Weren’t These Just a Few Bad Apples?

02

90-year-old grandma tries to defuse tense confrontation between police and her 21-year-old grandson

Via Buzzfeed News on Instagram (🎥: @justin.a.moore)

This video depicts police in Midland, Texas using excessive force to try to arrest a 21-year-old, Tye Anders, for running a stop sign. His grandmother, a 90-year-old Black woman, tries to passionately intervene, yelling "Leave my child alone, please!"

04

Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

By The Sentencing Project (April 19, 2018)

In this report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, authors at the Sentencing Project marshal myriad pieces of evidence to substantiate their claim that Black Americans have a fundamentally different experience of the United States criminal justice system than white and affluent Americans. Concurrently, blacks are massively overrepresented at every stage of the  criminal justice system. 

“The U.S. is a world leader in its rate of incarceration, dwarfing the rate of nearly every other nation.”

“African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, and they are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences.” 

“As of 2001, one of every three Black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as could one of every six Latinos—compared to one of every seventeen white boys.” 

“The United States in effect operates two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color.”

06

War Gear Flows to Police Departments

By Matt Apuzzo, The New York Times (June 8, 2014)

This 2014 article follows debates surrounding the arming of police in a sleepy Wisconsin town that has not seen a murder in half a decade to illustrate how, since 1990, the Pentagon has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in free war gear to local police departments across the United States. Even though violent crime has been trending downwards for decades, police departments, especially in large cities, “are adding more firepower and military gear than ever.”

“As President Obama ushers in the end of what he called America’s “long season of war,” the former tools of combat — M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more — are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice.”

“During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” 

“When the military’s mine-resistant trucks began arriving in large numbers last year, Neenah and places like it were plunged into the middle of a debate over whether the post-9/11 era had obscured the lines between soldier and police officer.”

“The number of SWAT teams has skyrocketed since the 1980s, according to studies by Peter B. Kraska, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who has been researching the issue for decades.”

“In the Indianapolis suburbs, officers said they needed a mine-resistant vehicle to protect against a possible attack by veterans returning from war.”

08

Police Militarization Fails to Protect Officers and Targets Black Communities, Study Finds

By Nsikan Akpan, PBS (August 21, 2018)

In surveying over 9,000 law enforcement agencies, Nsikan Akpan contends that police militarization erodes trust in police departments and seems to correlate strongly with the disproportionate deployment of military force in Black communities. The situation, he implies, is worse than the study shows, only because so few police departments keep records of their SWAT deployments.

“Over the course of four years, Maryland conducted about 8,200 SWAT missions, and the overwhelming majority — 92 percent — were used to execute search or arrest warrants. Only 5 percent involved barricades, which are typically meant for handling armed suspects.”

“Predominantly Black areas witnessed more of these SWAT deployments than white neighborhoods, but this happened even if the areas had low rates of crime. Every 10 percent increase in the number of African-Americans living in an area corresponded with a 10 percent increase in SWAT deployments per 100,000 residents.”

“The acquisition of SWAT forces had no perceptible impact on police safety — the number of officers killed or assaulted — on a national level.”

“Along those lines, Mummolo surveyed 6,000 people on their feelings toward law enforcement after they each read a mock news article about a police chief looking for a budget increase. All of the news vignettes contained the same text, but the photos differed. Some featured police in normal gear, while others showed militarized police.

“The respondents expressed losing confidence in policing, with support from Black participants being 21 percentage points lower than white respondents. The respondents were also more likely to perceive a city as being violent if they saw militarized photos.”

10

Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women

By Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, with Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer and Luke Harris, African American Policy Forum

This 2015 report by Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies highlights how female and transgender victims of police brutality have been left out of the police reform conversation and frames the importance of the #sayhername movement to shed light on the Black female experience of police violence that until recently, has largely been ignored.

“None of these killings of Black women, nor the lack of accountability for them, have been widely elevated as exemplars of the systemic police brutality that is currently the focal point of mass protest and policy reform efforts. The failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades, including Eleanor Bumpurs, Tyisha Miller, LaTanya Haggerty, Margaret Mitchell, Kayla Moore, and Tarika Wilson, to name just a few among scores, leaves Black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence.“

“...including Black women and girls in this discourse sends the powerful message that, indeed, all Black lives do matter. If our collective outrage is meant to warn the state that its agents cannot kill Black men and boys with impunity, then our silence around the killing of Black women and girls sends the message that their deaths are acceptable and do not merit repercussions.”

“In the age of mass incarceration and the “war on drugs,” Black women are often killed even when they are not the main targets of police. The notion of collateral damage,” which frames virtually all police violence against Black women as the product of simply being next to the “real target”—Black men—is by no means the only or even primary way in which Black women experience state-sanctioned violence.”

“Expanding the analysis of police violence beyond lethal and excessive force to include sexual harassment and assault, policing of gender and sexuality, and profiling and targeted enforcement in the context of prostitution-related offenses brings the breadth of Black women’s interactions with law enforcement into sharper focus. In order to conceptualize and act on Black women’s experiences of policing and achieve accountability for all forms of state violence, our attention must turn to police violence that takes gender- specific forms or occurs in gender-specific contexts.”

12

The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops

By Connie Hassett-Walker, The Conversation (Updated June 2, 2020)

This piece written by Connie Hassett-Walker, Assistant Professor of Justice Studies and Sociology at Norwich University, historicizes police as an institution that emerged to quell “disorder,” as opposed to responding to particular crimes. Across the United States, their role was to act on behalf of white, wealthy, and powerful citizens to pacify the poor from across racial backgrounds. Even once the police were “professionalized” in the twentieth century they still acted as enforcers of a status quo and of “Jim Crow” laws and remained some of the most ardent opponents of desegregation until the demise of the system.

“Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.”

“Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules.”

“The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere. The first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.

As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to control a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor.”

“Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes. … For about 80 years, Jim Crow laws mandated separate public spaces for Blacks and whites, such as schools, libraries, water fountains and restaurants – and enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws or violated social norms often endured police brutality.”

“Meanwhile, the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African Americans were lynched. Nor did the judicial system hold the police accountable for failing to intervene when Black people were being murdered by mobs.”

14

Podcast: Throughline, Ep. ‘American Police’

NPR, Hosted by Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei  (June 4, 2020)

Featuring historian and author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, this episode examines the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system

Link to transcription here.

“Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf.” 

“...it taught me something about the way that being able to characterize someone to essentialize who they are because of some prior encounter with law enforcement, no matter their guilt or innocence, was a fundamental ingredient to the process of punishment in this country.”

“It's a really - it's exactly the parallel that needs to be made. If we look at this from the moon or from 30,000 feet, what we see is that the function of police are to control essential workers in the early centuries of this country. The people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy were meant to be policed in ways that wasn't entirely about kicking them out of the country. That certainly wasn't true. Those immigrants were here precisely because they were expected to build the infrastructure of these modern cities just like enslaved people were expected to drive the economy through cotton production and sugar production and tobacco production. So what police were doing were ensuring that these out-groups had minimal freedom beyond what was required for them to do their jobs. Police officers were built to police the poor no matter who they were.”

“ The evidence has been presented for a century. The recommendations for change for holding police officers accountable, for charging them with criminal offenses when they behave criminally, for establishing citizen review boards that have an independent investigative power, all of it, just like the dozens of consent decrees and pattern and practice Department of Justice investigations like the one done on Ferguson in 2015 or the one done in Chicago in the wake of the Laquan McDonald shooting in 2017, it's a century of the same story playing out over and over again. So when you ask me the question, what do I think about this moment, what's possible in this moment, it seems to me that's what's possible is recognizing that police officers and police agencies are incapable of fixing themselves. They've never been able to do it, and they've never particularly been compelled to do it. The incentives have never quite added up to be strong enough.”

16

George Floyd Died After Officers Didn’t Step In. These Police Say They Did — and Paid a Price

By Justin Sondel and Hannah Knowles, The Washington Post (June 10, 2020)

This article explores what happens when police officers intervene and try to stop their law enforcement colleagues from perpetrating abuses of power and other misconduct. And the consequences they often face when they break the “code of silence.”

“The officers who stood by are charged with aiding and abetting the killing, and police departments are adding policies that spell out the obligation to stop a colleague’s violence, known as a ‘duty to intervene’ — something Minneapolis just moved to make enforceable in court. But those who have worked for years to reform troubled departments say that policy is the easy part. Much harder, they say, is changing the cultures of intense loyalty and deference to fellow officers that can help abuses of power go unchecked and unreported.”

“Another police whistleblower in Chicago, Sgt. Isaac Lambert, says his lawsuit alleging similar retaliation remains in limbo and his concerns unheard amid talk about reform. Lambert contends he was demoted for not helping to cover up a colleague’s unjustified shooting of a disabled 18-year-old.”

“‘Sometimes in my field, we lack integrity,’ Lambert said. ‘I mean, you shouldn’t be afraid to do what’s right.’”

“Baltimore, too, has a ‘duty to intervene/ policy. ‘But that’s a mandate by a department,’ Harrison said. ‘What we’re working to do is create officers who are willing — willing, and not mandated — to intervene.’”