Dallas Police Chief David Brown: the backstory
When the recent police shootings in Dallas were in the news I was singularly impressed by Dallas Police Chief David Brown. In his public statements he was consistently calm yet intense, forceful yet articulate, during a time of great stress. Listening to him on TV one day, I had the thought (although I don’t know his politics): now, why can’t he be a nominee for president?
Why, indeed? Or at least, someone of his caliber?
Alas, that’s not the prospect that faces us right now. But the thought made me do a bit of research and learn more about Brown, who has been widely lauded for reforms that have made the Dallas police force a model since he became Chief in 2010, which is quite an achievement during the last few years of turmoil over police behavior:
The department committed itself to transparency. It developed a new foot pursuit policy that emphasized de-escalation. One proposal would make police officers in Dallas subject to lethal force training every two months instead of every two years. Brown released an enormous amount of police data, too, publishing statistics including 12 years worth of data on police shootings on an official online repository. The number of body cameras used by officers increased. Poor performing police officers were fired. And after Brown declared that traffic citations were not intended to “raise revenue,” his officers issued half as many tickets at last count as they did in 2006…
…[C]rime statistics seem to validate Brown’s work. In 2014, Dallas had its lowest murder rate since 1930. Overall crime decreased by 4.5 percent last year while violent crime dropped at a similar clip. There have been ups and downs, including a dramatic uptick in murders this year, but the trend line appears to hold true: Dallas is a less violent city than it was five years ago.
Some point out that police reform may not be responsible for plummeting crime rates. But, at the very least, Dallas police appear to have cleaned up their act. Excessive force complaints against the department dropped by 64 percent over a five-year period. Arrests are decreasing by the thousands each year.
“So far this year, in 2016, we have had four excessive force complaints. We’ve averaged between 150 and 200 my whole 33-year career. So this is transformative,” Brown told a crowd of his fellow officers and policymakers at the White House in April.
As I researched more about Brown, however, I discovered a personal story that is almost unimaginably ironic and tragic, the sort of thing that would be dismissed as unbelievable if it appeared in a work of fiction. But this is no work of fiction; it is Biblical in its dimensions, although I’m not sure what the moral of the story is (from June of 2010, shortly after Brown took office):
Wearing only light-colored boxer shorts and dripping in sweat, David O’Neal Brown Jr. silently approached and fatally shot a man driving his girlfriend and two children through a Lancaster apartment complex Sunday night.
“He just put the gun to the window and opened fire,” LaQuita Spence, 25, said of the man who killed her boyfriend, Jeremy Jontae McMillian. “He just had a terrifying look. His eyes were big; they were kind of glossy.”
Minutes later, Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s 27-year-old son also shot and killed Lancaster police Officer Craig Shaw before Brown was himself killed by officers, according to a law enforcement official who asked that his name not be published.
McMillian, 23, who did not know Brown, died at the scene. Shaw, 37, a father of two, died at a Dallas hospital.
Please read the whole thing. It appears that Brown’s son (David Brown Jr.) had been high on drugs and acting very erratically for several days, and his behavior culminated in the killings. Let me add that everyone—everyone—in this story was black: the killer, the victim in the car, and the dead police officer (who seemed to be something of a model human being himself; see this). The murders occurred on Father’s Day, which may or may not have been of some significance.
The story encapsulates so many problems both in the black community and in society as a whole: drugs, violence, father/son relationships, police vulnerability during responses to violence.
He might be excellent presidential material, but instead, may he be widely emulated as a police chief. May his ideas become widespread in the land in police departments and we’ll have less to worry about further downstream in politics.
My retired cop neighbor tells me that throughout his years in law enforcement (30) he was taught that de-escalation was always the preferred route. Although his experience was in a medium sized city (250,000), it was a hub of Mexican drug and gang activity, and there was a considerable amount of violence. However, by using de-escalation techniques, he seldom had to get rough with a perp and never shot anyone. It makes me wonder how the training in police departments varies from place to place.
As to Chief Brown. My hat is off to him. He has held it together in the worst of life’s circumstances. He’s an example for all fathers who have lost sons to drugs and/or violence. May he continue to a beacon of strength to both law enforcement and we civilians.
Chief Brown is really someone you can judge on the content of his character. I wish more people would try to emulate him-both black and white.
LaQuita? Jontae?
In 2004 there was published in Quart. J. Econ. a paper titled “The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names”.
The abstract is given here in full:
“In the 1960s Blacks and Whites chose relatively similar first names for their children. Over a short period of time in the early 1970s, that pattern changed dramatically with most Blacks (particularly those living in racially isolated neighborhoods) adopting increasingly distinctive names, but a subset of Blacks actually moving toward more assimilating names. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the rise of the Black Power movement influenced how Blacks perceived their identities. Among Blacks born in the last two decades, names provide a strong signal of socioeconomic status, which was not previously the case. We find, however, no negative relationship between having a distinctively Black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child’s circumstances at birth. © 2004 MIT Press”
I am not sure what “controlling for a child’s circumstances at birth” truly means. That is, if Black names as we today hear them indicate a low socioeconomic status at birth, does “no negative correllation” mean that they did not slip even lower as adults? Even if that were possible. How can one slip lower than being an unmarried mother of two at age 19 on full government support?
I guess I’ll have to read the full paper.
Frog, I assume that “controlling for a child’s circumstances at birth” refers to whether the child was born into a stable, two parent family; or whether the child was one of several born to different men, none of which were in any of the children’s lives. Wow, that is a racist statement if I ever read one.
I will see what I can find about Chief Brown’s career path. I assume that it was not strictly an EEOC approved advancement, but, included gnarly duty out on the streets. Maybe I am mistaken, but he seems like that kind of cop.
I would certainly not jump to the conclusion that he is Presidential material–the Peter Principle is based on reality–but he is an impressive example of a competent Black man in a leadership role, and a strong voice for getting beyond the racial divisiveness that has become endemic.
Sheriff Clarke in Milwaukee is at least as good a man as Chief Brown. Interestingly, Clarke is a registered Democrat. He may be one of the few decent and normal Democrats in the USA.
Oldflyer: the Quarterly Journal of Economics appears to be the joint product of Harvard and MIT.
Detroit police chief James Craig, also black and a Democrat, appears to be cut from the same mold as Brown and Clarke: Detroit Police Chief: Terrorists don’t fuck with Detroiters because we all carry guns (paraphrased gently)
It’s going to require many more prominent blacks being willing to “speak truth to power” to get blacks to understand that Democrat programs and policies have thoroughly corrupted their culture, and that’s why they’ve made no progress economically since the “Great Society”. They’ve been given incentives that stifle their drive and motivation with Pavlovian behavior modification that has trained them to stay down. They understandably resent where they find themselves, but when Democrats ring the bell, they all automatically run after the Republicans/whites in general now.
Conservatives/Republicans need to find a way to get them to understand that the left has done this to them, not us.
There are several police chiefs of color who both are sensitive to the perception (and, to some degree, reality) of police abuse in the African American community, and are clear headed on the reality that their police focus needs to be in the communities where crime is highest – not from racial animus, but from facts derived from where crimes are most reported (IOW, they don’t completely buy into the left’s rhetoric, but value competence in getting the job done – no excuses).
Another example is Charles Ramsey (former Chief in both DC and Philly), if his recent TV appearances are anything to go by.
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BTW, in rising above the rhetoric and outrage, David Brown’s response to 2012 protests over Dallas officer involved shootings was to ask them to “Show him the one that wasn’t justified.”…
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20160729-the-false-equivalence-of-officers-shooting-vs.-officers-being-shot.ece
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BLM (and the left) lose credibility when they jump quickly on new cases where the merit of their claims are yet to be determined, and on continually pushing cases already discredited by the evidence, perpetuating a myth.
Too bad, as where there is some truth to their claims, it gets overshadowed by these false ones. They will never make headway. (IMHO, BLM lost a lot of ground with the recent attacks on police – read the linked article for why).
Couple that with the efficacy of their proposals towards their goal (most of it won’t work, IMHO), and, one has to wonder if the leaders of that movement really care about the BL part of the BLM.
Do people really expect politicians to fix these levels of problems? It would take a re engineering of the entire human edifice, from the ground up. A task that has broken kings and emperors, let alone wannabe megalomaniacs.
Couple that with the efficacy of their proposals towards their goal (most of it won’t work, IMHO), and, one has to wonder if the leaders of that movement really care about the BL part of the BLM.
BL lives about blacks the way the Shia Revolution cares about the Persians.
he has too much to lose if he did step forwards, which is why people of his caliber dont… we the people dont ahve their back, and we let the left tree, skin and lay them out in ruination… (ergo trump can cause he has nothing to lose but some money and has more than enough they cant take enough away from him).
its that simple
same thing with the CRA and banks, if we stood behind them, they could have resisted the false accusations of redlining racism, but we didn,t we joined in, and caught between a rock and a hard place they did what they had to do to try to comply wiht mutually exclusive missives and no support from the people who would have empowered them to eject hucksters from their lobbies
same with republican politicians, they get more support from the left for cheating than we give them for not cheating… heck, we cant even accept them if they have not couched their whole life to hiding who they are to be a foil we want over someone we dont like but who will represent us better…
we cant handle the truth of the real, so we want someone who is a shadow, who doesnt express themselves and says and does whats expected…
otherwise..