By David Gordon, associate editor
Racist attitudes, frayed relations between police and the communities they serve and possible ways to improve those relations were all part of Corey Saffold’s talk Wednesday night at the L. E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in Eau Claire.
Saffold, a black police officer from Madison, spoke to some 40 people as part of the Wisconsin Humanities Council’s Working Lives Project. The project’s goal is to promote reflection and action about the meaning of work both for individuals and for the community as a whole.
Saffold blamed both social media and established news media outlets for helping to create public mistrust of police. There is “so much negativity toward police, and that’s all we see” in the media, he said, and this affects both perceptions and some of the contacts that people have with the police.
Most of those contacts are, in fact, positive ones, Saffold said, but those don’t get reported.
“I wish there would be a media outlet that would devote time to positive contacts,” he said.
Faulty Perceptions of Black Males
He also criticized the media as one of the factors that help shape the faulty perception that all black males are violent. He illustrated this by showing a pair of stories from an Iowa newspaper reporting on two groups of young men arrested on burglary charges.
Photos of the trio of University of Iowa wrestlers – all of them white – showed them in jackets and ties. Photos of the four black men arrested were all police mug shots showing the men in every day clothes.
The impact of such coverage is a heavy contributor – together with such factors as parental attitudes – to how black males are frequently misperceived, Saffold said. He called the various contributing factors the “baggage of life” and added that people fall back on such ingrained biases, usually as a reflex, when they find themselves in strange or dangerous situations.
“What Lenses Do You Have On?”
“Perception is reality,” he said. The key questions are “what are you seeing and what lenses do you have on?”
An individual’s biases may be largely or even totally unconscious but, where black-white relationships are concerned, they still reflect racism, Saffold said.
This has resulted in wrong decisions and over-reactions by white officers confronted by situations involving black males, Saffold said. He showed two videos, both involving white police officers shooting black males when much less extreme measures would have been appropriate.
Such tragedies often reflect a failure by the police to take the time to understand fully a situation they encounter, he said, and this can be compounded by “baggage of life” misperceptions and biases.
Madison’s Efforts
Saffold said that the Madison police department is trying to provide training to help its officers act without regard to their biases, but nonetheless has endured some high-profile racially based incidents. He said that building relationships between individual officers and members of the community is one key to avoiding future incidents, as are efforts to help the public understand what goes into effective police work.
Madison “always works very hard to be engaged in the community and get rid of the ‘us and them’ mentality,” Saffold said of his department.
Those efforts include a community outreach team that spends full time on its mission, as well as officers assigned to patrol specific neighborhoods. The neighborhood patrols provide an opportunity to get to know the residents, and vice versa, which helps to engage community members in the law enforcement process, he said.
“I do think the best policing will come from the community,” Saffold said, but added that police involvement in the process is still crucial. Increasing the number of officers on neighborhood patrol “is happening and is very helpful,” he said.
Why Saffold Continues in Police Work
Saffold said he became a police officer, and continues as one despite the problems he described, because of the way the law enforcement system treated him when he was a teen-ager in Milwaukee. Almost on a dare, he took a valuable bass guitar off the wall at a music shop, walked out undetected and played it for a year even though he felt some guilt about it. Then, a (white) Milwaukee police detective caught up with him and explained that the guitar’s value made his crime a felony, which would create many problems for him if it went on his record.
Apparently convinced that Saffold merited another chance, “that detective did everything in his power” to persuade people in the criminal justice system to refrain from charging him with a felony, Saffold said. Everyone he encountered in the course of resolving his situation acted very professionally, and the way he was treated led to his decision on a career.
“I need to go and be a police officer and do the same thing for other people,” Saffold said, noting that in this role, “I can extend those same second chances to hundreds of people” and, in the process, influence how they view the police.
Saffold’s presentation was co-sponsored by UW-Eau Claire’s Circles of Change and by humanKIND, which is part of the Eastside Hill Neighborhood Association. The UW-EC program is an effort by the university and community partners to make the Chippewa Valley a more racially and ethnically diverse and inclusive environment.
A video of the program is now available by clicking here.