Introduction
The myriad problems facing the United States — which the entire people of the United States will eventually have to face back — are complex, often intertwined, and not susceptible to simple solutions. The majority of them have long and complicated histories.
Last week, I wrote half-jokingly about something that is not a laughing matter: the presence of police gangs. That is, actual criminally-oriented gangs that exist inside police departments. How many? I don’t know. I do know it’s not just one. It’s not just a couple. It’s not just a few bad apples.
At the same time, despite the criticism of one of my colleagues, I do not believe that all cops are bastards. To believe that every single individual of a particular group is identical, or even similar enough to be considered a monolith, is just idiotic. Human beings are far too complicated for that. It’s just part of the reason I resist racism.
The problem of police misconduct, misuse of force, and misguided policies is one of those complexities I alluded to above, particularly when dealing with police and people of color.
Cops kill a lot of people, and a disproportionate number are black
In a recent conversation, a friend claimed that blacks killed more cops last year than cops killed blacks. This is patently false, and easily proven so.
According to the FBI, 48 officers died in 2019 “as a result of felonious acts.” A black person killing a cop would constitute a “felonious act,” unless it were bonafide self-defense — and I doubt my friend intended to include any such justifiable killings.
No breakdown of the race of the killers is available.
However, a company called “statistica” reports that blacks are typically killed by police at a rate of over at least 200 per year, with 123 reported so far for 2020.
The government itself publishes data showing that even when the deaths were legally justifiable, they were sometimes preventable. (And that is backed by a cite to a report published on PoliceForum.com, not exactly an anti-cop forum.) While most victims (52%) out of the total number of police shootings are, in fact, white, blacks are killed at a disportionately higher rate (32%); blacks are 2.8 times more likely to be killed when you take population into account.
It’s even more disconcerting when you look at the data regarding those people cops kill who are unarmed.
First off, most people killed by cops are armed: 83%, according to the National Institutes of Health. Blacks, though, are more likely to be unarmed when shot by police — nearly 15%. Whites were unarmed 9.4% of the time, and Hispanics 5.8%.
Meanwhile, the number of killings of blacks by cops is rising.
All that information comes from the government, itself.
And, incidentally, just because someone killed by police was armed, that does not mean (by itself) that the police were justified in killing that individual.
In any event, the first three paragraphs of this section put to rest the bogus claim that there are more cops killed by blacks per year than blacks killed by cops. The rest of the section following them should make it clear things are a bit more complicated: most people killed by cops are armed. Are cops always bastards when those people get shot? It can’t be that they always are.
The rest, however — the differential statistics on blacks versus whites — is just the added misery that demonstrates something is wrong when it comes to blacks and law enforcement: it looks, smells, and brings to mind structural racialization.
Racism in law pre-dates law enforcement
Frankly, the structural racialization that infuses law enforcement was enshrined in law long before the first modern police forces were born. The enslavement of blacks pre-dated the birth of a nation (very sad pun intended). Its “premature” abolition would have doomed the nation before the nation saw the light of day. And so, in a compromise, it became part of the warp and woof of the nation’s very fabric.
Derrick Bell noted in the Third Edition of Race, Racism, and American Law,
Clearly, there was a contradiction between the recognition of individual rights demanded by white Americans for themselves and the suppression of those rights for blacks, free and slave, living in their midst.
But, while “slavery was flagrantly at odds with the principles of the American Revolution[,]”
there is adequate evidence that Northern delegates [to the Constitutional Convention] knew that the South would never abandon slavery, but they recognized that without the South’s support a strong federal government would be impossible.
And, so, knowing this, the Northern delegates abandoned slaves: slavery became enshrined in our Constitution. The vestiges of it remain there to this day, unexpurgated by even the 13th, 14th, or 15th Amendments, because of another compromise: the “victorious” North after the Civil War knew they could not get passage of the Amendments if they mentioned “blacks,” or one of the terms more in vogue back then.
And so they did not.
Ultimately our courts, including our Supreme Court, used the very laws intended to give the newly-freed blacks their civil rights, to instead deny them their rights. After all, they’d already been freed, and that was enough, wasn’t it?
As Justice Bradley wrote, in the the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which ironically declared unconstitutional Congress’s attempt to enforce the 14th Amendment:
When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.
Thus, laws like those passed by Congress after the War were struck down, or (when not completely struck down) limited in scope. These were Civil Rights Acts which guaranteed citizenship, the rights to do the same things that whites could do, including (after the 15th Amendment), the right to vote. But giving them “special” protections — that is, saying blacks get to do the same things whites do — would violate the “colorblindness” of equal protection, and so the courts made them ineffectual.
That the Southern states had no intention of protecting blacks’ rights “in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected” was of no consequence to “Justice” Bradley.
After all, as I said above, wasn’t it enough that “a man has emerged from slavery,” even if he went from there straight to the Black Codes and Jim Crow?
Slave Patrols, Black Codes, & Modern Police Forces
Our “modern” courts, and modern policing, have carried on this tradition of treating blacks “the same” as whites — the law must be “colorblind” — by simply denying that they are treating them differently when they violate blacks’ rights. A look at the history of policing explains why.
Some say modern police forces are the descendants of slave patrols. This is not exactly accurate. As Jonah Goldberg writes in The problem with claiming that policing evolved from slave patrols is that:
Policing—enforcing the law, preventing crime, apprehending criminals—has a very long tradition of existence.
The origins of policing may be impossible to determine. But there were “police” in ancient Babylon, and Rome, and the “first recognizable police force” was created in the United Kingdom in 1829. It was not for the purpose of policing slaves.
Not being exactly accurate, though, is not the same as being inaccurate. Dr. Gary Potter of Eastern Kentucky University, in his The History of Policing in the United States, points out that “[i]n the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path” than elsewhere; there is a line from slave patrols to modern police departments that runs through the Black Codes, and Jim Crow. And it is just as nasty, violent, and unconstitutional as the treatment blacks receive from police today.
But how about modern police forces in Vermont? Or Wyoming? Or California? These forces did not grow out of slave patrols, or the need to enforce the Black Codes.
Yet, just as it is not accurate to describe modern police forces as having their roots in slave patrols, so is it also wrong to say, as Goldberg does,
Moreover, the attempt to paint policing—all policing “across America,” in former slave states and free states alike—as the poisoned fruit of American slavery is problematic.
Again, I draw your attention to the birth of this nation. Slavery has been a part of the entire United States since that birth. It was entwined with the constitution of the United States, effectuated by the Constitution that compromised on an institution which, as Thomas Jefferson — a slaveholder himself — rather ironically commented upon in Notes on the State of Virginia, where:
Jefferson describes the institution of slavery as forcing tyranny and depravity on master and slave alike. To be a slaveholder meant one had to believe that the worst white man was better than the best black man. If you did not believe these things, you could not justify yourself to yourself.
Another founder, John Adams, said that the Revolution would never be complete, until slavery had ended. Ironically, though John Adams and his wife did not own any slaves — they supposedly hired white and free blacks, as needed — it does appear they were not opposed to hiring enslaved people, and paying the whites who “provided” them.
The point is that slavery was integrated into every aspect of American life from the beginning, and up until its transmogrification.
Because slavery did not end in 1865.
As Bryan Stevenson has said, “It evolved.”
The Luck of the Irish
But, I digress. Sort of. For while modern police forces in Vermont, or Wyoming, or California may not have grown out of the Slave Patrols, they did grow from the same root whence everything else in America has grown, and racism is part of that root.
The job of policing prior to the development of modern police forces was usually done by hired criminals. Rather ironically, the earliest police forces in the North were created “to control the Irish ‘problem.’” It seems that when — after the potato famine from 1845 to 1849 — Ireland sent us their people, they didn’t necessarily send their best.
The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists. And, worst of all, these undesirables were Irish.
The North created the “modern” police departments largely to control the Irish, who “were not well liked and often treated badly.” But, by 1860, America turned its attention towards the Civil War, and slaves, and discrimination against the Irish began to decline.
After the “end” of the Civil War, and especially after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, blacks began to migrate from the South to the North.
[T]he Great Migration saw an increase of African Americans in America’s cities. This coincided with a decrease in immigration from Europe. “As a consequence, popular white culture began to perceive racial difference”, says Jeffrey Adler, a professor of history at the University of Florida. And so there was a confluence of factors: an increased African American population in northern and southern cities, a decrease of European migration, a police force that was newly seen as professional and respectable and formal — and a white population that didn’t see brutality against African Americans as its problem.
But let me remind you what I said at the start of this article, “The majority of [problems facing the United States] have long and complicated histories.”
One-half a shamrock?
The traditional shamrock has only three leaves. St. Patrick allegedly used it to explain the Holy Trinity, with a leaf for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, to the Irish. The four-leaf clover — the fourth leaf, by the way, stands for luck — is sometimes mistaken for the symbol of the Irish. Totally understandable, if you’ve ever looked at “Lucky’s” hat.
In any event, two things redounded to the luck of the Irish at the same time blacks began their Great Migration from the South to the North. One is that the Irish began to advance politically, and, according to Christopher Muller (Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880-1950 (2012)),
a central way European immigrants advanced politically in the years preceding the first Great Migration was by securing patronage positions in municipal services such as law enforcement. (p. 284)
The country’s first Irish policeman had a short, and troubled, career. The ruling class thought the hiring of Irish as officers was a huge mistake, as “Irishmen commit most of the city’s crime and would receive special consideration from one of their own wearing the blue.”
Over the next several decades, however, the Irish (using the power of the ballot box, with a little nepotistic corruption thrown in) came to play an outsize role in police departments.
The second thing, which was probably intertwined with the first, is that the definition of what it meant to be “white” in America began to change.
Until the close of World War I, many European immigrants to the northern United States were denied the full privileges of citizenship associated with the “white race.” (Muller, supra at 292)
But,
The northward migration of African-Americans came at a time when the region’s imagined racial order had not fully solidified. Where in the status hierarchy foreign whites and African-Americans would ultimately fall was a question far from settled. (Id.)
And,
Rather than form a basis of solidarity, foreign whites’ status proximity to African-Americans cast the influx of southern migrants in a foreboding light. There was…sufficient ambiguity in the relative rank of European and African-Americans to breed severe conflict as the migration intensified. (Id. at 292-293)
As Derrick Bell wrote in the Frontispiece to his Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism,
Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well. Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us. Surely, they must know that their deliverance depends on letting down their ropes. Only by working together is escape possible. Over time, many reach out, but most simply watch, mesmerized into maintaining their unspoken commitment to keeping us where we are, at whatever cost to them or to us.
And so, as the luck of the Irish would have it, Irish-dominated police forces in places like Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and other major cities combined with an end to “[i]nternecine conflict among European immigrants,” and
redrew the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black, creating Caucasians where before had been so many Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans, and Slavs. (Muller, supra at 293)
Historical antecedents, structural racialization, and confirmation bias
Radley Balko has noted that some people are concerned with the term “systemic racism.” As he notes, this is
often wrongly interpreted as an accusation that everyone in the system is racist. In fact, systemic racism means almost the opposite. It means that we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them. When you consider that much of the criminal justice system was built, honed and firmly established during the Jim Crow era — an era almost everyone, conservatives included, will concede [was] rife with racism — this is pretty intuitive. The modern criminal justice system helped preserve racial order — it kept black people in their place.
Radley uses the term “systemic,” whereas I prefer the term “structural.” They’re often used interchangeably. But I think the term “structural” is a bit broader, and maybe a little less loaded. In fact, I recently ran across this definition, which I really like:
[T]he term structural racism refers to a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity….the structural racism lens allows us to see that, as a society, we more or less take for granted a context of white leadership, dominance, and privilege. This dominant consensus on race is the frame that shapes our attitudes and judgments about social issues. It has come about as a result of the way that historically accumulated white privilege, national values, and contemporary culture have interacted so as to preserve the gaps between white Americans and Americans of color.
In fact, I also like the term “racialization” as mentioned on the same webpage as the definition just given.
First, to avoid some of the negative response to the term “racism,” and second, to emphasize the processes by which institutions and systems create and maintain racism – not, at this point, the actions of individual people acting out of their own individual, conscious racism.
It reminds me of what Professor Ibrim X. Kendi says. Not exactly, but close.
First and foremost, many people hold both racist and antiracist ideas and support both racist and antiracist policies. How can you identify them as racist or antiracist in general? It’s conceptually impossible. But what we can do is, when they’re saying a racist idea, they’re being racist. When they’re saying an antiracist idea, they’re being antiracist.
In both cases, that means that “racist” and “antiracist” are descriptive terms. They describe what a person is saying or doing in a moment.
I have at times thought, when looking honestly at myself, that I “am” a racist. But, as Professor Kendi notes elsewhere in that interview, I don’t want to “be” a racist. I want to see myself as “not racist.” And, in fact, there are times when — again taking an honest look at myself — I am not being racist, or thinking like a racist, or saying something racist. I’ve always had a problem with this. Am I a racist? Or am I not racist? I have no doubt there are people who would say, “Well, you’re racist. It doesn’t matter that sometimes you try not to ‘be racist.’ You can’t avoid what you are.”
But as I think Professor Kendi would tell me, in those moments, I’m acting antiracist. I’m not “being racist.” But my being is also not “not racist.” I am, for those moments, behaving in an antiracist way.
People change from moment to moment. That’s more accurate, and it’s more reflective of the complexity of people as it relates to race and the complexity of humans in general. We live with contradictions.
It’s complicated.
Much of what we do, much of how we act…it’s reactive; not reflective. We go through our lives, and something happens, and we respond. Like when blacks migrated from the South to the North, and encountered the Irish who reacted to their presence, which felt threatening to them: the struggle to see who would occupy the bottom of the well, and who would be the next step up, gazing down, was on.
Over time, those reactions accrete. And as they accrete, they become structures. If we don’t stop to reflect, those structures are going to determine how we react to the world around us, to events, to others.
Sidenote: One reason I write is to force reflection upon myself. I’m having trouble tying this all in to where I started. And, yet, I have an inchoate sense that I’m on the right path.
I started with the title, a question: Are all cops bastards? The subtitle said that police reform is necessary, but not because all cops are bastards. The implication, which I have no problem making explicit, is that I don’t think all cops are bastards.
What I do think is that, as much of my article has stated, the United States has a long and complex history. Pre-existent to the birth of our nation, and running as a thread throughout its entire history up to this very moment — and, sadly, it will no doubt run on for quite a bit longer — is racism. It was there at the start; it was there during the Reconstruction and “Reformation” (I hate that word); it was there when Irish cops clashed with blacks during the Great Migration.
Confirmation bias has helped to keep racist ideas alive. As Christopher Muller notes in the conclusion of his article on northward migration and the rise of racial disparity linked and quoted above,
African-Americans’ distrust of the criminal justice system sprang from early evidence that they could not rely on police—even in the promised land—to protect or process them impartially.
Recent research demonstrates that this legacy extends into the present.
[…]
If, owing to a history of racially motivated police misconduct, law-abiding African-Americans avoid contact with police to a greater extent than other groups, police will encounter a biased sample in their routine efforts to enforce the law. They will observe a larger fraction of criminally engaged individuals among African-Americans than among other groups.
[…]
Police entering the field entirely free of bias would come to inherit their beliefs about the racial distribution of offending, in part, from the consequences of decisions made long ago by people they never met.
These “[s]elf-confirming interactions” tap into our confirmation biases. It doesn’t mean we’re all bastards. It doesn’t mean all cops are bastards.
What it does do is call for reflection.
And reform.
Are All Cops Bastards?
"Radley uses the term “systemic,” whereas I prefer the term “structural.” They’re often used interchangeably. But I think the term “structural” is a bit broader, and maybe a little less loaded."
This is a huge distinction I think. It's less loaded because "systemic" makes people react defensively -- "Hey! I'm part of the system! Stop calling me racist". "Structural" points out that the structure is built up out of racist blocks and still has a racial outcome without being accusatory.