Kris Henning – The Over-Policing of Brown and Black Youth

Kris Henning:
To enslave an entire group of people, one has to create a narrative to justify that.

Jay Ruderman:
Hi, I’m Jay Ruderman and welcome to All About Change, a podcast showcasing individuals who leverage the hardships that have been thrown at them to better other people’s lives.

Mashup:

Jay Ruderman:
Today on our show, Kris Henning.

Kris Henning:
why did he take off running? Well, the, people who are asking that question don’t live in neighborhoods where police officers are present 24 hours pretty much a day

Jay Ruderman:
Kris is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University and the Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic. She has been representing children accused of crimes for over 25 years.

Kris Henning:
I saw a line of children being escorted down the hallway in chains, shackles on their arms, shackles on their feet, and so many of those children were black or brown.

Jay Ruderman:
In her long career as a Public Defender, the overwhelming majority out of the thousands of kids she represented have been Black and Latinx. But she got a start to her career on the other side of the bench, as a prosecutor:

Kris Henning:
We go into that courtroom and I’m sitting with the prosecutor I looked over across the room and I said to her, I’d really want to be over there, and I’m pointing at the defense table.

Jay Ruderman:
In our fascinating – and frankly – troubling conversation, Kris weaves together powerful narratives and persuasive data. She explores the criminalization of normal adolescent behavior and makes a compelling case that racial disparities in the juvenile justice systems are rooted in America’s unfounded, and sometimes intentionally manufactured, fears of youth of color.

Kris Henning:
One child, a white child is not only, not punished, but is viewed as creative as intellectually curious and is put into advanced science classes where my client, my black client in Washington, DC ends up in court for nine months.

Jay Ruderman:
So, professor Henning, welcome to all about Change. Maybe I could start out by asking you – how did you decide to become a defense attorney and focus on, juvenile law?

Kris Henning:
I grew up in a family of preachers and teachers, all of whom cared deeply about, young people, working with at-risk youth in the community, in churches. And so I think I just saw it in my house and in my community, and gravitated towards working with young people. And then second, when I was in, in college, I had in my. Freshman year, an opportunity to do an apprenticeship at a local prosecutor’s office. And I will never forget the very first day of that, apprenticeship. I walked into the juvenile courthouse. It was in Durham, North Carolina. I turned down the hallway to go find the prosecutor, and I saw a line of children being escorted down the hallway in chains, shackles on their arms, shackles on their feet, and so many of those children were black or brown. We go into that courtroom and I’m sitting with the prosecutor and I, I looked over across the room and I said to her, I’d really want to be over there, and I’m pointing at the defense table. and that was my aha moment when I knew this was the kind of work that I wanted to do to be a defense attorney and to be a defense attorney specifically for children.

Jay Ruderman:
can you tell me about the impact of a child, a juvenile being arrested or even stopped by the police and the impact that that has on, on that juvenile, whether it’s in school or outside of school, and also their family and friends?

Kris Henning:
There is a growing body of research on this very question, but there’s a growing body of research documenting the extraordinary psychological trauma that police encounters have on young people, and especially on black and Latina youth. Those have been the, the, the subjects of the, of this particular research. And the research shows that young people, teenagers who live in heavily surveilled neighborhoods, Who attend heavily surveilled schools or who are the frequent stops of, by the police stops frisks searches by the police report, high rates of fear, anxiety, hopelessness. They become hyper-vigilant, really, which just means that they become always on guard and not trusting police officers.

Kris Henning:
What’s so tragic is that that distrust of police officers very often carries over to other adult authority figures that they begin to see as sort of quasi law enforcement. So teachers, counselors, other people, all of whom might be an ally to that child. So that’s really, what we are seeing.

Kris Henning:
And, and the research shows that the trauma occurs not just by becoming a direct target of some, police youth encounter, but also by witnessing it. Right, or hearing about it among friends and family and watching it on television. And so a child today, a teenager today watching, the killing of George Floyd on television has an extraordinary impact. We know this as an adult, but think about what impact it has onto an adolescent and what impact it has on a black or Latino adolescent who believes that this could happen to me.

Kris Henning:
And I say all the time, this isn’t an anti-police conversation. This is just the reality of what we see and what young people are experiencing it. And so the psychological research bolsters that.

Kris Henning:
You also asked about family, the impact on family. And I love that you asked that question because people very rarely think about it. We think about the, the impact of parental incarceration on young people. We rarely think about the impact of youth incarceration on adults and siblings and all of it. And what we find is that the trauma is real. You think about, how much fear, for example, black parents have when their children walk out the door because they’re afraid, um, of their children going to school and just being criminalized for doing the things that we all did when we were kids, right?

Kris Henning:
So you worry about their ability to get an education, you worry about them, being singled out and targeted, and you worry about, Biased presumptions about their intellectual capacity and their, prone to violence. These are just stereotypes and myths about black children that black parents have to contend with. And then, black parents always, you know, sort of live with this fear. What am I, what’s gonna happen if I get that phone call? Either that my child has been arrested or that my child has been shot and killed, worst case scenario. And so all of it is very painful, and very difficult to navigate.

Kris Henning:
We talk about the black parents really having no choice but to give their kid the talk. Do whatever you have to do to get home safe. You know, if you encounter a police officer, be deferential, say, yes, sir, no sir, yes ma’am. No ma’am. Put your hands up. Don’t make any sudden movements. Those kinds of things.

Kris Henning:
And you know, when I talked to, many white parents, it’s not true for everyone. But when I talked to many white parents, they never even thought about, you it’s certainly not until recently thought about giving that talk.

Jay Ruderman:
Hmm.it’s very powerful what you’re talking about. It’s almost like we’re living in two different Americas where in, in white America, parents do not have to give children their talk. But in black America, they’re concerned if is their child gonna come home. Maybe you could talk about the juxtaposition, because I know that, that you opened the book about, talking about Eric and, and what Eric did and what happened to Eric as a result of what he did, and juxtapose that with a talk that you gave in Connecticut where a white mother relayed a similar story.

Kris Henning:
Absolutely. Eric was a 13 year old boy who on a Saturday night was watching a movie and he sees someone in that movie with a Molotov cocktail. And in his 13 year old brain, he thinks, oh, that looks cool. Let me see if I can make something that looks like that. To be clear, he does not research it. He doesn’t ask anybody what’s in a me Molotov cocktail. He just goes to the kitchen, he grabs a glass bottle and he begins to pour in whatever liquids he can find, bleach, pine, saw water, whatever he can find, mind you together, And some of them separately are not flammable, but he pours them into a bottle.

Kris Henning:
And my favorite part of the story is that he grabs a piece of toilet paper, right? And he runs the toilet paper from the inside of the bottle to the outside and he closes the bottle. And we know that that toilet paper, he wants it to be a wick, but it’s gonna burn out before it even gets to the top. Um, but he tapes up the bottle. So that it looks like a Molotov cocktail and he plays with it for a little while, right? he’s 13, it’s Saturday night. He plays with it for a while, but then he forgets all about it.

Kris Henning:
He puts the bottle in his book bag, right, so it will not spill out on his mother’s white carpet, and he goes on about his business. He does not think anything of that. think anything about that bottle again until Monday. Monday morning comes his mother takes him to school, he grabs his book bag and he puts his book bag through the metal detector and a school resource officer sees the bottle and says, what is this?

Kris Henning:
Eric immediately says, oh, that’s nothing. You can throw it away. Eric goes on to class. Little does he know, this is the beginning of a nine month ordeal in our local juvenile court. Police officers and a fire department show up. and pull him outta class. He gets arrested in the hallway in front of friends and held in detention overnight. He is prosecuted, formally prosecuted the next day for possession of a Molotov cocktail and for attempted arson. Right.

Kris Henning:
He told those officers at the school, told everybody, look, I wasn’t trying to blow up the school. This was nothing. No one believed him. No one gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Kris Henning:
You also asked about family, the impact on family. And I love that you asked that question because people very rarely think about it. We think about the, the impact of parental incarceration on young people. We rarely think about the impact of youth incarceration on adults and siblings and all of it. And what we find is that the trauma is real.

Kris Henning:
You think about, how much fear, for example, black parents have when their children walk out the door because they’re afraid, um, of their children going to school and just being criminalized for doing the things that we all did when we were kids, right?

Kris Henning:
So you worry about their ability to get an education, you worry about them, being singled out and targeted, and you worry about, Biased presumptions about their intellectual capacity and their, prone to violence. These are just stereotypes and myths about black children that black parents have to contend with.

Kris Henning:
And then, black parents always, you know, sort of live with this fear. What am I, what’s gonna happen if I get that phone call? Either that my child has been arrested or that my child has been shot and killed, worst case scenario. And so all of it is very painful, and very difficult to navigate.

Kris Henning:
We talk about the black parents really having no choice but to give their kid the talk. Do whatever you have to do to get home safe. You know, if you encounter a police officer, be deferential, say, yes, sir, no sir, yes ma’am. No ma’am. Put your hands up. Don’t make any sudden movements. Those kinds of things.

Kris Henning:
And you know, when I talked to, many white parents, it’s not true for everyone. But when I talked to many white parents, they never even thought about, you it’s certainly not until recently thought about giving that talk.

Jay Ruderman:
Hmm. it’s very powerful what you’re talking about. It’s almost like we’re living in two different Americas where in, in white America, parents do not have to give children their talk. But in black America, they’re concerned if is their child gonna come home. Maybe you could talk about the juxtaposition, because I know that, that you opened the book about, talking about Eric and, and what Eric did and what happened to Eric as a result of what he did, and juxtapose that with a talk that you gave in Connecticut where a white mother relayed a similar story.

Kris Henning:
Absolutely. Eric was a 13 year old boy who on a Saturday night was watching a movie and he sees someone in that movie with a Molotov cocktail. And in his 13 year old brain, he thinks, oh, that looks cool. Let me see if I can make something that looks like that.

Kris Henning:
To be clear, he does not research it. He doesn’t ask anybody what’s in a me Molotov cocktail. He just goes to the kitchen, he grabs a glass bottle and he begins to pour in whatever liquids he can find, bleach, pine, saw water, whatever he can find, mind you together, And some of them separately are not flammable, but he pours them into a bottle.

Kris Henning:
And my favorite part of the story is that he grabs a piece of toilet paper, right? And he runs the toilet paper from the inside of the bottle to the outside and he closes the bottle. And we know that that toilet paper, he wants it to be a wick, but it’s gonna burn out before it even gets to the top.

Kris Henning:
Um, but he tapes up the bottle. So that it looks like a Molotov cocktail and he plays with it for a little while, right? he’s 13, it’s Saturday night. He plays with it for a while, but then he forgets all about it.

Kris Henning:
He puts the bottle in his book bag, right, so it will not spill out on his mother’s white carpet, and he goes on about his business. He does not think anything of that. think anything about that bottle again until Monday.

Kris Henning:
Monday morning comes his mother takes him to school, he grabs his book bag and he puts his book bag through the metal detector and a school resource officer sees the bottle and says, what is this?

Kris Henning:
Eric immediately says, oh, that’s nothing. You can throw it away. Eric goes on to class. Little does he know, this is the beginning of a nine month ordeal in our local juvenile court.

Kris Henning:
Police officers and a fire department show up. and pull him outta class. He gets arrested in the hallway in front of friends and held in detention overnight. He is prosecuted, formally prosecuted the next day for possession of a Molotov cocktail and for attempted arson.

Kris Henning:
Right. He told those officers at the school, told everybody, look, I wasn’t trying to blow up the school. This was nothing. No one believed him. No one gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Kris Henning:
Fast forward several months later, I’m at a conference in New Haven, Connecticut, and I share this story, when I’m talking, at this conference. And, someone comes up after I talk, and it was a white woman and she says to me, my son did the exact same thing. He made a Molotov cocktail and he took it to school. And I asked her what happened and she said, my son was put in advanced science classes.

Jay Ruderman:
That’s a very, very powerful story. And I think, many of us are faced, with incidents in the news of, racial disparity in America and the impact that it can have. But, you go back to a basic element that once you’re targeted in the system, and, and as a, as a former prosecutor many years ago in Salem, Massachusetts, I experienced this, once a child was in the juvenile system and brought before the court and charged by the police, they were sort of on the radar, meaning the police were always looking for them, and it was very common to see the same child of color in and out of the court system.

Kris Henning:
Yes. once you get arrested, if any of your siblings get arrested, right? The whole family gets labeled or targeted, or if a parent has been in the system before, they are on sort of the watch list. And these are very informal watch lists though I will tell you that there are also formal watch lists, right where there are, created shadow gang databases. There are surveillance teams now in police departments all across the country that are following social media, Instagram accounts, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, TikTok accounts for certain children, And only for certain children in the community.

Kris Henning:
So you’re absolutely right. Once you get targeted, you get, followed. and what we see often too, that, accounts for what you saw in Salem is the allocation of resources throughout the city so that you’re allocating more police officers to certain neighborhoods.

Kris Henning:
And so I talk very often about the criminalization of normal adolescent behaviors. Well, we know, right, that the more police are Present, physically observing those behaviors that quote unquote, are really adolescent, but technically meet the elements of a char of a crime. You can always find a way to arrest a child.

Kris Henning:
Right? and so, to be clear, I think even when police officers mean well, right? They wanna keep a particular neighborhood safe, they wanna be responsive to, purported crime in a particular neighborhood, or they even want to take care of a group of kids, that it still state intervention, right? State intervention, that actually ultimately does more harm than good.

Jay Ruderman:
Right, Right, And, and I want to talk about, first of all, what do you mean by normal adolescent behaviors? And also what is it like to live in a neighborhood where the police are all over?

Kris Henning:
Yes. I think about, Close. Let’s think back to tie dye T-shirts, right and bell bottom pants in the hippie era commonly associated with hallucinogens, right? And other forms of drugs. We never outlawed the tie dye T-shirt.

Kris Henning:
think about all black attire and short straight black hair. The commonly associated with the goth era and also associated with mass shootings. Of course, we never outlawed all black attire.

Kris Henning:
Think even today about steel toed doc Martins with red shoelaces, which some white supremacist groups, young, white supremacist groups have claimed as their own fashion statement. We have never outlawed that, but the one thing that we have, Outlawed on the books is sagging pants.

Kris Henning:
and I always tell people I don’t wanna see anybody’s underwear either. But should it be a crime on the books, right, that allow for police youth contact, this is what I’m talking about, the ways in which we have stereotypes and assumptions about hip hop styles, for example, right? That is criminalizing normal, Adolescent creativity.

Kris Henning:
Another example. Think about music. I think this one’s even more profound. Think about country music, hard rock, heavy metal, pop music. Even. All of those genres of music have the same themes. Themes of, misogynistic lyrics, glorification of drugs, sex, alcohol, violence, all of that appears in all of the genres of music.

Kris Henning:
But without consequence. You think about hip hop music and rap music and immediately, children who are listening to that music, let’s say loudly in a park, are automatically assumed to be dangerous and violent.

Kris Henning:
That’s what we’re talking about, the criminalization of normal adolescents.

Kris Henning:
You think about kids who sit together in a cafeteria, and I hope all your listeners can envision what it was like. You remember to be a teenager sitting together in a cafeteria and sometimes guess what? You dress alike, and if you’re a black kid or a Latino kid and you dress alike and you have hand signals and like maybe tattoos, you’re presumed to be a violent gang member, as opposed to just being a group of friends that are in a sorority or a fraternity.

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