Interviews: The U.S. Has a Police Brutality Problem
The Augusta Chronicle asked 60 people last week – 20 each in Aiken, Columbia and Richmond counties – whether the country has a problem. Seventy percent answered yes. Only 15 percent said no, while 13 percent believed it to be true in some places but not in others. One person (2 percent) was uncertain.
“Yes, I believe this country does have a police brutality problem,” said Kim Sharpton, 44, a son of a police officer. “Social media and the advent of cellular phones with cameras in them allows the opportunity for us to catch what happens in the act.”
One high-profile example was last month’s shooting of an unarmed North Charleston, S.C., black man in the back by a police officer during a foot chase after a traffic stop. The officer was arrested and charged with murder.
Last week’s riot in Baltimore followed the death of a 25-year-old black man whose arrest was captured on a cellphone video. On Friday, six officers were charged in Freddie Gray’s death.
Sheriff Richard Roundtree said police brutality is more perception than reality but understands why the public would believe there is a problem. Fourteen of the 20 people (70 percent) interviewed in Richmond County said they believe police brutality is an issue.
“The media draws a great deal of attention to it,” he said. “It was the same with school shootings. … When people see it every day (in the media) they believe it’s a bigger problem than it really is.”
Black respondents saw it as a bigger problem than any other group at 91 percent (20 out of 22). White respondents saw it less of a problem at 56 percent (17 of 30), with white men (9 out of 19) or 47.3 percent believing it was an issue.
Aiken County Sheriff Mike Hunt and Columbia County Sheriff Clay Whittle declined interview requests. Representatives from the departments said the sheriffs would only comment on issues involving their respective counties.
“We don’t comment on activities we have no control over,” Columbia County sheriff’s Capt. Steve Morris said.
Seventy-five percent of respondents in Columbia County said yes to the question, while 65 percent in Aiken County did likewise.
Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, said he’s not surprised that some wouldn’t comment. He said staying out of the national conversation about police brutality isn’t the answer.
“What they’re doing is they’re individualizing,” Stoughton said in general about law enforcement agencies. “They’re saying that I’ll talk about my individual agency but I don’t want to talk about systemic problems. Well, that makes sense, but it also prevents us from having a good conversation about systemic solutions.”
He agreed with Roundtree that some of the perception is media driven. With the rise of cellphone cameras and social media, Stoughton said, information is flowing at an all-time high, which might lead people to believe abuses of power happen more often than they actually do.
“Even after the Rodney King beating, we didn’t have the same prolonged, sustained public debate about policing that we’ve had now for almost a year,” he said.
Stoughton said he thinks that the majority of the respondents would have responded differently a few years ago.
“If we went back two years, I don’t think we would see these same numbers among any population group because it just wasn’t on people’s radar,” he said. “People weren’t thinking about it, weren’t confronted with it, and now they are.”
Fritz Wurzinger, 75, doesn’t believe there’s a police brutality problem.
“What we’re seeing in the news is a possible exaggeration because we only see a fraction of what’s actually happening,” he said last week.
In Richmond County, less than 1 percent of the 150,000 calls for service to the sheriff’s office this year resulted in complaints of police brutality, according to Lt. Allan Rollins. The department’s internal affairs division handled five cases of “excessive force.” Four of those occurred at the jail, and only one resulted in action, he said.
Since 2014, the Aiken County Sheriff’s Office has responded to more than 78,000 calls for service, resulting in nine complaints, said Capt. Eric Abdullah. Only one involved abuse of power, and it was unsubstantiated, he said.
In Columbia County, there have been no complaints about abuse of power or brutality, Morris said. One complaint regarding excessive force was investigated and was later determined to be unsubstantiated, he said.
Sheriff’s offices in all three counties generally forward citizen complaints to that agency’s internal affairs office, which decides whether a criminal or administrative investigation is needed. Criminal investigations are usually conducted by an outside, state-level agency.
Roundtree said it does not appear that recent events nationwide are having an effect on how Augustans interact with police. He has seen no extra hostility or fear from the public in recent encounters.
“If anything, I see the opposite,” he said. “People are engaging with officers because it’s not happening here. I think that’s a great thing that people can have conversations with their officers.”
