Photo Credit: Stephen A. McCain

Officer, you’re hawking the 93 Land Cruise, when there’s real criminals you should be watching for.

There’s no other way to explain, not just the interactions, but the trepidation black and brown people have of  interacting with police any more plainly than this: Imagine every time you walk or drive in the vicinity of police that you become aware that there’s a chance -not a guarantee- but a chance that they’ll use an excuse to stop you. It can be a broken tail light or headlight; driving too fast or driving too slow; switching lanes without using a turn signal; not stopping for a couple of beats at a stop sign; idling in a parking spot; sitting in your car in a parking lot; driving too “nice” a car; driving an old car that looks like a public hazard; looking like you don’t belong in a neighborhood; riding a bicycle on a sidewalk; being alone in a public park; looking like a “suspect” they’re looking for; walking in between subway cars; “loitering”, which just means you’re standing somewhere they don’t want you to be; walking past them “too many times”; “receiving a complaint” about someone whose description you match; simply put, not being white. And imagine that you’ve had these types in interactions enough times that your hyper awareness put you on edge; a glance at every mirror in your car accompanies with a hope that they’re not following. On foot, you continuously track their proximity without looking like you’re clocking them. Your cortisol levels rise to enhance hyper-vigilance. Your adrenaline levels rise, an evolutionary response optimized for what would have been a run-in with a lion or some other dangerous beast. But this beast, as KRS-One coined, has a gun and a system of oppression -disguised behind the mask of of social order- behind them. Neither, fight nor flight is a winning strategy. Either move can literally be your last.
If there is no interaction, your defense mechanisms subside, knowing the potential for another such moment, can replay itself at any moment. If there is an interaction, you suffer through the indignity of knowing ‘the why’ you were stopped but your ability to call the cop -and by extension the racist system behind him- on his bullshit depends on your instincts. Does this look like the type of cop who’ll kill me or just the type of cop who’ll fuck me up? Does he know that what he’s doing is fucked up but does it anyway, because it’s a job, or is he a mindless drone? Will he tell me to just keep it moving or will he run my ID through the system to justify stopping me by hopefully making a collar? You can process and analyse the situation as best you can, and still be wrong. And being wrong could mean that your family will have to identify your body.

You won’t asphyxiate me in a chokehold, death mocking me, so for that, eat my dust and keep clocking me.

Historically, police existed to protect the interests of the ruling classes. From ancient times in every corner of the world, keeping the social order meant making sure those who owned property stayed comfortable and rich. From ancient China, where prefectural law enforcement kept order and the ruling classes suffered no punishment (a Confucian ideal, surprisingly). To ancient Egypt, where nobles hired private guards to keep them safe, which evolved to the hiring of more formal force to protect caravans, marketplaces, and tombs. Even sub-Saharan African, the ruling classes hired and armed men to impose their will.   Ancient Greece had secret police (comprised of slaves, no less) to ensure there were no uprising of the serf class. In ancient Rome, a loosely created police force (also comprised primarily of slaves) served to protect the ruling classes. As a matter of fact, if the average citizen was a victim of a crime, he needed his neighbors and relatives to help get justice. When a more formal police force was actually created, they often stole from citizens and police brutality was common-place. While it’s somewhat common knowledge that throughout history, ruling classes have kept control of societies with hired guns, the idea that police brutality and corruption is as old as formal policing, itself is chilling,

Yeah, officer from overseer; you need a little clarity? Check the similarity…

Modern day policing, particularly in the United States, functions exactly as it was conceived; to keep the ruling classes and their property safe. The lower-classes and those assumed to be in lower classes, i.e., black and brown people, are meant to fend for themselves and deal with police brutality.

Historically, in the United States, policing has been uneven for as long as the country has existed. White criminals, even mass shooters and serial killers are taken into custody alive and intact, while innocent black and brown people are literally killed simply for being black. Take John Crawford III, who was shot by police in a Walmart, while he was holding a pellet gun, a non-lethal toy he was buying in that very store. Someone called 911 saying “there as a black man in the store waving a rifle around and pointing it at kids”. A lie. The operative was “black”. The officer who killed him didn’t bother to ask him to drop the gun; he shot Crawford dead, on sight. In fact, the officer said he wouldn’t have changed a thing if he had to do it again.

Uneven policing is a feature, not a bug. Formal policing in the United States took root in New England where white settlers hired Native American Constables to protect white settlers from other Native Americans. Drawing a direct line from the past to present, the St. Louis Police was formed to protect colonists from Native Americans. The intersection of the protection of the upper class’s financial interests and the formation of police, of course, starts with slavery.  Slavery is woven into the fabric of the birth of this nation. In Colonial America, Wall Street, was a marketplace for enslaved Africans so slavery was big business.
In 1704, Colonial Carolina created slave patrols to capture runaway slaves and to mete out justice. While the rich in ancient civilizations had actual material wealth to protect, enslaved Africans were valuable property that literally had legs and could walk away. So across the entire American Colony, hundreds of laws and statutes were created, specifically, to control Black people. The slave patrols evolved into the very police departments that exist today. Many of the laws that were created to control black people were phased out over time, but one piece of the country’s early history, an insidious relic in still on the books. That relic is part of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1865, the southern Confederate States of America, which fractured away from the Union for the sole purpose of holding onto slavery, were defeated by the United States of America. That year, the 13th Amendment, which ostensibly abolished slavery was added to the U.S. constitution, but with an evil caveat.
The first section of 13th Amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The 13th Amendment, a part of the document that serves as the basis for U.S. law, was supposed to guarantee freedom to formerly enslaved African-Americans. Its caveat, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” left the door open for former southern slave owners (or anyone really) to legally own people who had been convicted of a crime. Let’s not forget about the fact that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not call for an abolition of slavery in Northern states, but I digress. The 13th Amendment states, literally in so many words, that any entity that requires slave labor only needed to find convicts to have an unpaid labor force. When you examine the Prison Industrial Complex, the system that comprises the cartel of state and privately owned prisons that benefit from the labor of convicted felons, you can can draw a line to the labor camps directly from the 13th Amendment.

Prison, like slavery, is big business. And like in Colonial times, Wall Street is a marketplace that benefits from slave labor. In 2020, there are publicly traded private prison stocks, of companies that profit from legalized slave labor. The GEO Group, a $1.6 billion company had $2.4 billion in revenue in 2019, and $455 million in profit (before taxes, depreciation and amortization). That’s a lot of fucking money and yet it’s a drip in the bucket of the entire $85 billion a year industry (which includes bail bonds, food service, exorbitant inmate telephone fees) that profits from arrests and incarcerations. Prisons have ton of cells to fill and they aren’t going to fill themselves.  Police departments across the country are the vital conveyor belt that transport slave labor from the streets to the modern-day slave fields, the prison industrial complex.

I strongly urge you to watch the 2003 movie, Civil Brand, and Ava DuVernay’s documentary, 13th

This pig he killed my homeboy, so that fucking pig went on a vacation.

So far, I’ve laid out the reasons police are the way they are, but aside from being a cog in the Prison Industrial Complex, why should we defund the police?

Did you know that police officers spend six month, maximum, in the police academy to learn to serve and protect? They learn about laws (maybe?), how to use a gun (hopefully) as well as how to de-escalate conflicts (poorly) in six month’s time. Six months. Commercial pilots require 2 years worth of training and flying time before they can be entrusted with the lives of thousands of passengers. In six short months, a rookie cop has the power to take away someone’s life and freedom, almost with impunity. Actually, history shows they’ve done it with impunity. I’m not sure that I’d trust a mechanic with only six months of training with my car without supervision, but I’m expected to trust a person who is tasked with deciding whether or not I live, or get to live a free life with just six months of formal training?

While they may deny it, police departments have quotas for the number of arrests officers should make. Oftentimes these are low-level arrests for offenses as minor as petty theft or loitering. However, over time, an accumulation of arrests for low-level crimes, along with a predatory bail bond system often means people of color who cannot afford to pay their bonds get buried in the criminal justice system where they often languish waiting for an arraignment hearing. It’s a systematic siphoning of money and freedom from black and brown people. The arrests do not benefit anyone; in reality they tear down the communities by removing prime-age black men from their communities. Even if there are no quotas, it’s inevitable that police would need justify their existence.

Police statistics, which ostensibly point to the efficacy of policing and the downward trajectory of crimes, are a form of police self-justification. For example, every year, the City of New York publishes numbers that point to the quantity of certain types of crimes committed per year, along with comparisons of of hard numbers and percentages year over year, and decade over decade. It works like this: People want to feel safe. Cops are supposed to make the streets safe. Cops are sent like an occupying force into black neighborhoods. Cops feel the need to justify their existence so they do what they’re trained to do: arrest people. And because they’re in higher concentrations in black communities, it’s mostly black people who compile the over-whelming number of arrests despite being in the numerical minority. The stats are gamed (crime stats are under-reported), so there’s no correlation between arrests and crime reduction, even though they are portrayed as victory and vindication.

There is, however, correlation and causation between police in schools and students being arrested. Schools with police officers have 3.5 times more arrests than schools without police. And there’s no data to suggest that with those arrests, that punishable offenses in these schools decrease, as a results. Like in cops’ occupation of black neighborhoods, cops overwhelmingly occupy black schools. Not only does this create a justified resentment of police, but the public school to prison pipeline is created. Once a child has an arrest on his record, a die is cast for how he or she will be sorted out in life because options begin to close. It doesn’t mean a guarantee of time served in prisons, but putting blockers in front of people who have enough blockers amounts to systematic oppression to only benefit those who are invested in the prison economy. This is the on-ramp of the school to prison pipeline. Instead of investing in education, cities invest in policing.

Police do not hold each other accountable. In the George Floyd case, we saw three police officers stand idly while Derrick Chauvin killed a man who was trying to comply with an unjust arrest. In Buffalo, NY, we watched as police officers knocked over 75-year-old Martin Gugino, whose skull crashing into cement was a difficult sound shake. And despite this man being laid out on the ground, bleeding from his ears, when some officers tried to help the man, other officers pushed them along to leave him to succumb to his injuries. They neither served nor protected him. And when the cops were charged with assault, 57 police officers quit a special task force in protest. They were more upset that their fellow officers were being held accountable for their actions than for this heinous act. In video after video that show police brutality or misconduct, you’ll see similar acts of cowardice rather than a stand for actual justice. The police unions are typically at the forefront of the police’s extreme views and defense of crooked cops, no matter what. To the point that the NYPD’s union, the New York Sergeants Benevolent Association, which had openly declared war on its own mayor, doxxed the very same mayor’s daughter -an illegal act- for her participation in NYC protests against police brutality. Notoriously, police officers have been known to call their unions immediately after shooting unarmed people, instead of calling for medical assistance.
Instead of throwing in more stats and links, at the bottom of this post, I’ve included essays written by former police officers about crooked cops and the difficulty of holding other officers accountable.

Let’s go back to numbers, specifically, money. Did you know that police are able to take your private property if they suspect it’s connected to a crime, and even if you are never charged with a crime?  Civil asset forfeiture has allowed law enforcement agencies to bilk Americans of billions of dollars of cash, cars, and real estate. As noted in a 2015 study, despite being a smaller percentage of the population, Blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnic minorities were more often victims of the illegal seizure of property. This theft is yet another example of unjust transfer of wealth away from people of color and into the hands of law enforcement and those in power.

Police departments cost cities a lot of money because they’ll often (almost always) settle civil suits on the behalf of their police departments. In 2017, NYC paid out $302 million in lawsuits due to police misconduct. That same year, Chicago took at $225 million in general obligation bonds to pay off police department misconduct-related debt.  These so-called Police Brutality Bonds, mean that cities are borrowing money to pay of their rogue police department’s debt and banks are profiting money in the process. Again, this is money that is being taken from taxpayers, particularly in black and brown neighborhoods and transferred to the wealthy.
Police brutality settlements cost Chicago $521 million between 2004 and 2014; New York City. $348 million between 2006 and 2011; Los Angeles,  $101 million between 2002 and 2011, and Oakland, $74 million between 1990 and 2014. This means taxpayers were on the hook for over a billion dollars in just these four cities over the course of a decade. This is a fact that should piss off even the most pro-cop of pro-cop people. This is money that could be invested in schools and black and brown communities. Properly funded schools could ensure outcomes that would keep black and brown people out of the school to prison pipeline. Instead, police are allowed to beat and kill people of color, and society as a whole suffers as a result.

I promise, I’m honest, they coming for you, the day after they coming for me.

Coming full-circle, police are tools of oppression. Not only are they in place to protect an unbalanced justice system and the property of the rich, but they are part of a system that transfers wealth from black and brown people to the rich.

Here’s what we need:

1. Elimination of Qualified Immunity. Police are automatically given the benefit of the doubt in any case where they are accused of criminal acts. For far too long, they have lied about their misconduct and this needs to stop. Their word should have equal weight to any civilian.

2. Elimination of civil asset seizures. This is a no-brainer. Police departments are already overly-funded and property seizure is a icing on an already very iced cake.

3. Sue and eliminate the Police Unions. Because police unions are the backbone to the extreme views espoused by police, often attacking civilians and elected officials who get in their way, they need to be eliminated. They should be perceived as the terrorist organizations that they are and should be sued bankruptcy and oblivion. Sue them for being accessories to police brutality. Sue them for slander and libel, where appropriate. Sue the shit out of them. We did it to the KKK. Do it to the police unions.

4. Stop indemnifying police officers and police departments. Any settlement that comes as a result of an officer’s wrongful actions should come at his/her and the police department’s expense. Cities should not have to create debt to cover crooked cops. No line-item for settlements in their budgets, nothing. The money saved which had previously covered their asses should be redirected into schools in black and brown communities.

5. Get police officers out of schools. They serve no purpose except to create criminal records for teenagers.

6. Reduce the number of police officers in communities of color. The over-policing means more people are being arrested for petty bullshit. The accumulation of petty crimes snowballs until the person is indebted to the state, so he ends up a slave of the state.

7. Legalize marijuana and free everyone serving time for non-violent drug offenses. The war on drugs been successful at literally nothing else but siphoning black men away from black communities, reducing the ability to thrive socially and economically.

8. De-militarize the police. There’s no reason for police officers to look like they’re patrolling the streets of Raqqa. Police departments do not need tanks or Humvees or large calibre automatic weapons, nor endless supplies of tear gas and rubber bullets. These are expensive toys for sociopaths who want to play GI Joe and taxpayers are paying for it. The money spent on these weapons of war should go to communities of color. The NYPD’s budget is $6 billion. The City of New York gave the NYPD six fucking billions dollars last year (it’s projected to be $5.6 billion in 2020). Imagine that you know six thousand people. And now imagine that each of those 6,000 people gave you a million dollars. That’s what six fucking billion dollars is. Meanwhile, NYC public school teachers are buying school supplies for their students with their own hard-earned money. Imagine how transformative it would be to inject half, or even a quarter of $6 billion into the NYC Public School, housing systems, and mental health programs.

9. Stop hiring so many fucking police officers. Like we’ve seen around the country vis-a-vis the George Floyd protests, the mere presence of police creates a tension that often leads to conflict and arrest. The fewer there are, the better off we all are. If social systems are in place that eliminate gaps in wealth where there’s equity in opportunities, crimes of desperation go away.

10. Take guns out of police officers’ hands for non-violent interventions. Non-criminal conflict resolution should be handled by conflict resolution resources. Police should only be sent in where violent crimes have occurred. Their training, which today teaches them that any person less than 15 feet from them is a potential danger and can move fast enough to stab them in the neck, should be based on de-escalation and non-lethal force. This fear-based policing needs to stop. Police forces around the world manage to do their jobs without killing people anywhere near the magnitude of the U.S.

11 & 12 . Bring the level of police training up to par with the rest of the developed world. Police in Germany have a minimum of 2 years formal training. Police in France are required to hold a college degree and a clean criminal record. The more training police officers are required to have will disincentive the sociopathically inclined who want to be a cop just to fuck shit up, or because it’s an easy way to make a living. A requirement of having a college degree will help (not guarantee) that he/she is capable of rational thought. While we’re at it, thoroughly vet all police officers for any and all sociopathic tendencies and affiliation with white supremacist groups. These evaluations should be done on a yearly basis and administered through third parties and should be impossible to game. Police officers who are unable to process information quickly and have a lack of compassion for humanity are a a danger and a cancer.

13. Reform the criminal “justice” system and close the prisons. The court system is the dump truck that pushes prisoners into the bottomless pit of the prison industrial complex. The court systems that sentence people into lives of perpetual servitude should be re-worked to actually serve justice. Prisons are not centers for justice. Prisons are places where lives, bodies, and minds are broken. Most prisoners don’t come out of prison any better than they did before they went in. These “correctional” facilities don’t correct anything; if anything, they create hostile environments where humans undergo dangerous transformations as acts of desperation to cope with inhumane living conditions. So inmates leave jail more hardened than they were before they went in. And because having a felony offense on your record is often grounds for a job application to be thrown out, outright, former inmates run into the same dead-ends they did before they were prisoners and end up back in prison. Recidivism is a problem in the United States because our penal system makes the terms for keeping one’s freedom strict-to-nearly-impossible. The most violent of violent offenders who are absolute dangers to society should be removed from society. But all other offenders need to be rehabilitated and given opportunities to thrive. Those who have mental illness -research shows that up to 40% of prisoners were diagnosed with mental illness between 2011 and 2014- should get the medical help that they need. If we’re to ensure that the 13th Amendment doesn’t create new slaves, we need to destroy the slave plantations.

I had a section where I compared cops to gang members but it didn’t quite fit in this post. It’s a more compassionate portrayal of cops as unwitting participants of a fucked up system, but is also points to reasons the police should be abolished, as opposed to defunded. That essay, coming soon, hopefully.

Some final reading material, as if this essay wasn’t long enough. But they’ll be worth your while, I promise. I found three separate essays written by former cops about cop culture, and cop bias, and cops not holding themselves accountable, and they’re illuminating looks inside of what many of us already know, intuitively. The difference is that we rarely get to see this glimpse from behind the blue wall of silence. The last link is the Village Voice’s series about the corruption inside the NYPD.

I Was a Cop for 18 Years. I Witnessed and Participated in Abuses of Power.
Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop.
Trust Me, Minneapolis Is Right to Defund Its Police Force.
The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy’s 81st Precinct