The History of American Policing is Rooted in Control and Suppression

By Jeffery Robinson

During the 2020 Vice-Presidential debates, former Vice President Mike Pence said that the presumption that America is systemically racist and that law enforcement has implicit biases against minorities “is a great insult to the men and women who serve in law enforcement.” It is not an insult to tell the truth.

As America reflects on the verdict in the Chauvin case in Minneapolis, it is essential to remember that BEFORE George Floyd’s killing, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) had trainings on implicit bias, mindfulness, de-escalation, and mental health crisis intervention. Those reforms, which happened during the Obama administration, included a ban on “warrior” style policing and adopted a system of early identification of problematic officers. Neither George Floyd nor Daunte Wright benefitted from these efforts.

True to Their Design

Contrary to the dog whistles lobbed by police union groups and the like, these are not isolated incidents caused by bad apples and cannot be resolved with implicit bias training or de-escalation training. A true understanding of the police killings that continue to rock our nation is only achieved by diving into their origin. Looking back at those origins inevitably shows us the ugly roots that continue to impact policing today. That history reveals that in colonial America, in the document that formed our country, and in legislation adopted at state and federal levels, law enforcement was deliberately given the responsibility to control and suppress attempts made by Black people to achieve freedom and equality.

The laws of Colonial America assumed Black people were less than human and deserved no freedom. In Virginia, if a white “owner” of enslaved people raped a Black woman, not only was there no crime, but any child that came from that rape was, by law, an enslaved being. If an enslaved person was killed while resisting a master, no felony could be charged. South Carolina passed a 58 chapter statute to “keep the slave in due subjugation and obedience.”

After vigorous debate at the Constitutional Convention, America doubled down on white supremacy and the institution of slavery. The 3/5th clause, the electoral college, and the protection of the trans-Atlantic trade are examples of America’s embrace of white supremacy. Article 4 of the Constitution required any person “held to service or labor” to be “delivered up” on-demand. As a result, the freedom of Black people in the newly formed United States of America was made unconstitutional.

At the end of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment preserved the institution of slavery for those convicted of a crime. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Blackmon wrote that after the Civil War, the south responded with laws that were “essentially intended to criminalize black life.” Ninety percent (90%) of the people forced into convict leasing arrangements were Black. Black codes and Jim Crow laws were enforced by law enforcement. Non-white prisoners in Alabama jumped from 2% in 1850 to 74% in 1870.

Post-Reconstruction law enforcement has been characterized by aggressive and violent enforcement in Black communities along with a lack of protection of those same communities. The Tulsa Massacre is becoming one of the most well-known of dozens of similar killings of Black people during the first half of the 20th century. In most of those instances, law enforcement either actively participated or did nothing to protect the Black communities victimized. Law enforcement officers were either absent or playing an active role in the thousands of lynchings of Black people in the 20th century, with virtually no prosecutions, even though it was common to have pictures of the lynchings and those involved widely circulated in America.

Some advocates for the death penalty claimed that increasing the use of “legal” executions would reduce community lynchings. This claim lacked factual support because it ignored the truth about lynchings - many of the Black people who were lynched had committed no crime. The claim lacked practical support because, like everything else in America’s criminal legal system, increased use of the death penalty has only insured that the Black community in America has been and will be disproportionately impacted.

Why not reform

And what seems like a current deluge of police killings is just a continuation of the norm. Police killings of Black people inspired commissions in Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1935, Detroit in 1967, and Los Angeles in 1992. These commissions all said the same thing - anti-Black racism among law enforcement was a cause of the violence against and death of Black people occurring at the hands of police. The move to massively militarize America’s police officers without effectively addressing the underlying problems of anti-Black racism is one of the policy decisions that has resulted in policing in America looking like it does today. Today’s picture is the result of a system working just as it was designed to work centuries ago.

The war on drugs and the characterization of Black youth as “super predators” encouraged law enforcement violence and stoked the white public’s racist fears. Nixon’s close advisor John Ehrlichman could not have been more transparent when he said:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

A 2006 FBI report on white supremacists in law enforcement was heavily redacted, but The Intercept published unredacted materials from that report regarding the growing influence of white supremacists in law enforcement. The report made the obvious connection between white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement and an increase in abuses of authority and passive tolerance of racism within communities served.

And as recently as April 20, 2021, a police officer shot and killed a 16-year-old Black girl. While her dead body lay on the ground, another police officer says, “Blue Lives Matter” to the surrounding crowd. His statement contained a frightening message that reflects the relationship between policing in America and the Black community here.

The answer is not reform – how do you reform a system operating as it was designed more than 200 years ago? The answer is to divest from policing and re-invest in programs and actions that will actually make our communities safer.