***Excerpt from longer essay***
Hands up, don’t shoot
The pressing need for more community-based policing
Kevin Cummings
Around 11 p.m., on March 29, three rifle shots shattered the relative quiet of the evening, echoing hollowly off the uniformed rows of single-story suburban houses, and leaving fractures that have divided the community and left one family to pick up the remnants of a life they had created for themselves.
After receiving a call to break-up a house party, two Balch Springs, Tx. police officers - Roy Oliver, 37, and another, unnamed officer - were dispatched to the scene. According to Oliver, upon arrival, a car with five black teens was attempting to flee the ensuing cacophony of a busted high-school house party, when the driver of the vehicle threw the car into reverse and began speeding towards the two officers in “an aggressive manner.” Oliver raised his rifle. Three shots rang out. And 15-year-old Jordan Edwards was dead with a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
In the wake of the incident, body camera footage surfaced, showing Oliver lied about the shooting. In May he was arrested for murder, and in July, indicted by a grand jury in Dallas. During the hearing, citing previous anger-related suspensions and a June road-rage incident which resulted in two counts of aggravated assault by a public servant, Dallas County District Attorney Michael Snipes said that Oliver is “very likely a danger to the community.”
While the fact that Oliver is to stand trial is rare in cases of officer-involved shootings, the unsettling reality is that at least 608 people (according to the Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database) have been shot and killed by police in the United States since the beginning of 2017 is not. And with multiple months left in the year, the number of killings could very well surpass those of the previous two years - 963 people were killed in 2016 and 991 were killed in 2015. The need for a major rethinking of modern policing has never been more pertinent and a move towards community policing - the idea that police should be assigned to specific areas and neighborhoods so that they develop a familiar role and better reflect the demographics of the communities in which they are serving - never more necessary.
How did we get here?
The Western concept of policing has been around since at least the 9th century, with the Roman position of comes stabuli, or head of stables, whose duties included surveying land, overseeing land deals and executing warrants. However, the first police force was not established in the U.S. until 1838, in the city of Boston.
As the country expanded, so too did the size and scope of U.S. police forces. The American myth, at least among white, middle- and upper-class citizens, is that the police have always been around to “protect and serve” the population, acting as a bastion for justice and holding the line against the encroachment of violence and anarchy. However, rather than stopping blood from running over in the streets, in recent years, police forces across America seem to be unable to stop that same violence from seeping into their ranks.
Municipal police forces were first established in the United States in the mid-1800s. Based on the concept of constables in England, cities began creating their own forces; first in Northern states, like Massachusetts, New York and Illinois. By the end of the 1880s, nearly every city in the burgeoning country had their own municipal police forces. But even prior to then, and long before police began to resemble the Kevlar-clad commandos of today, competing versions of American history show the fine line walked between martyr and murderer, depending on which portion of the population that you ask - the “haves” or the “have nots.”
Prior to the Civil War and reunification of the country, the dispossessed who drew the ire of elites and bore the brunt of the violence of the police, who did their bidding. The focus of policing depended on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line one resided. In the Northern states, police were used to break up labor organization and strikes, as well as arrest those refusing to sign up for the draft that then-President Abraham Lincoln had instated. In the South, where the economy did not depend of factories and large populations of unskilled laborers, certain police forces preyed upon the most vulnerable - police were utilized in capturing runaway slaves.
While the national conversation surrounding police violence and shootings today largely centers around race, (which can easily be traced to America’s original sin - slavery) a larger underlying dichotomy has always divided in the form of socio-economic class. The prevailing cultural myth is that rigid class distinctions were left behind on the shores of Europe; however, they are carved just as deeply into the United States’ history and economy, though the line between reality and the American Dream has been somewhat blurred.
After the Civil War, slavery was abolished. One caveat still existed though that would keep a constant supply of unskilled labor. Slavery, which had relegated blacks to the status of property, and “involuntary servitude,” which had been used to entice poor, white Europeans to travel to the New World, was legal as “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” according to the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution at least. Perhaps this accounts for the pervasive role that race plays in the current national dialogue.
And it can seem that race is the motivating factor, when as early as May of 1866, for example, police in Memphis, Tennessee were used to break up a group of black men drinking on the street, which resulted in nearly 3 days of violence, at the end of which at least 46 black men were killed and four churches and eight schools were burned down in the city’s black community. Racial violence continued and became entwined with the history of many former Confederate states with clearly targeted strategies, such as poll taxes and Jim Crow Laws. While race was by no means forgotten in police-community relations in the North, prisons were also packed with the poor and with workers attempting to unionize. The effects stayed the same however: social, economic and political control of large portions of the population.
As the country matured, so too did its means of control. A wave of worker and civil rights laws were put into place, making things like debtor’s prisons and racial discrimination illegal, at least in their overt form. However, as the United States entered the 1970s, old themes still emerged as the political elites of the time (i.e. the Nixon Administration) were facing a lethargic economy and a culture in which numerous minority groups were calling for equality.
The modern iteration of the American police state was born. Their militarization on its unrelenting rise. The “War on Drugs” had begun. President Richard Nixon campaigned in 1968 as the “law and order” candidate, a designation many politicians, on both sides of the aisle, have happily claimed for themselves since.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White house after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people,” former Nixon-administration domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman told Harper’s Magazine in 1994. “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... and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
With this, the dispossessed could be maintained and controlled by creating a permanent criminal underclass, and many of the symptoms of poverty were targeted for increased enforcement. Due to way racism ingrained and institutionalized its way into society, blacks and Native Americans make up the largest portion of those living below poverty, with poverty rates at 27 and 25.8 percent respectively, according to a 2013 study by the United States Census Bureau. However, looking at the population as a whole, poor people of all colors are being locked up, with incarcerated people making an average annual income of about $19,000, which is nearly 41 percent less than their non-incarcerated counterparts, according to the non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative. It’s little wonder then that in the past 40 years the prison population in the United States has swollen by nearly 600 percent, especially as wage increases for a significant portion of the population have stagnated in recent years.
Militarization
And while prison populations have increased, the militarization of America’s police has also been on the rise. Today, the country’s police forces have come to resemble those of an armed, occupying force rather than the “peace officers” that they were sworn in as.
Part of this phenomenon can be traced to the formation of the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in Philadelphia in 1964 and in Los Angeles in 1967, which were created in response to the socio-cultural upheaval that was taking place at the time. By 2005, nearly 80 percent of communities across the country had a SWAT team. Even towns in which such an overwhelming show of force seems unnecessary; such as Keene, New Hampshire, which despite having a population of less than 25,000 and a violent crime rate that is significantly lower than the national average, (As a whole violent crime rates in the United States have been dropping nearly every year for a number of decades) has a SWAT team that includes a Ballistics Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck, a tank-like armored vehicle which is designed to withstand IED-blasts and a barrage of small-arms fire.
Though the weaponry and tactics seem better suited for the streets of Fallujah, they are being deployed against American citizens during the course of everyday, routine police work, with about 80 percent of SWAT team dispatches being used to execute arrest warrants, according to a recent study by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The next, and perhaps the most heavy-handed “tough-on-crime” candidate this country saw was Ronald Reagan. Besides policies such as mandatory minimum sentences and civil forfeiture, Reagan created a radical new rethinking of the ways in which police operate and of the tools that they use - equating America’s War on Drugs to a threat to “national security.” In 1981, Reagan signed Executive Order 12333 which directed the federal intelligence community to share not only information with local law enforcement entities, but also to share their hardware: weapons. In addition, the order, and its more recent revisions, also paved the way for the modern surveillance state by proliferating the scope of the amount of information and the means used to collect it for the federal government.
Urban decay was the portrait painted by the Reagan Administration, ravaged inner cities bursting and tearing at the seams to contain the rampant violence and crime. And one drug, littering the streets with the leaving behind only the hollow shells of a human, some scratching at themselves as if trying to free their soul, helped him push his agenda - crack.
Even though the United States Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in 1984, found that the new, crystalized form of cocaine shared more or less the same composition and consequence as its powdered cousin, two years later Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, while his wife, Nancy, offered children a simplified policy of drug prevention by just saying “no.”
No other drug-related prevention law has been more clearly targeted towards the poor, and by default the black community. The act, which won near unanimous approval in the Senate at the time (97 percent), among other things, tore the rift between sentencing standards on crack and powdered cocaine charges. Being caught with a gram of crack was equivalent to concealing a hundred grams of cocaine.
According to the 2006 report Cracks in the System: Twenty Years of the Unjust Crack Cocaine Law, by the ACLU, while more than 66 percent of crack cocaine users are either white or Hispanic, more than 80 percent of those charged and sentenced before a court are black. This is even more startling when one realizes that African-Americans make up only about 13 percent of the U.S. population. However, though blacks were bearing the brunt of ramped-up enforcement, a 2015 study by the New York University Center for Drug Use and HIV Research found that the largest determining risk-factor for crack cocaine use was socio-economic status, And it is those at the low end of the spectrum that are packing the prisons at an alarming rate.
The “tough-on-crime” stance is not confined to one side of the aisle. In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton created the 1033 Program when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 1997, which allowed the Pentagon to send surplus military-grade weapons to civilian police departments across the country. Since then, the program has exploded, according to Forbes, with at least 1.5 million myriad weapons-related items, along with multiple billions of dollars in other equipment. According to the federal Defense Logistic Agency’s website, the program is to “assist in [law enforcement’s] arrest and apprehension mission,” with “preference” being given to counter-drug and terrorism related request.
In 1996, when the 1033 program was created, it is doubtful Clinton knew of the prescience those “preferences” would have. The country rebuilt from the rubble of Ground Zero and the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001 would look vastly different from the one that came before.