From Insult to Estrangement and Injury: The Violence of Racist Police Jokes

It Is Just . . . Unequal Protection and Representation

Racist blue humor is often regarded as unfortunate, inconsequential (“It’s just a joke”), and even constructive in police culture, including by courts. In 1984, the New York State Police Academy faced complaints of racist jokes and remarks adversely affecting officer training. Cadets accused officials of violating a 1979 nondiscrimination order (United States v. State of New York, 1984) by creating a racially hostile environment. Several Black and Puerto Rican members of the 1981 recruiting class complained of racist remarks, including jokes, public ridicule, differential discipline, and more intense scrutiny, arguing this contributed to disparities in completion rates (93.8% of white males completed police training compared with 50% of Blacks and Latinos) and racial biases among white cadets. They challenged this unwelcome initiation into a professional culture hostile to their own identities, at odds with their professional objectives in becoming police officers, and threatening to their communities. They challenged this legal estrangement, asking the court to order the hiring, retroactive pay and seniority for officers who would have completed the academy if the 1979 order were enforced (“State Police Academy,” 1984).

Judge James Foley, who wrote the 1979 nondiscrimination order, dismissed the complaint. His ruling held that racist jokes were not harmful as alleged, and even useful:

The minority recruits who testified recalled only several, as usual with racial jokes; several should have been left untold. However . . . racial and ethnic jokes are told at every level of our society; many give humor and many are offensive. I find that the alleged jokes included ethnic jokes other than those relating to blacks and Hispanics. The stated purpose was to ease tension and to break the monotony of the classroom. I find those purposes acceptable. (United States v. State of New York, 1984)

It is noteworthy that the original nondiscrimination order came several years after the notoriously brutal response to the Attica Prison uprising (1971), where the racial animus of white New York State Police and correctional officers was clearly implicated in the lethal violence and torture unleashed in the retaking of the prison (Thompson, 2017). In this larger context, that a federal judge who wrote a police academy nondiscrimination order would soon thereafter dismiss the discriminatory nature of racist discourse in the same academy reveals the extent to which “jokes” have been shielded from scrutiny as assaultive and consequential speech.

At the same time, the harms of racist humor and insult in police culture have been seemingly recognized within police organizations and their regulatory efforts for decades. A mid-1960s edict by the Oakland, CA, police chief is the earliest example we find of departments prohibiting racist speech, in part as a response to racist police jokes. With this effort to regulate such discourse and improve police–community relations:

it was strictly forbidden that any officer at any time, under any circumstances, including the telling of a joke, employ the word nigger while in uniform or in the confines of the police department. Penalties on the order of five-, ten-, and fifteen-day suspensions were in fact imposed for this sort of violation. (Skolnick, 1966, p. 73)

Today, a half-century later, this same department is embroiled in a scandal involving racist, sexist, and homophobic discourse. An investigation implicates numerous police officers, departments, and other agencies in Northern California, including the Alameda County District Attorney. A city council member attributed this culture, in part, to a lack of representation, noting the department includes “almost no women, no LGBT people, and a dramatic underrepresentation of people of color” (Swan, Matier, & Ross, 2016).

This criticism of underrepresentation coexists with the fact that Black Oakland officers are among the accused, and women and LGBTQ officers are also implicated in other cases of racist blue humor. This is not simply contradictory, but relates to contested aspects of police acculturation, and the differences between statistical and substantive representation. Statistically representative police forces are not necessarily ones where diverse groups enjoy equal respect and recognition (DePillis, 2014; Ward & Hanink, 2016), in part for the “legal estrangement” of non-white and female officers in these often hostile environments, including through rituals of racist, sexist, and homophobic discourse (Bolton & Feagin, 2004; Chow, 1992; Delgado, 1982).

The Oakland Police scandal unfolded amid a 2015 investigation of the neighboring San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), where federal prosecutors painted a decorated former Sergeant as a “virulent racist and homophobe,” citing numerous racist text messages and jokes he exchanged with other officers between 2011 and 2012. In one exchange, responding to a text saying “All niggers must fucking hang,” then Sgt. Ian Furminger wrote, “Ask my 6 year old what he thinks about Obama.” In another text where Sgt. Furminger was informed that a fellow Black officer was promoted to sergeant he responded, “Fuckin nigger.” Many of his posts simply read, “White power!” Sgt. Furminger had been named San Francisco Police Officer of the Year in 2000 but resigned following a 2014 federal conviction. When later interviewed about his racist discourse, Furminger apologized for having “offended anybody,” but noted that his “closest friends are all Black, gay, Chinese or Asian, and Hispanic.”

Furminger explained his comments were jokes (“San Francisco Cops Who Sent,” 2015). Furminger regarded the texts as “banter amongst friends [that] wasn’t open to public disclosure,” and insisted they were harmless had they remained private. “They were supposed to be funny,” he said, “not to be broadcast on the news” (Lee, 2015). A defense lawyer for another implicated officer offered an alternative theory:

That was [Sgt. Furminger’s] code to be in a club that officers had to be in if they were going to be successful. Furminger was a police officer that was larger than life. Being in with him was important if one was going to be successful. It just shows the damage that someone like that can do to a police department. (Ho, 2015)

Participation in these racist exchanges, the lawyer suggested, was a condition of inclusion in the police organizational culture, including opportunities for promotion. In 2016, the SFPD made the news again when officer Jason Lai, a Chinese American and 6-year veteran with the SFPD, was found engaging in similar behavior (Glover & Simon, 2016). San Francisco’s Public Defender reviewed several years of cases and found 120 involving these and other officers (Ho, 2015). In other words, this behavior appeared to extend widely within and beyond the department, coloring a range of police–community relations, including police protection and representation.

In one sense, racist blue humor plays a role in rendering non-white officers more “blue” than Black, Latino/a, Asian American, and so on, where being blue is in conflict with and distant from these ridiculed race–ethnic identities. In this scenario, racist blue humor helps sustain cultures of white supremacy and racism in policing (Pérez, 2017; Ward, 2018), notwithstanding a more visibly integrated police force, as non-white police endure, and appear to adapt to “after-inclusion exclusion” (Carbado, Fisk, & Gulati, 2008), by partaking in dominant police cultural norms.

In another sense, the diversification of law enforcement appears to do little to change these cultural norms, as officers of color either assimilate, or are rendered targets themselves (Bolton & Feagin, 2004). This was highlighted by an anonymous Muslim officer in the SFPD who recently reported being the target of anti-Muslim jokes (e.g., terrorist and towel head) on the force, and “witness[ing] blatant misconduct against citizens.” As Sernoffsky (2018) reported, “Among the officer’s allegations are that co-workers routinely muted their body-worn cameras before making crude comments at crime scenes, and that several expressed support for the white nationalist movement.” The anonymous Muslim officer noted that he went to the media because he “lost faith” with the internal process of dealing with this issue after he reported his experience to the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau and the city’s Department of Human Resources. The officer chose to remain anonymous because he had “been labeled a rat, singled out by my colleagues, and I now fear for my safety.” In other words, what a culture of racist blue humor illustrates is not simply an organizational “joking culture,” but a discourse that is reflective of a deep and systemic racism that constitutes police culture and practice.

Estrangement and Exposure to Racist Police Violence

Our analysis of insult, estrangement, and injury envisions a cascade of cultural, legal, and interpersonal violence. Physical, interpersonal racist violence at the hands of police, whether conscious or subconsciously informed, is considered part and parcel of a larger social system of racialized violence. Police brutality coexists and combines with structural violence, such as racially selective law enforcement, systematic underprotection and overpolicing, and routine violation of constitutional rights. It also coexists and combines with cultural violence, such as racist, sexist, and homophobic humor. Such ridicule renders targets as less deserving of human and civil rights protections. Indeed, as less human. There is strong evidence that such dehumanization informs police and other state violence. Recent studies have shown, for example, that officers who implicitly dehumanize people of color—an association often referenced and reinforced through racist humor—are not only more likely to legitimize racially disparate police violence but to have engaged in it themselves (Goff et al., 2008; Goff et al., 2014).

While there is little research on the specific intersection of racist blue humor and police violence or other misconduct, there are clear indications that excessive use of force is found within such police organizational cultures. Decades before the USDOJ investigation of the Ferguson Police revealed such a pattern, a similarly motivated investigation of the LAPD also uncovered widespread circulation of racist jokes and other degrading speech. Chow (1992) examined the use and prevalence of racist blue humor in the context of the Rodney King beating by LAPD officers in 1991. The beating “constituted only a symptom of a larger problem of abuse,” Chow (1992) writes, referencing a department culture that was revealed only after an independent commission investigated the LAPD following the public outcry of King’s videotaped assault. Investigators found widespread circulation of racist discourse, much of it in the form of jokes, citing over 1,400 cases of “objectionable language in the MDT communications.” Non-whites were described as animals and police routinely derided racial and ethnic minorities (Chow, 1992). While LAPD policies prohibiting the use of racist language and messages were already in place as early as 1987, officers made use of such language “despite being fully aware that their statements were monitored,” knowing that such statements were unlikely to face discipline, as the policy was rarely enforced (Chow, 1992).

In a more recent case, several Miami Beach officers, including two senior officers, circulated over 200 racist and sexist e-mails between 2010 and 2012. One joke depicts a board game of “Black Monopoly” where every square reads, “Go to jail!” prefiguring potential bias in police discretionary arrest decisions (White, 2015). Rationalizing police violence against women, including gendered racialized violence (Ritchie, 2017), another “joke” shows a woman with a black eye, captioned: “Domestic violence. Because sometimes, you have to tell her more than once” (“Chief: Miami Beach Police,” 2015). In 2014, a Black sergeant in the North Miami Beach (FL) department was outraged by the discovery that members of the police sniper unit “jokingly” used mugshots of Black arrestees, including a photo of her own brother taken at his booking over a decade earlier, as targets for shooting practice (Barbash, 2015). Such “humor” literally and figuratively puts subjects in police cross-hairs, in this case, scripting racially disparate exposure to police shootings.

Police racist humor might not only legitimize such violence, at the hands of police or others, but impact how they serve and protect constituencies threatened and victimized by racist violence (Ward, 2018). High-ranking police officials in the Australian state of Victoria were among officers who circulated video, with added racist and macabre humor, of a man being electrocuted while traveling on the roof of a crowded train in India. “This might be a way to fix the Indian student problem,” one officer’s comment read, referring to Indian nationals studying at Australian universities (“Racism Scandal: Australian Cops,” 2010). The joke surfaced amid a wave of racially motivated murders and violent assaults targeting Indian and other South Asian students in Melbourne and Sydney, where protesters charged police with denying them adequate protection.

Research on the social psychological backdrop of extreme violence is instructive here. In his memoir The Lyncher in Me, an interrogation of his family’s complicity in a 1920 lynching, Walter Read (2008) emphasizes the relational dynamics that make such racial violence possible. “One person must dehumanize another, completely objectify him in order to make the act of violence that much more palatable and justifiable,” Read (2008) writes, invoking discursive scripts and resulting frames that generate “intellectual circuitry that gives us permission” (p. 143).

This practice is described by genocide scholars as a “splitting process,” where initial “moral disengagement” leads to “empathy shutdown” and finally the “objectification of victims,” all of which combine to legitimize atrocity (Rafter, 2016, pp. 108-120). Racist blue humor is relevant to this “splitting process,” as it potentially provides cognitive and affective wiring that gives police permission to deny equal protection to ridiculed and thus estranged populations.

Obviously, every exchange of racist jokes does not equally or automatically result in overpolicing and underprotection. Other cultural and institutional dynamics play important roles in exacerbating or limiting its threat. Yet this discursive field of moral disengagement clearly facilitates dehumanization and legal estrangement and may be particularly salient to the violence and misconduct of specific officers, including some of those implicated in cases we review. “If the [splitting] process is frequently repeated,” Rafter (2016, p. 109) writes, “it may become chronic, brutalizing the perpetrator.”

Addressing Racist Blue Humor

We have argued that effects of racist jokes on social affiliation and distancing likely diminish police respect, fidelity, and service to disparaged groups, and contribute to police violence. Yet this discourse is frequently defended as indecent but harmless (Waddington, 1999), a mere reflection of the “grosser aspects of cop joking” (Chow, 1992, pp. 851-852). This “just a joke” defense is often paired with a utilitarian argument, where such discourse provides “officers with a method of letting off steam after a long, hard day on the streets” (Chow, 1992, p. 858). That such humor simultaneously creates a context more conducive “to racist behavior, including excessive force by police officers against minorities,” or generates conflict between white and non-white officers (Chow, 1992, p. 900; see also Cashmore, 2010) is rarely given more serious and systematic consideration. Yet it should be clear from the cases and relevant scholarship we consider that such humor is implicated in legally estranging, splitting processes, with an array of likely adverse outcomes within and well beyond police departments.

The role of racist blue humor in legal estrangement is likely compounded and sustained when responses focus solely on individual responsibility, rather cultural and societal impacts. In the Ferguson case, where we began, the DOJ related the circulation of racist jokes to a pattern of “unreasonable use of force” against Black residents by officers, in violation of the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and found that these insults and their injuries were widely spread across City of Ferguson e-mail accounts during working hours among police officers, court authorities, and police officials (USDOJ, 2015). The justice department found that:

[No]officer or court clerk engaged in these communications was ever disciplined. Nor did we see a single instance in which a police or court recipient of such an email asked that the sender refrain from sending such emails, or any indication that these emails were reported as inappropriate. Instead, the emails were usually forwarded along to others. (USDOJ, 2015, p. 72)

The investigation revealed a norm of racial and gender discrimination and racial ridicule in a department where police also displayed patterns of excessive force and other misconduct. Racist jokes targeting African Americans, Muslims, and then President Barak Obama were widely circulated. Yet the discourse was represented as having been isolated to a handful of individuals who were soon disciplined and fired following the DOJ report. Ferguson Mayor James Knowles offered an unconvincing stock assurance that “These actions taken by these individuals are in no way representative of the employees of the city of Ferguson” (Lowery & Kindy, 2015).

As in this illustrative case, when racist blue humor is acknowledged and addressed by the state, it is typically individualized as a “pathology” of rogue officers, rather than a normative orientation with organizational or societal implications. This epistemological dismissal of the violence of racist discourse, or routine practice of “not knowing” (Jung, 2015), enables a discursive context where constitutional rights to “equal protection under the law” are undermined by practices of misrecognition, with jokes communicating a negation of human and civil rights.

Indeed, the reality of Black legal estrangement was itself the punch line in a joke told by Lieutenant Greg Abbott of the Cobb County (Georgia) Police Department, who was recorded calming an anxious white female motorist he had pulled over with a reminder that she need not worry because, “you’re not black. . . . We only kill black people, right”? (Grinberg & Jones, 2017). In his defense, Abbott explained that he merely meant to put the anxious driver at ease, offering a joke that conjured Black death to facilitate police service. He was allowed and perhaps urged to retire and retain a pension rather than face an investigation that might lead to broader sanctions and organizational revelations.

In California, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Chief of Staff, Tom Angel, who was also second in command in the Burbank Police Department, was found circulating jokes disparaging Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, and women through his official e-mail account in 2012-2013. The irony of this case is that Angel was hired by the Burbank Police Department to “reform a department reeling from allegations of police brutality as well as racism and sexual harassment within its ranks” (Tchekmedyian & Chang, 2016a). “I took my Biology exam last Friday. I was asked to name two things commonly found in cells. Apparently ‘Blacks’ and ‘Mexicans’ were NOT the correct answers.” The Los Angeles Times questioned Angel about this joke in particular, “which made light of high incarceration rates in some minority communities.” Angel responded that he was “Mexican,” and had not authored the jokes, but simply forwarded them to colleagues. Angel resigned following the publication of his e-mails in the Los Angeles Times, which “prompted numerous civil rights advocates to call on the sheriff to discipline his chief of staff” (Tchekmedyian & Chang, 2016b).

Finally, in 2015, a number of Fort Lauderdale police officers were also found circulating racist e-mails and a video titled “The Hoods,” which depicted a doctored image of President Obama wearing gold teeth, images of a Ku Klux Klan hood, and a police dog attacking a Black man. The State Attorney’s office was forced to drop 12 felony cases and 20 others involving these officers (Clary & Alanez, 2015). Four low-ranking officers in this case were disciplined and/or fired, but appealed their termination. “The city wants us to believe that a 22-year-old kid on the force for three years was the mastermind of all of this” noted Marsha Ellison, president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the N.A.A.C.P. (Robles, 2015). Howard Finkelstein, a Broward county public defender, called for an investigation and discipline that went deeper:

Look at the numbers. How is it possible that in a city that is 31 percent black, 96 percent of the people stopped walking or biking are black? How is that even possible, statistically? . . . I can assure you that if people think the beating of black young men is funny, then they are willing to beat young black men, period, end of story. . . . It is not possible for an officer to use hate-filled language and humor, but only on his private time. (Robles, 2015)

Yet the department here again reduced this racist discourse to the work of deviant officers, rather than a reflection of broader organizational problems with societal implications.

As these and other cases we examine illustrate, the use of racist blue humor is a practice found within police departments around the country, and internationally. This routine form of racist and often violent humor illustrates that law enforcement is far from “colorblind,” (Pérez, 2017), as state agents often pursue white interests and defend white racism under the guise of public service (Bracey, 2015). Yet such incidents are often individualized and not seen as constitutive of a larger cultural problem of white supremacy within policing. As a result, the termination of individual officers seems unlikely to uproot this underlying practice and sentiment within police culture.

Some apologists have argued that racist blue humor cannot be addressed structurally or systematically. In dismissing the discrimination complaint against the New York State Police Academy in 1984, Judge Foley stressed the impracticality of regulating the racist speech of police academy instructors, writing:

It must be remembered that the 1981 Academy Class was not comparable to a Sunday School class or the instruction of a group of seminarians. A total of two hundred nineteen instructors were at the Academy, and their every word could not be policed by the counselors and administrative staff. (United States v. State of New York, 1984)

Such dismissive and defeatist justifications of this cultural and symbolic violence run counter to existing regulatory efforts, and other possible means of suppressing racist blue humor and its harms. For one, as we elaborate in the conclusion, police departments do attempt to police and prohibit racist speech and have procedures for discouraging and punishing prohibited discourse. Furthermore, there are numerous policy areas, levels, and practices where meaningful efforts can be made, such as better screening of police recruits, training about cultural and symbolic violence, and greater enforcement of codes of ethical police conduct that can be combined with state and public vigilance in monitoring racist speech and action among prospective and active police officers and officials.