Research Notes #11
The terror of policing
On 20 April 2021, Derek Chauvin was convicted on all 3 charges for the murder of George Floyd. This was a positive outcome but it is not enough. There were at least 125 people killed by police during the time of the trial and as of this writing, in 2021, there have already been 335 deaths due to police violence. If Chauvin had not been convicted, it would have been a clear message that the justice system is, indeed, broken. I am happy that he did not get away with this heinous crime, but it should not take the pressure off of reforming the system of policing we have in the United States. In this issue, we will look at the history of policing and the corrupt and unequal way it has been used to maintain order in our society since its inception.
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The Beginning
Where did policing start? What are the roots of the system?
As is discussed in a wonderful and informative interview with Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Throughline, the roots of modern-day policing harken back to the early 19th-century practice of slave patrols. These patrols were made up of primarily white men who would monitor the comings and goings of Black people. All white people in the south were expected to participate, but white men were specifically held to the standard of reporting. Slave patrols were formalized into law in 1835 when Lousiana became the first state to pass a series of ordinances written between1835 and 1838. As Mohammad states, the slave patrol participants were to…
“Arrest any slave or slaves whether with or without a permit who may be caught in the woods or forest with any fire or torch which slave or slaves thus arrested shall be subjected to corporal punishment not exceeding 30 stripes. So you can hear in that early legislation, part of the concern is an uprising, is arson, it is the fear that slaves will burn things down and the responsibility not of what we would later expect due process or what white property owners were entitled to in the Bill of Rights but, in fact, immediate corporal punishment. So the tying together early on, the surveillance, the deputization essentially of all white men to be police officers or, in this case, slave patrollers and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning.” (npr.org)
Slave patrols continued to be used in the South, as a means of control, all the way through emancipation, at which time, the black codes were created to continue this level of control of Black people throughout the south. However, the south was certainly not alone in this system of policing Black folks. It stretches throughout the white communities of the North and West as well, tracing a line of fear that police also engage with today in their practice.
Continued policing in the South, North, and West
From slave patrols to the Klan to Jim Crow, the South continued to use white people to police the movements of Black people. Meanwhile, in the former colonial cities of the North, the police were also using a hierarchical system of control. Due to the lower numbers of Black people in that part of the country, previous to the Great Migration, whites were policing each other based on their perceived levels of status. This led to a caste-like system that, by the time Black people migrated to these areas in greater numbers was already set up to privilege white people of specific classes. Muhammad puts it much more succinctly, “the function of police are to control essential workers in the early centuries of this country”, demonstrating the theme that is still active today when it comes to policing in the United States. (npr.org)
As you can tell, policing is also heavily connected to surveillance and, most specifically, the extreme use of surveillance tactics in communities of color, as well as poor communities, in the United States. In discussing the surveillance state in America, the authors of an article on The Century Foundation site titled The Disparate Impact of Surveillance note, “there is nothing abstract about the physical, often menacing, intrusions into less fortunate neighborhoods, where mere presence in a “high-crime” area is grounds for detention, search, and questioning by police.” (tcf.org)
For more on Surveillance, check out these books by Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.
After Emancipation
The 13th amendment, which emancipated the enslaved, also created a loophole through which the criminalization of Black bodies would persist to the present day.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. (wikipedia)
That line ‘except as a punishment for crime’ is the loophole and the outcome is the prison industrial complex, an industry built around free labor and fed by a system of surveillance, coercion, fear of Black bodies, and the willingness of white people to continue to be part of the surveillance state. This is where white women specifically come into play in this surveillance state. We have, over the years, been the voices of fear in too many cases where Black folks have suffered violence, terror, or even death at the hands of white men coming to avenge false claims.
White women who treat the police as their personal protection brigade are playing into the stereotypes and history of slander done to Black men on behalf of white supremacy and this does real and lasting harm. Violence does, indeed, happen everyday and there are reasons to report, but when a white woman picks up her cellphone and calls the police because a person of color is doing something she doesn’t like, something that inconveniences her but does not hurt her, she plays into the history of violence that has been perpetrated in the name of white solidarity and this needs to stop. We, as white people, need to stop being the shills of a system of white supremacy. We need to stop thinking that our lives are more valuable than the lives of people of color. We need to break the cycle.
Police Reform
After the history that I have shown above, for policing in the United States, you would think that I would suggest that we throw the whole system of policing away and start again from scratch. However, there are people that are working in the realm of police reform that are much more level-headed and well-informed than me (of course! this is what we are here for, right?) that have more nuanced and critically thought through ways to improve the current system.
Reforming the system of policing in the United States often gets met with resistance. This resistance is connected to the maintenance of white supremacy. When an advocate of police reform suggests that we should take the funds given to the police and redistribute them across agencies that can better serve the people in each community there is always someone, often from the right wing side of the political spectrum, who chimes in with “if we take money from the police who will protect the people?” The answer to this question is - police are actually not protecting people in underserved neighborhoods, they are merely terrorizing the residents in these communities via surveillance and unwarranted ‘stop and frisk’ events.
Divest and Invest
There are so many other resources that can be used in place of police officers and there is already a standard for this type of community care in white neighborhoods across the country. (note: the fact that there are ‘white neighborhoods’ is extremely problematic and connects back to a history of segregation, redlining, and racism that was and still is rampant across the country.)
The barriers put up to true and meaningful reform are causing more and more, primarily Black, people to be targeted, terrorized, and killed. As you can see from the numbers I posted at the top of this piece, at least one person is killed each day in the United States by police and the highest proportion of those deaths are people of color. If we continue to ignore the data that has been present since the beginning of modern-day policing, we will never see meaningful and lasting change.
As I mentioned in the last issue of Research Notes, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour and then increasing that to $20 over 5 years, would make a huge impact on communities that are currently underserved. Investing in health and human services, education, and housing are other ways to shift the funds from policing to services that will actually improve the conditions on the ground decreasing, over time, the circumstances by which policing is even necessary. For more ways to divest and invest, check out the Movement 4 Black Lives site.
Pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 (H.R.7120)
On 8 June 2020, H.R.1720 was introduced to Congress by the bill sponsor, Representative Karen Bass (D-CA-37). This bill includes many of the many changes to policing that have been requested by police reform advocates and would be a step in the right direction for reform. The bill seeks to do such things as lower the standard for criminal intent from willful to knowing or reckless, create a national registry for police misconduct, establish a framework to prevent racial profiling and requires departments to provide training on implicit bias and racial profiling, and limits qualified immunity. Although the bill doesn’t go far enough, it certainly is a good first step to establishing reform across the country.
End Broken Windows Policing
Broken windows policing is a theory that assumes when minor infractions are heavily focused on, neighborhoods will improve. The theory has been debunked by overwhelming evidence of harm and this type of policing has led to “over-policing of communities of color and excessive force in otherwise harmless situations.” (campaign zero) By ending this type of policing, which also includes the tactic of ‘stop and frisk’, the number of victims of police violence, up to and including death, will decline.
A Better Tomorrow
Police violence is a active threat to individuals living in the United States today and we need to work together to pass reforms to change that fact. It is possible to make a better tomorrow for those targeted by police violence. We just have to get informed and take action. Please consider reading, listening to, and taking action on the resources throughout this post. As always - when we come together collectively we can change the future. And information is one of the most powerful forces we have on our side!
Additional Links and Resources
Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff on Toure Show - podcast
Urge Governor Lee to grant Pervis Payne clemency - action/petition
Campaign Zero 10 step initiative - vision statement
We Do This ‘til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba - book
Thank you for reading the Research Notes Newsletter! Now it’s YOUR turn. Please share your thoughts along with any other questions or suggestions for future research, in the comments. I look forward to lively discourse.