Six on Police Brutality Protests: Stop focusing on looting in Minneapolis. Be outraged that police keep killing black men; Police Responded Very Differently to Protests Over George Floyd and COVID-19 Shutdowns; Rights, riots and police brutality; A T
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Another. That’s the key word.
The mature and reasoned response is, of course, to explore what went wrong Monday on that Minneapolis street. Why did the police officers responsible for this unnecessary use of force still have badges, given their history of previous complaints? Why did it take so long for authorities to arrest the officer filmed pinning Floyd to the ground with a knee on his neck? What can Minneapolis — or Los Angeles, or Ferguson, or New York City — do to improve relations between police and the communities they serve? Cue up the commission, bring in the experts, hold some hearings, let people vent for a bit and then, by golly, we’ll have change.
That’s the lie we tell ourselves with depressing regularity. The solutions we keep trotting out fail to address the real fault lines here. Police now often carry body cameras, undergo implicit bias training and embrace community policing strategies aimed at bridging the divide. We keep looking for the technology or training that can be bought and implemented to end police brutality, and there have been some improvements, particularly in cities where police departments have restricted use of force in making arrests. But progress is not victory.
And this is not a technology problem, or something that can be ended with some policy tinkering. It is a function of deep structural racism that we as a nation have proved to be incapable of exorcising.
Los Angeles burned in 1965 when a white California Highway Patrol officer pulled over a black motorist, starting a cascade of events that quickly released a community’s pent-up rage and frustration over police conduct. Detroit burned in 1967 after a police raid on an after-hours bar filled with African Americans similarly breached a dam holding back years of anger over police violence against black neighborhoods. Newark, N.J., burned that year too, a single arrest and beating of a black man unleashing years of community frustration. These upheavals reflected years of rising anger in African American neighborhoods over the conditions of their existence and the excesses of police departments that, as the motto says, were there to protect and to serve. Then came the 1991 police beating of Rodney King, all the proof Los Angeles needed that history does repeat itself.And no, police violence does not justify the rampages that erupted in Minneapolis. But as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out more than a half-century ago, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” To focus on the damage and looting misses the point. Were it not for the killing of Floyd, and the history of police behavior, there would have been no protests."
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Yet it is in the intersection of structural racism and the police — the people whom we empower and arm to enforce laws — where such violence resonates with such ferocity. Floyd’s death, as Minneapolis City Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins said, “was a symbol for a knee on the neck of black America.” That knee has been there for an unconscionably long time. Too long."
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"I have so many questions, and they are not new: Why do police react with restraint in one situation and extreme force in another? Why do they perceive some gatherings to be more dangerous than others? Why are groups armed with the same weapons used in countless mass shootings less threatening than protesters with bottles and camera phones? Why is stealing from a Target deserving of a more violent police response than a mock lynching of an elected official? Why is the defense of a shopping center more imperative than the defense of the Michigan State Capitol? Why are police launching tear gas into one crowd and not the other?
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Taken on its own, the police response to the anti-lockdown protests is not disturbing. Those officers were doing the right thing by avoiding unnecessary escalation and respecting people’s right to express themselves. That’s a delicate and difficult balance to strike, especially when the protesters have guns. But the contrast is maddening. When faced with angry, predominantly white crowds, police agencies have proven that they are capable of discipline and a reasonable reaction to a perceived threat. It’s not crazy to wonder, had the police shown up to the anti–police brutality protests with the same level of restraint, might the escalation have been avoided? Riots are an inevitable consequence of systematic instability, or, as Martin Luther King Jr. called them, “the language of the unheard.” It’s not hard to see how meeting protesters who have come to stand against excessive use of force with an excessive use of force would lead to nowhere good.
In 2016, after Keith Lamont Scott was killed in a police shooting in Charlotte, a North Carolina cop acknowledged a general fear of black men among his ranks, and penned a call for his colleagues to meet and mingle with the communities they police. “I think that African-American males are treated differently by law enforcement, and that’s my honest opinion,” he wrote. “I think this fear of black men is real.” Whether or not more police officers are willing to see it, the evidence is everywhere. That fear, which my former colleague Jamelle Bouie dissected and dismantled so well in the wake of the fatal shooting of Philando Castile, contributes to the police violence that sparked the protests this week, and to the show of force police use at the protests as well."
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"On the other hand, when police culture and occupational norms support the use of unnecessary violence, we can describe brutality as being supported “from below.” Such informal conditions are a bit harder to pin down, but they certainly have their consequences. We may count among their elements insularity, indifference to the problem of brutality, generalized suspicion, and the intense demand for personal respect. One of the first sociologists to study the problem of police violence, William Westley, described these as “basic occupational values,” more important than any other determinant of police behavior.
Police violence is very frequently over-determined — promoted from above and supported from below. But where it is not actually encouraged, sometimes even where individuals (officers or administrators) disapprove of it, excessive and illegal force are nevertheless nearly always condoned. Among police administrators there is the persistent and well-documented refusal to discipline violent officers; and among the cops themselves, there is the “code of silence.”
Police brutality does not just happen; it is allowed to happen. It is tolerated by the police themselves, those on the street and those in command. It is tolerated by prosecutors, who seldom bring charges against violent cops, and by juries, who rarely convict. It is tolerated by the civil authorities, the mayors and the city councils, who do not use their influence to challenge police abuses. But why?
The answer is simple: police brutality is tolerated because it is what people with power want.
This surely sounds conspiratorial, as though orders issued from a smoke-filled room are circulated at roll call to the various patrol officers and result in a certain number of arrests and a certain number of gratuitous beatings on a given evening. But this is not what I mean. Rather than a conspiracy, it is merely the normal functioning of the institution; it is just that the apparent conflict between the law and police practices may not be so important as we tend to assume. The two may, at times, be at odds, but this is of little concern so long as the interests they serve are essentially the same. The police may violate the law, as long as they do so in the pursuit of ends that people with power generally endorse, and from which such people profit.
When the police enforce the law, they do so unevenly, in ways that give disproportionate attention to the activities of poor people, people of color, and others near the bottom of the social pyramid. And when the police violate the law, these same people are their most frequent victims. This is a coincidence too large to overlook. If we put aside, for the moment, all questions of legality, it must become quite clear that the object of police attention, and the target of police violence, is overwhelmingly that portion of the population that lacks real power. And this is precisely the point: police activities, legal or illegal, violent or nonviolent, tend to keep the people who currently stand at the bottom of the social hierarchy in their “place,” where they “belong” — at the bottom.
Put differently, we might say that the police act to defend the interests and standing of those with power—those at the top. So long as they serve in this role, they are likely to be given a free hand in pursuing these ends and a great deal of leeway in pursuing other ends that they identify for themselves. The laws may say otherwise, but laws can be ignored.
In theory, police authority is restricted by state and federal law, as well as by the policies of individual departments. In reality, the police often exceed the bounds of their lawful authority and rarely pay any price for doing so. The rules are only as good as their enforcement, and they are seldom enforced. The real limits to police power are established not by statutes and regulations — since no rule is self-enforcing — but by their leadership and, indirectly, by the balance of power in society.
So long as the police defend the status quo, so long as their actions promote the stability of the existing system, their misbehavior is likely to be overlooked. It is when their excesses threaten this stability that they begin to face meaningful restraints. Laws and policies can be ignored and still provide a cover of plausible deniability for those in authority. But when misconduct reaches such a level as to provoke unrest, the battles that ensue do not only concern particular injustices, but also represent deep disputes about the rights of the public and the limits of state power.
"Without the proper context, it is impossible to understand the mushroom cloud of uprisings that are exploding across the country in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others.
To contextualize the anger, frustration and desperation that forced protesters to recreate the lawlessness and chaos that black people experience on a daily basis, The Root has created a timeline of some of the events that led up to black people across the country collectively saying:
“Aight, den.”
- "1704: South Carolina creates the first modern-day, public police force. Called “slave patrols,” these publicly-funded organizations served three functions: 1) to chase down, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who violated rules.
- Sept. 9, 1739: “Jemmy” a literate, enslaved Kongolese warrior in South Carolina organizes an uprising against whites that results in 25 colonists and 35 to 50 Africans being killed. The Stono Rebellion was the largest revolt in the British Mainland colonies.
- April 1740: After the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passes The Negro Law of 1740, making it illegal for enslaved Africans to leave the US, assemble in groups, grow food, earn money, and learn to write. The law also gave slaveowners permission to kill rebellious slaves and it remained in effect until 1865."
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"President Trump may be uniquely bad at bringing a wounded, divided country together. Throughout six consecutive days of unrest in cities across the country — triggered by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in the custody a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes — Trump pledged military retribution on protesters engaged in unlawful acts, dismissed their outrage as the work of leftist troublemakers, and said nothing of reports of heavy-handed police actions during the demonstrations. And all this comes at a time when Americans are reeling from an epochal economic collapse and the toll of the coronavirus pandemic.
“President Trump has spewed division with ill-chosen tweets about looting and ‘shooting’ or ‘vicious dogs’ and overpowering weapons,” wrote my colleague Dan Balz. “He has attacked Democratic leaders as their communities burn. He flails rather than leads, his instincts all wrong for what confronts the country.”
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“Trump makes little disguise of conjuring a pre-civil rights America where white males held uncontested sway,” wrote Edward Luce of the Financial Times. “He will blame [former president Barack] Obama, China, radical leftists and ‘thugs’ for America’s unhappy condition — anybody, in other words, but himself.”
Under Trump, the United States has already scaled back its defense of human rights and the rule of law in other parts of the world. Now the events of the past week have unfurled like the kind of catalog of abuses you’d see documented by U.S.-based rights groups in countries elsewhere: Journalists and protesters blinded and maimed by local police? Check. A demagogic leader stirring rage against the free press? Check. Security forces targeting unarmed demonstrators with seeming impunity and even ramming their vehicles into crowds? Check and, yes, check.
America’s putative foreign adversaries also are watching. “This incident is far from the first in a series of lawless conduct and unjustified violence from U.S. law enforcement,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding to the Kremlin’s long history of pointing to human rights abuses in the United States. “American police commit such high-profile crimes all too often.”
Officials in Iran did the same, calling out racial injustice in America. “If you’re dark-skinned walking in the US, you can’t be sure you’ll be alive in the next few minutes,” read a tweet from an account associated with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, which was accompanied by a video that detailed the horrific history of slavery in the United States.
Hua Chunying, chief spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responded on Twitter to a message of support for Hong Kong from her State Department counterpart Morgan Ortagus with the phrase “I can’t breathe” — the dying words of multiple unarmed black men put in chokeholds by U.S. police officers that has become a global protest slogan.
“There are different reasons for the riots, but their similarities are overwhelming: they all defy the law, subvert order, and are destructive,” Hu Xijin, the nationalist editor of the Global Times, a state-affiliated newspaper, said in a tweeted video, in which he applauded Beijing’s “restraint” for not cheering the protests the way Washington celebrated Hong Kong’s demonstrations.
This is all very convenient for China’s leadership. “The timing of the current unrest in the United States could not be better for China’s purposes,” wrote my colleague Anna Fifield. “It is not China’s rise that is scary, the authorities are saying between the lines, but the United States’ decline. It also feeds into the prevailing view in Beijing that all of the Trump administration’s actions are designed to stop China’s rejuvenation and its elevation to what it sees as its rightful place at the top of the global hierarchy.”
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