Racism in policing: Two views from inside
The American Federation of Teachers invited state and local leaders from around the country to take part in a series of chats with AFT staff for Black History Month in February. Two of these leaders from AFT Public Employees were Antoinette Ryan-Johnson, an employee of the Baltimore Police Department and president of the City Union of Baltimore (CUB), and Wayne Spence, a parole officer and president of the New York State Public Employees Federation (PEF). Their conversation ranged from childhood aspirations to racism in policing and the school-to-prison pipeline. Their talk, below, is edited for length and clarity.
Wayne Spence: Today, I’m a parole officer, a member of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. But when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.
Antoinette Ryan-Johnson: I’m a civilian employee of the Baltimore Police Department. Something most people don’t know about me is that I’m a fighter and a survivor with multiple sclerosis.
Spence: When I was young, I took a lot of math and science courses and majored in engineering to pursue my dream, but at the same time I was running around with a Caribbean club and got arrested as a college student. That changed my trajectory. I decided to go into law enforcement and make a difference.
Ryan-Johnson: Unfortunately, Baltimore is known for having corruption in its police force. I am a civilian, not a sworn officer. However, even though I’m not sworn to protect and defend the public, I still don’t condone anyone who does wrong. It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in.
And the sad truth is that I have been pulled over twice by the police, at gunpoint, for speeding. How can I go from 0–60 in one block? Why pull me over at gunpoint for a routine traffic stop? Does this sound familiar? It’s known as “driving while Black” and it’s wrong.
The union leaders who inspire them
Spence: I am inspired by A. Philip Randolph, a giant in our movement who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (the first union organized by African Americans) early in the 20th century. By planning an original March on Washington during World War II, he was able to win rights for Black federal contractors and workers who had been barred from defense production jobs. His leadership secured those rights and many more.
Ryan-Johnson: I am inspired by AFT Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus Lorretta Johnson. My mother was a member of the Baltimore Teachers Union and she knew Lorretta Johnson, who was president of BTU. My father was a member of the Fraternal Order of Police.
The person who “onboarded” me in CUB gave me a union card with the expectation that I would join, and I did. But I never had any clue that I’d be in the position I am in today, as president. For two years, one of our officers tried to get me to become a building representative. Finally, I became a rep, then treasurer, then executive vice president and finally president. Now I’m part of our national union’s program and policy council for AFT Public Employees.
And I absolutely love what I do. The one good thing the pandemic has done is allow me to interact with our members more. Getting personal protective equipment out to members allows me to venture out on “field days,” to go and talk with members, showing them the benefits of union membership and solidarity. We all stay socially distant, so I get out and do it.
Spence: I didn’t have a choice of being in the union. If you’re a state employee, you’re a union member automatically. After joining the union, I learned that bullying is something you don’t leave behind in junior high school. Seeing my colleagues get bullied by their supervisors — none of it made sense to me. Why didn’t we leave all that behind as kids? I wasn’t going to be bullied, and I certainly wasn’t going to let my co-workers be bullied, so I became an advocate for our members.
Our AFT national president inspires me, too. I still learn things from Randi Weingarten, like how she runs a meeting and how she is so inclusive.
What makes them proud
Ryan-Johnson: We just had a fight. The city was going to lay off 68 employees, and the problem cited wasn’t the employees’ fault; it was flawed equipment the city was using. Luckily, we had a good relationship with incoming Mayor Brandon Scott and were able to save those jobs. This is not personal. It’s about our members, and I’m going to do everything for our members. I’m very proud of that.
Spence: We had a member whose vest didn’t fit because she was pregnant. Her supervisor berated her partner for allowing a female officer to stay in the state vehicle while he went to serve a warrant. To me, it was common sense to allow a pregnant officer to remain in the vehicle, but I relied on the science I had learned as an engineering student — that is, her fetus was suspended in fluid, and fluid amplifies sound. Of course they had to let her stay in the vehicle! From that favorable decision, they changed a policy we were told was never going to change. I owned that. It took me about three years to get it done, but I own it.
Ryan-Johnson: A lot of people still don’t know about unions. Being part of a union has given me job security. It gives me a voice in my workplace and allows me to be respected. Not everyone is meant to be a building representative or an officer, but there are different things you can do. As I told our members (we now have a lot of young people I’ve never seen before) during a virtual meeting: “This is not my union, this is our union.”
We had a tragedy a couple of years ago when a Department of Public Works employee fell into a large vat of wastewater and died; the AFT was there with me through the entire ordeal.
Spence: At the AFT, we are all together in one union with teachers, school support staff, public employees, healthcare professionals and higher education workers because we all confront some of the same issues. For example, the school-to-prison pipeline is just as important for teachers and staff as it is for members who work in public safety. I found out personally, as a young adult, how easily a young person of color can fall into that pipeline.
Also, we have found that threats to public services, like privatization, are the same for schools as they are for local and state government. I was lucky to have conversations with Lorretta Johnson before she retired; now we’re looking for opportunities to do training with school paraprofessionals and public safety officers about interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline.
How racism affects our country
Spence: The big dichotomy between American values and reality started for me with the murder of Trayvon Martin. I’m caught in the middle because I’m an African American peace officer. My son asked me: “You know how many Trayvon Martins there are on Snapchat?” He had resigned himself to that reality. But I know things have to change.
Number 1, we have to acknowledge systemic racism, which sounds like college terminology. What does it mean? As a recruit, I was trained to treat Black folks differently than the white folks who had money. Much later, we went for training down South and actually saw an officer on horseback guarding prisoners. At that moment, I realized my whole job as a parole officer was a war on African Americans. Our whole freaking job. That’s systemic racism. That’s how you define it.
Number 2, you are not going to solve systemic racism if everything is about money — if you keep giving traffic tickets to African American people who can’t afford to fight them. People like Philando Castile, a school cafeteria worker in Minnesota who was killed over a broken tail light. Every time I’m pulled over as a Black man, the police officer might see my service weapon and blow my head off before I have a chance to say a word.
I don’t even know where to start. If it ain’t about privilege, oh my God. If you’re Black in America, man, your life is not valued. It’s just not.
Ryan-Johnson: The Jan. 6 insurrection — that thing that went on at the Capitol in Washington to overturn a presidential election and overthrow the government. Six deaths, and only the heroism of a few Capitol Police officers prevented many more. I’m seeing our country in a way I’ve never seen it before. It’s a reality check. We have some serious problems in our country, we really do.
What keeps them going
Ryan-Johnson: I keep going because we have younger generations. We have young people coming up. I call them my babies. We just had a 16-year-old shot in the head. We have children missing. We have children being abused. We’ve got to do this work for the next generation.
Spence: I’m impressed by this new generation of kids who turned the world upside down last summer with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In my state, it wasn’t just happening in New York City but out on Long Island, and in Buffalo.
I thought: They can’t keep this up. And two months later, they still were. Then I thought: What happened during the summer manifested itself in the November elections. We had some young folks show up at the polls. Everything that happened last summer has given me faith. These young folks are galvanized, and it has given me hope. Even those stereotyped police shows were taken off the air. Even Hollywood has noticed.
When young people talk about defunding the police, that’s worthy of a conversation. Our union is an opportunity for solving problems. Our union is an opportunity for when there’s a bully, it’s not just you, alone. It’s strength in numbers.
And what’s more, workers and their unions face these same problems around the world. I got to see that by working with our global affiliate, Public Services International. It’s no different than in the United States. It’s people of color in jail, and it’s white people with all the power. It’s privatization on steroids.
If more Americans don’t get with the union, five or 10 years from now, the people in power are going to take even more money from public services. A lot of those private corporations we fought off, they went down to Central and South America to regroup. They’ll be back. So tell your friends — whether they’re in Alabama, Montana or New York — yeah, they’d better join a union.
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