Jamala Rogers just laughs when asked what organizations she's involved in. In addition to her day job as the Head of Youth Development for the city of St. Louis, Rogers has been working as an activist for the past 35 years in St. Louis. She is currently chairperson of the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), co-chair of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression (CAPCR), a member of the coordinating committee for the Black Radical Congress (BRC), and involved in "a host of other progressive radical organizations." She is also a contributing writer for The St. Louis American.

Rogers explains that she is in the leadership of all of these organizations to give her perspective as a black feminist. She is "also trying to put forward a radical perspective, to help the leadership and help these organizations achieve their goals." In this interview, Rogers discusses with Confluence the difficulties for both the activist network and the larger community with the issues of community involvement, police relations, race, and gender.

How does race play out in the issue of police brutality?

It is probably one of the key elements of law enforcement. The police are trained to respond to the black community much differently than the white community. That is evident by the number of times white citizens have been shot by police, as opposed to black citizens. Even the report from the Attorney General about racial profiling supports the evidence that police respond very differently to the black community. The system of justice is a racist system, even though the police officers are black and white. (For instance, the officer who shot Torrence Mull, Anthony Martin, is black, and his name was released almost immediately. The officers involved in the Jack in the Box shooting this past Labor Day are white. That incident left two black men, Earl Murray and his friend Robert Beasley dead from 21 gunshots, and the names of the officers have still not been released.)

There is also the issue that white communities have been resistant to Board Bill #71, the pending legislation to establish a Civilian Oversight Review Board that would act as a neutral investigative body on issues of police brutality. How do you respond to this? I think the average white citizen doesn't think this is a problem, or they think anything that happens to black citizens is deserved, or that they provoked it. That again goes back to the way officers behave when they're in a predominantly white community. They are there to serve and protect, but police officers' roles in poor communities, particularly those of color, is one of control and terror.

What can be done to improve communications between communities and the police, and among different communities?

I think it's a multi-faceted approach. One, the leadership at the police department has to make it clear that this is not going to be tolerated, which is a message that may be said but is not enforced.

Another thing, that the OBS has discovered, is that people in distressed communities usually don't see themselves as problem solvers. They are only calling someone from the outside to help. If you're having a domestic issue and the police are called, nine times out of ten someone's going to get knocked upside the head by the police. Often it results in assault and murder by the police who were called in to resolve the situation. There needs to be more education, more emphasis on having the power to control your own destiny and solve problems and not to be so quick to call the police.

How much are the organizations you're involved with trying to establish community outreach and education?

It's a role that the CAPCR would like to take on but hasn't been able to do in the broad sense, particularly because we're working so hard on Board Bill #71. But we have done a number of teach-ins around police abuse, what to do if you're stopped by the police, how to be in control when the police are around. I think black folks deal with police in two ways: they either run because they fear for their lives or they really believe that the police are there to help. Folks know police abuse exists, but when you have to call somebody, whom do you call? All you can do is hope that when they come on the scene that they will address the issues in a non-violent and productive way.

Many police officers tend not to be sensitive to issues of domestic violence, so I think training can help. Training means folks have to understand the need for it and be open and receptive, otherwise you sit there with recalcitrant officers who think they don't need to learn about cultural sensitivity or police behavior. It needs to be tied to performance reviews, statistics on how many times an officer has fired his weapon, how many complaints have been issued against him. Everybody wants accountability in the profession, but somehow when it comes to the police they don't need to be under the same scrutiny. If you have a policeman who's known for terrorizing communities and has a history of excessive use of force and it's allowed to continue, it's sending the message that this kind of behavior is acceptable and it's also a time-bomb waiting to happen. (Such was the case with Robert Dodson, an officer with a history of abuse, who was directly implicated in the murder of Julius Thurman in April 1999) Which is why the civilian review board is so important, because even though it's an advisory committee you still get to see who's doing what, how often they're doing it, and in which communities.

Obviously all of these issues are linked; they are not isolated events. How do other factors, such as gender, impact police brutality?

Definitely there's an impact, from the whole police brutality issue going up to the prison industrial complex. It most directly affects black men, but on the second tier are the women in their lives. One of the things OBS has noticed is that over the years we've ended up dealing with women's interests in the issues of justice. It's the mothers, the wives, the girlfriends, and the sisters who want to work for justice, and we've always ended up working with women as the primary family person. I'm not sure it's an issue we can readily deal with except to help women understand the societal forces they have to deal with, so that they don't go into the struggle with a naive perspective as to what's happening and why.

We have to take seriously the way the police and the community look at black males. They are all potential fodder for the prison industrial complex, although there's an increasing number of young black women who are going into the system.

We also have to educate our mothers about what the society is holding. Most mothers, 60% of whom in St. Louis are single mothers, know there is a place for their sons in a correctional facility. Especially in the case of Torrence Mull ­ why is a 16 year old carrying a play gun? People lump everyone in the black community together ­ saying all the young black people are Śgang-bangers' ­ but this is a kid who wasn't, who was just playful in that way. The fact that he would be killed for carrying a play gun probably never occurred to him.

The system of capitalism sets up a patriarchal system where men have the dominant roles, often of the oppressor. I think that a lot more discussion needs to be held by people who are organizing, to try new approaches with young men and women. We have always maintained in OBS that police brutality is a tool of oppression and repression and the police role is not one of protection but of control. Educating our community about the role of the police historically, and about power, is a long-term commitment.

What can be done to close the race and gender gaps within the activist community?

One of the key successes for O22 was that we had a multi-racial coalition to address the issues, which is very different from the coalition of 1983, which was all black. We've spent a lot of time trying to cultivate these relationships. The struggle is not over by far, but one of the things that's come out of it is an anti-racism effort that involves the commitment of white people to looking at the way they behave, particularly in multi-racial organizations, and how to build relationships across race and gender lines. Steve Hollis and Janey Archey (of the CAPCR) are working on that.

White groups also often choose to work on issues that are more global, but never link them up to local issues. Because then you have to reach out into communities that are not your own, and I think people don't think about that, or if they do, they think those communities are by and large inferior. It really is a white skin privilege piece that we need to put squarely on the table and talk about, and those people who are consistent in that behavior need to continue to be struggled with. If you have a group where men are making most of the decisions, and they all look the same, you have a problem.

We've had our fair share of struggles in our organization with the behavior of the men, and it isn't over yet. In OBS, everyone owns the process. If I am facilitating a meeting and two white guys have spoken in a row, I will stop and call out 'does anyone else want to say something because we've had two white guys speak in a row.' That's the way we say it, so that everyone's clear on the dynamics, because a lot of times this stuff is very unconscious, we've all been affected by bourgeois ideology. A lot of times women fall into the background and let the floor be taken by the men, or they will say Śwell someone else already said what I was going to say.' So we also really work with women, encouraging them to speak out.

You need to create an atmosphere that's inclusive and safe, where people feel they can say what they need to without being criticized unjustly or being treated differently because of who they are. Those are the kind of politics that operate in other places, and we don't need to have that in a progressive group.

How has the media treated issues of police brutality and the work of the coalition?

For the most part it's a racist media. They've played a critical role in helping to perpetuate the myths about black men, which goes hand in hand with racial profiling. Anytime there's a crime committed in the community, somehow we always get a lot of face time on the boob tube, as 'a black male suspect'. Even in the print media there is a lot of attention paid to running pictures of black suspects as opposed to a white suspects, when they might just list the name. Nine times out of ten that's they way it happens. A lot of respect is paid to protecting the identities and privacy of white perpetrators. I think that the media has played almost a diabolical role in the way the black community is targeted.

I just think that we live in two different worlds and that's not white people's reality - they cannot believe that officers would be harassing people for no reason, stopping people, chasing people down. That's an everyday occurrence, and I don't think that young black men should have to get used to it. White people don't get stopped and pulled out of the car and forced to stand spread-eagle. The inconvenience is a small part of it, but I think it's mostly the humiliation ­ here you haven't done a thing but be in a car and then you're sitting on the curb and anyone who passes by is looking at you, wondering what's going on. If I was a young black man I know I'd be hostile. Why do the police want to do that?

For more information, contact the CAPCR at 454-9005.