Two more highly publicized police shootings of black men. Shall we just begin calling them murders? Are these the unfortunate actions of a tiny, misguided minority of our police? Will anti-bias training and body cameras stop the killings? Or serve to justify them?
As I write, the heavy equipment of the National Guard is pulling onto the streets of Charlotte, NC. The police chief there has decided not to make public the video of the shooting. The debris from the peaceful vigil that turned into violence last night is being swept up. It looks for all the world like they are preparing a clean stage for more drama and violence tonight.
Whether your response is cynicism or sadness, these are individual tragedies that illuminate systemic ills. The stories of the individual police officers and the individual black men can obscure the consistent, systematic nature of this violence.
Like most of you, I live a life of relative safety and considerable security. Yet I feel each of these killings as a body blow. I am not simply using a metaphor. I feel each of them in my body.
One Presidential candidate today described the police as the blue line separating civilization from chaos. As I listened and felt my gut contract, I thought some unpacking of that phrase might be helpful. It is one thing I can do, today.
Modern police forces did emerge as a response to “disorder” or chaos. Dr. Gary Potter, in his History of Policing in the United States, writes:
“What constitutes public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests. … The commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business. …
They also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.”
It was a transferring of the costs of social control from those who profited onto those who are controlled.
This is a long way from the mission “to serve and protect” that has become the popular mythology about the goal of our policing, the aspirational mission that those who choose policing affirm.
Potter continues: “From the beginning, American policing has been intimately tied not to the problem of crime but to the demands of the American political economy. … The role of the police in the US has been defined by economics and politics, not crime or crime control.”
And, from their creation, police forces have focused their energy on “dangerous classes” of people, rather than the social/economic conditions that lead to crime. In the north, these dangerous classes were the poor, foreign immigrants and free blacks.
In the American south, like Charlotte, NC, police forces developed directly out of the “slave patrols” of the anti-bellum period. This is where the concept of the “police patrol” originated. Police continued to be critical agents for the control of African American and immigrant populations. The New Jim Crow highlights how that function continues to be central for police today. The use of police to violently resist the labor movement also deserves mention.
But doesn’t “the thin blue line” prevent crime or at least reduce crime? It is a good and important question.
Gary Potter: “The overwhelming body of scholarly literature … finds that the police have virtually no impact on crime, no matter their emphasis or role.”
Knowing this history will not solve our problems. But our historical amnesia does not help us. We spend too much time living out a
narrative of innocence rather than confronting a more compromised and complicated truth.
Though my prayers will not solve our problems either, I will be praying once again for a peace that grows out of justice.
Bill