Whether you consider dogs symbols of security
Or symbols of danger depends upon whether
You’re inside or outside the fence.
— Terrence Hayes, “Model Prison Model”
Jacob Blake was armed, they said. A knife. They tased him. Shot him in the back. In front of his kids. Paralyzed him. // The district attorney won’t charge the officers. Three of them on the scene. He would need to “disprove the clear expression of these officers that they had to fire a weapon to defend themselves.” // “I do not believe the state ... would be able to prove that the privilege of self-defense is not available,” says Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley. // Do not believe. Is not available. Double negatives. Obfuscation. How lawyers layer the language to avoid clarity. Responsibility. // The decision, says Blake’s lawyers, “further destroys trust in our justice system.” Trust in police. “It says it is OK for police to abuse their power and recklessly shoot their weapon,” attorney Ben Crump said, “destroying the life of someone who was trying to protect his children.” // Police say they felt threatened, but it’s hard to believe that from the video. They were responding to a domestic abuse call. He wasn’t in the house. There to break up a fight, say witnesses. Was never a threat. // But he was shot in the back. In the back. Point blank. In the door of his car. With the officer holding his t-shirt. // The threat was real. But what was the threat? To whom? //
*
Language matters. How we describe the world offers a glimpse into how we see the world. How we see the world depends on where we sit. Our vantage point. To the hammer, the cliche goes, everything is a nail. // Memory: Police station. Early ‘90s. Public information officer reviews police reports. Doles out those he thinks most interesting. That present the department in the best light. I am there to collect the police blotter, the crime report we will run in the newspaper. “Let’s see what his tale of woe is,” the officer says. Tale of woe. A story. Traffic stop. Charges for shoplifting. Drugs. // Reports presented as received truth. Unchallengeable facts. Guilt implied in each item. // We’d run without comment. As if these narratives were not written by police. From their point of view. As if charges were the same as convictions. I was complicit in this. Most local journalists were complicit in this. Still are. // On television, the anchor reads a story. A man goes “on a violent spree” with a tree branch in lower Manhattan. Arrested. Charged. Matter of fact. Crime. Lawlessness. “Violent chaos.” The police step in. Blue knights on a white horse. // This is the genesis of “the thin blue line.” The argument that police are the line between civilization and anarchy. A mythos rarely challenged. Rarely questioned. //
*
The placard lines the street. House after house. “We Support Law Enforcement.” A statement of solidarity. Underlined in blue. A blue line. // Language matters. The words matter. Law enforcement. Law. A system of rules. Regulations. Law enforcement. To literally enforce the rules. To use force. To coerce. By threat. Implied or overt. To compel obedience. // The phrase is from the Latin: enforce = in strength. From the Old French: “strengthen, reinforce; use force (on), offer violence (to); oppress; violate, rape.” //
*
I am not anti-police nor am I pro-police. I see them as necessary, but also as a potential threat. What they do can be dangerous, especially in a society awash in guns. That glamorizes guns. That glorifies violence and seems to endorse its use as a first response to all problems. // But they are the embodiment of authority. Tools of coercion. Of enforcement. At its root, the institution of the police is designed to compel obedience. // Like Roman Centurians. Or slave catchers. Strike breakers. The coppers of old assigned to keep the lower classes, the immigrants, in line. To keep the slaves with their masters. To maintain the boundaries between white and black. //
*
A history of policing, from Time Magazine:
The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says (Gary Potter, a crime historian at Eastern Kentucky University). These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
*
I teach at a county college in a heavily minority county. Many of my students are students of color — Latinos, African Americans, Caribbeans, Africans, South and East Asians, Muslims from various Arab and Asian nations. They are native born and immigrants. Many express distrust of the police. // A Latino student grew up poor in mostly minority neighborhoods. Speaks in class of being profiled by police. Of being seen because of his background and the neighborhood as an inherent threat. This is before George Floyd. Before Jacob Blake. In an essay, he describes a Hispanic man walking home after dropping his car at the mechanic. The man is stopped. The “neighborhood is known for drugs and violence, so immediately, this young man looks dangerous in the eyes of a police officer.” The man is interrogated, despite having done nothing. The police “look for any reason to search or ... arrest this man.” // There should be “nothing suspicious about a man walking down the street except,” in this case, “he is a minority.” // “This young black or Latino male does not know the police officer as a protector; he sees someone trying to control and instill fear.” //
*
This is a common story. Part of the literature of race and police. Brent Staples tells such a story, Jeffery Renard Allen does, too. A young African American walks down the street or enters a store. The eyes follow him. Treat him as criminal. Force him, as Staples says, as Allen says, to acknowledge himself as threat. To transform himself. To become non-threatening. To become obeisant. Not to protect others, but to protect their own bodies. //
*
Echoes of the slave patrols. The strike breakers. The order keepers. James Baldwin wrote in 1964 that “Harlem is policed like occupied territory.” As if occupied by a military force. A separate sovereignty under rule of another. // The police, Baldwin wrote, “are simply the hired enemies of this population.” A harsh criticism. Outside my personal experience. I am white. From the suburbs. // “They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.” // Can we say that it has changed much at all? //
*
Loose cigarettes. Past-due child support. Forged checks. For some, these are tales of woe, as my old police contact would say. For others, they are the first step toward a death sentence. // Possession of a toy gun. Of legal guns. Jogging. Walking. Dead. // I was pulled over in Princeton when I was 20. We had punched out the trunk lock on my Dodge Dart. The lock jammed after we overloaded the trunk with cases of beer. Months later, an officer stops me. Explains it to me. Let’s me go. // Why? I can only guess. Can only be thankful. No ticket. Nothing more than late for work. Other minor infractions. Fines paid. All in the past. // Small-scale interactions with police are invitations to violence for too many. // “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master,” Baldwin wrote, “still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.” //
*
Distrust. Fear. “When I see them I get mad,” Antoinette Rootsdawtah tells me on Facebook. “My husband has to calm me down.” // “Why do we have to prove who we are and we haven’t broken any laws just because people see Black people.” // I can’t answer. I’m white. I don’t have to fear the police when I see lights in my rear view mirror. I don’t have to fear an irrational response. // Rootsdawtah talks of negative experiences. She’s law-abiding. Upstanding. Gets pulled over. // She once was accused of breaking into an AirBnB she rented. Police were called. Another time she was accosted at a hotel despite paying in advance. // The list of unwarranted stops is long. Painful. Has affected her entire family. // “My daughter, who was there most of the time, didn’t trust the police either as a child growing up. She’s now 26.” //
*
Baldwin remains relevant, writes the Princeton theologian Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Blacks protest. Challenge authority. Demand justice. They are met with rubber bullets. Tanks. Their neighborhoods treated as occupied zones. // White Trump supporters charge the U.S. Capitol building, Glaude writes. There are “no tanks or militarized weapons. No police in army fatigues. No bullhorn warnings to the assembled crowd. As these white men and women engaged in insurrection, no one shot rubber bullets, few police rushed into the crowds to arrest anyone.” // This is evidence, he says, of “the different quality” of Black citizenship. // “In the United States, Black people are meant to be disciplined, corralled and contained, and the violence of police is all too often the primary mechanism by which they are kept in their place.” //
*
I ask on Facebook for police — working and retired — to explain what officers see as their job. How they view the Blue Lives Matter flag, the thin blue line. // “There is a very narrow margin in our society (between) completely disintegrating and having a civil war in some instances,” says a conservative friend. That’s what “Thin Blue Line” means, he says. // I’ve know Doug Hoffman for almost 30 years. He served as mayor when I was an editor of the local paper and, while we come down on opposite sides on most issues, he approaches these questions with intelligence. // Hoffman’s son is now a police officer in Dallas. “I’m worried about him every day,” he says in an email. Officers, in general, he said, could be killed at any time for making a routine traffic stop, protecting a battered wife or husband, or enforcing the existing laws.” Police should not be seen as the problem, he said. // “What (the Blue Lives flag) means to me is that there is absolutely no reason, for anyone at any time, to think that the life of a police officer is not important,” he says.
*
Michael Prate served 27 years with the New York City Police Department. Spent nearly all of it in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a small stretch of Brooklyn viewed as more dangerous than other neighborhoods. He worked anti-crime. Narcotics. Served as a detective. Worked with the FBI. // Prate is a relative through marriage. We’ve talked often over the years about his job. Mine. Our differences. // The thin blue line, he says, are officers who “swore to an oath to serve and protect the communities they work in.” When he hears the phrase, he says, “(I) think about all those who serve in law enforcement across the county, whose goal first and foremost is to protect and serve.” // It means unselfishness. Sacrifice. Community effort. “That sacrifice should never be forgotten,” he says. //
*
The phrase. The Blue Line flag. The blue lights that shine in some neighborhoods at night. These are symbols of support. And they remind him that he serves the community. // Prate refers to “Sir Roberts Peel’s Nine Principles of Law Enforcement from 1829.” Peel founded the Metropolitan Police in Great Britain. “The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police.” // This, I tell him, leaves me skeptical. Seems contradictory. This blue line creating a separation. Police and public on opposite sides. // He acknowledges the potential and real divisions. The way police are seen in Black neighborhoods and how police see the neighborhoods they police. // “I spent 96% of my time in a 98.5% black neighborhood during my career. Over the years you are told by those who were antipolice that you were inherently racist. An occupier.” Others, he adds, “would quietly invite you in to share stories, coffee and even flowers grown from their gardens to bring home to your wife.” // He worked at a time when drugs and gangs proliferated, he said. “Terrorized and prayed on the innocent.” That led to support for police in those communities, he said. // “Policing and the interaction in the community is ever evolving,” he says. “Winning the trust of the community should always be the goal.” //
*
I agree. Trust should be paramount. But if trust is the goal, both imagery and actions matter. Imagery: The Thin Blue Line, the Blue Lives Matter flag, the deification of cops on TV, the habit of news casters to overemphasize local crime, to racialize it. The language we use. The assumptions we make. These set the narrative. Police as last defense. Police as right. Good. // On TV, police often fire their weapons with impunity. Kill only the bad guys. Not the Black man fleeing a traffic stop, afraid he’ll be jailed for nonpayment of child support. Not the legal gun owner in his car. On TV, cops don’t use choke holds or kneel on the necks of suspects. Don’t choke the innocent to death. // On TV, the bad guys deserve it. The bad guys are drug dealers. Mobsters. On TV, internal investigations are intrusions. Internal Affairs is the rat squad. Is as bad as the perps on the streets. // We consume these stories. Internalize them. And they act as filters on our minds. Lenses through which we read the news. // Imagery. Action. Jacob Blake paralyzed. George Floyd dead. Breonna Taylor dead. Upwards of 1,000 victims of police shootings every year. Some guilty. Some shot in the commission of a crime. In self-defense. But many not. Many shot while running. Shot in their cars. In their backs. // Images. Actions. Fears. //
*
These are difficult questions. They require complex answers. Police abolition has been floated on the left. There are arguments in its favor. But the underlying rationale is flawed. Based on an unrealistic view of human behavior. // Police are needed. But they have been given too much authority. Too much leeway. // We ask too much of them. Ask them to be public safety officers. Traffic monitors. Social workers. Educators. Their budgets have grown to accommodate these tasks, and police spending crowds out other public efforts. This is why a call to “Defund the Police” makes more sense. We should shrink the size of local forces. Transfer the money to public health and mental health initiatives. Address poverty and its impacts. Make police less necessary. //
*
In Philadelphia in October, a 27-year-old man is shot by police during a what the press described as “a violent psychological episode.” A similar shooting occurred a month earlier in Lancaster, about 75 miles west. Another 27-year-old, one “diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia five years earlier” and “wouldn’t take his medication,” was shot. // The Washington Post Fatal Force tracker reports that about 1,000 people were killed by police in 2020. The victims are disproportionately Black and Latino. And about one in four are mentally ill. // Some cities are experimenting with response teams that include police and mental-health workers. These programs are small. Leave primary responsibility with law enforcement. And they do nothing to shift resources from police response to prevention. // Nothing to address the proliferation of guns. The glorification of violence. // Nothing to address the economic structures that drive criminal behavior. That have chased entire neighborhoods into the underground economy. // Nothing to change the historic disconnect, the antagonistic relationship that has long existed between police and the policed. //
*
The disconnect. A thin blue line. A flag that merges police and nationalism. Elevates the coercive. Proclaims an enemy. // Support for the police cannot be automatic. Police, like all of us, must earn the respect they demand. Police, and not the Black and brown community, must change the relationship. As it is on Whites to end systemic racism. // The relationship Baldwin criticized nearly 60 years ago. That the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. denounced in his “I Have a Dream Speech,” when he declared that Black American “can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” or that “the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.” // This has to be the focus. George Floyd’s murder captured the public’s attention. But so did Michael Brown’s in 2014. And Amadou Diallo’s in 1999. We can trace the anger both forward and backward. To before King’s comments. To slave patrols and strike breakers. // As of Feb. 16, the Post’s tracker reports, 98 people had been killed by police. Most were armed. Several suffered mental illness. Most will be deemed clean shoots. And we will move on. Until the next time. There always is a next time. //
*
Works Cited
Allen, Jeffery Renard. "Urgently Visible: Why Black Lives Matter.” Evergreen Review, n.d., https://evergreenreview.com/read/urgently-visible-jeffery-renard-allen/ Accessed 16 Feb. 2021
——. “A Letter to My Native Son, Elijah Nasir Allen, Firstborn.” Google Drive, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nDX2nnzXUQInqvSuGWB3aWP3UJUh2odZ/view?usp=sharing. (This is an nnnotated version for my composition class, and was originally published in the new-defunct Blue Shift Journal.)
Caraballo, Emmanuel. “Police Bias.” Middlesex County College. 26 Sept. 2019.
Glaude Jr., Eddie S., “We Can Make America Anew Only If We're Honest About the Depth of the Ugliness and Hate Today.” Time, 11 January 2021, https://time.com/5928566/u-s-capitol-attacks-eradicating-white-supremacism/ Accessed 28 January 2021
Gray, Madison J. “Ben Crump Releases Statement On Kenosha D.A. Decision Not To Charge Officer In Jacob Blake Shooting.” BET Online, 5 Jan. 2021, https://www.bet.com/news/national/2021/01/05/ben-crump-statement-police-not-charged-in-jacob-blake-shooting.html. Accessed 5 Jan. 2021
Hayes, Terrance. “Model Prison Model.” How To Be Drawn, Penguin, 2015, pp. 77-79.
King Jr., the Rev. Martin Luther. “I Have a Dream.” NAACP, 28 Aug. 1963, https://www.naacp.org/i-have-a-dream-speech-full-march-on-washington/ Accessed 15 Feb. 2021
“Man in custody after wild spree with tree branch across Manhattan.” ABC 7 New York, 4 Jan. 2020, https://abc7ny.com/man-in-custody-after-wild-spree-with-tree-branch/9329236/. Accessed 4 Jan. 2021
Peel, Robert. “Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Law Enforcement from 1829.” Durham Constabulatory (UK), n.d., https://www.durham.police.uk/About-Us/Documents/Peels_Principles_Of_Law_Enforcement.pdf Accessed 28 January 2021
“Police Shootings” database. The Washington Post (updated regularly), https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.
Richmond, Todd and Michael Tarm, “No Charges Against Officer Who Shot Jacob Blake..” Associated Press, 6 January 2021, https://apnews.com/article/cf6228f55a4f2a5fdd66978e5523a912 Accessed 28 January 2021
Romo, Vanessa. “Philadelphia Police Release 'Traumatic' Bodycam Video Of Walter Wallace Jr. Shooting.” NPR, 4 Nov. 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/11/04/931598467/philadelphia-police-release-traumatic-bodycam-video-of-walter-wallace-jr-shootin Accessed 15 Feb. 2021
Sholtis, Brett. “Family Mourns Man With Mental Illness Killed by Police and Calls for Change.” Kaiser Health News, 19 Nov. 2020, https://khn.org/news/police-killing-mental-illness-emergency-crisis-care-pennsylvania/ Accessed 15 Feb. 2021
Staples, Brent. “Just Walk on by: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space.” Literary Cavalcade, vol. 50, no. 5, Feb. 1998, p. 38. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=959581&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Waxman, Olivia B. “How the U.S. Got Its Police Force.” Time, 18 May 2017, https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/. Accessed 5 Jan. 2021