I spoke with Lindsay Navarre,
the Democratic Party candidate for Lucas County Court of
Common Pleas. Although Navarre presents a familiar name to
local voters, the political contest has been relatively
low-key given the clamoring voices for criminal justice
reform in the current era of aggressive policing, penal
growth and Black Lives Matter.
This is the finale of our two-part conversation.
Perryman: What are your thoughts
on disparate sentencing of African Americans and
disproportionate minority contact with the criminal justice
system?
Navarre: There are certainly
statistics to prove it. Did you see the editorial that was
in The Blade where it was called a War on People?
Perryman: Not as yet.
Navarre: Read it. It’s one of
the better one’s I’ve seen recently and it goes all the way
back to the Nixon era and when he decided to announce this
war on drugs it sounds like there have been interviews with
aides, assistants and people that worked with him. It says
that Richard Nixon viewed everything as about him versus
other people. It wasn’t at all about working with each
other. So he saw Democrats, hippies and minorities,
especially, as people who were not on the same team as him
and the war on drugs was really intended to target specific
groups of African Americans, young people, poor people,
people who considered themselves hippies. There’s no
question that is whom the war on drugs has targeted – lower
income people and minorities in particular.
I’m optimistic that the new
shift taking place in thinking about criminal justice reform
and policy and drug laws will even the playing field and
that it will apply to everyone as we start looking more at
reducing demand and looking more at prevention, treatment
and lowering incarceration rates across the board. But there
is no question that for the last 40 years statistics have
been pretty horrifying and this country has spent I think
over a trillion dollars locking people up for the war on
drugs.
Perryman: The subject has
been part of my graduate research, so I can say that the
U.S. drug war was decidedly political and built upon white
backlash to the gains provided by the Civil Rights Movement.
I’m wondering if we’re seeing a similar backlash in the
current presidential race with the vitriolic rhetoric of
Donald Trump and with his campaign rallies looking more like
KKK rallies than actual political rallies.
Navarre: Well there’s no
question in my mind that certainly now that we have had
President Obama in office for almost eight years now, two
full terms, that that backlash is present, and it’s
unfortunate and it’s sickening. I think that we would all be
silly to turn a blind eye to it and not recognize that
racism is unfortunately still a big part of what this
country is and it’s just disgusting.
The fact that Donald Trump
has gotten so much traction based on caustic rhetoric that
is without question, so sexist and so racist and it’s so
classist, it’s just appalling. Sometimes I feel like I’m
watching a Saturday Night Live skit. I think to myself this
can’t be real. I think we need to acknowledge it. So many
people don’t want to talk about it, people want to kind of
brush it off, like “oh no, it has nothing to do with
racism.” Well, how could you look at those rallies and
listen to what he’s saying and not acknowledge it? But, I
think it’s really important to acknowledge it, to really
look it in the eye and make a promise to each other that
we’re not going to let it bring us down.
Perryman: Let’s talk about
what we’re seeing nationally with the problems between law
enforcement and the African-American community with the
numerous African-American men, women and children that have
been killed by law enforcement or who die in police custody.
Rarely do grand juries come back with indictments in these
instances.
Navarre: I’m a proponent of
body cameras. I think they protect both sides of that
camera. I’ve worked very closely with law enforcement my
whole career and obviously I come from a family of law
enforcement. I hate seeing scenarios where unarmed people
are losing lives or unarmed children are losing their lives.
I also don’t like seeing an entire group of law enforcement
blamed for the mistakes of those few, because…and I know
that you work with law enforcement pretty closely as well,
you and I know that there a few bad apples in every group.
So, I think body cameras would also protect good officers
who do their jobs fairly and the right way. I think it
protects people on both sides of it. Camera usage holds
people accountable and makes for transparency in law
enforcement and that’s really what we need.
Being a prosecutor, I’m also
a proponent of potentially having a third, neutral party,
come in and present cases to the grand jury when it comes to
police officer misconduct or police officer shootings. Never
have I experienced any kind of unfair partiality for someone
on one of those cases. In fact, our office (Lucas County
Prosecutor) prosecuted Officer White from Ottawa Hills for
shooting that unarmed motorcyclist and paralyzing him, so we
have carried out our jobs with dignity. But, I think that at
this point the public is really demanding that. They want to
ensure that these grand jury proceedings are done without
bias. So, I would not have a problem bringing in someone
from maybe the attorney general’s office or just another
prosecutor’s office to handle a situation so that the public
knows that we are always…everyone is getting treated exactly
the same way. I think that’s very important.
I also think that, like I
told you, my answer always comes back to education.
Sometimes these cases where something goes bad or wrong, you
can really always tie it back to a lack of training. I think
making sure our law enforcement officers are well trained,
and not just in the academy, but they continue… and not just
training about guns and takedowns and search warrants, but
training about being sensitive to people who are suffering
from mental illness and being sensitive about being
communities with more diversity, especially if we have
officers who are unfamiliar with that.
So I think training across
the board is good, and TPD Chief Kral, I believe, is doing a
good job initiating that, and getting officers out into our
community more in a non-confrontational state. Just getting
out of their cars and talking to kids and talking to
neighbors who are having problems, just getting to know the
neighborhoods where they’re patrolling and making it more
about a team effort and not an offense. So I’ll tell you
firsthand how much crime is not being solved when people
don’t trust the police enough to talk to them, so we have to
build on that trust and just have to work a little harder.
Perryman: Well, finally I
want to talk about the prosecutor’s office in which you
currently work. There’s a group, the Thurgood Marshall Law
Association and attorneys Keith Mitchell, Rebecca West-Estell,
and Lafayette Tolliver, who have expressed concerns, both
with the minority hiring in the prosecutor’s office and the
fact that I think that there’s zero black public defenders.
These issues get my attention given the disproportionate
numbers of minorities coming through the justice system or
accused of a crime, without having the cultural competency
in their representation, as well as not having the time for
public defenders to really get into the details of the cases
of these individuals. I know that, as a pastor, I’ve had to
go out and do investigative research on cases myself to
provide information to the public defender just so that a
church member or their relatives would have adequate
representation before a judge.
Can you please speak to both the lack of black attorneys as
public defenders and a lack of minority attorneys in the
prosecutor’s office?
Navarre: Well, we have to do
better, there’s no question about that. I think the problem
is we don’t have many minority applicants quite frankly, and
I think something that I’m involved with personally is a
good way of increasing our numbers in law school. I am a
facilitator and presenter for the Law and Leadership
Institute, a statewide program that operates over the
summer. The main goal of the program is to create diversity
in the legal profession, so underserved high school students
from our community are targeted and they participate in a
fully paid for summer long program. It introduces them to
all the different careers within the legal profession, and
their experience is really hands-on.
The students work with judges
and prosecutors and private and public lawyers. We take them
into courtrooms and they see trials, and we really try to
show them how many opportunities there are for them in the
legal profession. So instead of getting to a point where I’m
in the prosecutor’s office and we’re saying how do we
increase the number of minorities who are applying for these
positions, we’re going even deeper because I think it’s
important to start increasing the number of minorities who
are going to law school because that’s really where it
starts.
We have to give minorities
the opportunities initially to even want to be in this
profession and to get involved and I think that’s how we
increase our numbers. Because you’re right, especially when
you look at the data of who’s being incarcerated and who’s
going through this criminal justice system, it should be
more representative and we do need to do better.
I’m really active with our
local Bar Association and with our law school, so I go to
the law school usually about three or four times a year and
address two different groups of students out there about
what it is to be a prosecutor, why I think it’s a great job
and to discuss some of the different professions that are
available to them. The purpose is to increase our exposure
so that students understand that it’s a good place to work
and you can really come into this job and seek justice and
help protect our community. So they understand that.
It ultimately comes down to
doing a better job getting out there, increasing the numbers
in our law school and kind of going from there.
Perryman: Thank you and good
luck in your campaign for Judge of the Lucas County Court of
Common Pleas.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
Blessed Are The
Peacemakers PART 1
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