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]]>The post ‘Because they can get away with it’: Why African Americans are blamed for crimes they didn’t commit: Experts appeared first on Virus Reports.
]]>A panicked white woman in New York City’s Central Park calls 911 to say that a black man threatened her and her dog.
A Florida mom claims two black men abducted her son, who had autism, and was later found dead.
But the harrowing story from Manhattan was just that — a tall tale about about a potential assailant, but a bird watcher. And the supposedly terrified mother, police say, was never confronted by two abductors, but instead has been charged with killing her son.
Both the phony 911 call and the alleged kidnapping story follow, experts say, the stereotypical notion of black men as criminals and the ingrained racism that has existed in American society for generations. Although some may find it shocking that people are still resorting to these tropes, experts say that a culture of relative impunity has allowed it.
“It’s because they can get away with it. They do it because the criminal justice system is not going to give them consequences,” said Gloria Browne-Marshall, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Patricia Ripley, the Florida mom, was charged with first-degree premeditated murder on May 23 after Miami, Florida, police said that in her initial report her son, who was non-verbal, was abducted by “two black men” during a carjacking was a farce.
During the manhunt for the two vaguely described alleged abductors, police say they found surveillance video that allegedly showed 45-year-old Ripley attempting to drown her son in a canal. Police say neighbors heard screams and rescued the boy, but an hour later, Ripley allegedly drowned the child in another canal, police said. Ripley is expected to be arraigned on June 12 and it was not clear if she had an attorney. “We don’t agree about what they said about my wife,” said Aldo Ripley, the father of Alejandro Ripley, after Patricia Ripley’s bond hearing on May 23.
The allegations surrounding Ripley were reminiscent of Susan Smith‘s October 1994 story to South Carolina police that her two sons, aged 1 and 3, were kidnapped by an African American man during a carjacking. Smith, now 48 and serving 30 years to life prison sentence, confessed that she actually let her car roll into a lake with the boys inside, drowning them.
Smith, a white woman, and Ripley, who described herself in a police report as a “white Hispanic,” were not charged with filing a false police report.
In the second recent incident, Amy Cooper was seen on a now-viral cellphone video on May 26 frantically telling a 911 operator that the African American man recording her, Christian Cooper, was threatening her life after asking her to put her dog on a leash (she earlier told him, on camera that she would do exactly that). Dogs are permitted off-leash during certain hours, but not in the section of Central Park they were in.
Amy Cooper has since been fired from her investment firm job and apologized for her actions, saying “I am not a racist.” The New York City Commission on Human Rights launched an investigation into the incident.
Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist and author of the 2004 book “White Like Me: Reflection on Race from a Privileged Son,” compared Amy Cooper’s actions to “a white woman in the Antebellum South lying about a black man raping her and then maybe getting exposed.” Wise said the woman’s thoughts would likely be “oh, my life is ruined now. Everybody’s going to think I’m a liar.”
Instead, she should have been thinking about the potentially dire consequences of her claims, Wise said. “Gee, maybe you shouldn’t have tried to get this man killed,” he said. Nearly 3,500 black people were lynched in the United States from 1882-1968, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Browne-Marshall maintained that white people jump to blaming African Americans, specifically African American men, for crimes in some cases because they don’t want to believe they themselves are “the Boogeyman.”
“They do it because in their minds, they are the victims no matter what they have done to every group of color, they still see themselves as victims,” said Browne-Marshall. “That brother [Chris Cooper] could have been killed based on that white woman’s lies. How many black people generally, and black men in particular, have been murdered on the lie of a white woman?”
In an infamous case from 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was beaten and lynched after a white woman falsely accused him of touching and whistling at her. The woman admitted she lied about the incident in 2017. Six years prior to Till’s murder, four African American men were falsely accused of raping a 17-year-old white woman in Florida. Labeled the “Groveland Four,” three were arrested and several beaten as the fourth escaped. The fourth man was later found by a mob, which shot him to death. The accuser maintained she was telling the truth, but the men were pardoned in 2019..
Falsely reporting African Americans for crimes has happened on a number of other occasions and is not exclusive to white women.
–In 1989, Charles Stuart reported to police that this pregnant wife was shot to death by an African American man during a carjacking in a predominately African American community in Boston. He then pointed out an innocent African American man in a police lineup.
It wasn’t until Stuart’s brother told police that he helped with the murder in an alleged insurance fraud scheme that the truth surfaced. Stuart died by suicide the following year.
–In 1992, Jesse Anderson falsely reported that two African American men attacked him and his wife in Milwaukee. His wife was stabbed dozens of times to death. Anderson went as far to give police a hat that one of the alleged assailants were wearing. The investigation found that Anderson bought the hat and the knife used to kill his wife. He was convicted of her murder and in 1994 died after a prison beating.
–Sherry Hall, a Georgia rookie police officer, falsely claimed in 2016 that an African American man shot her. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hall described her assailant as a 6-foot, 230-pound African-American man wearing a green shirt and black jogging pants. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation got involved and found her story to be a lie. She was charged, convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison on a range of charges including making false statements.
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and former Boston police officer, told ABC News on Friday he remembers the Stuart investigation as “a nightmare.”
“With a serious crime like that, police have to believe the victim, but they also have to check the information,” said Wexler, who did not work on the Stuart case. “What it did was create racial issues in the city. Police stopped a number of African American men and police got criticized for racial profiling.”
The man who Stuart identified in the lineup, Willie Bennett, stood accused of the crime until Stuart’s brother came forward. Bennett spent 12 years in prison on an unrelated robbery charge.
Dr. Rheeda Walker, a licensed clinical psychologist, told ABC News on Thursday that the consequences of African Americans being falsely blamed for crimes can transition to “internalized racism.”
“Over the course of generations, some, not all, but some black people start to internalize this notion that ‘I don’t matter, my life doesn’t matter’ because the messaging is so pervasive…these narratives gets warped into not only are you not human, you’re a violent person,” said Walker.
Walker said that African Americans are sometimes seen as potentially violent simply because of their skin tone.
“It is out of our control and I think that’s the part of what gets to be really, just hurtful because skin is something that you are born with, yet is perceived as a weapon or by your inherent birth, somehow you’re dangerous,” said Walker, the author of “The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health.”
According to Walker, African Americans find themselves making daily efforts to avoid triggering a potential racist.
“You always have to live your life with these calculations, with these limitations, because you have to navigate other peoples’ racist insanity,” said Walker. “So, often black people do things in society to look less threatening that way other people don’t have to feel threatened. It’s a calculation.”
Browne-Marshall, the author of “Race, Law, and American Society: 1607-Present,” said that white people have “the privilege of escape, of never looking inward to determine why they have a fear of black people in the first place.”
People, Wise said, are “trained” to believe negative things about African American people and “even if you’re a decent person, 99.9% of the time, you are still being conditioned to react in that way.”
“And so if you live in a society where you have been told to fear black folks, not just to fear, but to have contempt for black and brown bodies, to actually view them as less deserving of consideration of humanity as you, or to believe that they ought not be in your space when you’re in that space or that they should have to defer to you,” said Wise.
According to Walker, there’s enough “misunderstanding” about who African Americans are in every level of the government, healthcare, criminal justice and education systems racial biases are passed from generation to generation.
How to deter from falsely accusing African Americans for crimes
African Americans make up 49% of wrongful convictions since 1989, according to data collected by The National Registry of Exonerations (NRE). By contrast, 37% of whites and 12% of Hispanics were exonerated during the same time period.
According to a 2017 report from the NRE, black people were seven times more likely to be falsely convicted of murder than white people, three and a half times more likely to be innocent when accused of sexual assault because of misidentification (happened in half the cases) and 12 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted in drug cases.
Like in Amy Cooper’s case, the moments when a 911 dispatcher receives a call that a crime is being committed are the most crucial, experts say. Wexler says that dispatchers are trained to ask several questions before deploying officers to a possible crime scene.
“If someone says there’s a suspicious man in the neighborhood and a police officer stops someone who is doing nothing it becomes a nightmare for everyone, for the person stopped and the officer who is now being accused of racial profiling,” said Wexler.
Wexler said it’s “frustrating” when people use the police for racial profiling, but you “cannot control citizen’s discretion” on when to call the police.
According to Wexler, training police officers on how to detect implicit bias and recognize that there are citizens who want to draw police into their biases can prevent responses to calls like Amy Cooper’s.
Browne-Marshall suggested that laws be created or amended “to protect, laws to give criminal consequences to people who abuse law enforcement for their own racial harassment and reform the prosecutorial system.”
“So when these people are using police officers for harassment, that should be a crime and someone should pass legislation that if police officers are used for racial harassment that it should be a crime punishable of a fine…now that’s action,” said Browne-Marshall. “We need to put the burden on the white people to prove that it is not racism.”
New York State Assistant Assemblyman Felix W. Ortiz sponsored a bill in January 2019 to amend the statute for falsely reporting an incident to include hate crimes. Ortiz posted on Twitter that if the bill passes it would make falsely reported incidents, like Amy Cooper’s, a hate crime.
Ortiz’s bill is still pending votes with the committee.
“If they can come up with a fine this fast for social distancing then they can come up with this,” said Browne-Marshall.
Walker says, for now, it’s more important to resist internal racism and be responsible for the mental health of the community “because we have that in our control.”
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With traffic dramatically down in recent months, the United States is in the middle of an accidental experiment showing what happens to air pollution when millions of people stop driving.
The air is clearer. But the pollution declines aren’t nearly as large as early indications suggested, according to an NPR analysis of six years of Environmental Protection Agency data.
In some cities, the amount of one pollutant, ozone, has barely decreased compared with levels over the past five years, despite traffic reductions of more than 40%. Ground-level ozone, or smog, occurs when the chemicals emitted by cars, trucks, factories and other sources react with sunlight and heat.
NPR analyzed more than half a million air pollution measurements reported to the EPA from more than 900 air monitoring sites around the country. We compared the median ozone levels detected this spring with levels found during the comparable period over the past five years.
Our analysis revealed that, in the vast majority of places, ozone pollution decreased by 15% or less, a clear indication that improving air quality will take much more than cleaning up tailpipes of passenger cars.
In cities such as Los Angeles, stubbornly poor air quality during the coronavirus lockdown underscored how vast fleets of trucks are a dominant source of pollution. In industrial cities like Houston, refineries and petrochemical plants spew considerable air pollution. And in Pittsburgh and across a swath of the eastern U.S., much of the air pollution still comes from burning coal.
Scientists say those cities, where air pollution often exceeds federal health standards, will likely have to change the way they generate power, manufacture goods and move those goods around if they hope to have healthy air.
“I think it’s a really important [question] to think about: What can we learn from decreases in traffic pollution?” says Jenna Krall, a statistician and air pollution expert at George Mason University. “It will give us more information about what these pollution mixtures could look like [with] fewer people driving.”
Freeway traffic was light and the air was relatively clear in Los Angeles on April 6.
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Los Angeles — trucks overtake cars
Initially, the virtually nationwide lockdown appeared to have dramatically positive results. In early April, NASA published satellite images of pollution disappearing over New York City.
After California issued a stay-at-home order in mid-March, greater Los Angeles saw the longest stretch of clean air that had been documented in decades. In Los Angeles, the skies seemed to clear just as rarely seen images of nearly empty freeways began to make headlines. It was welcome news for an area with some of the highest levels of ozone in the country, often exceeding federal health standards.
Breathing polluted air for long periods of time can damage the lungs and make it more difficult to fight respiratory disease. Ozone pollution is especially detrimental to children and elderly people and those with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory illnesses. The COVID-19 pandemic adds another respiratory disease to that list.
But the cleaner air wasn’t just about reduced traffic.
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A series of rainstorms swept through Southern California in March, which helped remove pollutants from the air. But as the weather warmed up in late April and early May, the air quality worsened, even hitting the “very unhealthy” warning category from the EPA.
“There was a lot of pressure on us to come up with the answer that everyone wanted to hear, which is that the COVID-19 measures have cleaned the air in Southern California,” says Philip Fine, deputy executive officer at the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates air quality in greater LA.
Overall, ozone levels were down only 14% in late March and April compared with the same period over the previous five years, according to NPR’s analysis. The modest drop points to a fact air regulators have long emphasized: Cars are not the biggest air pollution problem in Los Angeles.
“I’ve read a lot of newspaper articles over the past couple weeks that have said if only we can have people telecommute one day a week across the entire basin, our air quality problems will be solved,” says Fine. “And unfortunately, it’s not that simple.”
As passenger cars have gotten cleaner, they’ve become a relatively smaller source of pollution. Heavy-duty transportation, such as trucks and buses, now accounts for the largest source of nitrogen oxides, which form ozone, in the area. Major ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach handle more than 30% of the nation’s shipping container traffic, requiring a vast network of ships, trucks and trains coming in and out of the region.
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Emissions from those sources, combined with hot and stagnant weather, cause air pollution to hit dangerous levels during the summer, which puts the region out of compliance with federal air standards. Low-income communities are hit the hardest.
While activity at the region’s ports has slowed with the pandemic, trucks have largely stayed on the roads to ensure that goods are arriving in stores. At the end of April, truck activity was down only about 8% across California, according to the American Transportation Research Institute.
In a strange wrinkle, the reduction of one pollutant can also make ozone slightly worse. Cars and trucks produce nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx. While that pollutant helps form ozone, under some conditions it can temporarily break down ozone molecules. So with less NOx being emitted recently, ozone hasn’t been suppressed as much.
“Small reductions in NOx actually increase ozone,” says Cesunica Ivey, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside. “So we’re just going to have to be more aggressive with our sustainable transportation solutions.”
Severe Los Angeles smog in the 1950s and ’60s prompted California to ultimately pass some of the most aggressive air quality regulations in the country. The state still sets its own tailpipe emissions standards for cars, apart from the federal government. The Trump administration is now seeking to revoke California’s legal authority to do so.
California also has an ambitious target for putting 5 million electric cars on the road by 2030. That could help lower emissions because instead of burning gasoline, those cars would run on electricity, largely generated by solar, wind and hydropower in the state.
Now California is crafting a similar policy for trucks. State regulators are expected to vote on rules in June that would require truck manufacturers to sell all-electric or fuel-cell trucks in the state — from delivery trucks all the way to tractor-trailers. The policy would begin in 2024, requiring that 5% to 9% of sales be electric, depending on the type of truck. By 2035, it would be up to 40% to 75% of sales.
Some truck manufacturers have pushed back against the proposal, saying the market for selling electric trucks hasn’t developed yet. Supporters say higher sticker prices would be offset by fuel savings over time, and when paired with California’s other efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, could potentially save thousands of lives by improving the air.
“We don’t need a pandemic to breathe cleaner air,” says Yifang Zhu, professor at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There is a sustainable way for a society to achieve a cleaner world in the future. We need to do more than we’re doing right now.”
Water vapor rises from a coal powered power plant stack. Pollution from burning coal affects a larger area than vehicle emissions.
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Water vapor rises from a coal powered power plant stack. Pollution from burning coal affects a larger area than vehicle emissions.
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Pittsburgh — coal on display
Less car traffic makes pollution from coal more obvious in the broad swath of Midwestern and Eastern states where the majority of coal-fired power plants are still operating. Compared to passenger cars, burning coal releases large amounts of air pollution, including nitrogen oxides and small particulate matter, or soot.
Nowhere is the role of coal in air pollution more evident than in Allegheny County, Pa., where Pittsburgh is located. The county is home to a major coking plant that uses coal to make the fuel for the blast furnaces in steel factories, as well as a coal-fired power plant. Both continued to operate during the lockdown along with other steel facilities clustered in and around the county.
Between March 15 and the end of April, NPR’s analysis found ozone levels in the Pittsburgh area dropped about 9%, compared with 14% in Los Angeles. Across the coal-intensive Ohio River Valley, the analysis concluded that in major cities, ozone dropped only between 3% and 8%.
Scientists say that’s not surprising because coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels. “Unlike a lot of the eastern part of the United States, there’s not much, if any, coal-fired power plant production in California,” says Emily Elliott, a geochemist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies nitrogen oxides.
Pollution from burning coal also affects a larger area than vehicle emissions, which means modest air pollution reductions in East Coast states may partly be because of their location downwind of coal-fired facilities. “If you think about a power plant that has a tall smokestack, those emissions are going high aloft in the air and they’re going to travel long, long distances compared to a vehicle tailpipe that’s close to the ground,” Elliott says.
The Houston metro area is home to the largest concentration of petrochemical facilities in the country. Residents of Houston, despite a 40% reduction in local traffic, did not breathe significantly cleaner air during the lockdown.
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The Houston metro area is home to the largest concentration of petrochemical facilities in the country. Residents of Houston, despite a 40% reduction in local traffic, did not breathe significantly cleaner air during the lockdown.
Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images
Houston — the petrochemical industry’s role
Coal is not the only industry culprit for poor air. NPR’s investigation found that residents of Houston did not breathe significantly cleaner air during the lockdown, despite a 40% reduction in local traffic.
Houston experienced an 11% decrease in ozone. Daily ozone levels in Houston were still high enough to trigger an air quality warning in the city in mid-April.
The Houston metro area is home to the largest concentration of petrochemical facilities in the country. Refineries and chemical plants are major emitters of not only nitrogen oxide, but sulfur dioxide, which also contributes to smog and haze.
NPR’s analysis also found only modest decreases in Houston’s soot pollution during the lockdown. The median amount of soot in the air decreased by just 13% in Houston compared with the previous five years, according to air monitoring sites that reported data between March 15 and the end of April. Air monitoring sites that reported comparable data in greater Los Angeles showed a 30% decrease. There was not adequate data to compare soot levels in Pittsburgh.
Chronic exposure to soot is associated with shorter life expectancies, lung cancer, diabetes and low birth weight and can exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses.
Regulatory rollbacks could make industrial pollution more severe in the future. The Trump administration announced this spring that it will not strengthen limits on soot, despite an assessment published earlier this year by EPA scientists that found that a stronger standard would save lives.
An accidental experiment
Scientists around the country say reduced car traffic offers them an unexpected opportunity to study how cars, trucks, factories and power plants contribute to air pollution and to test the assumptions that go into pollution models.
One such study is already underway at Texas A&M University, where atmospheric scientist Gunnar Schade examined preliminary air data for the city of Houston and found that levels of particulate matter increased slightly in at least one location in Houston during the lockdown.
“That was a somewhat surprising result, that particulate matter is not going down at all,” he says. “We assume that car traffic does contribute to [small particulate pollution]. It has in the past.”
Schade’s analysis, which has not been peer reviewed and is still being updated as more data becomes available, also suggests that particulate pollution decreased more in residential parts of Houston than it did in industrial areas.
Schade says it’s too soon to be sure whether that means the pollution came from the industrial sites — he needs more data.
Despite decades of research and a relatively robust set of satellites and ground-based air monitors, there are still sizable holes in our understanding of how different sources of air pollution contribute to overall air quality, according to Elena Craft, the director of climate and health at the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas.
The pandemic could help make scientific models of what are called emissions inventories more accurate. “If you take all the cars off the road and it doesn’t put a dent in your emissions inventory, then probably cars are not making up a lot of that inventory,” explains Craft. “But if, on the other hand, you take all the cars off the road and air quality is great, then you may tweak the models.”
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