116th Congress S. Res. 602

Defund the Slave Patrol

Mark Costis

When faced with the latest in a seemingly endless litany of names of black men killed by the police—and the lack of meaningful accountability for this lethal force—many will say "but isn't the problem just a few bad apples?" The answer is no. The entire orchard is rotten to its roots, which reach deep into the blood-soaked plantation soil of slavery.

Policing is born of slavery, racism, dehumanization, and violence, including its humble beginnings in the American South as Slave Patrols, whose mission was to “(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law." In the Northern parts of the US, modern policing arose largely from the need to control labor unions. These origins lead one to ponder the true meaning of "To Protect and Serve"—to Protect rich whites from a perceived threat/danger from minority groups, and serve rich whites by chasing down human commodities during slavery and protecting property/assets (property damage due to slave revolts, and property damage from rioting).

From its origins in violent terror and dehumanization of black men, policing has grown increasingly sophisticated in its racist use of violence to maintain "order." The primary tools of policing rely on at least the threat of violence to maintain "control" of the populace, and the majority of police tactics exist in that "force spectrum"—from a verbal warning (threat of legal actions that can be reasonably expected to include possible violence for "failure to comply") to police brutality (which can include beatings, mayhem, torture, and murder). Even the lights of a police car are designed to instill confusion and fear in "suspects" so that they may be more easily controlled. But physical violence is the most powerful means of police control, and the leading cause of death for young African American males is getting killed by the police.

Interactions between urban police departments and African Americans were greatly influenced by the Great Migration (1916–70) of African Americans from the rural South into urban areas of the North and West, triggering white residents' inbred racism, which manifested as fear and hostility toward blacks. Taking their racist cues from the people (or was it the other way around? Racist chicken or white supremacist egg?), northern police assumed that African Americans, and especially African American men, were inherently predisposed toward criminal behavior and thus necessitated "constant surveillance and…restrictions on their movements (segregation) in the interests of white safety."

The practice called "redlining" began with the National Housing Act of 1934, aggravating the decay of minority inner-city neighborhoods and increasing racial segregation and urban decay. 

“[W]hat white Americans have never fully understood-but what the Negro can never forget-is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it [such as the legal practice of redlining], and white society condones it.” ...... "In racially isolated neighborhoods where jobs are few and transportation to job-rich areas is absent, where poverty rates are high and educational levels are low, where petty misbehavior and more serious crime abound, young men and cops develop the worst expectations of each other, leading to predictable confrontations."

White fear of black Americans reached a fever pitch in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when police participated alongside members of the Ku Klux Klan in the wanton massacre of an estimated 200-300 black residents of Greenwood and the physical destruction of an entire African American district. Referred to at the time as "Black Wall Street" because of the success and wealth of its African American residents, the Greenwood district was not a welcome sight for the poorer white neighborhoods nearby. An accusation (later recanted) by a white woman that a black man had assaulted her was all the excuse needed for mobs of white vigilantes to begin roaming the streets in search of revenge.

With white police overseeing and in some cases participating, white rioters rampaged through the black neighborhood that night and morning killing black residents and burning and looting stores and homes—including dropping incendiary devices from airplanes flying overhead. The next day Oklahoma National Guard troops were brought in—not to help secure a path toward accountability and justice, but to restore "order." There were no convictions for any of the violence and "there were decades of silence about the terror, violence, and losses of this event. The riot was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories: 'The Tulsa race riot[sic] of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place.'"

By the mid-1950s many urban police departments had an "implicit mission to protect whites against blacks." To carry out this mission, they employed forms of police brutality such as "physical assault (e.g., beatings), excessive use of force, unlawful arrests, verbal abuse (e.g., racial slurs) and threats, sexual assaults against African American women, and police homicides (murders of civilians by police)." Additionally damning, police were often complicit in crimes in black neighborhoods, including drug dealing, prostitution, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun-smuggling.

In the decades after World War II African Americans' expectations of greater freedom and democracy at home, and their attempts to assert formal rights and liberties (e.g., respect from local governments, judiciaries, and law-enforcement agencies) often reinforced white police officers' views of themselves as protectors of white communities from black criminals.

As rural whites migrated to nearby cities, police began to view their violence against blacks as a just means of control to defend the interests of whites, and police brutality replaced lynching as a means of oppressing blacks. During this period, white supremacist and terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council operated openly in Southern cities, where police brutality against African Americans was abetted by government and political leaders, district attorneys, and judges, among others.

In other cities, especially in the North, the flight of whites to the suburbs and the increased populations, visibility, and mobility of African American in formerly white spaces made it easier for white police to claim that the "threat" of African Americans justified extralegal and/or violent tactics to control African Americans’ mobility and limit their use of public ("white") spaces.

From the 1960s, police brutality was a catalyst for the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Detroit Riot of 1967. In the 70s, after recruitment and affirmative action drives significantly increased the number of African Americans in local police forces, some of these same African American officers committed "serious acts of brutality against African American civilians, in part because they wished to be seen as 'good cops' and to be otherwise accepted within their departments."

In the 1970s as well, Richard Nixon launched the "War on Drugs"—which contributed greatly to subsequent massive increases in police budgets and the hyper-militarization of police tactics and equipment (both of which again accelerated significantly after the terrorist attacks of 9-11).

Is the War on Drugs inherently racist? I'll let John Erlichmann, Nixon's domestic-policy adviser, answer in his own words (from Harpers interview here):

You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? 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.”

The escalation of urban crime rates in the 70s and 80s, including in predominantly minority neighborhoods, reinforced and further ingrained in whites in general and police officers specifically the belief that African Americans are inherently criminal, a trend perpetuated in the pernicious criminalization of poor and working class blacks.

In 1992, the LAPD savagely beat Rodney King and were then acquitted on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force, sparking the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. 

In 2014, the fatal shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and a grand jury’s subsequent decision not to indict the officer on criminal charges provoked rioting in that city. Later race riots (along with peaceful demonstrations) followed the deaths in police custody of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland (2015), and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2020), both of whom were African American.

These are only the lowlights of a hundreds-year American history of racist and violent policing. In response to this most recent extrajudicial killing of a black man by the police, the police have responded to protests of their racist brutality by dispensing more police brutality: firing teargas, rubber bullets, and (in at least one fatal case) live rounds into crowds of protestors, driving police vehicles into crowds of protestors, using horses to trample protestors, ripping college students from their car while tasering them, firing paint canisters at people lawfully sitting on their front porch and into cars of motorists, beating protestors—most of them peacefully protesting at the time—with batons, shields, fists, and boots; using militarized techniques like the "wedge" formation to aggressively control civilian populations; knocking over old men and women sitting peacefully; and even in two instances during the protests so far, using the very same tactic of kneeling on a man's neck to "subdue" him that was the spark that lit this raging fire of righteous protest.

The time is long overdue for America to come to a reckoning with the racist history of our police systems, and to realize that the real problem is not a few bad individuals, and it cannot be remedied just by removing "bad cops" and training the "good cops." Our entire policing system is built on the racist foundations of our country's beginnings, racism that has been systematized and perpetuated by the very individuals we are asking to change, as if that will fix the fundamentally racist system to which they have sworn an oath of duty, and that is not only an ingrained part of their culture but of our entire country's culture. The problem is bigger than a few or even many "bad cops"—the whole damn system is racist. We can't fix this nightmare by fixing individuals alone—we have to fix the system, and first we must acknowledge the racist foundations of the very structure of policing. This bill is a small but meaningful step in that direction. Vote YES on S.Res. 602.