On the Origins of Police Violence

Massive protests against police violence directed toward Black citizens have become a daily occurrence.  Calls are being issued to either defund police forces or to eliminate them altogether.  These are passionate responses to a status quo that cannot be allowed to continue.  Are our current police agencies so irredeemable that such drastic measures are required?  Two recent articles provide background on the history of our police forces that addresses the changes that have become necessary.  The first is by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker: The Invention of the Police.  She makes clear that Black people have always been a particular target for our policing agencies by opening with this comment. 

“Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.” 

The second article appeared in Foreign Affairs by Laurence Ralph: To Protect and to Serve: Global Lessons in Police Reform.  He agrees on the conclusion that controlling Black people has always been a specific function of our police.

“If Americans and their political leaders are to glean useful lessons from the experiences of other countries, they must first examine the practice of policing in the United States and try to define—as precisely as possible—the nature and scope of the problem. The aggressive tactics that U.S. police departments employ today were shaped by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. During the late nineteenth century, the slave patrols and militias that had regulated the movement of enslaved people before emancipation coalesced into more formalized police forces, and they continued to enforce the racial hierarchy in a segregated nation.”

“In the second half of the twentieth century, as the country slowly and often grudgingly integrated, police departments honed the tactics of those earlier eras as a new means of controlling and repressing Black Americans. In response to the protests and unrest of the 1960s, police forces developed the kinds of quasi-military techniques that Americans today have seen applied to a new generation of protesters. In recent decades, police departments have systematically harassed Black communities with stop-and-frisk methods and aggressive fines, which municipalities craved to supplement their shrinking budgets in an age of tax cuts and austerity.” 

Lepore provides the insight that in the establishment of modern police forces, the goal was always to produce an agency capable of applying violent methods to specific groups of “enemies.” 

“Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.”

“Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. ‘For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,’ he later explained. ‘After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society’.”  

A war requires an army and recruits who have demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence. 

“To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation.”

“Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.”

Of the enemies identified at the dawn of the twentieth century, all have dissipated or vanished except Black people.  Segregation left them an easy target for “the war against the enemies of society.” 

“Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.”  Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

Someone who has spent most or all of his/her life this side of the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in this country and the yoke of colonialism was finally lifted from peoples of color around the world may have trouble realizing how deeply imbedded racism was.  In the decades prior to that time, biologists, political scientists, historians, and politicians were out writing and lecturing about how the United States’ experiment with treating Blacks as equals during Reconstruction had been a failure and it was necessary that they be kept under control because of their demonstrated inferiority.  These beliefs were necessary to support Jim Crow laws in the South, segregated housing in urban areas, and white racial dominance around the globe.  These beliefs did not disappear in the 1960s, they merely became less politically correct. 

Black people have always been special targets for the police. 

Ralph includes data detailing the consequences of this policing approach.

“This kind of policing does not simply threaten the quality of life in Black communities; it is a matter of life and death. In 2014, ProPublica published one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of racial disparities in deadly police encounters. Its examination included detailed accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides between 1980 and 2012, drawn from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. During this three-decade period, ProPublica found that young Black men were 21 times as likely to be fatally shot by law enforcement as were their white peers.”

The Supreme Court would essentially provide police a license to kill when it ruled in Tennessee v. Garner that “a police officer could use deadly force if a suspect posed a threat to a police officer or to others.”

“In the four years preceding Tennessee v. Garner, “officer under attack” was cited in just 33 percent of police killings; 20 years later, over another four-year period, it was cited 62 percent of the time, eventually becoming an almost infallible legal defense for police officers who kill.” 

Data on police shootings are not readily available, presumably by design.

“Citizen-led organizations have tried to fill the void. A group called Mapping Police Violence maintains a comprehensive, crowdsourced database on police killings in the United States, scouring social media, obituaries, and criminal records in an effort to account for every lost life…Crucially, the group’s findings contradict the common assumption that police officers kill African Americans at higher rates because they pose a greater threat: police departments of the 100 largest American cities killed unarmed Black people at a rate four times as high as the rate for unarmed white suspects.” 

Ralph’s focus is on how policing in the United States differs from that in other countries and learning lessons from those comparisons.

“The analysis by Mapping Police Violence also contained another revealing finding: the group compared the victim data it had compiled against published crime rates and found no correlation between levels of violent crime in American cities and the likelihood of police killings. This presents a stark contrast with the rest of the world, where correlations generally exist between crime, social instability, and police killings.”

Police killing in the United States is much more common than in other developed nations.

“The United States is a wealthy, stable outlier in the list of countries with the highest rates of police killings. In 2019, the rate at which people were killed by the police in the United States (46.6 such killings per ten million residents) put it right between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (47.8 per ten million) and Iraq (45.1 per ten million), both of which are just emerging from years of conflict. Countries with levels of police brutality comparable to that in the United States are generally far more violent places to live and include ones, such as Egypt and Iran, that are often described by human rights campaigners as ‘police states’.” 

For comparison, the number of police killings per 10 million people are for Luxembourg 16.9, Netherlands 2.3, Norway 1.9, Germany 1.3, United Kingdom 0.5, Japan 0.2, Iceland 0.0. 

A major difference between the United States and other countries is in the autonomy that Police Unions provide.  Here they are reminiscent of crime families where snitches are not tolerated and loyalty to the family prevails over any notion of a public good. 

“Other factors also differentiate the United States from wealthy, stable countries with low rates of police killings. For one thing, the countries with the lowest rates, such as Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and Japan, have instituted mechanisms for police oversight at the national level. Although police unions exist in countries with low levels of police violence, these unions are generally affiliated with larger organizational bodies, such as Sweden’s Confederation of Professional Employees and the German Confederation of Trade Unions, and do not have as much power to insulate officers from punishment as police unions in the United States do.” 

Ralph indicates the existence of almost 18,000 police agencies in the United States.  The recruitment, training, and policing standards vary considerably among the various agencies.  A national approach would provide better practices on average and lead to greater transparency in police activities.  Uniform standards on when deadly force is justified would be extremely useful.  Recruitment policies that select candidates based on attributes other than previous military service should also prove important. 

“In Japan…police departments are coordinated and trained by the National Police Agency. In Luxembourg…and Iceland… that role is filled by the Ministry of Internal Security and the Ministry of Justice, respectively. In the Netherlands…the National Police Corps coordinates policing efforts in different regions of the country.”

“Another commonality among countries with low rates of police violence is the rigor of their training programs. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, the American quarterback who is widely believed to have been blackballed by the National Football League for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence, observed that in the United States, ‘you can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist.’ In fact, Kaepernick’s estimate was too generous: basic training can take as little as 21 weeks. By contrast, the requirements to be a police officer in Germany (1.3 per ten million killed by the police in 2019) include at least two and a half years of basic training, and in some circumstances, it takes up to four years to become an officer. Iceland, which has had only one fatal police shooting in its history, requires two years of training.”

It should be noted that countries similar in wealth to the United States provide greater levels of social support to their citizens and possess both lower crime rates and fewer police killings.  In a few other countries, ownership of firearms is quite common yet deaths by gunfire and police killings are much less frequent than in the United States. Guns are part of the problem—not all of it.

The cultures that have developed over the decades in our police forces are generally toxic and must be replaced.  Ralph lists other countries in which police forces were deemed irredeemably corrupt or otherwise socially unacceptable.  Wholesale firing was one way of producing a changed culture.  Defunding a police force and transferring funds to social programs or eliminating it entirely to be replaced by something else are not outside the realm of possibilities.  We must recognize that some of the qualities that make the United States exceptional are things for which we should be ashamed. 

Justice demands that action be taken—no matter how painful.