Police violence in America is a complex
issue with a deep and troubling past. A
young Black male today is 21 times more
likely to be killed by police than a
young white male. And because of a legal
doctrine called Qualified Immunity, in
99% of police killings the officer is
never charged with a crime. To understand
this problem better we need to take a
closer look at how we got here. First we
all need to understand that, historically
speaking, the Black community has never
really had a reason to trust in the
police.
Let's visit colonial America in the
early 1700s. As the number of enslaved
people grew in the South, many slave
owners realized they were vastly
outnumbered. Fearing a revolt, they needed
a way to prevent an overthrow or mass
escapes. This fear led to the creation of
slave patrols. Slave patrols were
essentially unofficial groups of armed
white men tasked with policing enslaved
people and preventing them from
rebelling or escaping. These slave
patrols had the power to beat and whip
people who were non-compliant, with zero
accountability or oversight. As the use
of slavery spread over the next hundred
years, so did the use of slave patrols.
Now we arrive at the Civil War. The
Confederacy loses and slavery is no
longer legal. With slave patrols
officially dismantled, former militias
and organizations like the KKK stepped
in to fill the void. After all, someone
needed to police the large number of
Black people who were previously
enslaved. As states adopted segregation
and Jim Crow laws, these old slave patrol
structures morphed into official police
organizations now in charge of policing
the Black community. Over the following
century, we see many examples of police
either participating in violence towards
Black Americans or turning a blind eye
to it. From the end of the Civil War
until about 1950 there were over 4,000
public lynchings of Black Americans in
almost every state in the country and
police departments would often ignore
these public executions. In 1921, there
was the Black Wall Street Massacre in
Tulsa, Oklahoma where an angry mob killed
as many as 300 Black business owners and
burned down entire blocks of
Black-owned businesses. In the 1940s and 50s
there was a Black neighborhood in
Birmingham, Alabama that was bombed so
frequently by white supremacists that
people nicknamed this Dynamite Hill.
Events like these and many others helped
to promote the idea in the Black
community that the police did not exist
to protect them. When we fast forward
through the Civil Rights movement of the
1960s, the war on crime that racially
targeted minorities through the 70s, 80s
and 90s, and the current militarization
of police departments that seem to
have zero accountability or oversight,
Black communities still see no reason to
trust in these police structures. From
2015 to today, Black Americans have been
killed by police at more than twice the
rate of white Americans. According to Pew
Research, 84 percent of Black
Americans feel they're not treated
fairly by the police. Likewise, only 56
percent of police officers say that
their relationships with the Black
communities they serve is good or
excellent. That's compared to 91 percent
for white communities. So what can you do?
First, we must acknowledge that there are
many police officers and police
departments trying their best to tackle
these systemic problems from within.
These voices should be encouraged,
supported and amplified. And police
unions that block reforms should be
called out. Second, we must support
efforts to reallocate police funds into
programs that address the underlying
causes of social instability. New York
City, for example, spends more on policing
than homeless services, health services
and youth and community development
combined. Like Chris Rock says, "Some jobs
can't have bad apples. American Airlines
can't say 'most of our pilots like to
land we just have a few bad apples that
like to crash in the mountains." Investing
in community support, higher
accountability, higher barrier of entry
for police officers, and a genuine effort
to finally purge police departments of
the remnants of white supremacy will all
go a long way to restoring the public's
trust in the police. Peace.
