Police Reform FAQ
Policing is a hot topic these days. George Floyd was far from the first Black man to be murdered by police, but his death in 2020 reached the US in a way that others had not. It wasn’t even just the protests, we’ve had those before, nationwide, for decades at least. But something happened that made all of America take notice and form an opinion.
During times like these, a lot of words, phrases, philosophies fly around as we collectively begin to deconstruct the system that got us to this point. People say that modern policing is descended from slave patrols, is that true? Why do people want to defund the police? And what is ACAB anyway? Let’s break it all down.
The Story of Modern Policing in the US
I’m going to start with the most complex question. Law enforcement is ancient, dating back to the earliest civilizations such as Egypt or Babylon. No one is claiming that policing was invented by those trying to keep slaves submissive. Indeed, vagrancy and loitering laws have their roots as early as the middle ages in England. And these laws today disproportionately affect Black and other people of color, just as they targeted marginalized communities such as the serfs in medieval England.
What is being noted when people make this connection, however, are the commonalities between slave patrols in early America and modern policing of today, and the acknowledgement that pretending there was zero influence from the one to the other is irresponsible and incorrect. So for this post, we are limiting our review of historical law enforcement to United States history, colonial and independent.
Slave Patrols
When Europeans began bringing kidnapped Africans to this continent to use as slaves for free labor, they needed to come up with enforcement for keeping the enslaved people in line. They chose violence and terrorism (1), which tracks since kidnapping and slavery is all also inherently violent. They meant to break the spirits of any humans who dared to demand their right to autonomy.
The Civil War
After the Civil War, and particularly after the passage of the 14th Amendment which supposedly guaranteed equal rights to all citizens of the United States, the South began to get around this by creating laws which targeted Black folx without specifically saying so. For one example, before the War, Black Codes would limit freedoms granted to Black Americans, such as the right to vote. However, after the 14th Amendment was passed and guaranteed suffrage for Black men, racists resorted to limiting voting rights to those who owned land. Since many Black folx in the South during Reconstruction were only recently freed, this law effectively prevented the Black community from being able to vote and the racists never even had to claim it was due to race.* This is how racism functions to this day: hidden, surreptitious, discrete. This is also how white supremacy works to this day: they have no second thoughts about marginalizing poor whites while they maintain their control in the name of racism.
*Obviously this hasn’t changed much in all this time. While the Voting Rights Act was passed during the Civil Rights Movement, in the last decade SCOTUS has been chipping away at and undermining the Act, and to this day voting discrimination laws disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. Always remember, there are no such thing as red states, there are only voter supression states.
Policing shifted, too. Whereas before the Civil War, it was slave patrols who would keep order, afterwards it was “militia-style groups who were empowered to control and deny access to equal rights to freed slaves” (2). In the 1900s when more cities began forming modern police departments, these were tasked with enforcing the laws, including Jim Crow laws. Police would be pressured by cities to brutalize and terrorize Black citizens (2). So here we see clear similarities between slave patrols and modern police. But wait! There’s more!
Police Protect Property, Not People
I know it’s the opposite of what we want to believe, or what we want to be true, but in the 2005 case Castle Rock v. Gonzales, SCOTUS determined that police are not required to protect people (3). In that case, a woman alerted police that her children had gone missing and that she suspected her estranged husband as having broken a restraining order to abduct them. The police did absolutely nothing about this and later found that the children had been murdered by their father. SCOTUS determined that police are not required to enforce restraining orders, leaving restraining orders utterly useless and folx in situations of domestic violence in a dangerous place.
Oh and By the Way, Slavery is Still Legal
I know, right? But it’s true. The Thirteenth Amendment, pictured below with relevant text for clarity, was the amendment which outlawed slavery. With that one caveat.
You can find the full original image here.
Find this table here.
The US prison system is… problematic. We have, by far, the highest rate of incarceration among NATO nations. We also have a significant number of privately-run, that is, for-profit prisons and that number has risen considerably in the last 20 years. The Sentencing Project notes that “The largest prison system [in the US] relying on privatization is the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Since 2000, the BOP’s reliance on private facilities has increased by 39%,” and that “Under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, there is an average of 19,254 people held daily in immigrant detention, and 79% of this population is held in privately run facilities.” Further, those who are incarcerated are often forced to work not only to pay their own room and board, and not only to keep the prison running, but sometimes for outside private companies, such as Oriental Trading. They are paid less than $.50 per hour. Those party decorations you ordered? Made in America. By slaves.
Imagine owning a company in which your goal is to profit off of the incarceration of people. I find this highly unethical, to put it mildly.
And of course our prison system houses people of color at disproportionately higher rates than white people. According to the Sentencing Project, we have five times more Black people in prisons than white people.
You can kind of start to see how modern policing is not that far from slave patrols. If we have such high incarceration rates, particularly for people of color, sometimes at for-profit prisons, working for pennies to make goods for private companies, and it turns out slavery is not even illegal, and the police are at the heart of the system, arresting, and at times executing people without due process, you can kinda see how that looks like slave patrols, right?
What is ACAB?
First of all, let’s say what ACAB, which stands for All Cops are Bastards, is not saying. It’s not saying that every single cop is an asshole. It’s got nothing to do with how nice or kind any individual police officer is. Police officers can absolutely be kind humans who are genuinely wanting their work to protect their communities.
Instead, it is a critique of the system. Police should be protectors of the community, but as we’ve seen here, at least within the United States, it is actually a system in which Black people are kidnapped, often for mild charges, and used as almost-free labor for corporations to increase their profits. Even good police officers, then, are being used by the system for ulterior purposes. All cops are bastards because what should be a noble profession of protecting humans is merely the first step in our modern system of slavery.
ACAB, or “All Coppers are Bastards” is first recorded in the UK in the early part of the 20th Century during worker’s rights strikes (4). It is unclear whether their conscious intent at the time was to decry the bastardization of policing the way it is today of if they were merely calling cops names, but regardless this history does, in fact align with the modern meaning because when police attempt to stop strikes, they are inherently siding with the bourgeoisie and choosing to enforce anti-egalitarian laws. In any case, the phrase was picked up by the midcentury punk movement (and punk has always been antifacist and socialist…. mostly) and spread across the word from there (4). Today the meaning by most activists who use the phrase is a critiquing of the policing system rather than mindless insults.
Just like with “Not All Men” arguments - every police officer, if they truly want to do good work in the world, should acknowledge and align with ACAB ideology. As with every group of oppressors, we will never fix anything from the outside of the group. If you count yourself as a police officer and if you believe you are not racist, you must be doing this work.
Why Do We Want to Defund the Police?
Defunding the police is not nearly as dramatic or frightening as many conservatives would make you believe. It doesn’t mean abolishing the police (although there are those who believe this should be the goal, that is an entirely separate discussion). Currently police in general are over-funded. To defund the police simply means to more appropriately fund the police, to correct the current imbalance.
For example, currently police are the ones responsible for managing folx who have mental illness-related breakdowns and getting them to a care facility (most often an emergency room). This means that a person having a physiological problem with their body - in this case their brain - are being put in handcuffs in the back of a cop car as though they have committed an illegal act in need of punishing, instead of an ambulance with health care providers. Sometimes police are specially trained to work with mental illness, but oftentimes they are not. And when they are trained, it is really minimally. They do not spend years learning about mental illness the way that, you know, mental health professionals do. To defund the police would mean to reallocate funds from policing to actual mental health care workers and social workers.
You may assume that police got involved in the first place because sometimes mental illness can lead to violence (while this is true, it is vitally important to remember that on the whole folx with mental illness are more at risk of being victims of violence than they are of committing violence). But there are no police in mental hospitals so it should not be necessary outside of hospitals. Meanwhile mental healthcare facilities are struggling for appropriate funding and police are throwing folx with mental illness into the back of a cop car in handcuffs.
Conclusion
To review:
Cops are still terrorizing and brutalizing people of color more disproportionately than whites
Cops are not required to protect people
Slavery is still legal and exists within the US prison system
There may not be links between every single police department in the US and a former slave patrol, but as we have yet to see an era in which Black people can expect to live in peace and to thrive in our social systems, I do think it is irresponsible to say there is no link whatsoever. We can see here that when you take away the details that make things look and sound modern, we haven’t come very far in centuries. Police departments are still slave patrols and slavery still exists as a thriving industry.
There are so many oppressive systems at work and for many marginalized communities this can push people towards desperation. By far the best way to eliminate crime is to support people before they become desperate or jaded. Provide universal basic income, provide homes, make minimum wage a living wage. When people have all their needs met, they are less likely to commit crimes. But the system as it currently is merely punishes people for not being born with privilege.
I expect that if you’ve read this far, you’re angry. That’s natural. It’s righteous to be angry at violence and injustice. If you’re looking for something to do, you can donate to one of the organizations I linked to today, you can donate to me to fund this work that I do, or you can just tell everyone you know and be obnoxious af.
Comfort those who are oppressed and make oppressors uncomfortable!
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Sources:
“Slave Patrols, ‘Packs of Negro Dogs’ and and Policing Black Communities” by Larry H. Spruill: https://www.jstor.org/stable/phylon1960.53.1.42
(free to read online at Jstor with a free membership)NAACP, “The Origins of Modern Day Policing” https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/origins-modern-day-policing
Harvard Undergraduate Law Review: https://hulr.org/fall-2020/castle-rock-v-gonzales-and-the-legal-obligations-of-police
GQ: “A Brief History of ACAB” https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/acab-meaning
