The San Jose State justice studies department invited criminal justice experts from various U.S universities to speak at an Oct. 28 webinar on why people protest.
The webinar was named after the social justice book, “Hands Up Don’t Shoot: Why Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter and How They Changed America.” The event was a part of the Ann Lucas Lecture Series in Law and Justice organized by the SJSU social studies department.
According to the department’s website, the series honors scholars whose books offer critical perspectives in the fields of law, social theory and the humanities like Lucas, a former department chair who died from cancer in 2009.
Jennifer Cobbina, author of “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” and a Michigan State University criminal justice professor said during the webinar that the book explores how protesting tactics against police officers intensified after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Grey.
Cobbina was invited to share her research at the webinar by Ericka Adams, an SJSU justice studies professor and webinar organizer.
Cobbina said that Brown was an 18-year-old Black man who was killed by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Grey was a 25-year-old Black man who died from an injury while in custody in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015.
She said that their deaths made society realize that police brutality against people of color is not a series of isolated incidents.
“People felt a moral obligation to protest, to sit down was no longer OK,” Cobbina said.
During the webinar, she said that their deaths set off weeks of civil unrest and protests in the two cities because people wanted to bring to light the unjustified killings of Black people by police. Black communities are able to express their anger and frustration toward a racist police system through protesting, according to Cobbina.
Cobbina added that direct and indirect experiences with officers shape people’s discontentment with police.
When she interviewed Black residents in Ferguson and Baltimore in 2016 for her research, she found that people who consistently experience or hear about racist encounters with police will negatively view officers.
“[People] had negative encounters with the police,” Cobbina said. “If [their families and neighbors] also had these, that cancels out any positive interaction they may have had with the police.”
Adams said that she thought students and community members would find Cobbina’s research on protesters and police to be informative, especially since protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have reignited the Black Lives Matter movement surrounding systemic racism and police mishandling of minority communities.
Floyd, a 46-year old Minneapolis resident, and Taylor, a 26-year-old Louisville resident, were killed by police officers in spring.
“It's important for students to see that the violence perpetrated against Black and brown people is not something recent, [but] historic,” Adams said.
Adams also invited two criminal justice professors from east coast colleges to make comments and ask questions about the research in Cobbina’s book during the webinar. The professors were Delores Jones-Brown from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Andres Rengifo, from the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark.
Adams said she knows the webinar’s experts through the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network, which is based in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and consists of 150 scholars from around the world who research connections between race, ethnicity and crime.
Rengifo said during the webinar that Cobbina’s research on protests and police brutality exemplifies that the U.S. lives in “two different worlds” where one people’s rights and expressions are protected by the law, and the other where police oppress those rights.
“People pretend and expect the state to protect them, [because they live in] an industrialized and rich country like the U.S.,” Rengifo said. “[Protesting proves] that's not the case.”
He said he agreed with Cobbina when she said protesters' main priority is to raise awareness of police brutality and mistreatment of Black people and people of color.
“This is not a story for individuals, this is a story of communities,” Rengifo said.
