America experienced another incident of police abuse of power; five Memphis Scorpion officers beat African-American Tire Nichols to death. The video that was made public shocked the whole planet and provoked the anger of a part of the American people, who held protests across the country, as well as the immediate intervention of President Joe Biden. The immediate need to advance the reform of the legislation and to pass the "Justice for George Floyd" resolution did not return to the fore. In the case of Tire Nichols, the officers who assaulted him were also African-American, a fact that echoes the voices of those who argue that the problem of police brutality and racism in the US is systemic and complex.
On the occasion of the new incident of police brutality in America, theCommonSense; republishes the New Yorker article on police creation in the US published in July 2020.
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Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.
Police means maintaining law and order, but the word comes from police - the Greek for "city" - or "polity" which comes from Latin politics meaning "citizenship" and entered English by police (police) of Middle French, which meant not constables but government. "Police," as a political force tasked with crime prevention, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with the monarchy—"keeping the king's peace"—and it is surprising that, in the anti-monarchical United States , she got so big, so fast. The reason is, above all, slavery.
"Abolish the Police" as a rallying cry dates back to 1988 (the year NWA recorded "Fuck tha Police"), but long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek city had to become the modern police. "To be a political being, to live in one city, meant that everything was decided by words and persuasion rather than force and violence," Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Human Condition". In the city, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the city, in households, men dominated women, children, servants and slaves, under the rule of violence. This division of government floated on the river of time like a raft, striking, but above all, picking up wood and mud. Kings imposed a rule of power on their subjects with the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in "Commentaries on the Laws of England», argued that the king, as the "pater-familias of the nation," directs the "public police," exercising the means by which "the individuals of the state, like the members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform in general conduct to the rules of decency, good neighbourliness, and good manners; and to be dignified, industrious, and harmless in their respective stations." The police are the king's men.
The story begins with the etymology, but it does not end there. The city is not a police force. The American Revolution overthrew the king's power over his people—in America, "the law is king," wrote Thomas Paine—but not a man's power over his family. Police power is rooted in this kind of authority. Under the rule of law, people are equal; under police power, as legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants and slaves of a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be part of the city. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, justice and equal rights, we fought to enter the city. One way to think of "Abolish the Police," then, is as an argument that, now that we've all finally clawed our way into the city, the police are obsolete.
But is it? The policing crisis is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures in education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, EMTs and paramedics: they are there to help, often at great sacrifice, and putting the officers themselves in harm's way. To say this doesn't always work, however, doesn't begin to cover the magnitude of the problem. His murder George Floyd, in Minneapolis, we cannot wishfully see it as something extreme. In each of the last five years, police in the United States have killed about a thousand people. (During each of those same years, approximately one hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number of emergency room visits as a result of injuries caused by police officers and security guards was almost as great as the number injured, as pedestrians, by motor vehicles. City police forces are almost always whiter than the communities they patrol. Victims of police brutality are disproportionately black adolescent boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which of course is the case, is to fail to address both the nature and scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best intentions, doing their best, cannot fix this system from within.
There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, which is lower than the European average. The difference is the weapons. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in a one-day encounter in 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three police officers fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when Guardian count police killings, he reported that, "in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police in England and Wales combined in the last 24 years." America's police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars worth of surplus military equipment loaded by the Pentagon into eight thousand law enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans own a gun, usually more than one. Gun violence undermines the lives of citizens and demeans everyone. One study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American man. The policing debate is also about all the money spent to pay heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they are not trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a ghost full of bullets.
This story begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when keeping the king's peace became the duty of a court officer called a constable, with the help of his guards: any grown man could be called upon to take a turn walking in a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a flag and shout. This practice lasted for centuries. (One version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, served on his neighborhood watch shift.) The watch shift did not work particularly well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” wrote Blackstone—and it did not work particularly well in colonies of England. The rich paid poor men to take their turn on guard duty, which meant that most of the guards were either very old or very poor and very exhausted from working all day. Boston instituted a guard shift system in 1631. New York tried paying guards in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the opinion that the militia could make the city safer than the shift, but militias should not to police the king's subjects. they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting native peoples trying to hold onto their lands, or suppressing slave revolts.
The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a police rule. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law, revised in 1688, and decreed that “negroes and other slaves” were “wholly incapable of being governed by Laws . . . of our Nations' and devised, instead, a special set of rules 'for their good Regulation and Regulation'. Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:
It shall not be lawful for any negro or other slave to carry or arm himself with any club, stick, gun, sword, or any other weapon of defense or offense, nor to enter or depart from his master's territory without a certificate from his master , his mistress, or his overseer, and this permission is not to be granted except in very exact and necessary cases; and every negro or slave not having a certificate as aforesaid, shall be sent to the next constable, who shall be pleased to give the said negro twenty lashes on his bare back, and send him home to his said master, mistress, or overseer...that if any negro or other slave absents himself from his master's service and hides in dark places, injuring them inhabitants and will resist any person or persons who shall employ any lawful authority to arrest and take said negro, in case of resistance, it shall be lawful for such person or persons to kill said negro or slave who is outside resisting.
In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not assemble in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night. He could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and he could not sell "Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit" in any street or market of the city. Stop and frisk, stop and flog, shoot to kill.
Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish gangs called hermandades they had hunted down runaways in Cuba beginning in the 1530s, a practice adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had much in common with England's posse comitatus, a group of burly men that a county sheriff could call upon to hunt down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slave owners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702. Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married guard shifts with militia: patrol service was required by all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was assembled from the militia), and the patrols used loud protest and shouting to call anyone within earshot to join the chase. Neither the guard shifts nor the militia nor the patrols were "police", which were French and were considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans existed characteristically la police: armed city guards, wearing military uniforms and receiving wages, a slave patrol of the city.
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair of "law and police" at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that "police" had recently entered the English language in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: the police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. ("No justice, no peace!" Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published his "Treatise on Metropolitan Police." He also distinguished the peace kept in the streets from the justice administered by the courts: the police were responsible for regulating and correcting behavior and “ PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES ».
It is often said that Britain created the police and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun, who spent his adolescence and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton growers and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun's ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel – in the wake of major labor unrest and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland in his capacity as Irish Secretary – persuaded the Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of about three thousand men, headed by two civil magistrates (later called "commissioners"), and organized like an army, each inspector supervising four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and one hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore blue coats and trousers with black caps, each given a numbered badge and a glop. Londoners came to call these men 'bobbies', after Bobby Peel.
It is also often said that modern American policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This also ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “ An appeal to the colored citizens of the world ", calling for violent insurrection: "One good black man can kill six white men." Walker was found dead within a year, and then Boston had a series of mob attacks on abolitionists, including an attempted lynching of William Lloyd Garrison, its publisher The Liberator, in 1835. Walker's words horrified Southern slave owners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state senators: "I beg you will bring this matter before the police of your city, and invite their immediate attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book." By "police," he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker's "Appeal," North Carolina formed a statewide "commission of patrols."
New York established a police department in 1844. New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the 1850s, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and an increase in crimes such as prostitution and burglary contributed to the emergence of policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston broke up its ancient guard shifts and formally established a police department; that year, the Know-Nothings swept the city's elections.
American police differed from their English counterparts: in the US, police commissioners, as political appointees, came under local control, with limited oversight; and law enforcement was decentralized, creating a jurisdictional divide. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York City Police, run by the mayor's office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. An amateur baseball team of the same name was founded that year.
Also, unlike their British counterparts, the American police carried weapons, originally their own. In the 1860s, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called the Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police Department began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside of major cities, law enforcement officers were rare. In territories that were not yet states, there were US marshals and their deputies, officers of federal courts who could act as de facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a region became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became self-appointed punishers, especially likely to kill native populations and lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the 1920s, mobs, outlaws, and law enforcement officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched an estimated five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in what became California. Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. A San Francisco commission of uninvited punishers established in 1851 arrested, tried and hanged people; it boasted thousands of members. A Los Angeles vigilante committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.
The US Army also functioned as a police force. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new standing army departments: the Dakota Department, the Platte Department, the Missouri Department, the Texas Department, the Arizona Department, the California Department, and the Columbia Department. In the 1870s and eighties, the US military engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against indigenous peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, after an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a cavalry regiment massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, FBI agents, SWAT teams, federal troops and state marshals besieged Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired over half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the CDC, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other racial or ethnic group.
Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of police in Berkeley, California. Vollmer reformed the American police into an American army. He had served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. "For years, since the days of the Spanish-American War, I had studied military tactics and used them to good effect in picking up rogues," he later explained. "We are finally waging a war, a war against the enemies of society." Who were these enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist rioters, strikers, union organizers, immigrants and blacks.
In domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been developed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer established a training model that was imitated across the country, by police departments often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States' wars of conquest and occupation. "A police captain or lieutenant should hold exactly the same position in the public eye as a captain or lieutenant in the United States military," said Detroit's police commissioner. (Today's police officers are disproportionately veterans of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police force, found that police officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts them to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use violence and more likely to fire their weapons.)
Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: the Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South since the late 1870s and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became police chief of Savannah in 1907. Earlier, he had won a Medal of Honor for his service with the US Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, the city's African-American congregations were complaining to Savannah newspapers about "total arrests of Negroes for being Negroes—arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances." African Americans also faced Jim Crow policing in the northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Chief of Police of Philadelphia since 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force's training on manuals used by the US Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven percent of those arrested were African American; under Robinson, this number rose to 14.6 percent in 1917. By the 1920s, a quarter of those arrested were African American, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 percent of the population.
Progressive era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized blackness, as historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Black Nature: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America». Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and disproportionately arrested Blacks. Prosecutors disproportionately charged blacks. Juries found blacks disproportionately guilty. Judges gave blacks disproportionately long sentences; and then, after all that, social scientists, looking at the number of blacks in prison, decided that, as a matter of biology, blacks were disproportionately prone to crime.
More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the incarceration of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has become worse. "By population, per capita incarceration rates, and spending, the United States surpasses all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal supervision," Muhammad writes in a new foreword to his book . "The number of African-Americans and Latinos in American prisons today exceeds the combined populations of some African, Eastern European and Caribbean countries."
Policing became tougher in the Progressive Era and, with the emergence of state police forces, the number of police officers increased. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California's, began as "highway patrols." Others, including state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as private paramilitary industrialists employing America's younger immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and destroy unions, including the United Mine Workers. In 1905, three years after a coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police became operational. "One state policeman should be able to handle a hundred foreigners," said his new chief.
The US Border Patrol began in 1924, the year Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of southern and western farmers, Congress exempted Mexicans from the new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers into the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small group responsible for enforcing federal immigration law and intercepting smugglers at all of the nation's borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it evolved into a national quasi-military focused on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrests and forced deportations of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police such as the notoriously brutal LAPD, as historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrant protests of Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century, even as a burgeoning film industry churned out features about black-hunting Klansmen, Indian-killing cowboys, and police that hunts Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in LA Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed LAPD officer who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes dilapidated, abandoned sets by DW Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance seems like a relic of an unforgiving era.
Two kinds of police appeared on American television in the mid-century. Good guys solved crime in prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” starting in 1968 (both featuring the LAPD). The villains shook America's consciousness on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barred black students from Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Birmingham police arrest and arrest approximately seven hundred black children protesting segregation , in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting rights protesters in Selma, 1965. These two figures of policing help explain how, in the 1960s, the more people protested police brutality, the more governments gave more money to police departments.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on crime" and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military weapons, weapons used in the war in Vietnam. During the Watts riots that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand. Fighting the protesters, the LAPD chief said, was "a lot like fighting the Viet Cong." Preparing for a Senate vote a few days after the uprising ended, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said: “I've felt for some time now that the job of law enforcement agencies is not really that different from the military. That is, to prevent crime before it happens, just as our military goal is to prevent aggression."
As Elizabeth Hinton reported in “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” the “front-line soldiers” in Johnson's war on crime—Volmer-era policing from the ground up—spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling black neighborhoods and arresting blacks. Policymakers concluded from these disparate arrest rates that blacks were prone to crime, causing police to spend even more time patrolling black neighborhoods, which led to an even higher arrest rate. "If we want to rid this country of crime, if we want to stop nipping at its branches, we have to cut off its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum," Johnson told an audience of police politicians in 1966. The following year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. "We're not rising up against all you white people," a Newark man told a reporter shortly before he was shot by police. "We are rising against police brutality."
Johnson's Great Society effectively ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which diverted money from social programs to policing. This magazine he named it "a piece of demagoguery concocted out of malice and acted out in hysteria." James Baldwin attributed his "irresponsible ferocity" to "some pale, fascinating nightmare — an overwhelming collection of private nightmares." The truth was darker, as sociologist Stuart Schrader recounted in his 2019 book, “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counteringency Transformed American Policing». During the Cold War, USAID's Office of Public Safety provided assistance to police in at least fifty-two countries and officer training in nearly eighty, with the goal of counterinsurgency – suppressing an anticipated revolution, this collection of private nightmares; as OPS reported, it brought "an international dimension to the government's war on crime". Counterinsurgency backfired and returned to the United States as policing.
In 1968, Johnson's new crime law established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration within the Department of Justice, which, over the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime control projects. Even funds meant for social projects – for example youth employment, along with other health, education, housing and welfare programs – were diverted to police operations. Under Richard Nixon, all elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of the Johnson Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing and prison construction. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, even more social services were closed or underfunded until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, employment programs, early childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists today calling for police defunding argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police are deployed to cut the dangling threads.
The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from Harvard political scientist James K. Wilson between 1968, in his book “Varieties of police behavior” and in 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled "Broken Windows". On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, patrolling on foot and doing what he called "community policing." (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson asked other professionals to handle what he called police "services" – "first aid, cat rescue, ladies' help and the like" – which is a reform people are calling for today. ) On the other hand, Wilson asked the police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson's work informed programs such as STRESS of Detroit (Stop Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), which began in 1971, in which Detroit police secretly patrolled the city, disguised as everything from a taxi driver to a "radical university professor", and killed so many young black men that a Black police organization called for the unit to be disbanded. The campaign to end it STRESS arguably marked the beginnings of police abolition. The STRESS defended his methods. "We just don't go up and shoot somebody," said one commander. "We ask him to stop. If he doesn't, we shoot."
For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan and had substantial support from the black caucus of Congress. "Crime is a national defense problem," said Mr Joe Biden in the Senate, 1982. "You're in as much danger on the streets as you are from a Soviet missile." Biden and other Senate Democrats introduced legislation that led to the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped author the Violence Control and Enforcement Act. law, the provisions of which included mandatory sentencing. In May 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The NRA first endorsed a presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, first endorsed a presidential candidate, George H. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, he endorsed Bill Clinton.
In part because of Biden's history of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after the Ferguson, Missouri police shooting of Michael Brown, the Obama administration created a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Her report argued that the police had become warriors when what they should really be are guardians. Most of her recommendations were never implemented.
In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying "our members believe he will make America safe again." Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. "We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment," Trump said at Mount Rushmore, on the occasion of the 4th of July. "We will not be intimidated by bad, bad people."
Trump is not king; the law is king. The police are not the king's men; they are civil servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing isn't really a partisan issue. From the quiet of the closed station, voices of protest roared like summer thunder. The vast majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms to American policing. And too many police officers, in defiance of their unions, also support these reforms.
These changes will not address many larger crises, mainly because the policing problem cannot be solved without addressing the gun problem. But this much is clear: the city has changed, and the police will have to change too.
*Cover photo: The Chinatown Squad, a notoriously tough police unit in San Francisco, 1905. Photo courtesy of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Source: new yorker