When is enough, enough?
Historical violent policing in communities of color fueled today’s society of distrust in authorities.
Welcome to The Breaking Point, a weekly newsletter that draws on the historical legacies of injustice based on the news cycle and culture trends to understand what in the world is going on.
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Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash
Across the country, the killings of unarmed Black people have sparked nationwide protests for racial justice — protests that are roughly two-months strong and evolving. Among the police killings that led to these protests, Breonna Taylor’s case is one that has yet to meet justice. The three Louisville police officers that discharged their weapons and killed Taylor are still running free. Two of them still have their jobs.
“I’m not surprised Breonna Taylor’s taken more than four months to be brought to justice because we’ve taken more than four hundred years to be brought to justice as Black people,” Jecorey Arthur, the youngest person to be elected to Louisville’s metro council at 28, told The Guardian. “I’m not surprised by anything any more. I’m actually surprised by how surprised other people are about this process and about this lack of justice.”
That’s just it. When it comes to state violence and repression toward minorities, justice seems so far away. In 2019, 54 percent of those who died as a result of police brutality were people of color — including Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and Pacific Islanders — compared to 50 percent in 2014, according to data from Mapping Police Violence. Now U.S. armed forces and police officials are back on the spotlight for their aggressive and violent tactics, along with the unnecessary presence of federal law enforcement in cities like Portland and Chicago as ordered by President Trump.
On Sunday, ProPublica published a sweeping report that includes a database disclosing thousands of police discipline records that New York City kept secret for decades (with some limitations). The database shows active-duty officers who have had at least one allegation against them sustained by New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board — totaling roughly 4,000 officers out of the NYPD’s 36,000 police force. Now New York’s police department unions are suing to block the city from disclosing such data to the public.
Although it is the ruthless and combative tactics against peaceful protesters — now widely caught on videos and photos — that have been the face of police brutality since the civil rights movement, the sobering reality is that the racist roots of pervasive violent policing in communities of color are what’s fueling the society of distrust today.
Read more: We’re Publishing Thousands of Police Discipline Records That New York Kept Secret for Decades by Eric Umansky, Propublica
Figure of the week: 98
The number of days until the U.S. is officially set to exit the Paris Climate Agreement on November 4. Read what’s at stake here.
The history of police brutality is a long and painful one. The massive protests during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, in which several activists suffered bloody beatings, could nearly mirror the growing Black Lives Matter movement today. In the most unfortunate of timings, Congressman John Lewis — the civil rights icon who had been badly beaten by state troopers in Alabama for fighting for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King Jr. — passed away just as the nation hit a breaking point in the wake of George Floyd’s grueling death (and during a pandemic that’s disproportionately killing Black people).
Injustice still exists in full force. “We demand an end to police brutality now,” said a poster sign during the 1963 March on Washington that now hangs in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Nearly 60 years later, the message remains a rallying cry in the streets of Minneapolis, Louisville, New York City, Portland, and more. Though today, the narrative has significantly shifted from ending police brutality to defunding and abolishing the police forces as a whole.
Policing in the U.S. can be traced back to as early as the 1630s, following the development of policing in England. The early colonies had a volunteer and community-driven “watch system,” whose main responsibility was to simply warn people of impending danger. Boston was the first to impose a night watch system in 1636, then New York in 1658, then Philadelphia in 1700. As the watch system expanded, the colonies implemented a day watch system that soon evolved into a paid and centralized police institution — the first of its kind modern policing in the U.S. The first American police department was created in Boston in 1838, followed by New York City in 1845.
But it was different in the South. The evolution of modern policing in the southern states unjustly focused on the enslaved. They called it the “Slave Patrol,” first created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. The “Slave Patrol” had three primary ghastly duties: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return enslaved folks trying to escape to their owners; (2) to promote terror to block slave revolts; and (3) to discipline the enslaved laborers, if they violated any plantation rules. After the Civil War and Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, these Southern organizations became modern police departments with the goal of controlling and threatening freed slaves who by then were laborers working in an agricultural caste system.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Jim Crow segregation laws in the early 1900s were specifically designed to deny freed people of equal rights and access to the political system. What happens next are unjust arrests of Black people for crimes they did not commit and cases that white police forces had covered up, which led these innocent people down death row. Bryan Stevenson, a young Harvard-educated lawyer, risked his life as a Black man and moved to Alabama to defend those who were wrongfully condemned and trapped in our broken criminal justice system. He freed innocent Black men out of prison and death row for crimes they did not commit, and later founded the Equal Justice Initiative. The Central Park Five case is another prominent example of wrongful conviction, in which five Black and Latino kids, now known as the Exonerated Five, were harassed and charged for a rape incident they did not commit. The oldest out of the five, Korey Wise, served 12 years in prison.
(For more, read Stevenson’s book “Just Mercy” and watch Ava Duvernay’s film series “When They See Us” on Netflix, if you haven’t already)
Fast forward to the 21st century, we have what activists call modern-day lynching with the police killing of unarmed Black people. We have federal law enforcement and state police officials attacking and throwing tear gas and impact munitions at protesters fighting for human rights and racial justice, showing no mercy. And we have an exorbitant amount of funding going to police departments instead of community investment.
What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say today? His iconic “I Have a Dream” speech still rings true given the prevalence of violent confrontations between the police and Black people. King said, “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”
When is enough, enough?
I realize my newsletters can be such a mood-killer sometimes, but there is a glimmer of hope that can be found in small changes happening at the local level. In Olympia, Washington, for instance, the city started taking a different approach to nonviolent incidents that involve folks who are homeless, with mental illness or drug addiction. Instead of dispatching armed police officers to respond, the city sends so-called “crisis responders” to diffuse the situation and connect folks with proper services. Read the full story at The Marshall Project, entitled “This City Stopped Sending Police to Every 911 Call” by Christie Thompson.
Have a great rest of your week!
by Rachel Ramirez ❤️
A reading list, you say? 📖
One home, a lifetime impact: Blacks in the US face a huge gap in homeownership rates by Michele Lerner, The Washington Post
6,000 acres of Minneapolis parks have their own police force by Alexandria Herr, Grist
Before Portland, Trump’s Shock Troops Went After Border Activists by Ryan Devereux, The Intercept
The Eviction Ban Worked, but It’s Almost Over. Some Landlords Are Getting Ready by Jeff Ernsthausen and Ellis Simani, ProPublica
A Small Federal Agency Focused on Preventing Industrial Disasters is on Life Support. Trump Wants It Gone by Alexia Fernández Campbell, The Center for Public Integrity
New Jersey’s new law will shield poor communities from new sources of pollution. What about existing ones? by yours truly, Rachel Ramirez, Grist
thanks for reading, and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already. see you next week!