Interview: First Sgt. Walter Shawn McDaniel, Richland County Sheriff’s Office

The summer of 2020 was a time when America experienced a heightened awareness of the racial inequities in policing in our country due to the high profile murders of several Black Americans including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Though racial inequities in policing have always existed, serious conversations about the matter exploded into the public discourse.

In this episode of the Access Aisle we talk with someone who experiences both sides of the issue, First Sgt. Walter Shawn McDaniel. First Sgt. McDaniel is a 25 year officer with the Richland County Sheriff’s office and a Black American. He shares his unique perspective about healing the racial divide in our country as well as how the police and disadvantaged communities can work together to earn trust back and develop more of an understanding of each other.  

Disclaimer

Able South Carolina is providing this podcast as a public service, but it is neither a legal interpretation nor a statement of local, state, or federal legislation or policy. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by Able South Carolina. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an Able South Carolina endorsement of them or any entity they represent. If you have any questions about this disclaimer, please contact us at advocacy@able-sc.org

 

Episode Transcript:

00:14 Chris Sparrow: It has been 11,059 days since the ADA was passed, and you are parked in the Access Aisle.

 

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00:30 CS: I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Chris Sparrow, but you can just call me Sparrow, and I am your new host of The Access Aisle. Today, we have an incredible interview with Robbie Cop and First Sergeant Walter Shawn McDaniel, and stay tuned 'cause afterwards, we got some exciting news for you. So Robbie, go ahead and take us away.

 

00:56 Robbie Kopp: Today on the Access Aisle, I'm joined by my guest, Walter Shawn McDaniel. He is currently a First Sergeant with Richland County Sheriff's office, and we have had the good fortune of being able to work together on some law enforcement and disability interaction policy with Richland County Sheriff's Department a few years ago. So welcome. Good to see you over Zoom, Shawn.

 

01:23 Walter Shawn McDaniel: Good to be here, thank you for having me.

 

01:25 RK: Absolutely, thank you for taking this time. We're really living in a unique moment right now as we see the interactions of law enforcement under increased scrutiny, as we see lives lost like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and many, many more, presumably as a result of bias from law enforcement and risk to folks of color and people with disabilities. And what we're hoping to cover a little bit is a time to hear your perspective from law enforcement and as a person who's Black, and hear the interaction of where things are now and where things really could be and should be with acknowledging difference, and also making sure that we're looking out for each other and protecting each other. So with that, I'm gonna open up pretty broadly and let you share a little bit, what's the perspective that you've gotten? What are some of the things that you've been seeing inside law enforcement as we navigate and have a larger conversation around race?

 

02:35 WM: Sure. So, the narrative of racial indifference is not a new narrative, to be honest with you, it is not a new phenomenon that we're just discovering. And so I get a chance to speak from both perspectives, if you will, of 24 years of experience in law enforcement, working in different areas such as major crimes, armed robbery, aggravated assaults. You get a chance to see society from a different space, if you will, and trying to understand human behavior. It forces you to rely on instinct and to rely on your training, which is a key factor that hopefully this conversation will lead in that direction, 'cause at the end of the day, it's broken on both sides of the fence, and it's time that we each take ownership of that. To include citizens who are fully aware of racial indifference, gender indifference, socioeconomic indifference, and due to their silence, they've contributed to the protracted conflict associated with indifference. And so we need to do a better job at understanding what our contribution is, and so I look forward to the conversation. It's a difficult conversation to have. And so, of course, we have to be willing to hold it. We have to be willing to mutually learn on both sides of the fence.

 

04:06 WM: We have to be willing to allow space for emotion. That's crucial. If you don't allow space for emotion, please know that emotion will be heard one way or another. And when you're not allowing that space, you're almost forcing the hand of those individuals who feel slighted. They know something's wrong, they can't put their finger on it, and that's what we're experiencing. We're experiencing whites in general that typically can't seem to separate themselves from this statement like, "I don't see color." So we clearly know that that's not true, and I think I know what they're trying to say in terms of that, like, "I don't see color." Well, clearly, to not see color is equivalent to, if someone's in a wheelchair, for you to say, "I don't see anyone that's handicapped or anyone that has a disability." Right? So that's just unrealistic on a very basic fundamental level. And although you may have good intentions, it's actually offensive to say that. So if you don't see color, then that means that you don't see me, 'cause that my color is part of me.

 

05:24 WM: And so I think one of the things I've found throughout my walk within law enforcement, and as a Black man, is that many times, we pick and choose those battles in which we're willing to fight, and we pick and choose those battles based on our comfort zone and based on the familiarity factor, to not be willing to extend ourselves beyond that. I think that this is the end result of it. We've been trained to believe that we should focus on the differences. Let's just be honest, if you ask the average individual who's white in this country, if they would swap out their position for the position of anyone that's African-American in this country, very few of them would, because they can't put their finger on what's wrong, but they really... They know something is different. We can't suffer from what is known as the theory of attribution, we attribute certain behaviors to certain people or certain groups, and apply these parameters to them, such as, "Well, they're only like that because their home was broken." And we know that there are broken homes in the white culture and in the African-American culture and in every culture, there are broken homes. And so that theory of attribution doesn't really apply.

 

06:46 WM: So the position of a lot of whites today, "Well, slavery is over. Well, I never owned any slaves and you were never a slave, and so why are we still holding that conversation?" They think that by discussing it, we're perpetuating the old narrative. Well, I wanna say this to you, to those individuals, number one is, it's offensive. To say that the Homestead Act had nothing to do with the current socioeconomic positioning of whites today is equivalent to saying that the original creators of the phone had nothing to do with where we are with the phone and its usage today. And you can't separate the two. And so you can apply that to everything and anything. Our systems that are in place, that there is systematic indifference, there is systematic racial indifference, that prevent access to opportunity, that it creates the presence of demoralizing stereotypes for certain people. And again, not just racially driven, but also socioeconomic indifference. We look down on those that don't have what we have, right? And so we have to be honest about that. Everyone knows the one set of cousins that may not have what you have, but yet we tend to think that that's okay, and to be solid.

 

08:15 WM: And lastly, I think we all need to do a better job at realizing this one fact. Everyone is responsible for fixing and leaving this world better than how we found it. You don't get to just do it for your own race, you don't get just to stand by and... Or your own gender, or your own socioeconomic class, you don't get to do that, you don't get to do that. And so if there's a conflict, if there's an existing problem, you bear an obligation to take ownership of what your contribution is, even if it's silence. If you've utilized silence when you heard the N-word and you said nothing, then that's your contribution. If you recognize that there were issues in military, law enforcement, whatever field you're in, as it relates to gender or race, and you said nothing, well, that's your contribution. I'll end on that note, and I know I said a lot, but...

 

09:16 RK: Yeah. And I think that's so important that everyone take the time to find their role in the indifference, the racism, the ableism, whatever the -ism is, and do the work that's necessary to address that, not make it somebody else's problem, and not to make somebody else make you feel better or make you do... Or teach you something, but to really educate yourself and find your role and find ways to do better and elevate people as people and make sure that the footing is at least equal because of the systemic racism, ableism, transphobia... Pick a group. Marginalized populations have been marginalized, have been put down to a place where in order to reach equality, we have to address all of these past inequalities, and acknowledge them and own them and move past them. And I think that that's the challenge. And I think what has been giving me hope in my own work is seeing how communities are coming together to a point to acknowledge each other and acknowledge where each group is coming from.

 

10:35 RK: With violence and police brutality in the cases that we've heard, I think they have stirred something in everyone. In being able to see another human looking back at you, in the case of George Floyd, and hear the story of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, we have the same stories or... No story is the same, but similar stories from inside the disability community, from people of color and white people with disabilities, too, that are being targeted because of that difference or have received a death sentence for something incredibly minor that should not have happened that way, with cases like Maha Chaudhry and Laquan McDonald, and making sure that the stories have to be told, and we have to do the uncomfortable work of acknowledging how these biases really wreak havoc across systems. I wonder if you'll comment a little bit, I think there's a lot of terms that people are using in this space with these conversations, tell our listeners a little bit around your use of indifference as kind of a term that defines what's at odds in society right now.

 

11:48 WM: Sure. So when I use the term racial indifference or indifference as a general application, I am talking about that when indifference is fueled by implicit biases. And not knowing what those implicit biases are can oftentimes manifest itself in the form of indifference. And you end up utilizing whatever position you're in, whether you're an employer seeking to hire an interviewee, and you begin to project your implicit bias, and it evolves into the form of indifference. And next thing you know, that individual is not graded or considered to the same degree as someone else that doesn't trigger your implicit bias. So I think that's in law enforcement. And first of all, training in law enforcement has got... We can talk about that again. Training has gotta shift in law enforcement with respect to measurable tools that are transparent in the form of pre and post-exams during training to give us some sense of measurement with respect to proficiency, and to see how agencies are scoring in the areas of cultural diversity, implicit bias training, adverse childhood experiences, and to be able to grade an agency.

 

13:28 WM: How comfortable would that be to know that your loved one is traveling through a small town in Alabama, and you discover that they are being pulled over in a traffic stop? And in one quick search, you'll be able to find that they scored a... They're at the 92 percentile rate with respect to proficiency in the areas of cultural diversity, so you know that they're trained on it. That just creates discomfort that's needed throughout the country right now with respect to trusting law enforcement. So when I talk about indifference, I'm talking about the usage of implicit biases through the authoritative positioning of one's privilege or a job or status. That's what I'm talking about. And that also comes in the form of gender indifference. Oftentimes, whilst you're hanging around the cooler with the fellas, and a female employee will walk by and an inappropriate comment is made and you said nothing, you did nothing, you didn't... You're just as guilty as the individual who made the comment.

 

14:38 WM: And so yeah, that's what I mean by racial indifference. So when law enforcement began and when they start utilizing their position to effectively exercise their implicit biases. And they need to know what those are. We need to... And give them an opportunity to be coached through it. That's important, that's so important. You're the sum of all of your experiences, Robbie, and if you're a white male that never had to be around African-Americans before and now you're a police officer, and as a result of six months' worth of training, you're now given the authority to engage and interact with people who culturally, you're sincerely ignorant with in knowing how to deal with them, well, we need to know where your limitations are so that we can train you through that. We need for you to identify what your implicit biases are. We need for that officer to see the need to move beyond their comfort zones and to seek understanding concerning other cultures, to include those, the culture of disabilities. We're not trained in that area like we should be across the board.

 

15:53 RK: Yeah, and I think that that's a good bit of what we're hearing nationally around conversations that are termed "defund the police", and often refer to restructuring. How do we rethink policing? How do we give cops the tools that they would need to do their everyday work? Is that a different title? I think we see a lot of community work that falls in something that is kind of an emergency category that ends up being a law enforcement issue. If it's not fire, then it's law enforcement in a lot of cases. So I think that there's a lot of expectations from law enforcement to be able to interact with every last person, and that there's a lot of expectation that that situation may be inherently dangerous. And that's not always the case. So I'm curious, I think we've seen training as a helpful tool in that I think that there have been some best practices put forth around training. And I really like the idea of having an attributable number and the public being able to see this law enforcement officer, this department ranks highly or proficiently very well in that cultural awareness and sensitivity.

 

17:13 WM: So gone are the days, Robbie, of hoping that they actually provide, and hoping that the officers who are being trained internalize the training, and then hoping that they know how to apply it and allow it to become part of their daily routine. We can not only just rely on that. Respectfully, in good faith, we're not training on those areas, and we need to do a better job at that. And then we need to be able to measure it and hold them accountable for understanding and applying that in which that they learned. And we're not doing that, we're not... We say that we are. And I think when you open up the training curriculum to the public, I think that that level of transparency forces law enforcement to make some pretty sound decisions in how they administer training and how they measure it. And what's equally important is the need to go back and train where there's a void, the need to go back and... If someone scores a 74 in the area of implicit bias or cultural diversity, then we don't need to hope that they'll eventually get it. We need to know that there's a practice, a methodology, if you will, that's in place that will ensure that that particular individual is going to get advanced training, and that particular individual is going to be expected to meet a certain standard.

 

18:54 WM: Right now, with our department, if you fail our PT test on the third try, you are terminated. You are fired. And so with the same sense of urgency and the same level of importance that we apply to that aspect of our training. We need to apply to the areas of being disability-informed, being trauma-informed, being informed as it relates to implicit biases, being informed as it relates to adverse childhood experiences, and stop riding the boat of, "Well, that was then, this is now." Right? So I utilize the, again, the analogy of a track race. If we're all in the same race, but there are two starting guns, one allows one group of individuals to get ahead and to go two and three laps ahead, and then the other gun is for another group of individuals to, "Pow! Now you go." And then we're looking at them saying, "Catch up." It's just an unrealistic way of looking at how we have evolved as a society in this country.

 

20:21 WM: One of the biggest gripes for a lot of whites is those who are... I guess the best way to say it is this, Africans were not brought here to seek the same, they were brought here as property. And so now, when slavery was abolished, now you have to do... What do you do with these individuals? Now, they're just as educated, now they have access to books, now... That was the reason why. If you were caught with a book in your hand that you can suffer severe punishment. That was the reason, because of what we're experiencing now. And we're not going anywhere, to be honest with you. We're gonna live together, we're gonna work together, we're gonna move past what Martin Luther King coined as sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. And we're going to acknowledge how we've all created this problem, how we're all complicit in dealing with this cultural cancer. There is one overall culture, and that is the human culture, and we all share in that culture. We're forced to engage with each other. It's just, we have to stop falling subject to what Antonio Gramsci identified as hegemony and false consciousness, and realize that we're all in the hamster cage [chuckle] trying to figure out who's gonna get on the wheel next.

 

21:58 RK: Yeah, for sure. I think in my observation, there's just been so much division, and there's kind of this attempt to draw lines between groups of people, while there are systemic issues, while there are institutions that have been built on premises of racism or ableism. The lines that we draw are the biggest part of what separates, is that we have this opportunity to be human and to look out for each other and to care and to find your role in other people's struggle, and make sure that we're owning that role and covering that role and erasing the lines where they need to be gone and helping each other up where that's needed.

 

22:49 RK: And I think that that's what's really interesting in seeing a lot of the work that's taking place in communities across the country following the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, is that, I think a lot of other rights groups, and again, that this other mentality is probably off, [chuckle] but other marginalized groups are finding that same thread of indifference, or are finding that when there's one voice of rights, of human rights, that all boats can be lifted. We have cases of individuals with disabilities that are Black and can see that outcomes are worse, whether it's an academic outcome, employment outcome, earnings outcomes, or arrest rates. We see that where groups are marginalized and where they identify with multiple marginalized groups, there's even more barriers, and that that can be especially challenging.

 

23:58 CS: Thank you, guys, for such an eye-opening interview. I learned a lot there that I'd never really thought about before, so thank you. Part two of the interview is gonna be coming up next month for the Access Aisle. And like I told you before, we got some big news, so there's gonna be some big changes happening to the Access Aisle in the New Year, and we're really excited about it. We think you guys are really gonna love it and you're really gonna appreciate what we're doing here. So please stay tuned for next month, for part two of the Access Aisle interview with Robbie Cop and First Sergeant Walter Shawn McDaniel, and then we're gonna give you a little bit more information coming up in the next episode. So stay tuned for episode two.

 

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