The axiom goes: If you can’t beat em, join em. Just a short time ago, the head of the Fort Lauderdale police union took that maxim to new heights.

Or, if you prefer, depths.

The city’s cops have been at odds with the Broward County branch of the NAACP since a racially charged incident last summer. After testifying in a court proceeding, officer Robert Hoffman allegedly put a hand over his mouth and told a black teenager in the jury box, “I’m going to get your black ass.” He allegedly lied about it during a later investigation.

The chief of police recommended Hoffman be fired, a position supported by the local NAACP under its president, Marsha Ellison. But a citizens review board chose instead to limit punishment to a suspension and letter of reprimand, a position supported by the Fraternal Order of Police. The episode was a turning point in the acrimonious relationship between the police union and the civil rights organization.

Now we are at another. As reported two weeks ago in The Miami Herald, police Lt. Alfred Lewers Jr. sent an e-mail to officers suggesting they join the NAACP as a means of increasing understanding and easing tensions. To this reasonable suggestion, union President Jack Lokeinsky added an unreasonable suggestion of his own. He appended a paragraph saying the FOP is “tired of the current position of the president of the Broward Branch of the NAACP. In an effort to vote out the president and her views of the police I support the membership drive.”

In other words, the police should take over the NAACP and subvert it from within. “It’s absolutely not a power play,” Lokeinsky, a former NAACP member, said recently.

He’s absolutely lying, because it absolutely is.

Ellison, who is up for re-election in the fall, has responded in kind, demanding Lokeinsky either resign or be voted out of office. If the union is in earnest about winning the respect of the community it serves, it should give that demand serious consideration. It’s hard to see how the FOP under Lokeinsky can ever again be an effective liaison between the police and the black community.

His attempt to undermine the NAACP echoes a recent theme in racial politics. Meaning that one keeps seeing those outside the black community attempting to choose its leadership. I’m thinking of Sean Hannity’s online lionization of Jesse Lee Peterson, a harshly conservative would-be black leader of no discernible influence in the black community. And of the 2005 GOP outreach to a carefully chosen group of black pastors in an effort to make the black church a beachhead in its fear-mongering crusade against gay marriage. And of all the e-mails I get castigating black folk for their failure to revere Condoleezza Rice.

There is something creepy and paternalistic about this unsubtle effort to tell the black community who it should admire. And no, that complaint is not meant as a defense of either Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, both of whom have long seemed more interested in seeing their names in the paper than in effecting change. Indeed, some of us feel the whole notion of a “black leader” is an obsolete one. Who, after all, are the nation’s white leaders?

No, my only point is that people have the right to choose their own destiny. And to whatever degree there still are black leaders, they should be chosen by black people. Or, at a minimum, not chosen by those whose aim is to stifle dissent and subvert purpose.

In his attempt to do precisely that, Jack Lokeinsky has embarrassed his profession and set back efforts to forge understanding between cops and community. He does not have to like Marsha Ellison, but her representation of black interests is not his call.

If you can’t beat em, deal with it.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. His e-mail address is: lpitts@miamiherald.com.


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