By Elaine Magliaro
Redditt Hudson has an interesting article titled I’m a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing over at Vox. Hudson was a St. Louis police officer for five years. He currently serves as the board chair of The Ethics Project, and as a member of the National Coalition of Law Enforcement for Justice, Reform, and Accountability.
Here is an excerpt from Hudson’s lengthy Vox article:
On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.
That’s a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, “I can’t believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!” He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.
That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.
It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.
Here is a video that was included with Hudson’s article at Vox:
The racism of the US justice system in 10 charts
Click here to read Redditt Hudson’s article I’m a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing.
SOURCES
I’m a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing (Vox)
A Black Cop With The Real Story About Race And Policing (Crooks and Liars)
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
Elaine,
This information is horrifying, but not unexpected. The horror comes from the blunt expression from an officers perspective of what the Black community experiences daily at the hands of the police and the corrupting influence exerted upon police cultures all over this country by the worst among them. It also clearly points out the media complacency in this and the media’s constantly portraying all law enforcement officers as heroes, which lulls the general public into complacency by abuses literally occurring daily beneath our eyes.
Training given by your local Klan rally, what do you expect.
Yes the blacks in America are innocent,they rape, rob and murder at will.They will shoot you dead in a home invasion.They commit most of the crime but it is all covered up by the media.Why are the US prison population made up of mostly black Americans and hispanics I say no more.
Jack,
You know the expressio “you don’t know Jack shit? You’re “Jack ‘
” it refers to.