On the Prince Georges County, Maryland police

Dear Editor:

So now the Prince Georges County police force has agreed to reform its procedures regarding shootings and the use of dogs, and to monitoring by the U.S. Justice Department (news article, Jan. 23). Sure.

When my ancestors came to Maryland from Scotland in the 17^th century, settling in PG County, they and others quickly discovered that it was more comfortable in the warmer climate to purchase African slaves to do the heavy labor. The overseers they hired were the ancestors of today's police. The next two hundred years or so established cultural patterns that have been hard to break merely by means of pieces of paper such as a Constitutional Amendment outlawing slavery.

Thus when I was teaching in College Park in the 1960s the PG police were well known to be infiltrated by the Klan. In the 1970s a black teenager from Bladensburg was sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing two cops in self defense (he went downhill after that, being killed himself in a robbery attempt a few years ago -- to the accompaniment of cheering by Maryland's finest). And speaking of the use of dogs, while I was living in Mt. Rainier in the 1980s another black teenager who was loitering in a prohibited area was shot to death by the police, but not before he managed to kill the dog that had been sicced on him with a knife. And to be sure, people (including, by the way, the Washington Post reporters and editors covering the matter) made more fuss over the dog. The ascension of African Americans to positions of leadership in the county did not prevent the further abuses in the 1990s and early 2000s your article alludes to, any more than the promotion of some slaves from the field to the house in earlier days ended the beatings of those left.

As for monitoring by the Justice Department, it has recently distinguished itself by profiling people of Arab descent. Forgive me if I remain skeptical that anything will change.

Sincerely,

(1/23/04)

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