#35: Where the Gospel Meets Law Enforcement & Ethnicity

#35: Where the Gospel Meets Law Enforcement & Ethnicity

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

AUDIO CLIP (JESSE EUBANKS): We are heading downtown. The police department has declared a state of emergency. Uh, the governor said that he’s likely to call in the National Guard. Downtown has been completely blocked off, uh, from vehicular traffic. And, yeah, all the businesses are starting to board up.

JESSE EUBANKS: On March 13, 2020, a young woman named Breonna Taylor was shot by police in her apartment — right here in Louisville. Breonna was African-American, and the police were all white. 

AUDIO CLIP (JESSE EUBANKS): So now we’re at an area called Fourth Street Live, which is one of the hearts of tourism in the city. And you can hear the sounds of construction because people are literally boarding up everything.

JESSE EUBANKS: In the aftermath of Breonna’s death, downtown Louisville was completely transformed. People took to the streets to protest. Some people started rioting and looting. Businesses downtown put plywood over their windows and their storefronts to protect their property. 

AUDIO CLIP: Yeah, so as we walk through Fourth Street Live, everywhere we look stuff’s being boarded up. There’s a big pile of lumber in the road. The Fifth Third Bank here is 100% covered. There’s no — I don’t even know how you would get into the building.

JESSE EUBANKS: And downtown is usually a flurry of activity — it’s full of business men and women, tourists, families going out to eat, cars driving up and down the road, noise everywhere. But the day that I went down there, cars were blocked from accessing downtown, and so we walked blocks and blocks and never saw anyone. Just 24 hours before the attorney general made their announcement on the ruling of Breonna’s case, it was strangely quiet and eerie.

AUDIO CLIP (JESSE EUBANKS): Yeah, I mean it is like the rapture around here.

JESSE EUBANKS: But the one place where there were people was at the epicenter of the protests — an area called Jefferson Square, right outside the courthouse. 

AUDIO CLIP (JESSE EUBANKS): There is a memorial to Breonna Taylor. There is a large painting of her, um, really beautiful painting, photos of her, pictures of her.

JESSE EUBANKS: This was day 119 of the protests. And even at 10:30 in the morning, there were people there — there in support of Breonna. But they were also there for a much broader reason — to let their voices be heard when it came to the topic of law enforcement and the treatment of minorities.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

CAT FOWLER: And I’m Cat Fowler. Every episode we hear stories of social action and Christian community. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Cat is one of our alumni from Love Thy Neighborhood, and she’s joined me in the studio today to look at where the gospel meets law enforcement & ethnicity. Okay so, Cat, why is this topic important to you personally?

CAT FOWLER: This topic is important to me because I’m a third-year law student studying at George Washington University in D.C., because I’m a woman, because I’m black, and because I’m a Christian.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, we understand that this is a lightning rod topic, especially in this cultural moment in our country. So we wanna take the time to walk Christians through this. And we’ll do that by looking at this from two angles — that of protestors and that of the police. And where do Christians fit in the midst of all of this? Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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NEWS CLIPS OF PROTESTS ACROSS U.S.: Anger spilling into the streets of Louisville…. No justice, no peace… Cities across the United States remain in a state of high tension tonight… (indistinct)… Heartache, a lot of pain all across the city…

JESSE EUBANKS: The year 2020 has seen protests across the country as several back-to-back cases of African-Americans dying at the hands of police have made the headlines.

NEWS CLIPS: The murder of Ahmaud Arbery… protests to demand justice for George Floyd, unarmed… (indistinct)

JESSE EUBANKS: And of course we’ve experienced this first hand with the death of Breonna Taylor in the south end of Louisville this past March.

CAT FOWLER: Now we’re not a news station, so we aren’t going to go into all the details of her case here. There’s plenty of places where you can do that. But the basics are that she was fatally shot when three plainclothes officers attempted to serve a no-knock search warrant in her apartment as part of a narcotics investigation. Only one officer was indicted — with three counts of wanton endangerment. No one was charged with Breonna’s death. And naturally, many people, especially minorities, saw this outcome as a gross injustice and took to the streets to protest.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, but it gets tricky because, y’know, you have to look at all the details surrounding what happened. The police claim that they announced their presence before entering Breonna’s home. Surrounding neighbors claim that they didn’t. Breonna’s boyfriend fired his gun at the officers. He claims that he was acting out of self-defense. The officers claim that they were acting out of self-defense. And that created a whole other type of response to these events — one that defends our law enforcement and frowns upon the action taken by protestors, in particular those who protested violently. 

CAT FOWLER: Now, there are many nuances with this, but if you had to boil it down simplistically, there are two major groups of people — those crying injustice and those crying for silence.

JESSE EUBANKS: But as Christians, what are we supposed to cry? Are we to hit the streets and protest? Are we to have compassion on the police? This can be a tricky situation to navigate, but thankfully this isn’t the first time God’s people have been faced with differing responses to those in authority.

At the time when Jesus was on the earth, God’s chosen people, the Jews, were under Roman authority. Rome was the government, and Rome called the shots. 

CAT FOWLER: But the Jews were divided in how they thought they should respond to this pagan government. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Some quietly sat in rage against Rome, believing that the Messiah would eventually bring this terrible government to an end. 

CAT FOWLER: Many of the religious leaders were complacent — they saw Rome as either a call for compliance or an act of God’s judgment. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And some were active and took matters into their own hands. In Mark chapter 15, we come across a man named Barabbas. Verse seven tells us that he was quote ‘among the rebels in prison who had committed murder in the insurrection.’ So likely Barabbas was seeking to free his people by joining a revolution against Rome. 

CAT FOWLER: And these differing viewpoints are not unlike what we see today when it comes to matters of law enforcement and ethnicity. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And so let’s look at two of today’s viewpoints on this. And the first is that of the protestors — specifically minorities who are protesting. So one of the big moments for us here in Louisville was awaiting the attorney general to give the ruling on the Breonna Taylor case, to see whether or not the policemen would be charged. It was such a tense moment that the city wouldn’t even announce exactly when and where the statement was gonna be made until that morning. And during the time that we were waiting for the ruling, I actually went downtown to see if any of the protestors gathered at Jefferson Square wanted to talk.

AUDIO CLIP

JESSE EUBANKS: Do any of you wanna talk?

WOMAN: What, where are you from?

JESSE EUBANKS: We’re a non-profit, we’re just from around the corner. So we’re not the news or anything.

MILLIE MARTIN: I’ll give you a statement.

JESSE EUBANKS: Hey, how’s it going? Hey, what’s your name? 

MILLIE MARTIN: Millie Martin. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Hey Millie.

JESSE EUBANKS: So the person I was able to talk with was Millie. Millie is African-American. She’s in her mid-20’s. She was sitting in a camping chair next to a grill with some charcoal in it. It was clear that they had just finished, uh, making some food. But they had been up all night long in anticipation of waiting for this verdict to come out. And I asked Millie why it was important for her personally to be downtown protesting.

MILLIE MARTIN: What a lot of people don’t understand is the guilty by association, in our case, as black women, black people in general — is these are the people that we have to associate ourselves with. So a lot of people is looking at it as if, ‘Oh, you know, you get this she’s, she was a drug dealer or she was associated with a drug dealer.’ I mean, we’ve been suppressed. Drugs is in our neighborhood — everywhere. It could have been me, not because I’m a drug dealer, not because I associate myself with drug dealers, but that’s just the life that we live.

JESSE EUBANKS: Now I guess I just wanna take a moment here and acknowledge that some of our listeners might be tempted to stop listening. I mean, you hear words like ‘suppressed’ and all your radars go off about victim mentality and you’re tired of hearing these narratives. But I just wanna encourage you to keep listening because we’re gonna hear from the other side. So Cat, what do you think about what Millie had to say?

CAT FOWLER: I think that’s right-on. I think in the African-American community it really is a community, and so we see each other in each other’s stories because for so long in this country it’s been us against those who have the power to control every aspect of the African-American life. And so when these types of things happen, it’s not just, y’know, ‘I wasn’t in that situation so I can’t relate.’ It’s ‘I see myself in that person. I see myself in this injustice that they faced just because we share the same skin color.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, one of the things that I was really struck by — just the quickness with which she, y’know, imprinted herself onto Breonna Taylor was very striking. So for people like Millie, they’re protesting the actions of the police or authorities because they recognize that the same thing could easily happen to them.

MILLIE MARTIN: It’s hurtful that the city of Louisville has allowed this to go on as long as it did. Louisville, Kentucky is not for us as black people, whether it’s women, men, or children. I mean, because in that instance, a man could have been murdered, a woman was murdered, and there was kids all over the apartment building, and they didn’t care. So it is hurtful. It really, really is. It’s hurtful.

JESSE EUBANKS: And the truth is, that just isn’t a reality for some of us. We live in communities or neighborhoods where the day-to-day realities that Millie is talking about — those are not our day-to-day realities. In our neighborhoods, there’s not drug dealers, there’s not much criminal activity or much poverty. Our realities are just different. So I asked Millie what she wanted to say to folks who maybe didn’t experience life the way that she has.

MILLIE MARTIN: If you don’t know, you just don’t know. Now where the problem comes in is when you don’t know and you actually don’t take the time to try to see what it is is actually going on. You know, a lot of people don’t have to deal with what we’re dealing with every day, so they look at it, um, in the most negative way possible. Ignorance is a bliss. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So Cat, like what would you say is the goal of protesting? 

CAT FOWLER: Yeah, the most basic desire that I’ve seen is really just accountability in justice. We have a criminal system that on its face looks like you have these laws, you have structures set up for people to be held accountable, but you see a disparity with who actually gets held accountable and who doesn’t. You see black people being killed and the people who are taking their lives are not only not going to prison, but they’re still paid, they’re still working, they’re still out on the streets able to do it again versus black people who maybe just are selling drugs, right, get life sentences. There’s just inequality in the way that justice is given in our systems, and I think people are just fed up.

JESSE EUBANKS: Folks are trying to say, ‘Hey, you need to give more reasonable consequences to people that are breaking the law and for officers you need to give more severe consequences,’ because they have more authority, more power, and they have the ability to do more harm.

CAT FOWLER: Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly it.

JESSE EUBANKS: So a response like Millie’s is one way to view the situation, but, y’know, I said I wanted to look at two viewpoints. And the other one I wanna look at is that of those in law enforcement.

OFFICER DALE: When a law enforcement officers that are doing this for the right reasons sees the injustices in law enforcement, it pisses us off. It infuriates us because that’s not what we signed up to do. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Officer Dale. He works in recruiting and trains officers in his academy. Now, Dale isn’t his real name, but for obvious reasons he asked to remain anonymous. Dale has been in law enforcement for seven and a half years, and he sees his job as an opportunity to help people.

OFFICER DALE: When you come into contact with people, it’s one of the worst days of their life, meaning that not everybody wants to be in that position. Some people do, some people don’t, but you got a unique opportunity. It may be that you have to take them to jail. It may be that you don’t. But you’ve got a unique opportunity to intercede with them, and you can really help change the course of somebody’s life.

JESSE EUBANKS: So for Dale, y’know, it’s about serving his community. And I asked him what his take was on matters like the Breonna Taylor case. And for him, it gets personal.

OFFICER DALE: When I first came on the department seven and a half years ago, my wife’s greatest fear is that I would get shot or hurt at work. That’s not her greatest fear anymore. Her greatest fear is if — what happens if I have to shoot somebody at work? Am I, my wife, or my kids ever gonna live a normal life again? 

JESSE EUBANKS: So there’s a real fear for Dale that just by doing his job and trying to make the right judgment calls, he and his family could get marked with a sort of scarlet letter and that he’ll be seen as the bad guy.

OFFICER DALE: What you’re doing is taking one or two officers’ bad decisions and you’re lumping in as a whole saying all officers are bad, right? They’re doing the exact same thing. They’re saying that you’re taking one or two criminals and you’re saying the whole black community, the whole Hispanic community, the whole white community is bad. And I don’t think either one is the truth. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And so for Dale, there is a real tension between wanting to see justice happen but also being patient about executing that justice.

OFFICER DALE: As law enforcement, you’re looking at this thing from three different perspectives. What does the law say? What do my emotions say? What are the facts of the case? And then, were all of those put together in the right way? When you look at a full investigation, there’s so many things that as law enforcement you have to protect as far as witnesses and victims and suspects. You can’t tamper with the trial, you can’t — there’s so much out there that we know from law enforcement that the normal general public just doesn’t understand. ‘Well how can you cannot take a stance yet?’ Because, well, what looks like on the surface may not be, it may be. What looks on the surface may be the truth, but what looks on the surface may not be the truth. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Dale actually went on to say that he thinks that a large contributor to the division on this issue is actually social media.

OFFICER DALE: So much can be said behind a phone, a computer, that we would never say to each other face to face — or if we would say it to each other face to face, would we work through issues? Would we not? I just think law enforcement’s under a microscope right now because of the things that have happened. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve got these two views — protestors and police. So where do Christians fit in all this?

CAT FOWLER: Here’s what’s interesting to me is that looking at these two different views — protestors and police — the people who are most likely to say that there isn’t a problem are white evangelicals.

JESSE EUBANKS: What do you mean?

CAT FOWLER: Well according to Pew Research, 7 out of 10 white evangelicals believe that the police in our country are doing either an excellent or good job at protecting people. But if you ask minority evangelicals that? Less than half agree.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so this past June, Christianity Today published this headline — ‘Do White Evangelicals Love Police More Than Their Neighbors?’ So what you’re saying, Cat, is that the overarching attitude of white evangelicals is the problem isn’t with police — the problem is with culture, the problem is with communities, the problem is with individuals, it’s not the police’s fault that things are the way that they are. 

CAT FOWLER: And I wondered — how did they get to this conclusion? And it turns out that this has been the attitude of evangelicals for almost a century.

AARON GRIFFITH: Because Americans today — not just evangelicals, not just Christians — but I think Americans more generally, um, we have come to rely on law enforcement as the solution to broader social problems. 

CAT FOWLER: Coming up — why evangelicals love law and order. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

CAT FOWLER: And I’m Cat Fowler. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets law enforcement & ethnicity.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve looked at two different viewpoints concerning the deaths of African-Americans by police. We’ve heard from a protestor and from a cop. 

CAT FOWLER: And statistically evangelicals are more prone to be sympathetic to the police. But why is that? And to answer that question, we need to have a little history lesson of law and order in the United States. Okay Jesse, when you hear the words ‘law and order,’ what comes to mind?

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, one of my favorite TV shows. (laughter) I love Law & Order, like it’s so dumb and so amazing at the same time. But seriously, when it comes to thinking about history and the United States, what comes to mind is law and order politics.

AUDIO CLIPS: Nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets safe from bullies… The people of our country are sick and tired of the breakdown of law and order, and they in turn then in my judgment would tell the police ‘enforce the law’… I wanna be tough on crime and good for civil rights. You can’t have civil justice without order and safety… I am your president of law and order. Mayors and governments must establish an overwhelming law enforcement presence until the violence has been quelled…

CAT FOWLER: So what you just heard was a series of presidents and presidential candidates talking about law and order. That just shows that law and order has become an important part of a lot of presidential candidates’ political platforms. And a famous point in time for this was the 1960s with the war on drugs. In fact, many scholars actually point to this time in history as the beginning of many of our modern problems when it comes to minorities and the criminal justice system. But when it comes to talking about Christians and the justice system, we actually need to go back farther than that. So we’re gonna hear from a guy named Aaron Griffith.

AARON GRIFFITH: So my name is Aaron Griffith. I am assistant professor of history at Sattler College, and I write and research on issues related to American religious history, the history of evangelicalism, and a modern American criminal justice. 

CAT FOWLER: And Aaron is gonna take us all the way back to the 1920s. So in the 1920s, there were several things happening at a societal level.

AARON GRIFFITH: There’s prohibition, this sort of call to ban the, uh, sale of alcohol. There are broader racial problems that still persist in the aftermath of emancipation and then after reconstruction. And then there’s the professionalization of law enforcement. 

CAT FOWLER: Many major cities were for the first time installing official police forces with uniforms and patrol cars and firearms, and all these ingredients came together to form an overarching narrative in the American mind.

AARON GRIFFITH: That crime is a problem and we need to solve it through an expansion of the state. And religious leaders are on board with this in large part.

CAT FOWLER: So religion played a significant part in backing up this call for increased law enforcement because religious leaders were becoming increasingly concerned with the declining morality of our country, as showcased by the Leopold and Loeb case.

JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, what is that?

CAT FOWLER: So Leopold and Loeb were two teens from wealthy families living in Chicago. In 1924, they devised a plan and acted out the murder of a 14-year-old boy. And during their trial, it was apparent that the boys had no remorse over their actions. In fact, they bought into this idea that it was their intellectual superiority that justified them. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Wait a second, so they’re claiming that because, y’know, they think they’re superior, that they can just treat people however they want? I mean that does have this tone of like survival of the fittest, natural selection, evolution. I mean obviously that’s disturbing in any time period, but I’m thinking about 1924. That’s a year before the Scopes trial, which is when the nature of evolution being taught in the public school system was like this huge debate. So I could see in the American conscience at that time that they’re hearing this and they’re going, ‘Wait, wait, wait. This is evolution infecting the minds of our young people.’

CAT FOWLER: Exactly. So American Christians at the time were very concerned with these new modern science ideas. Many Christians saw this new modernism as a key player in why Leopold and Loeb wanted to commit murder. They saw modernism as ruining the very fabric of society. They thought crime was increasing because modernism was increasing. And to get back to a more traditional society, they sought to use law and order.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, I get it. Okay, so it’s like ‘Modernism is bringing chaos to society. So to fight chaos, we need law and order. And by bringing law and order to our society, it will take us back to a more traditional lifestyle.’

CAT FOWLER: Exactly.

AARON GRIFFITH: A lot of evangelicals coming to see law enforcement as a solution to problems of poverty, problems of addiction, um, problems of mental health.

CAT FOWLER: In fact, the police began to be viewed not only as vehicles for justice and moral order, but as the vehicles that would save the state of Christianity in our country. And so naturally many Christians revered them — like Charles Sheldon. Do you know who that is?

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh yeah, totally. Uh, I read his book. That’s the guy who popularized the phrase WWJD — ‘What Would Jesus Do?’

CAT FOWLER: Yes. Okay, so Charles Sheldon is the one who popularized that phrase, but he also popularized viewing police officers as missionaries.

JESSE EUBANKS: As missionaries?

AARON GRIFFITH: Charles Sheldon was all about policing and he saw policing as a humanitarian cause and he saw it as a solution to problems of poverty in cities in the early 20th century. And he would even call, um, policemen ‘missionaries.’ And I think that notion of policemen as missionaries was really important for Christians on all sides of theological and political spectrums throughout the 20th century. ‘These are people who are here to help and that law enforcement can solve, um, a host of social issues.’

CAT FOWLER: It set up this framework for Christians to think, ‘Okay, society is not on our side, but the cops are on our side. And everything the cops do is for the good of Christianity.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Wow. Y’know, and this idea of like, of an us versus them mentality — that permeates society. I mean you still see it now. You get on social media, you see, y’know, a post for ‘black lives matter’ and then the next one you see is for ‘all lives matter’ or ‘blue lives matter,’ uh, or you see a call for defending the police next to a call for defunding the police or one that’s pro-law enforcement next to one that’s pro-protests. 

CAT FOWLER: Yeah, so this attitude isn’t new. This is something that has been entrenched in the evangelical world for more than 80 years. And here’s what’s surprising about all of this is that many of the problems with policing weren’t birthed out of overt hatred. Especially in Christian sectors, many things were done with the best of intentions.

AARON GRIFFITH: People thought they were doing the right thing, which has made the problems all the more deep seated and attractable. Good intentions often go awry. Uh, just because Christians think they’re doing the right thing, just because they think they’re being faithful, just because they think they’re not being racist doesn’t mean that there cannot be incredibly tragic consequences to their actions. 

CAT FOWLER: Yeah, like the consequences being not understanding how tragic it can be when you call the cops on black people because you’re thinking these are people here to protect the community. You’re not thinking ‘this can actually escalate to the point of death.’ You might not call the cops on them if you have a better understanding of the relationship between African-Americans and the police.

JESSE EUBANKS: So one of the consequences for us as white evangelicals is that when we have such reverence for police that we really almost view them as borderline infallible, like they don’t make mistakes, but we don’t appreciate the fact that there’s a whole lot of other narratives and biases that could be at play that could lead to an outcome that none of us really want. There’s nothing wrong with having respect for law enforcement. I mean in fact God tells us to respect those who have authority. But are the viewpoints we’re taking truly out of compassion for our communities or simply out of fear that society is slipping away from us, that society’s doing something that’s inherently evil and we need law enforcement to fix it?

AARON GRIFFITH: I think Christians need to do a lot more self-criticism and a lot more, uh, have a lot more open, honest spaces for their own assessment and their own ability to listen on these issues. And, uh, and we should ask, like, who are we in conversation with? Who are we hearing from?

JESSE EUBANKS: Cat, I don’t know if you know this, but when I was a senior in high school, I actually took African-American history. I knew that after I graduated from high school that I was gonna go do an urban missions program, and so I decided if I’m gonna live in a community that is going to be predominantly black that I need to learn the history of the folks in my neighborhood. And so I signed up to take this African-American history class, and I actually ended up being the only white guy in the class. As the months went by, I slowly realized that almost every single male in the class who was black — including my black male teacher — all were telling stories about being pulled over by the police. I kept going like, ‘Why is everybody being pulled over so often? Like what is the deal with that?’ And I realized that I was being forced into a corner where I had to make a decision — either every black man that I’m surrounded by right now is a criminal and deserves to be pulled over because they’re doing something awful or there is something in the way that police are being taught to police that is telling them that each person in this room needs to be pulled over for the safety of our country. And I could not square the character of the people around me with their relationship with the police. It, it literally just did not make sense to me, and that’s when I just started to realize my experience is not everyone’s experience. People are having a whole other experience with the police that is different than mine.

CAT FOWLER: Yeah, I actually have a stat about that. According to a survey by Pew Research, black adults are about five times more likely than whites to say that they’ve been unfairly stopped by the police.

JESSE EUBANKS: And while we recognize that each experience is different, I’d actually like to share a story that I think represents many minorities, in particular black males. It’s a story from Jason Stephens. Now, we featured Jason in one of our shorts episodes. He performed original spoken word at our podcast live event, he’s an elder at his church, and his view of the police was shaped really profoundly all the way back in college.

JASON STEPHENS: I go back home for the Christmas break, and I go to see a friend of the family to pick something up from him. 

JESSE EUBANKS: At this time, Jason is a student at the University of South Florida, but he’s from the Fort Lauderdale area, so he’s back there for the holidays. And he’s sent on an errand to a family friend’s house. 

JASON STEPHENS: So I, I’m driving over there. It’s a super nice neighborhood. I hadn’t been home in a few months, um, so just a little fuzzy on where the exact home was in the, like, development. I remember stopping at a stop sign and, uh, and I’m like, ‘Man, is this the turn?’ So I make a turn down the street, and then I realized, ‘Oh nope, this doesn’t look familiar.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So Jason circles back around the neighborhood and eventually finds the house. Jason visits for a minute, gets what he’s supposed to be picking up.

JASON STEPHENS: Then as I’m leaving the house, coming back to leave the development, I see the police behind me. They go to pull me over, and I’m asking him, y’know, like ‘What, what is the issue?’ and he’s saying I look suspicious. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So while Jason had been lost in the neighborhood trying to find his way looking for his friend’s house, apparently the police had been watching him.

JASON STEPHENS: He asked me for my driver’s license and registration and all this, and, uh, and random questioning starts happening where he asked me, ‘Hey, when’s the last time that you smoked weed?’

JESSE EUBANKS: Which seems like such a random question to ask somebody that’s just been pulled over because they can’t figure out how to get to where they’re going, but that’s part of bias. Part of bias says, ‘Black guy, white neighborhood. He probably has weed on him.’

JASON STEPHENS: And I’m like, ‘I’ve never smoked weed before,’ and I’m like, ‘Hey, I, I am a student at the University of South Florida. Do you wanna see my ID?’ He’s like, ‘No.’ He’s like, ‘What school do you go to?’ I’m like, ‘University of South Florida, like I’m an engineering major.’ And he’s like, ‘Okay, cool.’ And then, then he asked me some more questions. He says, ‘When was the last time that you smoked weed?’ And I’m like, ‘I just answered this question.’ Um, and he’s like, ‘What school do you go to?’ And I’m like, ‘University of South Florida. Do you wanna see my ID?’ And then he asked me a third time.

CAT FOWLER: Even as he’s telling this story, like I can hear the tension in his voice, like you hear him starting to get riled up and the frustration building. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. I mean he’s answering all the officer’s questions, and the officer just keeps asking him the same questions over and over. 

JASON STEPHENS: I’m really confused. I’m angry. Um, I don’t know why he’s probing me in this way. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And the officer doesn’t ask any more questions. Instead, he suddenly just says, ‘Well, I need to search your car.’

JASON STEPHENS: I step outside of the car and at this point my heart’s beating like super fast and by that time another police vehicle had pulled up behind him. So there’s now two cop cars. He searched the whole car. There’s nothing in the car obviously, and so he proceeds to search me everywhere, even down to the, to the lining in my boxers to make sure that there was nothing in there.

JESSE EUBANKS: Like I cannot imagine the idea that I have gone to visit a family friend, I get lost while I’m in their neighborhood, and fast forward 15 minutes and now I have a police officer who’s pulled me out of my car, who’s searching my car, who is like literally searching the lining of my underwear, and the whole notion of like neighbors and people that I don’t know are seeing it all — like I just can’t imagine how embarrassing and shaming that experience would be. And scary.

CAT FOWLER: Yeah, I think not only is it that embarrassment aspect. It’s that he listened to Jason’s story and he says, ‘Can I search the car?’ That’s when it escalates for me because you really don’t know who this officer is, what quotas they have to meet. If they wanted to bring someone in, they could. Y’know, they could plant something. The stakes are so much higher as I listen to him. A police stop is never just a police stop when you’re black.

JASON STEPHENS: And as I’m sitting on the side of the road, like, it’s just the most demoralizing feeling where you feel like, um, not only are you being violated, but also like, ‘Man, anyone driving by right now, uh, thinks I’m a criminal.’ Um, and they send me on my way, but, um, I don’t know, those types of things, they just change you. Right? Um, they impact you, you know? And, uh, and to think that like I had broken no law, I had given no cause to be pulled over in the first place, but I felt like I was assumed to be a criminal in that moment.

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the thing, like I know Jason. Jason is like a deeply ethical person. He really values morality and righteousness. And so for Jason — because of his own experience with the police — it’s hard for him when another news story comes out about yet another person of color being shot by the police.

JASON STEPHENS: And I think something traumatic happens, you know, when you go to watch videos like this — I think one thing, just death in general, to see that played out, right? As you see someone made in the image of God not treated as such, like that does something to us. I think that there is another level on top of that. When you think, ‘Man, this could be my husband. This could be my brother. This could be my friend. This could be someone that I love. This could be you.’ Right?

JESSE EUBANKS: But there’s another level even on top of that when you add faith to the equation.

JASON STEPHENS: I have those real experiences, right? But as a Christian, I wanna make sure that like those things don’t — aren’t my only eyes I see police officers through. Like I’ve been pulled over. I’m not the greatest driver in the world. (laughs) I’ve been pulled over for other legitimate reasons, and the police officers have been super nice. And so I don’t want to see things only from that lens, but at the same time, when I do see the police in my mirror, there is a fear there. There’s always a fear. And it’s like, ‘Man, which police officer am I gonna get this time?’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: And the truth is that faith creates tension. Y’know, for Jason, he wants to love his neighbors, even his police officer neighbors, but he also wants to see justice enacted for those who may be vulnerable or mistreated. And that’s a hard thing to navigate. In fact, when I was downtown talking with Millie, I asked her actually about the role that faith plays in her protesting and in her pursuit of justice, and she actually said that it was something that she couldn’t reconcile.

MILLIE MARTIN: Honestly, I’ve personally tried to take faith out of it, um, only because a lot of times — let’s just say for instance, a three-year-olds’ or six-year-old child’s father is murdered. The first thing that people say is, um, ‘God doesn’t make any mistakes.’ The pain that comes out of that — how can you explain to a six year old that God took that baby’s father and cause that baby pain? ‘In this situation, God doesn’t make any mistakes.’ Like how can you associate God not making a mistake to the murder of a 26-year-old woman? So I try to keep good hopes, but I’ve honestly taken faith out of it.

JESSE EUBANKS: I think in part the reason she responds that way is because she probably looks out and sees a lot of the Christian community not be very empathetic. 

CAT FOWLER: It’s kind of that analogy that we talk about where, even in anticipation of the election when, y’know, people said, ‘God is sovereign’ or ‘God is in control.’ It may be true, but it’s not kind or helpful in that moment. And so when you have the church not actively standing up and saying ‘we are not okay with murder in this sense,’ it’s more harmful because then you don’t have the theology for ‘Does God see me in my pain?’ If he’s in control, but then the people that he’s placed here who are his body are not empathizing but are just telling me that he’s in control — how do I reconcile that? I have to compartmentalize it because there’s no clear theology for me to understand those two things working together — empathy and God’s sovereignty.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I agree. So I said we were gonna look at this from two viewpoints, but there’s actually one more that I’d like to explore. Because we’ve heard from the experience of a person of color, we’ve heard from the experience of a police officer, and we’ve heard from the experience of a Christian. But what happens when you’re all three of these things?

OFFICER BILLY: You know, there is an internal battle being African-American and being a cop, right?

JESSE EUBANKS: Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

CAT FOWLER: And I’m Cat Fowler. Today — where the gospel meets law enforcement and ethnicity.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve looked at the perspectives of African-Americans and police officers and Christians. But what happens when you’re all three of those things? That’s something that Officer Billy has to wrestle with. So, again, like the police officer we heard from earlier, this is also not his real name. Billy’s been in law enforcement for four years, and he says that reconciling his ethnicity, his job, and his faith — sometimes it’s pretty tough.

OFFICER BILLY: You see things throughout history and you wonder — so was this a situation where and it just has happened to somebody just because the color of their skin, or did this play out just how it played out and it just seems that way? Right? So there is an internal battle. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so now here’s the thing. So Billy is actually friends with Officer Dale that we heard from earlier. And Dale will actually often turn to his friend to try to understand his perspective.

OFFICER DALE: When this initially happened with Breonna Taylor, uh, me and my wife were sitting down talking one night and we’re like, ‘How do we begin to filter through this?’

JESSE EUBANKS: And so Dale actually just decided to invite Billy and his wife over for dinner.

OFFICER DALE: I said, ‘Hey, enlighten us on what’s going on in your mind, enlighten us on what’s going on in your heart, enlighten us on what’s going on in your family because we’re not dealing with the same struggle as you are, but we want to help understand how do we begin to help and how do we begin to heal as a community, as a family, as a law enforcement community, as a community as a whole.’

JESSE EUBANKS: And Billy was up for it because actually Billy’s always more than willing to have conversations with people. Because for him — he says that you can’t just look at the color of a person’s skin or a badge on their uniform and assume that you understand where they’re coming from.

OFFICER BILLY: Sometimes you just need to go have a dinner with somebody, right? Sometimes you need to take somebody to lunch. Sometimes you needs to go to, uh, a room and meet. I have a lot of black friends who don’t identify in the way that you would automatically assume that they would identify, right? Uh, their opinions are very different, you know, and it could be surprising to somebody who just doesn’t know, like, ‘Wow, really? You black and you think that?’ Right? That would be your first thing. That’d be your first thought. And then I got a whole group of black friends who exactly what you think they would say. Then I got friends that are kinda in the middle. People are different. People are different.

JESSE EUBANKS: In fact, having conversations is a part of Billy’s job. So Billy meets with officers in his academy and assists them with their mental and emotional health, and he says that this is an area that can easily get overlooked. And as an example, he started talking about Derek Chauvin. Chauvin is the officer who placed his knee on George Floyd’s neck and was ultimately charged with Floyd’s death. And what Billy had to say was honestly something I was not expecting.

OFFICER BILLY: I think about, uh, Chauvin with the George Floyd case. They released a little bit about his, uh, professional history and different things that he’s, he’s, uh, been involved in over the course of his career. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So Chauvin had actually used similarly really aggressive tactics with a teenage boy back in 2017.

OFFICER BILLY: And the thing that popped in my mind was I wonder how many people came to him and said, ‘Hey, let’s talk’ or ‘Hey man, have you considered doing this’ or ‘Think about doing this man.’ And I wonder sometimes like, ‘Man, had somebody came to him, could this situation have been avoided?’ Right? Maybe not, or maybe so. But it goes back to just people having the conversation.

JESSE EUBANKS: And I think that the reason this shocked me so much was because I’m just used to seeing people take sides, like I’m used to people turning it into ‘it’s us versus them.’ But Billy is taking a third way — showing compassion and seeking justice. And I guess I just wanna acknowledge this — like being a cop is really hard. I cannot imagine the hardship that they go through. They put their life on the line on a daily basis. They literally move towards things that could bring harm to them or death to them, like it is a hard job. Y’know, in fact, last year the suicide rate among police officers was up 24%. So I don’t think that it’s fair for us just to hate officers — ‘all cops, they’re all terrible, they’re all the same.’ But at the same time, I do think that we need to hold people accountable, that when officers make bad judgment calls, they need to be held accountable for that. And for Billy, he says that the only thing that allows him to walk this line of love and truth is his Christian faith.

OFFICER BILLY: I don’t put my hope in any policy, guideline, regime, political party, any of those things. I know that we are all sinners. I know that without the presence of grace and mercy and sacrifice with God we are all condemned to hell. He is the reason that we even had this opportunity to move forward in his good graces. 

CAT FOWLER: So as Christians, the question for us is this — do we love people, or do we love the law?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. I just wonder if, like, there are times where we love law and order so much that we’re willing to hurt people, we’re willing to ignore people, we’re willing to turn a blind eye towards the wounds that communities are experiencing because we are just convinced if people just obeyed the laws everything would be fine. And it’s just not that simple. Y’know, are there times where we’re just overly concerned with maintaining law and order at the harm of people? And, y’know, in preparing for this episode, I actually discovered I’m not the first person to wonder that question. I actually want you to hear from a guy named Tom Skinner. So Tom was a former gang leader turned Christian, and he proclaimed a message of racial reconciliation everywhere he went. And so we’re gonna go all the way back to 1970, where he preached a sermon at the Urbana student missions conference. And here’s what he said.

TOM SKINNER CLIP: I went through the motions because it was expected of me, but I never bought any of it basically like a great number of black people because I could not reconcile Christianity with the kind of community that Harlem was. Harlem was more than 40% slums. Thousands of people lived in rat-infested, run-down, dilapidated apartments that the landlords never came around to provide services for. It was not uncommon for some mother to wake up in the middle of the night and send a piercing scream to the community as she discovered that her two-week-old baby had been gnawed to death by a vicious rat. You could set your watch as to when the police would drive into the neighborhood to collect their bribes, to keep the racketeering going. Now during this great upsurge in revolution and rebellion that’s been going on, there’ve been great numbers of evangelical Christians who’ve joined the hoot and cry for law and order. But how do you explain law and order to a mother who stands at the foot of her bed watching her baby lie in a bloodbath when she knows that that baby would have never been bitten by the rat in the first place and the rat would have never been in the building if the landlord to whom she had been providing — been paying high rent — had been providing the kind of service she deserved for the kind of rent she was paying? How do you explain law and order to her when she knows the building code inspector who represents the city administration who is supposed to check out violations in buildings was by that building the day before, was met at the front door by the landlord who palmed a hundred dollars in his hand, and the building code inspector kept going? Now that is lawlessness. But the point is, the point is we never arrest the landlord, we never lock up the building code inspector, but I tell you who we do lock up. We lock up the frustrated, bitter 16-year-old brother of that two-week-old sister, who in his bitterness takes to the street, throws a brick at that building code inspector, then we lock him up and say, ‘we gotta have law and order.’

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the deal. What Tom Skinner is getting at is about systemic injustice. Y’know, not just that there are individuals who act unjustly — and surely that there are — but the fact that we do have practices and policies set up in our country that don’t always actually allow for true justice.

CAT FOWLER: There’s a tweet by conservative columnist David French that I think captures the Breonna Taylor situation really well. So French writes — ‘The officers who directly returned fire were operating under a series of precedents that made clashes between armed homeowners lawful, inevitable, and unjust.’ So he’s calling out systemic problems in our laws. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, and we see these systemic problems all the time. I mean, think about Christians’ views on abortion. We believe that the law upholds abortion, and we also believe it is morally wrong. Christians have strong opinions on things like taxes, y’know, that are not even as explicitly clear in the Scriptures, and yet we would say they’re morally wrong even if they’re legal. And so legality and morality are not the same thing. Justice and law are not always the same thing. I think it’s really important that we understand that. Even if the police were operating lawfully, is the law right in the first place?

TOM SKINNER CLIP: Make no bones about it. The difficulty in coming to grips with the evangelical message of Jesus Christ in the black community is the fact that most evangelicals in this country who say that Christ is the answer will also go back to their suburban communities and vote for law and order candidates who will keep the system the way it is. So that if you’re black and you live in the black community, you soon begin to learn that what they mean by law and order — it was all the order for us and all the law for them. 

JESSE EUBANKS: You know the thing I hate the most about this sermon? Is that it still sounds relevant. A sermon from 50 years ago talking about social issues should not sound relevant, and yet Tom Skinner’s sermon sounds like it could’ve been preached last Sunday. This sermon became really notable for urban missions because Tom Skinner actually preached this at the same conference where the famous evangelist John Stott also preached that same weekend. Those two men ended up launching an entire barrage of urban missions around the world where people went into the cities and suddenly white evangelical Christians understood that they have a responsibility for their urban neighbors.

CAT FOWLER: Not to do a little plug, but that’s where I found Love Thy Neighborhood — at Urbana actually, in 2015. And I did not want to do urban missions at all. I was like, ‘I wanna go abroad. I wanna be, y’know, an international missionary.’ But it really shook my faith because I had to learn — what biases did I grow up with as a black woman from a white majority town? And how was God calling me to love my neighbors who came from a different socioeconomic background? As a Jamaican-American, how could I relate to African Americans in a real and sacrificial and honest way? And so I think that’s just so great that, yeah, it’s relevant then, but, man, that work is still having its ripple effects 50 years later, like you said, in my life even.

JESSE EUBANKS: So what do we do with all this? The truth is that this is not a one-size-fits-all scenario. All of us are in different places, different walks of life, different starting points. Y’know, maybe for some of you, you need to get off social media and have a conversation with somebody who’s not in your echo chamber, somebody that has lived a different experience, is from a different neighborhood, is of a different ethnicity. Maybe you need to examine your own views of the police. Maybe they’re not all bad. Maybe you need to study African-American history and begin to see that some people have just experienced life different than you have. Y’know, whatever it is, let’s seek to move forward in the tension of our faith — upholding both grace and truth. Back in ancient Jerusalem, people only saw two responses to Rome — they could either follow a radical named Barabbas who took matters into his own hands, or they could be like the religious leaders who sat back and folded their hands. But in the end, neither one of those actually got it right because there was actually a third way — and the third way was the way of Jesus. Because Jesus entered the scene, and he showed a better way. I’d like to leave you with the final few minutes of Tom Skinner’s 1970 sermon because as it turns out — what Tom Skinner said 50 years ago is better than anything we could say today.

TOM SKINNER CLIP: The thing that turned me on to Jesus was the fact that there was a system working just like today. The Romans were oppressing the Jews, and there arose in the hills of Jerusalem a fellow by the name of Barabbas. Barabbas said to his people there was only one way to get that Roman honky off your back, and that’s to burn them out. And Barabbas went through the hills and through Roman suburbia burning those nice Roman suburban homes. They finally caught up with Barabbas and arrested him and charged him with anarchy, insurrection, and murder. But out in those same hills was another radical. His name was Jesus. He had no guns, no tanks, and no ammunition. And of all the dumb things, he went around preaching a thing called the kingdom of God. So they finally had to arrest him too, because, you see, Jesus was dangerous and he was dangerous because he was changing the system. The whole Roman empire was shaking, but no shots were being fired, no fire bombs being thrown with the whole Roman empire’s rocket. Because, you see, anybody who changes the system is dangerous.

JESSE EUBANKS: As you continue in the gospel of Mark, Pilate, the governor, has these two prisoners on display — Barabbas and Jesus. And he asks the people which one they want released to them. 

TOM SKINNER CLIP: ‘Now I’m going to release one of them to you, and I want you to tell me which one you want. Over here I’ve got Barabbas.’ And he said, ‘Barabbas has been burning the system down, killing people. Do you want him? Or over here I’ve got Jesus, claims to be the son of God. I’ve interrogated him and I can’t find anything wrong with him, other than the fact that some dead people are alive because of him. Some blind people are seeing, some deaf people are hearing, and by the way, he did feed a few thousand people with a welfare giveaway program. But other than that, I can’t find anything wrong with him. Now, which one do you want? Jesus or Barabbas?’ And with one voice, they cried out, ‘Give us Barabbas.’ Christians, why Barabbas and not Jesus? Barabbas is the cat burning the system down. He’s killing people. Why him instead of Jesus? Very simple. You let Barabbas go, you can always stop him. The most Barabbas will do is go out and round up another bunch of guerillas and start another riot, and you will always stop him by rolling your tanks into his neighborhood, bringing out the National Guard, and putting his riot down. Find out where he’s keeping his ammunition, raid his apartment without a search warrant, and shoot him while he’s still asleep. You can stop Barabbas, but how do you stop Jesus? So they took and nailed him to a cross. They took and buried him, rolled the stone over his grave, and they wiped their hands and they said, ‘That is one radical that will never disturb us again. We have gotten rid of him. We will never hear any more of his words of revolution.’ Three days later, Jesus Christ pulled off one of the greatest political coups of all time. He got up out of the grave, and when he arose from the dead, the Bible now calls him the second man, the new man, the leader of a new creation, a Christ who has come to overthrow the existing order and to establish a new order that is not built on man. Keep in mind my friend, with all your militancy and radicalism, that all the systems of men are doomed to destruction. All of the systems of men will crumble. And finally, only God’s kingdom and his righteousness will prevail. You will never be radical until you become part of that new order and then go into a world that’s enslaved, a world that’s filled with hunger and poverty and racism and all those things of the work of the devil, proclaim liberation to the captives, preach sight to the blind, set at liberty them that are bruised, go in the world and tell men who are bound mentally, spiritually, and physically the liberator has come. 

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JESSE EUBANKS: For even more resources on this topic, including Tom Skinner’s full sermon — which, I do need to say is in my top five favorite sermons of all time — or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Millie Martin, Officer Dale, Aaron Griffith, Jason Stephens, and Officer Billy. Special thanks also to Tom Skinner.

CAT FOWLER: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Cat Fowler. Cat, thank you so much for joining me today.

CAT FOWLER: Thanks for having me.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our media director and producer is Rachel Szabo, who we are all so glad to welcome back from the land of quarantine.

CAT FOWLER: Our media assistant and audio engineer is Anna Tran. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

CAT FOWLER: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’