Kaepernick's Cause Célèbre

Colin Kaepernick (center) kneels before the San Diego
Chargers game last Thursday September 1st.

From the perspective of a former professional football player, it's been fascinating to watch the varied reactions to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernik's decision to sit or kneel on the sidelines during the playing of the national anthem before preseason games as a means to protest the disparate treatment of people of color by some police officers in America.

His actions have drawn intense media scrutiny for good reason.


Case in point: the public request of 34 different New York City council officials yesterday, including Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Public Advocate Letitia James, issued to Mayor Bill de Blasio demanding that the city change it's policy to allow the release of the NYPD disciplinary records of Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner after placing him in an illegal choke hold caught on video over two years ago.

The city has been dragging it's feet on filing charges against Pantaleo for months, and the city council members made their public demands on Tuesday after Mayor de Blasio tried to duck responsibility for putting pressure on the NYPD by insisting that the New York State Legislature must change the laws governing the release of disciplinary data for the NYPD.

So Kaepernick isn't just kneeling for nothing.

I think it goes without saying that the NFL star's now-infamous sideline protest also includes the systematic racial bias entrenched in local, state and federal judicial courts as well, which, as we've learned from Department of Justice analysis of places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, go hand-in-hand with the biased policing practices particularly common in communities where people of color are the majority.

Actor Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station

Some regard his decision as disrespectful to the flag and the country, like the Santa Clara Police Officers Association (the union that represents the approximately 70 police officers who provide security at 49ers home games) which sent a letter to the team saying officers may boycott working San Francisco home games if the team does not discipline and rebuke Kaepernick for what they regard as anti-police statements.

The SCPOA letter also accused Kaepernick's "anti-police" statements as being "inaccurate and completely unsupported by any facts"-maybe the SCPOA should show Fruitvale Station at their next union movie night.

The critically-acclaimed 2013 film directed by Ryan Coogler depicts the last day of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American who was unarmed and being held face-down by Bay Area Rapid Transport officers on the platform of a subway platform in nearby Oakland, California when a white officer shot him in the back and killed him in front of horrified onlookers who also captured the incident on video.

Many others, including the President, see Kaepernick's actions as the legitimate exercising of his 1st Amendment right to freedom of expression - according to a Washington Post article NFL players and even fans from other teams may begin joining Kaepernick in sitting during the national anthem when the NFL kicks off this weekend.

Personally speaking, those kinds of political or personal expressions weren't really a part of the landscape of the National Football League when I played in 1992 - 1994.

It's not that players didn't feel strongly about such issues, that was the post-Rodney King era after all when excessive and unjustified violence against people of color by police officers was first truly coming into the mainstream global spotlight, and I can tell you from personal experience that more than a few African-American teammates that I played with during my time with the New York Giants experienced instances of being pulled over for "Driving While Black" by local police in different parts of north Jersey for no other reason than being black and driving an expensive vehicle.

Kaepernick in his younger days

In the early 90's the use of and access to social media via hand-held cell phones was not a part of the mainstream as it is today.

So NFL players really didn't have the kind of readily accessible outlet to express beliefs or opinions the way they do today, when almost every college and professional athlete has a Twitter or Instagram account to use as a platform for personal expression.  

I don't know Colin Kaepernick, so I can only speculate that, like many other people around the world, he got fed up with the slew of unjustified shootings of innocent people of color by some members of law enforcement that have dominated the headlines in recent years.

When I see him these days with his beard and large Afro as he now looks in the photo up at the top, my sense is that he's matured and evolved in his sense of self-awareness of his own racial identity.

He's noticeably different than he was as a younger player with his close-cropped hair, and though he's of mixed race ancestry, he's not someone that I pegged as distinctively "African-American" in appearance.

Honestly, I thought he was Hispanic when I first saw him on TV a few years ago.

Now obviously if you'd read this blog, you know I don't mean that in any kind of demeaning way, black Americans come in many different shades; I have relatives in my own family who run the gamut of skin color from Kaepernick as he appears in the photo above, to really really dark-skinned.

Having been raised in the suburbs of Bethesda, Maryland and West Windsor, New Jersey, I  know what it's like to be "the only black guy in the class", so my guess is Kaepernick has had to deal with his own kinds of issues with peers, some family members and strangers in terms of his race.

He was adopted by a very loving white family in 1987 after his birth mother made the difficult decision to give him up for adoption; in fact he refuses any contact with her even though she's tried to connect with him - check out noted sports writer Rick Reilly's ESPN.com article on Kaepernick's complex upbringing for more insight.

The NFL is a tightly-run ship in terms of conduct and behavior on and off the field, so I have to admire Kaepernick's defiance of those happy to cheer him when he's throwing touchdown passes, who do a 180 and view him with contempt or anger when he expresses an opinion that doesn't jibe with their own.

Lest we forget, he's using his position in the spotlight to bring needed attention to one the paramount  issues of justice and human rights facing this country; the systematic disparate treatment of people of color by some police officers, which can and has led to the loss of innocent lives.

If there's a better way for an athlete to make use of his fame, I'm not sure what it is.

Broken Windows, Broken System - Daniel Pantaleo's Arrest Record Reveals Wildly Distorted Policing Policy

Officer Daniel Pantaleo after choking (& killing) Eric Garner in Staten Island

Analysis of records of the 259 arrests made by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was caught on video applying an illegal choke hold during an arrest that led to Eric Garner's death, calls into question the very existence of the NYPD's "Broken Windows" policing policy.

Records show that a mere 24 of Pantaleo's 259 arrests were actually for serious felony crimes.

The bulk of his arrests are for very minor infractions like marijuana possession, loitering, obstructing traffic, selling loose cigarettes and of course, resisting arrest. If his record is a sample of a typical NYPD patrol officer, what does that say about Broken Windows and the thousands of people being shuttled into New York City's penal system?

The basic theory of Broken Windows follows a simple premise: by focusing police resources and manpower on lower-level offenses that directly impact quality of life, much more serious felony offenses like rape, robbery, assault and murder would in turn be reduced.

But is the enforcement itself triggering horrific felonies far beyond the petty offenses that often trigger violent confrontations between police and (mostly) minority suspects? WNYC reporter Robert Lewis explored that question in an excellent piece back in July.

The Broken Windows policy was a hallmark of the Rudy Giuliani-era when NYPD officers began to crack down hard on things like overly aggressive squeegee guys approaching idling vehicles, cleaning windshields then demanding change for the unsolicited service.

The NYPD also stopped graffiti artists from tagging trains, subway stations and walls; in conjunction with city ordinances they made it harder for kids to buy spray paint (and box cutters) from hardware stores. Fare-jumpers who hopped subway turn styles, or people drinking from open containers of alcohol in public also drastically dropped. They even started harassing food cart vendors.

The policy continued under the Bloomberg administration. 

But as the arrest statistics piled up almost exclusively for young men of color, as did the staggering number of totally innocent citizens caught up in the wide net that Broken Windows cast, the Constitutionality of "Stop and Frisk" (a core element of Broken Windows policing strategy) became a much larger legal issue. Now it's an ugly stain on the legacy of the Bloomberg administration.

In light of the national attention focused on Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson's fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown over the summer, Eric Garner's death from Daniel Pantaleo's illegal choke hold during an encounter in Staten Island (resulting from Garner's arrest for selling loose cigarettes to people on the street) became more than just business as usual for the NYPD.

The encounter was filmed by a bystander and went viral, placing the policy of Broken Windows squarely into the spotlight of global media scrutiny.

Disturbing facts about Pantaleo have emerged as witnesses from some of his 259 arrests have stepped forward with alarming details of his treatment of suspects.

Back on August 2nd the NY Daily News ran a piece on 43 year-old Tommy Rice, a welder who was stopped, strip-searched and falsely arrested (along with three other passengers in a car) in Staten Island by Pantaleo and another officer back in March of 2012.

Rice was eventually awarded $30,000 from the city after it was shown Pantaleo mocked and insulted Rice during the strip search by slapping his genitals. Where do you find that technique in the NYPD manual?

Earlier today NPR ran a feature and interview about another African-American who was falsely arrested by Pantaleo in Staten Island after the rogue cop stopped him and a friend on the street while they were taking an old boiler to a scrap yard for cash.

Pantaleo accused the man of stealing the boiler even though he explained that it had come from his girlfriend's mother's home and had been given to him. Pantaleo arrested him anyway; further clogging the New York City court system by charging the guy with obstructing traffic for pushing the boiler along the street in a shopping cart.

Obviously Garner's death was a ruled a homicide, but should we really blame Pantaleo? What about the system that put him back out on the street as a cop? Clearly the guy is no brain surgeon, but he's only enforcing the existing laws on the city's books.

What's becoming painfully clear is that Pantaleo is just one cog in a damaged machine and a symptom of a broken system.

If you want evidence of just how broken the system is, last week Sarah Ryley published the findings of some truly unsettling analysis by the NY Daily News. Look for yourself as these startling statistics showing the disproportionate rate at which Hispanics and Blacks are issued summonses for low-level offenses in New York.

Take for example the Upper West Side (North) in Manhattan, where, according to Ryley's Daily News article, blacks and Hispanics make up 34% of the population - yet they account for 84% of the summonses issued by the NYPD.

As Ryley's article states: "The analysis also found blacks and Hispanics received the vast majority of summonses for scores of common offenses, such as disorderly conduct (88%), loitering (89%), spitting (92%) and failure to have a dog license (91%) — even though the Health Department estimates that less than 17% of dogs citywide are licensed."

Those numbers are startling. If you consider the amount of revenue those summonses generate for the city, one might conclude the Broken Windows policy essentially amounts to a city tax on the behavior of black and Hispanic citizens.

Or perhaps Broken Windows policing serves the more sinister goal of offering NYPD officers the option of being able to criminalize virtually anything a person of color is doing in New York; walking an unlicensed dog, spitting on the sidewalk, having some weed in their pocket - any of which their white counterparts are also doing on any given day in Park Slope, the Village, Williamsburg or DUMBO.

I lived in New York for 15 years, I know that's true. By the way it's common knowledge that you can walk into almost any corner Bodega and by a "loosie" (a single cigarette) in case you just want a quick smoke and don't want to shell out ten bucks for a pack, strange that Pantaleo would arrest Eric Garner for doing it on the street in Staten Island.

Stranger still that Pantaleo would put him in a choke hold and end Garner's life for doing it.

But when viewed in the larger context of the numbers cited in the Daily News analysis, an officer like Daniel Pantaleo actually makes sense - a policy like Broken Windows can only function when you have officers like him to do the dirty work.

Dirty work indeed.