Police
Police | No. 3 (2020)
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is a staggering, overwhelming, important, rigorously researched, and just plain fierce book. I read it in 2017 and learned that, at that time, the percentage of U.S. Black men who were incarcerated was higher than the percentage of black men incarcerated in South Africa during the height of Apartheid.
I’ve been meditating a lot on that fact. And as a result, talking with more white folks “as-white-folks.” I’ve listened as my neighbors and loved ones tell me this:
“I think they’re really not giving us enough credit. Lots of white people marched in the Civil Rights movement.”
“There are more white people in jail than there are black people.”
“Policing in the United States is rooted in the desire to protect all people.”
“The people who lived in the black neighborhoods asked Mayor Bloomberg to put “stop and frisk” into place. There was so much black-on-black violence that they couldn’t take it.”
Then, this past Sunday’s New York Times featured an opinion piece citing the results of a recent poll:
“40% of white respondents to the NYTimes poll say that discrimination against white people is a bigger problem than discrimination among other races.”
That is wrong. I believe that people believe it. And that we tell stories to ourselves that might feel true or justified. But they’re not.
We can do better.
Policing in the U.S.
The genesis of the modern police organization is the "Slave Patrol" (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions:
to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves;
to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts;
to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules.
Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.
In the post-Civil War era, municipal police departments came into being to address strike-breaking. By the late 19th-century union organizing and labor unrest were widespread in the United States. New York City had 5,090 strikes, involving almost a million workers from 1880 to 1900; Chicago had 1,737 strikes, involving over half a million workers in the same period (Barkan 2001; Harring 1983). Police strike-breaking took two distinct forms:
forced dispersal of demonstrating workers, usually through the use of extreme violence;
and staggering numbers of "public order" arrests.
Here’s the takeaway:
From the beginning, American policing has been intimately tied not to the problem of crime, but to the exigencies and demands of the American political economy. From the early slave patrols to the anti-immigrant bashing of early police forces, the strike-breaking of the later 1800s, and the unrelenting oppression and slaying of black lives, the role of the police in the United States has been defined by systemic racism, economics, and politics.
For more, read Dr Gary Potter’s The History of Policing in the United States
Stop and Frisk: New York City
So in 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that police could “stop and frisk” a citizen based on reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed. (This decision was judged unconstitutional and reversed in 2016.)
After taking office in 2002, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg oversaw a dramatic expansion in the use of stop-and-frisk. The number of stops multiplied sevenfold, peaking with 685,724 in 2011 and then tumbling to 191,851 in 2013. During Mr. Bloomberg’s three terms, the police recorded 5,081,689 stops.
Ninety percent of those stopped in 2017 were African-American or LatinX, aged 14–24. Seventy percent of those stopped were later found to be innocent. There’s a widespread misconception that the Black community asked the police to enact Stop-and-Frisk in their communities. They did not:
“The temperature in the city at the time was that the police were at war with black and brown people on the streets,” said Jenn Rolnick-Borchetta, the director of impact litigation at the Bronx Defenders, one of the groups that have successfully sued the Police Department over the practice. “And that is how people experienced it.”
Read more at the New York Times “How Stop-and-Frisk Inflamed Black and Hispanic Neighborhoods”
Bye for now.
So. Much Love.
Cara
