On Policing & Race

Apr 30, 2021

In today's horrifying climate of police brutality directed disproportionately (though by no means exclusively) at Black and other citizens of color, the debate raging in Washington and the news media regards whether policing, as an institution(s), is systemically racist. A review of the history of policing in America reveals that, not only is policing rampantly racist (and blatantly classist), but that it is, and has been so, by design. Thinking that racism and corruption have been excised from law enforcement despite its (not so distant) history is tantamount to believing that the USA "is not a racist country" for the simple reason that we elected people of color to the presidency and vice presidency - those are notable achievements, to be celebrated, but fall far short of proof positive that racism is no more in our country.

I couldn't possibly hope to cover the full history of American policing in so small a space, but a mere overview of the historical landscape can illuminate some of what is currently being debated regarding the role of law enforcement in the United States and the extent to which racism, classism, and corruption is baked into the very DNA of policing philosophy, organizational structure, and policy. Importantly, a significant majority of Americans of all "races" agree that Black Americans are unfairly treated by police due to their skin color. The protestations of the RNC to the contrary notwithstanding, this is not a controversial issue (while there is legitimate debate over the specific reasons for such treatment, how much is due to personal bias, explicit or implicit). The empirical evidence for disproportionate stops, arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration of Americans of color is stark, voluminous, and easily accessible.

Before delving into the history, I should note that, while I was aware of the link between 18th & 19th century slave patrols and the development of modern policing (no thanks to my New Orleans public school education, not even the venerable Ben Franklin HS), I was not remotely aware of how thoroughly the growth of professional law enforcement in the United States has involved the subjugation of people of color and, generally, the non-wealthy (a class, of course, comprising the vast majority of us), and the "protection" of political and business elites from the poor and darker-skinned. The scholarly literature on the history of policing in America is shockingly thin, though some scholars, most prominently Gary Potter of Eastern Kentucky University, are producing important work.

As Potter notes, early police departments focused less on responding to crime than on "disorder". What constituted "disorder" was determined largely by wealthy, white businessmen (and I use "men" here consciously, as the business elites of the 17th-19th centuries were almost exclusively white men), to protect their growing mercantile interests from perceived threats amongst the rabble - the poor of all races, Black Americans, and immigrants (largely from southern & eastern Europe, and Ireland). Integral to this conceptualization of disorder was ay activity that remotely resembled organization of labor interests. Essentially, early American policing focused on protecting businesses and social elites from "threats" they perceived coming from - well, most everyone else, the proverbial 99%.

Organized, professional police organizations began to take shape early in the history of British North America. Volunteer "night watches" existed in several major cities by 1700, as did British-styled constables. Such nascent policing groups began receiving municipal wages (i.e., public funding) as early as 1654, though most policing groups were privately funded until the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Slave patrols, vigilante bands of armed white men tasked with capturing escaped slaves and quashing slave uprisings, first formed in the Carolina colony in 1704, and spread quickly other areas, their power later bolstered by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. While these patrols were officially abolished after the Civil War, similar militia-style groups were active during Reconstruction, some of which manifested in the form of the original Ku Klux Klan. Just one tragedy (a true massacre) that ensued involving such post-bellum militias took place in Colfax, LA in 1873 - there were many (many) more, throughout the American South, and parts of the North.

Beyond racism, corruption was baked deep into the DNA of early American policing. Urban police forces were organized largely by the elites who controlled party politics in cities and counties across the country (exemplified by Boss Tweed & the Tammany Hall Democratic machine in New York). These very same elites frequently operated various "services" to feed America's ever-growing appetite for vice - illicit gambling, drinking, prostitution, and the like. Potter very explicitly identifies the close link between early American organized crime (organized, that is, by these wealthy and influential political and business elites) and law enforcement. All too frequently, police served as the enforcement and protection arm for enabling political corruption and criminal activity. The late 19th century saw municipal police forces in most sizable American cities, which inherited all of the baggage of being linked to the objectives of the business and political elites who originally funded them (and continued, largely, to dictate policing priorities).

The nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies (municipal police forces, county sheriffs, state police, et al.) now in America trace their roots largely to these two streams of early policing (urban enablers of political & business corruption and rural enforcers of white supremacy), especially those not associated with the federal government. Racism, classism, and corruption were deliberate features of these historical antecedents. To believe that we now live in an environment where policing is overwhelmingly virtuous, honorable, impartial, unbiased and just in carrying out its mission (while recognizing that large numbers of police officers do embody these very qualities) is to ignore history and the sheer force of institutional inertia - change in such entrenched bureaucracies occurs in fits and starts, and takes years, decades to manifest in everyday encounters between police and the public. The very real intervening advances in criminology, recruitment, professionalism and training have, so far, been insufficient to overcome it.

The pressing question, of course, is how to effect meaningful change - how to reform police agencies to reduce and minimize the inherited baggage of corruption, racism, and classism. One idea (the principal part of the broader Defund movement) is to redefine and narrow the scope of what issues police address in our lives: redirecting many services to other social support organizations better suited to provide them, such as mental health counseling, domestic conflict resolution, routine traffic enforcement, et al. Another is to eliminate or deprioritize enforcement of statutes that provide little value towards public safety - a salient example being Minnesota's proscription of items hanging from a rearview mirror. As Steven Greenhut, at reason.com, astutely notes, "Many deadly police encounters start with the enforcement of some picayune regulation—such as when New York City police put Eric Garner in a chokehold ("I can't breathe") after detaining him for selling "loosies" (individual cigarettes)." (Greenhut's article also outlines reform efforts underway in several states.) The overall idea is to avoid having armed police officers encounter the public when an armed person is not necessary and for which police are not well trained.

Some good news is that there is a growing number of scholarly and crowdsourced online resources on police-public encounters. The three I have found most useful are Fatal Encounters, Stanford's Open Policing Project, and Mapping Police Violence. Such resources take significant strides toward addressing the shortcomings of local, state, and federal data on violent and fatal encounters between police and the public.

Sources and Useful Resources:

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