The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to traffic Stops

 Outrage over racialism and therefore the killing of African Americans by cops and vigilantes in recent years helped create the Black Lives Matter movement.

But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.

There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered within the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a policeman shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.

The precedents include the la riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of law enforcement officials for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for battery.

I’m a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on problems with race, class, and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I've got come to determine how the roots of racism in American policing – first planted centuries ago – haven't yet been fully purged.

Slave patrols
There are two historical narratives about the origins of Yankee enforcement.

Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws associated with slavery. They located and returned enslaved those that had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people, and punished enslaved workers found or believed to own violated plantation rules.

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina within the early 1700s. because the University of Georgia social service professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time President John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone’s home, no matter their race or ethnicity, supported suspicions that they were sheltering people that had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to make within the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and shortly cropping up in big apple City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia, et al.

The first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.

As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to regulate a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants, and also the poor. Through the first 20th century, there have been few standards for hiring or training officers.

Police corruption and violence – particularly against vulnerable people – were commonplace during the first 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the work. In my opinion, these factors – controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers, and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow laws
Slave patrols formally dissolved after the war ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the following three years, these new laws specified how, when, and where African Americans could work and the way much they'd be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel, and limited where they might live.

The ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 quickly made the Black Codes illegal by giving formerly enslaved blacks equal protection of laws through the Constitution. But within 20 years, Jim Crow laws aimed toward subjugating African Americans and denying their civil rights were enacted across southern and a few northern states, replacing the Black Codes.

For about 80 years, Jim Crow laws mandated separate public spaces for blacks and whites, like schools, libraries, water fountains, and restaurants – and enforcing them as a part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws or violated social norms often endured police brutality.

Meanwhile, the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African Americans were lynched. Nor did the judiciary hold the police answerable for failing to intervene when black people were being murdered by mobs.

Reverberating today
For the past five decades, the centralized has forbidden the employment of racist regulations at the state and native level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of USA citizens killed by the police by race, gender, and other characteristics. The newspaper’s database indicates that 229 out of 992 of these who died that way in 2018, 23% of the entire, were black, although only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed the maximum amount because it could. for several African Americans, enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality within the justice system and resistance to advancement – even stressed from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.

When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to seem for evidence of systemic racialism, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to own their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the proportion of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver’s complexion is harder to determine from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing due to progress in other regards.

There is a greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, ends up in public mistrust, and police forces have become more diverse.

What’s more, college students majoring in criminal justice who decide to become future enforcement officers now frequently take “diversity in criminal justice” courses. This relatively new curriculum is intended to, among other things, make future police professionals more conscious of their own biases and people of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.

In addition, enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to acknowledge and minimize their own biases in NY City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.

But the persistence of racially biased policing implies that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it's likely to stay repeating mistakes of the past. this can hinder police from fully protecting and serving the whole public. The Conversation

Connie Hassett-Walker, professor of Justice Studies and Sociology, Norwich University

This article is republished from The Conversation under an imaginative Commons license.