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Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.

To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis-the Greek for "city," or "polity"-by way of politia, the Latin for "citizenship," and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. "The police," as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy-"keeping the king's peace"-which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.

"Abolish the police," as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded "Fuck tha Police"), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. "To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence," Hannah Arendt wrote in " The Human Condition." In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his " Commentaries on the Laws of England," argued that the king, as "pater-familias of the nation," directs "the public police," exercising the means by which "the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations." The police are the king's men.

History begins with etymology, but it doesn't end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people-in America, "the law is king," Thomas Paine wrote-but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we've been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about "Abolish the police," then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.

But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures-failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they're there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm's way. To say that this doesn't always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number who were treated in emergency rooms as a result of injuries inflicted by police and security guards was almost as great as the number who, as pedestrians, were injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.

There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, "in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years." American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars' worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that's spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren't trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.

That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king's peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn't work especially well in England-"The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law," Blackstone wrote-and it didn't work especially well in England's colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren't supposed to police the king's subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense-waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.

The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that "Negroes and other Slaves" were "wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations," and devised, instead, a special set of rules "for the good Regulating and Ordering of them." Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:

It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.

In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell "Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit" in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.

Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England's posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were "police," who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.

In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in "law and police" at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that "police" had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. ("No justice, no peace!" Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published "A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis." He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and "the PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES."

It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun's ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel-in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary-persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called "commissioners"), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men "bobbies," for Bobby Peel.

It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published " An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World," calling for violent rebellion: "One good black man can put to death six white men." Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker's words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state's senators, "I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book." By "police," he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker's "Appeal," North Carolina formed a statewide "patrol committee."

New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city's elections.

American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor's office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.

Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren't yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.

The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, SWAT teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.

Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He'd served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. "For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I've studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks," he later explained. "After all we're conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society." Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.

To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A "police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army," Detroit's commissioner of police said. (Today's police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)

Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah's chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the "whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes-arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances." African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia's chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force's training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.

Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, " The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America." Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.

More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. "By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision," Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. "The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries."

Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California's, began as "highway patrols." Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. "One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners," its new chief said.

The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation's borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants' protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith's 1916 film "Intolerance," imagined relics of an unforgiving age.

Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like "Dragnet," starting in 1951, and "Adam-12," beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America's conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on crime," and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was "very much like fighting the Viet Cong." Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, "For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression."

As Elizabeth Hinton reported in " From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," the "frontline soldiers" in Johnson's war on crime-Vollmer-era policing all over again-spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. "If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum," Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. "We ain't rioting agains' all you whites," one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. "We're riotin' agains' police brutality." In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.

Johnson's Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it "a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria." James Baldwin attributed its "irresponsible ferocity" to "some pale, compelling nightmare-an overwhelming collection of private nightmares." The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, " Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing." During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency-the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed "the international dimension to the Administration's War on Crime." Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.

In 1968, Johnson's new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects-youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs-were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson's Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.

The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book " Varieties of Police Behavior," and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled "Broken Windows." On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called "community policing." (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the "service functions" of the police-"first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like"-which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson's work informed programs like Detroit's STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a "radical college professor," and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end STRESS arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. STRESS defended its methods. "We just don't walk up and shoot somebody," one commander said. "We ask him to stop. If he doesn't, we shoot."

For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. "Crime is a national-defense problem," Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. "You're in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile." Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers' Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.

Partly because of Biden's record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.

In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that "our members believe he will make America safe again." Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. "We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment," Trump said at Mt. Rushmore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. "We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people."

Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king's men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn't a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.

Those changes won't address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can't be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too. ♦

An earlier version of this piece misrepresented the number of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated as a result of police-inflicted injuries in emergency rooms.

Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests

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Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, Jill Lepore writes, is mainly slavery.

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.
If you would like to read more about the topic: We love to hear from our listeners! Tweet at us @throughlineNPR, send us an , or leave us a voicemail at (872) 588-8805.

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries.

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"#BlackLivesMatter: There has never been a reckoning for American policing's slave patrol origins"

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"#BlackLivesMatter: There has never been a reckoning for American policing's slave patrol origins"

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Dr Connie Hasset-Walker is assistant professor of Justice Studies and Sociology at Norwich University. She was interviewed by Devyani Onial about the roots of US police atrocities against African-Americans, and the way ahead for America after the extraordinary events that followed the murder of George Floyd. Police relations with the African American community have always been fraught. How much does it owe to the past? You have written about slave patrols. Can you please talk a bit about the violent roots of policing in the US and how systemic racism is?
I personally see the US history of slavery (about 250 years long) and then Jim Crow laws (about 80 years long) as very connected to what's happening now. American policing is decentralised, meaning there's no main headquarters that can set policy for all police departments throughout the country. To my knowledge, there has never been a reckoning for policing's slave-patrol origins. By reckoning, I mean an admission that it happened and a deep commitment to purge that past from the present and start over.

It is also worth noting that not all American states were slave states. At the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), there were only 34 states at the time (now there are 50); 15 of those 34 states were slave states. As the slave population grew in the slave states, there was concern among the white landowners, as well as the rest of those states' population, that there could be slave revolts and escapes. (And there were.) So the states began to pass slave laws or codes. These facilitated the creation of the slave patrols, sometimes also known as paddy rollers. Members of the slave patrols were typically white men.

Their job was to capture escaping slaves and return them to the plantations/slave owners; as well as terrorise and discipline any slaves that slave owners said were misbehaving. Their tactics were brutal, similar to actions that plantation overseers would use. The Carolina Colony (which would later become North and South Carolina) was the first to create slave patrols in 1704; by 1837, South Carolina slave patrols had more than 100 members - larger than the police forces of some northern cities.

By the end of the 1700s, every American slave state had slave patrols. They lasted for about 150 years, ending with the South's loss in the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which outlawed slavery.

After that, the former southern slave patrols morphed into police departments that technically were different from slave patrols, but were basically still charged with controlling the freed former slaves (Black people). About 30 years after the end of the Civil War, we start to see the passing of what are called Jim Crow laws. These laws basically kept segregation - separation of whites and blacks - in place legally until the late 1960s. A key factor in bringing Jim Crow to an end was the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964).

So 150 years of slave patrols (in the southern states; in the northern states, policing evolved differently) and about 80 years of Jim Crow laws, all enforced by police - this is 230 years of structural racism and violence in policing versus only about 50 years of post-Jim Crow policing. I am of the opinion that people cannot just flip 'off' the switch and forget about structural racism, discrimination and violence. It takes generations to evolve beyond that, and a commitment to do so.
Cases of police atrocities by whites against African Americans and little police accountability have been recorded regularly over the past decades. How has this particular aspect affected race relations in the US? Has it kept the two communities wary of each other?
In a word, yes (e.g., the African American community are wary of police, more so in some communities than others). While George Floyd's death as seen on widely available video (YouTube) is particularly terrible, there have been many others: Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Ahmaud Aubrey (recent), Breonna Taylor (recent), Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, and on and on and on. The difference nowadays, to me, is that everyone seems to have a smartphone and knows to pull it out and start video recording a citizen-police encounter once they see it; and then they upload it to their social media for the world to see.

If you know about the police beating of Rodney King back in Los Angeles, California, in 1991, Mr King was certainly not the first Black man to be beaten up by police, but it was the first time that someone video-recorded the beating. That video validated what many African Americans knew at that time - that Los Angeles police were very brutal towards Black people. The frequent lack of consequences in the justice system for police that beat up and sometimes kill African Americans - that was a leading cause of the start of the #Blacklivesmatter movement.

What is different about the murder of George Floyd is how quickly the police officer, Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on his neck, was charged with third-degree murder. (The charge has since been upgraded to second degree murder. The other officers who were present but did not intervene when Mr Floyd was killed have also been charged) Whether Mr Chauvin will ultimately be convicted... we'll see. But the swift arrest and issuing of a charge - that's important, and unusual.
The police are often highhanded with all minority groups, but would you say the bias is more stark against African Americans than, say, Hispanics or Asians?
I can't say definitely against which race/ethnic group police bias is worse; it would depend on what data were being used and how bias was defined and measured. In general, there are disproportionately more arrests of Blacks and Hispanics (disproportionate to their size in the overall US population) than of whites. Asians tend to get arrested less frequently in the US.
A disproportionate number of African Americans are in American prisons. Could you talk a bit about that?
Arresting/policing and corrections are two different branches of the justice system. They're related obviously, but there are differences. Much of the current disproportion of Blacks and people of colour in jails and prison - both men and women - stems from the "war on drugs" that was launched in America around the 1970s. Lots of get-tough-on-drugs laws were passed (e.g., three strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing laws).

Fast forward to 2020, most criminologists would agree that the "war on drugs" was basically a failure. It didn't stop people from buying or using drugs, but it did put lots of people of colour, African Americans particularly, in prison. This has more to do with modern racial disparities stemming from the war on drugs than the country's history of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
What reforms does the police need? Has anything been done in recent years, and what could be the road ahead? What would you say about police accountability?
There's no quick fix for systemic racism in policing, but my suggestions would be:

* Acknowledgement that the origins of American policing (slave patrols, enforcers of Jim Crow laws) still echo today

* Agreement that there cannot be another murder like what happened to George Floyd

* Continued hiring of more officers of colour & women, including in supervisory positions

* Have officers live in the communities they police

* Consequences for bad behaviour (arrest, charging)

* Proper training emphasising techniques to use and not use force, when to stop using force (i.e., when a citizen is adequately subdued and no longer a threat)

* Police unions should take ownership of this issue
Is underrepresentation of African Americans in law enforcement agencies part of the problem? Is there any data on their representation? Is the proportion better for other minority groups?
This is not my area of expertise, but from what I understand the hiring of Blacks as well as other people of colour to police forces has improved over the decades. I am of the impression that there is a lack of representation of non-whites in supervisory law enforcement positions. Hiring more Blacks, Hispanics and women into law enforcement will certainly help, but it's not the sole fix for systematic racism in policing. A more multi-pronged approach is needed.
📣 Express Explained is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@ieexplained) and stay updated with the latest Emmett Till's murder and the acquittal of his killers in 1955 became a rallying point against racism and was seen as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement. The riots of the 1960s, the Rodney King riots, what are the instances you would say that became turning points in America and where would you locate the killing of George Floyd in this?
My sincere hope is that Mr Floyd's murder - the sheer awfulness of it, how terrible his final moments must have been - is a catalyst to help bring about real change in police-citizen interactions and relationships. Sometimes in the wake of a terrible event, such as Martin Luther King's assassination, change can happen. I hope that will happen this time, so that another murder like George Floyd's will not happen again.

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#BlackLivesMatter: 'There has never been a reckoning for (American) policing's slave-patrol origins'

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Dr Connie Hasset-Walker is assistant professor of Justice Studies and Sociology at Norwich University. She was interviewed by Devyani Onial about the roots of US police atrocities against African-Americans, and the way ahead for America after the extraordinary events that followed the murder of George Floyd.

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The false racial narrative that justified slavery was never addressed and continues to haunt America.

The myth of racial hierarchy-the belief that Black people are inferior-was created to justify the enslavement of Black people. Enslavement could not be sustained as legitimate without a false narrative about Black people being less human or worthy of freedom that would make it justifiable.

That racist belief survived the formal abolition of slavery and evolved to include the belief that Black people are dangerous criminals. This was reinforced during the decades of racial terror lynchings that followed enslavement when white people defended the torture and spectacle murder of Black people as necessary to protect their property, families, and way of life from Black "criminals."

Criminalizing Black people was the basis for convict leasing, a system created to provide cheap labor after slavery was abolished. Southern lawmakers passed "Black Codes" so that African Americans could be arrested for "crimes" like loitering and forced to work in white-owned businesses and plantations throughout the South.

States passed laws to segregate Black people, banning them from sharing public accommodations, barring them from interracial relationships, and humiliating them by restricting them to marginalized spaces.

To this day, we have not adequately confronted the legacy of racial injustice and instead have let it evolve into the widespread presumption that people of color are suspicious, dangerous, and criminal-that young Black men are to be feared, monitored, and even hunted.

New language has emerged for the non-crimes that have replaced the Black Codes-driving while Black, napping while Black, jogging while Black. All reflect incidents in which African Americans were mistreated, assaulted, or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white.

The presumption of guilt assigned to people of color targets them for unfair treatment in the criminal justice system.

Black men are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men; Latino men are nearly three times as likely. Native Americans are incarcerated at more than twice the rate of white Americans.

In 2001, the Bureau of Justice Statistics projected that one of every three Black boys and one of six Latino boys born in 2001 will go to jail or prison under current trends. Black defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than Black-a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared "inevitable."

Numerous studies have demonstrated that as a result of a history of racial inequality, people have strong unconscious associations between Blackness and criminality. Implicit biases have been shown to affect policing and all aspects of the criminal justice system, leading to:

Disproportionately high rates of police stops, searches, and violence towards young men of color

Higher rates of childhood suspension, expulsion, and arrest at school

Disproportionate contact with the juvenile justice system

Harsher charging decisions and disadvantaged plea negotiations

A greater likelihood of being denied bail and diversion

An increased risk of wrongful convictions and unfair sentences

Higher rates of probation and parole revocation.

The presumption that people of color are dangerous and guilty is so deeply entrenched that studies have found that support for harsh criminal justice policies correlated with how many African Americans they believed were in prison: the more Black people they believed were incarcerated, the more they supported aggressive policing tactics and excessively punitive sentencing laws.

This bias has contributed to the U.S. prison population increasing from 250,000 in the early 1970s to over 2.2 million today. America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and communities of color are disproportionately impacted.

Our nation's history of racial injustice has polluted the environment in which the criminal justice administration is administered. The smog is suffocating and toxic. Understanding how today's criminal justice crisis is rooted in our country's history of racial injustice requires truthfully facing that history and its legacy.

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The false racial narrative that justified slavery was never addressed and continues to haunt America. The myth of racial hierarchy-the belief that Black people are inferior-was created to justify the enslavement of Black people. Enslavement could not be sustained as legitimate without a false narrative about Black people being less human or worthy of freedom that would make it justifiable.

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"How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing"

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"How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing"

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The more commonly known history-the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course-is that American policing can trace its roots back to English policing. It's true that centralized municipal police departments in America began to form in the early nineteenth century ( Potter, 2013), beginning in Boston and subsequently established in New York City; Albany, New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; Newark, New Jersey; and Baltimore. As written by Professor Gary Potter (2013) of Eastern Kentucky University, by the late nineteenth century, all major American cities had a police force. This is the history that doesn't make us feel bad.

When a relationship begins like this, can citizen mistrust of police ever fully be overcome? Has policing as an institution evolved far enough away from its origins to warrant Black communities' trust?

This article isn't the first public discussion of the history of racism in policing. Indeed, racism in policing is officially acknowledged by the National Law Enforcement Museum. More famously, comedian Dave Chappelle did a bit about it at the Brooklyn club, the Knitting Factory, back in 2015. A piece about the issue, published by the author in 2019 in the scholarly magazine The Conversation, got a lot of traction after the death of George Floyd. As of this writing, over 240,000 people have read that article. The reactions to The Conversation article have varied from positive to negative. Some readers agreed or wrote that it confirmed what they already suspected. Others disagreed ("It's [police/citizen relations] not much better for white people") or tried to minimize feelings of guilt ("black Americans played a significant role in the slave trade! So there is lots of blame to go around"). A few annoyed readers took the time to send an email rather than simply posting a comment in the comment section. One email received simply said, "Your a moron." (The author resisted the urge to reply that if the emailer wished to call the author a moron, then the emailer should use proper grammar.)

Why should there be hostility to simply reminding people of the history of events that already happened? After all, we-Americans-did this. Isn't owning one's actions the right thing to do, even if it makes us feel bad for a while? The ugly past should be revisited because there is still a problem with police/community relations with respect to African Americans.

How You Start: Slave Codes and Slave Patrols

In the 1880s, new forms of Black Codes known as Jim Crow laws were enacted across southern states. In effect until 1965, these new laws prohibited Blacks and whites from sharing public spaces, such as schools, libraries, bathrooms, and restaurants. The hardships of life for African Americans in the Jim Crow South (Mississippi, specifically) are the focus of a recent book by Jim Sturkey, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.Perhaps the most infamous image from this era is the separate but "equal" water fountain for white versus colored individuals, taken in 1950 by Elliot Erwitt in North Carolina (see here). Blacks who broke the law or violated norms during the Jim Crow period were often met with brutality at the hands of the police ( Robinson, 2017).

Fast forward to the 1960s and the formal end of the Jim Crow era. The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act came during a decade of much social and political upheaval. Opposition to the Vietnam War and other protest movements-for civil rights, women's rights, victims' rights, prisoners' rights-signaled that America had entered a new era of challenges to the status quo. In July 1964, civil rights activist Malcolm X would denounce what he called New York police's " outright scare tactics" in responding to racial tensions in the city. During this time of upheaval, the police acted as enforcers of the status quo. It was no longer about quashing slave uprisings. Indeed, citizen protests and police response to those protests were not just happening in the former slave states but throughout the country. According to Dr. Victor Kappeler (2014) of Eastern Kentucky University, the police were now tasked with responding to anyone who pushed back against the existing social, political, and economic structure of America-which seemed to disadvantage the poor and people of color. During the summers of the late 1960s, race riots broke out in cities across the country, particularly in 1967 and after the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The police responded at times harshly to the riots using dogs, fire hoses, and tear gas.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning that policing isn't alone in the criminal justice system in having an issue with institutional racism and discrimination. Other parts of the system-including courts and corrections-are also affected. Two words: wrongful conviction. Ava DuVernay's excellent Netflix miniseries When They See Us portrays the heartbreaking ordeal of the men-Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, and Yusef Salaam-known as the Central Park Five. Decades earlier came the wrongful conviction of teenagers known as the Scottsboro Boys. They were also falsely accused of raping two white women. These are not isolated incidents.

How We Finish?

For the record, the point of this article is not to assert that individual police officers are racist. The author has friends, family, and students in law enforcement who are good, ethical people and who view their primary job as to protect and serve the public. When speaking with police officer friends and family members in the wake of George Floyd's death, the word that came up most often was "disgusting" (how Floyd died). The point is that the overall institution had a terrible start in some (not all) aspects, for which there has never been a reckoning. Perhaps if policing-and the justice system more broadly-had done a better job of reconciling with its racist past, there wouldn't be calls currently to defund the police.

Yet, issues remain, such as racial profiling ( Meehan & Ponder, 2002). In New York City, police stop-and-frisk practices have been the subject of a recent federal lawsuit that found them to be unconstitutional in that they unfairly target Blacks and Hispanics. A new study by Stanford University researchers of 100 million traffic stops nationwide found evidence of racial profiling by officers in stopping drivers ( Pierson et al., 2020). The researchers found that Black and Hispanic drivers were stopped and searched more frequently than were white drivers, but this drops after sunset when the driver's race is harder to spot from a police car.

How far we have come, how far we have yet to go.

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How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing

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Though history books may say otherwise, policing in the United States has its roots in the slave patrols in the South. The institution of policing, and the larger justice system, must reconcile its past in order to evolve away from its racist roots.

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For National Police Week, a brief history of policing in the U.S. and how societal changes shaped the evolution of the force

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"Fear of a Black Uprising: Confronting the white pathologies that shape racist policing"

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"Fear of a Black Uprising: Confronting the white pathologies that shape racist policing"

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The summer of 2020 will be recorded as a once-in-a-generation uprising against police brutalization of Black people. The multiracial protests that erupted in all 50 states seemed to break the embargo-at least momentarily-against the official acknowledgment of the continuing legacy of anti-Black racism in American policing. Fueled by the video-capture of the casual hand-in-the-pocket-style murder of George Floyd, this mass repudiation might be read as an expression of the humanitarian values that the brutal slaying of Floyd flagrantly violated. But as the 24-hour coverage and daily analysis of the uprising revealed, the regime that produced Derek Chauvin and the still-uncharged killers of Breonna Taylor is not a broken one: It continues to work as it was designed to.

The deeper functions of American policing were revealed every night that breathless reporters told harrowing stories of protesters smashing windows with considerably more urgency than they relayed news of police officers smashing heads. Not even the frightening descent into a lawless police state could trump the anxiety over a possible takeover from the bottom. Cable TV viewers watching the commentary and recaps of the president's terroristic attack on peaceful protesters in front of the White House by an unidentified national police force were suddenly interrupted with the urgent story of a local drugstore break-in on the other side of the country-the perpetrators having long since departed from a scene that was miles from any active protests.

Not even the frightening descent into a lawless police state could trump the anxiety over a possible takeover from the bottom.

The reflexive treatment of erratic outbreaks of looting as a more ominous threat than the organized massing of state terror also speaks volumes about the nation's real civic priorities. Consternation over the loss of goods rather than the incalculable loss of eyes, limbs, and lives points to the bedrock realities on which modern policing is built. It was not simply that the vicious response of police to the mass protest (while the entire world was watching) was unexceptional. It was the violence-enabling pearl-clutching about looming social disorder that reminded us yet again that mainstream thinking is just as powerfully organized around the fear of the bogeyman as the nightmares of childhood are. This particular bogeyman is a phantom born of slavery, a fear embedded in the DNA of post-slavery society grounded in the recognition that orchestrated and professionalized violence might not be enough to preserve the shaky foundations of racial hierarchy.

The fear of being outnumbered and overrun by the indignant and unforgiving masses is that thing that goes bump in the night-the gnawing insecurity that the paddy rollers in the antebellum countryside would take care of while the misnamed keepers of the peace tucked in the owners and the elites for the night. Generation after generation, they do their work out of sight, as the descendants of the slaves and the descendants of the guardians play the same unchanged roles, only occasionally brought into unforgiving light by the dawn of freeze-frame technology.

I saw firsthand how the white elite, stuck in the bogeyman nightmare, gave their tacit approval to the ugly work of their guardians when a white woman invited neighbors in a tony university neighborhood to hold up a Black Lives Matter sign at the corner. All hell broke loose at the very thought; local business owners closed their shops while their landlord threatened to sue her for the loss of a day's business. All this for a sign expressing what should be the simple promise of living an unterrorized life in twenty-first-century America.

Such episodes are all-too-vivid reminders that the hopeful talk about the current reckoning may well return to its familiar and limited outlines when the fundamental question is raised: How can we imagine a better future without first contending with the darkness that underlies the pervasive fear of Black people? In a white supremacist society, that fear is like muscle memory. When the baseline of the social order is slavery, when the freedom-seeking self-help behavior of running away was called theft, how can any policing be anything more than fundamentally racist-regardless of who is playing the role of the police?

In order to prevent yet another reversion to the status quo of white moral panic, we need to prod the emerging new discourse around racial justice and policing to engage the deeper question of how we might reckon with, and finally dislodge, this toxic muscle memory that continually disfigures our body politic.

Beneath the facade of law enforcement is a steady barrage of incidents like the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in which the police and the institutions that hold guns would rather sustain white supremacy-whether it's legal or not-than substantiate any anti-racism. These episodes again reflect the original design of American policing, and focus on its larger context and purpose.

Scholars like Robin D.G. Kelley have recently reminded us that American policing is designed to protect property. In an interview with The Intercept, Kelley notes that original paddy rollers had one job: to recapture any and all escaped Black people and to return them to the owner.

The deployment of paddy rollers-the corps of white vigilantes who are etymologically and ideologically tied to modern police patrols-would rise and fall in concert with the paranoia of white elites haunted by the bogey of a slave revolt, of the sort that Toussaint Louverture led in Haiti in 1791. When the threat of revolt was in abeyance, slave owners would seek to institute checks on the paddy rollers' violent and destructive excesses-until, that is, the fear of a slave rebellion surfaced again. What many liberals unschooled in this basic history are wholly unwilling to say now is that the core function of the police isn't to protect every person from a randomized form of personal and property trespass but rather to protect white people against the larger population of subordinated people.

My colleague Cheryl Harris laid out the property-protection foundations of modern policing in her 1993 Harvard Law Review article "Whiteness as Property." Its crucial insights show how current oppression remains embedded in these formative and interconnected forces of American racism and property ownership. According to Harris, property rights are "contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race." Today's policing is a remarkably sturdy and long-lived adaptation to this racist social order, and still conforms to its fundamental directive-to protect racialized American property. This mandate always transcends liberal America's cries for reform.

In post-slavery-and post-policing-of-slavery-America, racist policing in the American slavocracy was also tied to partnerships with the private violence of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. That's why lynchings and other extralegal acts of white supremacy were reinforced by the firm hand of the U.S. government, as in the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. It's also why the legal system continues to forbear any serious effort to confront lynching and other forms of extralegal violence to the same extent that the state tries to police alleged trespasses within anti-racist movements.

Indeed, white supremacist groups in America have never been subject to the same crackdowns that are continually unleashed on anti-racist groups. The clumsy and misguided initiative from the Trump administration to label antifa a terrorist organization may look at first like another burst of flailing incompetence-but in fact it is grounded in the firmest of American traditions: state intimidation of those fighting for equality.

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran a Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) intending "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of" civil rights groups by engaging in tactics such as wiretaps, blackmail, spreading disinformation, raiding offices and homes, fabrication of evidence and perjury at trials, vandalism, and exposing targets to violence and death.

Though COINTELPRO has ended, the FBI's desire to destroy Black activism has not. COINTELPRO operated under the guise of investigating radical Black extremism and violent Black nationalism or separatism. The FBI continued to dedicate its resources to combating "Black separatism" long after COINTELPRO was dissolved in scandal in 1971.

In 2017, the FBI coined the term "Black Identity Extremism" (BIE) in direct response to increased Black activism and the growing Black Lives Matter movement following the killing of Michael Brown. By 2019, the threat previously described as BIE was grouped with White Supremacy Extremism (WSE) as two forms of the same kind of violence-Racially Motivated Violent Extremism. These allegedly equivalent tendencies were treated as a threat on par with ISIS, justifying a major program of surveillance, investigation, and infiltration.

Yet there is no similarly vigorous arrangement to interrogate the underpinnings of the likes of Dylann Roof and Timothy McVeigh-white men hell-bent on the production of whiteness-as-ideology-infused attacks on dissenting and nonwhite Americans. Just between the two of them, Roof and McVeigh claimed far more lives than any "BIE" has over the course of half a century. In Roof's case, he did so specifically in a Black church in South Carolina. His massacre was targeted and lethal-and it has not been met with anything like the same institutional force that has persecuted and injured peaceful Black people advocating that their loved ones not be killed by police. Instead, Roof and others like him are labeled lone wolves, their ideologies-much like Trump's-dismissed as fringe.

These facts point us toward a troubling but essential fact: that the behavior of police in the United States has hardly been about law enforcement; it's instead been about the protection of a very particular status quo. And that status quo is tied directly to the maintenance of the inferior status of Black people. It is a calculated legal institutionalization of white dominance that's been kept in place for all of American history.

During World War II, many Black soldiers were sent across the world to defend the lauded principles of this racially segmented nation. This was supposed to be a great unifying national crusade-the flattening of difference in the face of a true common enemy.

And yet, Black soldiers in Germany were tasked with cleaning the latrines of German prisoners of war, they were asked to sleep at the foot of flooded hills, and they were driven from German businesses by white American military police. In this very publication, in 1945, a Black soldier wrote, "You hear a lot of stuff about how homesick the overseas American soldier is for the good old USA. But you don't hear much of that from the Negro soldier. Not the ones in Europe. Anyway, not the ones I know, not the ones in the 41st Engineers. Hell, why should they be homesick? Homesick for Jim Crow, for poll taxes and segregated slums? Homesick for lynchings and race riots?"

When Trump boosts references to "white power"-and when we describe Trumpism as the politics of white nationalism-we must collectively recognize that such a claim is grounded in a layered history of coerced white superiority. And no matter the context surrounding it, this obsessive focus on the preeminence of whiteness remains central to the concept of America.

It's clear that American government has mirrored the intersectionally racist ills of society, and reinforced them at home and abroad. This brutal form of social mimicry harks back to philosophical concerns of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote more than 200 years ago of her fears that government would merely serve as the all-powerful arm of scalable oppression. When we see the operations of the white supremacist state from this vantage, it should be no surprise that the June killing of a Black federal security officer in Oakland by Air Force Sgt. Steven Carrillo has gotten little attention, whereas the fantasy threat of antifa, Black "thugs," and "identity extremists" remains central to the entire political establishment's discourse.

Carrillo has since been tied to the so-called boogaloo movement, and officers found that his clothes were festooned with symbols-and that his social media profiles actively engaged the claims of this white-national-identity group. FBI Special Agent Jack Bennett says Carrillo and his co-conspirator Robert A. Justus Jr. used Black Lives Matter protests as a cover for their plans to attack law enforcement. In his getaway, Carrillo wrote-in his own blood-"BOOG" on the hood of a hijacked car.

If the backlash to police reform were really about protecting the police, this story would be shared by every Blue Lives Matter "advocate" in the country. It would have warranted a robust response from friend-of-the-police Donald Trump, and it would have brought about the intensive, widespread response of federal law enforcement that the specter of "looting" provoked in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing.

But that's not what the pro-police backlash is about. It's about white supremacy. So when the person doing the killing is a white supremacist, it hardly prompts a response. And it certainly doesn't spark any law-and-order tweeting from the Oval Office, or any outraged yelling from the Trump-aligned golf carts in The Villages, Florida.

Again, the explanation here is painfully simple: The fear of marauding Black masses undermining white people's well-being, security, and lives is more horrifying than actual terrorists conspiring to kill Black cops. Until this undercurrent of alarm is ferreted out, and our racial bogeymen confronted in their true and full profile in the light of day, we cannot begin to untangle the close relationship between policing and the white supremacist social structure that policing props up.

The call to defund the police might thus be framed more accurately, and broadly, as the mandate to dismantle the hyper-militaristic, racist functions of the police as the coercive power of white nationalism. In other words, defunding the police needs to be a call for the de-weaponizing of white supremacy.

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The summer of 2020 will be recorded as a once-in-a-generation uprising against police brutalization of Black people. The multiracial protests that erupted in all 50 states seemed to break the embargo-at least momentarily-against the official acknowledgment of the continuing legacy of anti-Black racism in American policing.

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Slavery by Another Name
Clip | 32m 37s

Watch a summary of SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME. This documentary challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality.

Aired: 02/17/14

Rating: NR

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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Slavery by Another Name | Preview: Slavery by Another Name

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Slavery by Another Name Clip | 32m 37s Watch a summary of SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME. This documentary challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.

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"Slavery and the Origins of the American Police State"

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"Slavery and the Origins of the American Police State"

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Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, the question of freed Black people's status in the postwar South was still very much unresolved. Under black codes, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. Outrage over black codes helped undermine support for President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Party.

Reconstruction Begins

When President Abraham Lincoln announced the impending passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in early 1863, the stakes of the Civil War shifted dramatically. A Union victory would mean no less than revolution in the South, where the "peculiar institution" of slavery had dominated economic, political and social life in the antebellum years.

In April 1865, as the war drew to a close, Lincoln shocked many by proposing limited suffrage for African Americans in the South. He was assassinated days later, however, and his successor Andrew Johnson would be the one to preside over the beginning of Reconstruction.

Did you know? In the years following Reconstruction, the South reestablished many of the provisions of the black codes in the form of the so-called "Jim Crow laws." These remained firmly in place for almost a century, but were finally abolished with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Johnson, a former senator from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union during the war, was a firm supporter of states' rights and believed the federal government had no say in issues such as voting requirements at the state level.

Under his Reconstruction policies, which began in May 1865, the former Confederate states were required to uphold the abolition of slavery (made official by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off their war debt. Beyond those limitations, the states and their ruling class-traditionally dominated by white planters-were given a relatively free hand in rebuilding their own governments.

Passage of the Black Codes

Even as former enslaved people fought to assert their independence and gain economic autonomy during the earliest years of Reconstruction, white landowners acted to control the labor force through a system similar to the one that had existed during slavery.

To that end, in late 1865, Mississippi and South Carolina enacted the first black codes. Mississippi's law required Black people to have written evidence of employment for the coming year each January; if they left before the end of the contract, they would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and were subject to arrest.

In South Carolina, a law prohibited Black people from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100. This provision hit free Black people already living in Charleston and former slave artisans especially hard. In both states, Black people were given heavy penalties for vagrancy, including forced plantation labor in some cases.

Limits on Black Freedom

Under Johnson's Reconstruction policies, nearly all the southern states would enact their own black codes in 1865 and 1866. While the codes granted certain freedoms to African Americans-including the right to buy and own property, marry, make contracts and testify in court (only in cases involving people of their own race)-their primary purpose was to restrict Black peoples' labor and activity.

Some states limited the type of property that Black people could own, while virtually all the former Confederate states passed strict vagrancy and labor contract laws, as well as so-called "anti-enticement" measures designed to punish anyone who offered higher wages to a Black laborer already under contract.

Black people who broke labor contracts were subject to arrest, beating and forced labor, and apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters.

Passed by a political system in which Black people effectively had no voice, the black codes were enforced by all-white police and state militia forces-often made up of Confederate veterans of the Civil War-across the South.

Impact of the Black Codes

The restrictive nature of the codes and widespread Black resistance to their enforcement enraged many in the North, who argued that the codes violated the fundamental principles of free labor ideology.

After passing the Civil Rights Act (over Johnson's veto), Republicans in Congress effectively took control of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment-which granted "equal protection" of the Constitution to former enslaved people-and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union.

The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." During this period of Radical Reconstruction (1867-1877), Black men won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress.

As indicated by the passage of the black codes, however, white southerners showed a steadfast commitment to ensuring their supremacy and the survival of plantation agriculture in the postwar years. Support for Reconstruction policies waned after the early 1870s, undermined by the violence of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.

By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black people had seen little improvement in their economic and social status, and the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region had undone the political gains they had made. Discrimination would continue in America with the rise of Jim Crow laws, but would inspire the civil rights movement to come.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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Black Codes - Definition, Dates & Jim Crow Laws

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Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War.

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How you start is how you finish? the slave patrol and jim crow origins of policing.

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a of force of government mean to serve and protect civil disputes

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The purpose of having a police force is to enforce the law and let people know what to do and what not to do.

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How You Start is How You Finish

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To “maintain order” however due to many other failers in our gov and education system, this claim becomes skewed based on the officer.

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Black codes directly contributed to the criminalization of black and brown Americans. This is evident as black codes were put into place purely to gain control over and to oppress black people.

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To keep the peace and to protect civilians, maintaining order.

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Black Codes contributed to the false perception of Black criminality because its purpose was the restrict, and keep black people in one place to gain some sort of control over them.

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Then, black people were seen as impure and evil by everyone especially people in power. Today, this has only slightly become better in people. But it most notably needs to get better in politicians and people of power.

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The aspect that looks similar are things like stereotypes, where people get this false perception or insight of any certain community. What looks different is the way they are treated, although it may not be as bad as back then, but just because it lowered, doesn't mean its not happening at all.

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It is very saddening that racism is promptly institutionalized and taught to the youth. Also due to the extensive institutionalized racism, marginalized people sometimes tend to internalize those lessons.

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Black codes contribute to the false perception of criminality

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As much as any thing like this is unfortunate, all we can really hope for is for the future to not do the same.

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historically black people were treated for cheap labor. black people are still a minortity group today.policing is a big issue and we are divided racially as a country

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I am thinking that as much as I do want any sort of discrimination to not be there, it will always exist, just because that is how people are. No matter be it race, sex, intelligence, I don't think there would be a point in time where this would end.

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As much as we want to move past racism, the reality is that it is inside the fighters for racism and the fighters against slavery. As a unit we all have to work to rid the country/ world of slavery however, that seems very unlikely to happen now.

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k

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a of force of government mean to serve and protect civil disputes

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a of force of government mean to serve and protect civil disputes

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k

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historically black people were treated for cheap labor. black people are still a minortity group today.policing is a big issue and we are divided racially as a country

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historically black people were treated for cheap labor. black people are still a minortity group today.policing is a big issue and we are divided racially as a country

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"How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing"

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to maintain order and law

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presumption of guilt

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For law and order

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It contributed because it spread the belief that black and brown people couldn't be tamed on their own, it spread the false narrative that blacks were scary and needed to be under control. So in order to keep them in check or whatever they started using black codes to outlaw black and brown people.

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The purpose of a police force is to keep the common people in line.

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The purpose of a police force is to keep the common people in line.

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Black codes gave white people an excuse to treat Blacks completely differently from the laws for whites. They could basically do whatever they wanted to Blacks, with no repurcussions.

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Black codes gave white people an excuse to treat Blacks completely differently from the laws for whites. They could basically do whatever they wanted to Blacks, with no repurcussions.

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to police the people and make sure people abide by the "laws"

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to police the people and make sure people abide by the "laws"

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I feel really bad for all the murdered Black slaves who weren't doing anything wrong but were blamed and killed, just for "fun".

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I feel really bad for all the murdered Black slaves who weren't doing anything wrong but were blamed and killed, just for "fun".

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black codes allowed for the unfairness and over policing on black people. Due to the over policing from black codes, this played into the perception that black people were bad, criminals etc.

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black codes allowed for the unfairness and over policing on black people. Due to the over policing from black codes, this played into the perception that black people were bad, criminals etc.

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I'm thinking about how different the world would be if Black people did the same to Whites; how entitled would White people act now?

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I'm thinking about how different the world would be if Black people did the same to Whites; how entitled would White people act now?

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America has hated and still sometimes continues to hate Black people.

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America has hated and still sometimes continues to hate Black people.

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Back then, black people were seen as scary and they were prohibted to do certain things like be a politician or drink out of certain fountains. This is kinda similar to today with false preconceptions people make on other people like stereotypes and stuff. when you can walk into a store and be judged just by the way you look, yeah that's something that has been passed on from history.

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Throughline - "America Police"

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The fact things like this happened many years ago and it's still so relevant in today's society where we can't even take a step forward from history, many of those racist laws and policies still exist in work places and schools and it's honesty so stupid.

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to make sure no one breaks the law