The Violence of policing
Police Brutality and Black Criminality Defined
Police brutality is defined as the use of excessive physical assault or verbal assault during police procedures, such as apprehending or interrogating a suspect. Deadly force is not always excessive force. However, when deadly force exceeds the force that is necessary to create a safe environment, it is considered police brutality. Black criminality, which is the process where people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not. That process has been a vicious cycle in American history where black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, and then thought of as dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further.
Police in America
In the North
Policing in Colonial America was a very informal privately funded system that employed people part-time. Towns relied on a “night watch” where volunteers signed up for a certain day and time, mostly to look out for fellow colonists who might be doing something the community banned. Boston started one in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700. But the system wasn’t very efficient because the watchmen often slept and drank while on duty, some people who were put on watch duty as a form of punishment. When cities and towns tried compulsory service, if you were rich enough, you paid someone to go on watch for you — ironically, a criminal or a community thug. As the nation grew different parts of the country developed different policing systems.
Police brutality is defined as the use of excessive physical assault or verbal assault during police procedures, such as apprehending or interrogating a suspect. Deadly force is not always excessive force. However, when deadly force exceeds the force that is necessary to create a safe environment, it is considered police brutality. Black criminality, which is the process where people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not. That process has been a vicious cycle in American history where black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, and then thought of as dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further.
Police in America
In the North
Policing in Colonial America was a very informal privately funded system that employed people part-time. Towns relied on a “night watch” where volunteers signed up for a certain day and time, mostly to look out for fellow colonists who might be doing something the community banned. Boston started one in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700. But the system wasn’t very efficient because the watchmen often slept and drank while on duty, some people who were put on watch duty as a form of punishment. When cities and towns tried compulsory service, if you were rich enough, you paid someone to go on watch for you — ironically, a criminal or a community thug. As the nation grew different parts of the country developed different policing systems.
In cities, especially in the north, increasing urbanization made the night-watch system useless. The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was established in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places. These merchants figured out a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.” It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century, when black migrants began to move to northern cities, particularly during World War I and what became known as the Great Migration, that the North began to describe black people as prone to being criminals, as a dangerous race. This was used as a way to limit their access to the full benefits of their freedom in the North.
|
In the south
Policing in the southern states where slavery existed developed a different institution: the slave patrol. Because the white majority was so concerned about slave revolts (of which there were many), and runaway slaves, they created a new form of law enforcement. The slave patrols were the first modern police forces in the United States. The Charleston, South Carolina, slave patrol, for example, had about 100 officers in 1837 and was far larger than any northern city police force at that time. The abolition of slavery, except as punishment for crime, left a gigantic loophole that the South used in the earliest days of black freedom. Basically, all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights became subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts were defined as criminals. The only thing that wasn’t criminalized was submission to a white landowner to work on their land. |
As a consequence, the South built a fairly large prison system and started to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for it. The criminal justice system operated alongside a political economy that was thoroughly racist and white supremacist. African Americans were criminalized to maintain the established social order.
Black people as criminals
During this time social scientists began to define black people as a criminal class in American. They used as evidence data coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery ended. They used this data to point out the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. Blacks were almost three times overrepresented in the 1890 census in Southern prisons. That evidence was to used to say, “Well, now that black people have their freedom, what are they doing with it? They’re committing crimes. In the South and in the North, and the census here is the proof.”
This view of Black Americans became enshrined in the Jim Crow form of segregation, but it really starts to become national during the Great Migration period and shapes the unequal distribution of public goods for black people like access to neighborhoods, access to schools, access to hospitals, access to forms of leisure. And, of course, all of these restrictions are enforced by white citizens but most especially by local law enforcement, by police officers. During this time social scientists began to define black people as a criminal class in American. They used as evidence data coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery ended. They used this data to point out the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. Blacks were almost three times overrepresented in
Black people as criminals
During this time social scientists began to define black people as a criminal class in American. They used as evidence data coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery ended. They used this data to point out the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. Blacks were almost three times overrepresented in the 1890 census in Southern prisons. That evidence was to used to say, “Well, now that black people have their freedom, what are they doing with it? They’re committing crimes. In the South and in the North, and the census here is the proof.”
This view of Black Americans became enshrined in the Jim Crow form of segregation, but it really starts to become national during the Great Migration period and shapes the unequal distribution of public goods for black people like access to neighborhoods, access to schools, access to hospitals, access to forms of leisure. And, of course, all of these restrictions are enforced by white citizens but most especially by local law enforcement, by police officers. During this time social scientists began to define black people as a criminal class in American. They used as evidence data coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery ended. They used this data to point out the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. Blacks were almost three times overrepresented in
the 1890 census in Southern prisons. That evidence was to used to say, “Well, now that black people have their freedom, what are they doing with it? They’re committing crimes. In the South and in the North, and the census here is the proof.”
This view of Black Americans became enshrined in the Jim Crow form of segregation, but it really starts to become national during the Great Migration period and shapes the unequal distribution of public goods for black people like access to neighborhoods, access to schools, access to hospitals, access to forms of leisure. And, of course, all of these restrictions are enforced by white citizens but most especially by local law enforcement, by police officers. The basic idea that in white spaces, black people are automatically suspect, still plays out in America today. The idea that police officers should prevent crime in black communities, rather than simply policing the borders of black communities, is what gave us stop and frisk, which actually is not just from the 1990s but goes back to the 1910s and ’20s. Sound Tracks About Police Violence
|
During Prohibition the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol created a huge underground economy, which was controlled by white men who don’t sue each other in civil court, but shoot at each other when they’re competing over the spoils of bootlegging. A lot of that action deliberately takes place in black communities. The speakeasies are hidden in black communities. Everyone is complicit in this: The bootleggers are complicit, the police are complicit. The only people who aren’t complicit are everyday working-class black people who don’t want what’s happening in their communities to be happening. The effect of this is that yet another collection of crime statistics come out of Northern cities that show the high rates of arrest of black people during the Prohibition period, when in fact, they’re being targeted for political clampdowns of overwhelmingly white underground activity.
In 1929, the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice published the Illinois Crime Survey. Conducted between 1927 and 1928, the survey sought to analyze causes of high crime rates in Chicago and Cook County, especially among criminals associated with Al Capone. But also the survey provided data on police activity—although African-Americans made up just five percent of the area's population, they constituted 30 percent of the victims of police killings, the survey revealed. That same year, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement to investigate crime related to prohibition in addition to policing tactics. Between 1931 and 1932, the commission published the findings of its investigation in 14 volumes, one of which was titled “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.” The realities of police brutality came to light, even though the commission did not address racial disparities outright. |
The earliest days of the civil rights movement were focused on the problem of lynching. Alongside their focus on racial violence in the earliest days, they also began to pay attention to police violence, particularly in the North, because the NAACP leadership was in Northern cities. It was headquartered in New York. And so what was happening in their own backyards was more like systemic police violence than lynch mobs. And that began the process, particularly for W.E.B. Du Bois, who established a kind of police-brutality blotter, which became the primary magazine for the organization.
Ida B. Wells, who was also a founder of the NAACP, began to organize around police violence and other forms of racial violence in those northern cities. African Americans started to resist policing. Ministers, teachers, bricklayers, essentially the working and professional class of black America at the turn of the 20th century, became very vocal, and demanded police reform accountability for criminal activity among the police. By the 1920s, the first of a series of race riots erupts in East St. Louis and spreads to Philadelphia. Another one occurs in Chicago. The Chicago riot is sparked by the death of a 17-year-old black boy swimming in Lake Michigan who crosses the color line. Black people are outraged. They want justice. White people take offense and begin to attack them in their communities. One result of the violence was the first blue-ribbon commission to study the causes of riots. In that report, the Chicago commission concludes that there was systemic participation in mob violence by the police, and that when police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them. Multiple people testify, all white criminal justice officials, that the police systematically engaged in racial bias when they targeted black suspects, and were more likely to arrest them and to book them on charges that they were for a white man. A decade later, Harlem broke out into the first police riot, where African Americans believed that an Afro-Puerto Rican youth was been killed by the police. In fact, he hadn’t been, but the rumor that he had led to a series of attacks directed towards white businesses in Harlem and against the police. Eventually, that uprising led to the Harlem riot report in 1935. |
|
That report came to the same conclusion, it noted that there needs to be accountability for police. That they need to be charged and booked as criminals when they engage in criminal activity. They call for citizen review boards and an end to stop and frisk, which they name in the report. Mayor Fiorello]La Guardia of New York, shelves it, doesn’t do anything with it, doesn’t share it with the public. The only reason it ever became public was because the black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, published it in serial form.
During the Civil Rights Era, though many of the movement's leaders advocated for peaceful protests, the 1960s were fraught with violent and destructive riots. Aggressive dispersion tactics, such as police dogs and fire hoses, against individuals in peaceful protests and sit-ins were the most widely publicized examples of police brutality in that era. But it was the pervasive violent policing in communities of color that built distrust at a local, everyday level.
One of the deadliest riots occurred in Newark in 1967 after police officers severely beat black cab driver John Smith during a traffic stop. Twenty-six people died and many others were injured during the four days of unrest. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson organized the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of these major riots.
The origins of the unrest in Newark weren't unique in a police versus citizen incident. The commission concluded "police actions were 'final' incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.”
The commission identified segregation and poverty as indicators and published recommendations for reducing social inequalities, recommending an “expansion and reorientation of the urban renewal program to give priority to projects directly assisting low-income households to obtain adequate housing.” Johnson, however, rejected the commission’s recommendations.
Black newspapers reported incidents of police brutality throughout the early and mid-20th century and the popularization of radio storytelling spread those stories even further. In 1991, following the beating of cab driver Rodney King, video footage vividly told the story of police brutality on television to a much wider audience. The police officers, who were acquitted of the crime, had hit King more than 50 times with their batons.
During the Civil Rights Era, though many of the movement's leaders advocated for peaceful protests, the 1960s were fraught with violent and destructive riots. Aggressive dispersion tactics, such as police dogs and fire hoses, against individuals in peaceful protests and sit-ins were the most widely publicized examples of police brutality in that era. But it was the pervasive violent policing in communities of color that built distrust at a local, everyday level.
One of the deadliest riots occurred in Newark in 1967 after police officers severely beat black cab driver John Smith during a traffic stop. Twenty-six people died and many others were injured during the four days of unrest. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson organized the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of these major riots.
The origins of the unrest in Newark weren't unique in a police versus citizen incident. The commission concluded "police actions were 'final' incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.”
The commission identified segregation and poverty as indicators and published recommendations for reducing social inequalities, recommending an “expansion and reorientation of the urban renewal program to give priority to projects directly assisting low-income households to obtain adequate housing.” Johnson, however, rejected the commission’s recommendations.
Black newspapers reported incidents of police brutality throughout the early and mid-20th century and the popularization of radio storytelling spread those stories even further. In 1991, following the beating of cab driver Rodney King, video footage vividly told the story of police brutality on television to a much wider audience. The police officers, who were acquitted of the crime, had hit King more than 50 times with their batons.
Adapated from The Police in America by Samuel Walker and Charles M. Katz and from The History of Police in America by Olivia Waxman.