cruisers pulled up with their lights flashing. They took Love out of the car and had him stand in the middle of the street. At one point, one shined his police light right into the teenager’s face “And you heard them ask the woman, you know, ‘Is this him’? And she says, ‘I don’t know.’ And so luckily I had the presence of mind to think, ‘We had just stopped at the ATM to get the money I needed for my ticket.’ So I explained to them, I said I had just got the money that I needed to pay for my ticket.” Love happened to have the receipt from the ATM; the time stamp corroborated his story. “And luckily they let me get away, but that easily could have went in an entirely different way.”

  By “entirely different way,” Love meant being swept into the vortex of a penal system that captures more than half the black men his age in his neighborhood. By “entirely different way,” he meant an adulthood marked by prison, probation, and dismal job prospects rather than debate coaching and activism. If he hadn’t been so quick on his feet, if the woman hadn’t been unsure the police had the right person, everything might have been different.

  Fair to say that Dayvon and I, in our ways, both dodged a bullet, but the similarities ended there. I actually did something wrong: I was carrying an illegal drug. I wasn’t quick enough on my feet to defuse the situation, and even if I had been arrested and booked, it all almost certainly would have worked out fine in the end. The stakes felt very high, but they were actually pretty low.

  Dayvon, on the other hand, had done nothing wrong. Unlike me, he was quick enough on his feet to successfully defuse the situation. And while for me the stakes were in reality rather low, for him they weren’t. Everything really could have changed in that moment for the worse. Out of those two brushes with the law, we both ended up with the same outcome: a clean record and a sigh of relief. But it took vastly different degrees of effort and ingenuity to get there.

  THE UNITED STATES IS the most violent developed country in the world. It is also the most incarcerated. For more than four decades the second problem has grown, often under the guise of addressing the first. While the country’s homicide rate has fallen sharply from its peak, it remains higher than that of any other developed democracy, sandwiched between Estonia and Chile in international rankings. America imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country, free or unfree, anywhere in the world, except the tiny archipelago of Seychelles. The total number of Americans under penal supervision, some have argued, even rivals the number of Russians in the gulag under Stalin. Nearly one out of every four prisoners in the world is an American, though the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population.

  If you move in affluent, white, elite social circles, you probably know these statistics but never really see them in action. In the world’s most punitive criminal system, the application of punishment is uneven in the extreme. Black men aged 20 to 34 without a high school degree have an institutionalization rate of about 37 percent. For white men without a high school degree, it’s 12 percent, or nearly three times lower. In Sandtown-Winchester, which is 96.6 percent black and is the small slice of West Baltimore where Freddie Gray lived and died, there were, in February 2015, 458 people in prison. In Greater Roland Park/Poplar Hill, an affluent Baltimore neighborhood that is 77.5 percent white, there was a grand total of three.

  Just as punishment is unequally distributed, so too is violence. Within the same city, the threat of violent death from homicide is radically unequal across different neighborhoods. Chicago has many affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods on the North Side where the murder rate is less 1 per 100,000. But on the city’s poor, predominantly black South Side, several neighborhoods have a homicide rate that is 9,000 percent higher. On the whole, across the country, African Americans are victims of homicide at a rate of nearly 20 per 100,000. For whites, the rate is 2.5. Put another way: for white Americans, lethal violence is nearly as rare as it is in Finland; for black Americans, it’s nearly as common as it is in Mexico. So to talk about the American experience of crime and punishment is to miss the point. Though Dayvon and I are both Americans, we live in different countries.

  Different systems of justice are a centuries-old American tradition, indeed a foundational one. But the particular system we have now—the sprawling alternative state of jails, prisons, probation, penal supervision, warrants, “stop and frisk,” “broken windows” policing, and the all-too-frequent shooting of the unarmed—dates back to the late 1960s.

  Three things happened in the 1960s to shape the politics of how and upon whom we enforce law. The first was the success of the civil rights movement in beginning to dislodge decades of Jim Crow and crack open the vise of American racial hierarchy. This hard-fought success also produced intense, even violent white backlash, widespread fragility, and resentment at the social order being unmade.

  The second was a once-in-a-century crime rate increase that would last several decades. The scope of this social upheaval is difficult to overstate. In 1965, the year of the Watts riots, there were 387,390 violent crimes in a nation with a population of about 194 million. By 1979, the number of violent crimes jumped more than 300 percent to 1,208,030, in a country whose population increased by only about 15 percent. The trend would continue until 1992, the year the country set an all-time violent crime record with 1,932,274 incidents. The great crime wave showed up in almost every geographical area in the country and across every category of crime, from rape to murder, assault to larceny. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before.

  Any social indicator that rose as rapidly as crime did would rightly be seen as a national crisis. If the number of people who died in car crashes doubled in ten years or if inflation went up 750 percent in thirty-five years, our politics would demand some response. So the question in the late 1960s wasn’t so much if something would be done but what would be done.

  The third thing was that even as white backlash was gaining strength and crime was on the rise, street protests were exploding. In 1965 the unrest and police response in Watts left thirty-four dead. In 1967 twenty-three people were killed in Detroit following a police raid on a speakeasy. More uprisings followed in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., resulting in forty-three people killed in riots throughout the nation.

  There are many theories as to why crime exploded during this period, and they vary significantly in their persuasiveness, but what mattered most politically was how easily politicians and then voters were able to make the connection between the unraveling of order and the violations of law. When people ar
e allowed to take over the streets in protest, what’s to stop them from robbing and stealing and killing?

  In 1968 Richard Nixon ran for U.S. president making precisely this argument. When he appeared before the delegates of the Republican National Convention in Miami to accept their nomination, he offered a grim vision. “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he said. “We hear sirens in the night. . . . We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.”

  As Nixon spoke, the war in Vietnam was in its deadliest phase, protests against it larger and more militant than ever, Martin Luther King was dead, black power was ascendant, and riots continued to rage from coast to coast. Nixon assured the delegates and the voters watching at home that “the wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America.”

  “Tonight,” Nixon said, “it is time for some honest talk about the problem of order in the United States.” He spoke amid an unfolding rights revolution in the nation’s courts, with the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, strengthening the rights of criminal defendants as never before, most famously in its 1966 Miranda decision. Nixon argued that things had gotten out of whack. “Let us always respect, as I do, our courts and those who serve on them. But let us also recognize that some of our courts in their decisions have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in this country and we must act to restore that balance.”

  Today liberals tend to think of Nixon’s 1968 campaign as fueled primarily by potent racial backlash. But Nixon understood that the majority of Americans viewed themselves as fair and freedom-loving and would reject rhetoric that sounded too overtly authoritarian. He recognized that his best bet was to cultivate white resentment with coded appeals, wrapped in gracious displays of equanimity and high-minded rhetoric about equality. He even went out of his way to address his critics who accused him of using dog whistles. “To those who say law and order is the code word for racism,” he said, “there and here is a reply: Our goal is justice for every American. If we are to have respect for law in America, we must have laws that deserve respect.”