Police Practices Past and Present

When trying to understand what is happening around us, it is not the result of isolated incidents that have no connection to one another. We have to look at the aggregate, the whole together, and look at it from a historic perspective, because if we don’t know our past, then we cannot be released from the snare of its repetition.

In recent months they have been several deaths of African Americans at the hands of police officers officially and unofficially. On February 23rd Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed while jogging, by a retired police officer in Glynn County, GA. On March 13th Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed by police in her home in Louisville, KY. On March 28th Tony McDade, a transgender man was shot and killed after neighbors heard the police officer saying “Stop moving n----er.” On May 25th George Floyd is killed by an officer kneeling on his neck, in Minneapolis Minnesota.

The case of Ahmaud Arbery where there was a video showing his murder, an arrest did not take place until 74 days after the killing, and then only after public outcries. Originally the prosecutor stated that there was not enough evidence, and that the perpetrators were lawfully conducting a citizen’s arrest and defending themselves against an unarmed man. I have not heard it mentioned once in any article that I have read so far, that Arbery had most likely been trying to defend himself and fight for his life from two gun-wielding men that had approached him on the road, while he was out for a jog. Why would a man struggle with another man with a gun, if he didn’t think his life was in imminent danger?

With a law on the Georgia books that anyone can hop in a truck with a gun/weapon, chase someone down, kill them and then claim self-defense, “who is to stop them?” In the case of Treyvon Martin was this not the same case, where a man pursues another with a gun, a struggle ensues because the person being pursued perhaps views their life as being threatened. The person that is pursued is killed, and the murderer goes off Scott-free since he was defending himself. McMichaels, Arbery’s killer, claimed that there had been someone that had been doing burglaries in the neighborhood. According to police records there were no burglaries prior to the shooting of Arbery, but there were two trespassings, and one auto theft, and McMichaels himself had reported a gun stolen from his truck on Jan. 1st. But McMichaels gave no description of a suspect. Why did McMichaels seeing a black man running in his neighborhood go after him with his gun? He didn’t know if the person who had stolen his gun was black or white, male or female. He didn’t know anything about them. Why then did he go after a black man running? Was it the racist assumption that if a black man is running, then he must have done something wrong? If a white man had been running would he have reacted the same way?

What ended up transpiring was a modern-day lynching, with a white man taking the law into his own hands, and going about the business of dispatching justice against someone black. This is not new scenario.

During the period of 1916-1970 six million African Americans left the South for the North to escape the lynchings that were prevalent in the South, in what was called the Great Migration. The lynchings had been a way of keeping black people in their place, by terrorizing them with false accusations that would culminate into a public hanging at the hands of an angry mob. Afterward, victims would have pieces of their bodies taken home by participants as souvenirs. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-memorial-us-south-montgomery-alabama

In the case of Breonna Taylor she was in her home, and the police burst in without identifying themselves as police. What ensued is that Breonna’s boyfriend who had a registered gun fired thinking that it was a break-in. His single bullet hit an officer Mattingly in the thigh. The boyfriend calls 911 asking for the police to come because “someone kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.” (911 transcript). https://www.cbsnews.com/news/breonna-taylor-kenneth-walker-911-call-police-shooting/

The police created this situation by not identifying themselves, and then shot indiscriminately into the home. If a burglar breaks into someone’s home in the middle of the night and the resident shoots because they are in fear of their lives, how is the resident at fault? They are defending themselves and their family. Now, Kenneth Walker, Breonna’s boyfriend is charged with the attempting to murder officer Mattingly. Is this not a form of terrorizing the black community, by knowing that at any time the police can burst in and start shooting, and if anyone gets killed, well that’s just business as usual, but if you defend yourself, you go to jail. This a no-win situation of taking your chances of getting killed to stay alive, and stay out of jail. Here an innocent woman is killed, and her boyfriend may potentially go to jail. But, let’s stop right here, would they burst into the home in a white neighborhood? If the answer is no, then this is a racist practice, as well as unjust one.

Tony McDade was a transgender (identifying as male) and was killed by Tallahassee police. Witnesses said they did not hear the police officers identify themselves, but they did hear one of the police officers tell McDade “stop moving, n----er,”and then he was shot after he stopped moving. If he complied with the police officers and stopped moving, why did they shoot him? https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/tony-mcdade-shooting-death-tallahassee-1008433/

McDade is one of twelve transgender or gender non-conforming persons killed in 2020 in the U.S. According to a study in the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services “transgender people experience more brutality, unwarranted stops and negative interactions with the police on the basis of gender identity (Serpe 2017).” If this is the case, then the police are terrorizing this community as well.

George Floyd was accused of passing a fake $20 bill at a local convenience store. And for this, a man is killed. Why did the police have to use deadly force? Eric Garner was suspected of selling “loosies” that means loose cigarettes in a park in Staten Island, and the police restrained him in a choke hold that left him dead. The video of Eric Garner shows him asking police officers why they kept arresting him over and over again? I can’t tell you how many local bodega store owners sell loose cigarettes, because people in the neighborhood are too poor to buy a full pack. If this is not a victimless crime, then I don’t know what is. One thing I do know, is that Eric Garner stated very plainly before being killed by a police officer “"Every time you see me, you wanna arrest me. I'm tired of it. It stops today. Why are you harassing me for? Everybody standing here. I didn't do nothin. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you gonna harass me. You stop me, trying see if I sell cigarettes. I'm minding my business officer. I'm minding my business. I told you the last time Please Leave me alone." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24PAhUhnACo Constantly arresting people for minor crimes with the threat or potential that if they are perceived to resist in any way they may be or will be killed, is the practice of social control and terrorizing of a community.

There is only so much that the black community or any community can take of being terrorized by the police, starting with one of the first police forces that was put in place to track down runaway slaves from the South. And there is only so much a white community can stand when they see that they are a part of systems that terrorize people because of their skin color or because they are different. According to historian Gary Potter the “slave patrols,” during the slavery here in the U.S., as they were called provided three functions:

“(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law.” https://lawenforcementmuseum.org/2019/07/10/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-american-policing/

Looking back only five years at the justification for “broken windows” policing, New York Police Dept. Comissioner Bill Bratton said, "By applying summonses to violations and arrests to misdemeanor crimes, rather than looking the other way because these offenses are 'too insignificant," officers were correcting conditions early (nypost.com 4/30/15). What this is saying by continually seeking to enforce minor infractions of the law you prevent bigger crimes from happening. There is no evidence that this type of policing works, but what it does do and has done is to criminalize, terrorize, seek to control, and incarcerate Black, Native Americans and Latinx communities disproportionately.

In the U.S. there are approximately 2.3 million people in prison, one in five prisoners in the world is in prison in the U.S. By percentage the U.S. has 20% of the world’s prisoners, while having less than 5% of the world’s population. By percentage per 100,000 people within each group by race, 115 Asians, 450 White, 831 Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander 1017, American Indian or Alaska Native 1,291, Black 2,306. According to Pew In 2017 the prison population sentenced from 2006-2017 to U.S. federal and state prisons were 475,000 Black, 436, 500 White, and 336,500 Latinx. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/raceinc.html

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/

We need to be aware that there is still a legal form of slavery in the U.S., and that’s for prison inmates. Many large U.S. companies use prison labor, with prisoners sometimes making as little as 50 cents an hour, meanwhile the prison makes money from their labor. The companies make a profit by either reducing the cost of their labor overhead, and/or the cost of their products for sale. The tragedy is that once these prisoners leave the prison after having learned a skill, these very same companies don’t hire them, and their time has been lost when they could have learning a trade that could find work in after incarceration. (to learn more about corporations using prison labor go to https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/corporations-and-governments-collude-in-prison-slavery-racket/)

This brings us back again to the slave industry in this country that amassed great wealth from not having to pay for labor from 1619-1865, but even after the Civil War, there came the “Black Code Laws,” which were numerous laws that legally enforced restrictions on new found freedom of former slaves. The purpose of the “black code” was to ensure cheap labor, as well as continue to perpetuate the assumption that African freed slaves were inferior. Among these were the vagrancy laws that considered a black person a vagrant if they were unemployed and without a permanent home, and if this was the case they would be arrested, fined, and pressed into servitude if they could not pay the fine. This was slavery under a different name. https://www.britannica.com/topic/black-code

The past repeats itself today with individuals that can’t pay their bail, for crimes they have not even been convicted of, and they sit in jail. Jails that have employees that have to be paid. In essence their mere presence in the jail system is money in the bank, and pays people’s salaries. Black bodies in jail is big business. According to the Vera Institute it costs depending on which state, anywhere from $30,000-$60,000 a year to house an inmate. If that same amount of money were used to educate, train, provide mental health services, then there would be less recidivism, and society would benefit as a whole, but instead we have a punitive system of justice, that seeks to punish and to warehouse humans bodies for profit. https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends-prison-spending

The police have been and continue to be a tool to terrorize and control. We have seen it even in the protests with brute force being used against peaceful protesters, and threats to bring in the military. We need to look back at the sin and stain of slavery, and how we have continued to perpetuate the same crime over and over again in different permutations, so that white supremacy can live and thrive in this country. The time has come to face what we have done in the past, and what changes need to be done to ensure a just future for everyone, starting with how we educate our children so they learn not be afraid of others and our history should not erase the accomplishments of any people, how we protect an employee’s right to fair labor standards, an end to a punitive justice system and replace it with a system of restorative justice, an end to broken windows policing, where those that harvest the food are treated fairly and decently, where we outlaw U.S. companies benefitting from slave labor here or abroad, where everyone has the right to medical care regardless of wealth, a universal income (where people have food on their tables), and where neighborhoods are not segregated by color, a complete overhauling of police culture where their mission is to serve and protect, and not to arrest people based on their color or any other characteristic. We need to have these discussions and bring all these dark truths to light, as well as make amends and reparations here in U.S. to African, Native, and Puerto Rican Americans that have shouldered the burden of these systems of oppression for hundreds of years.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/florida-teen-trayvon-martin-is-shot-and-killed

https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/local/records-show-only-three-thefts-reported-in-neighborhood-where-brunswick-man-was-killed/77-cf1d2312-30cb-484d-9d10-82e5ff1896d8

https://www.insider.com/this-is-what-we-know-about-gregory-and-travis-mcmichael-2020-5

Serpe, C. R., & Nadal, K. L. (2017). Perceptions of police: Experiences in the Trans*Community. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 29(3), 280–299. doi: 10.1080/10538720.2017.1319777