Two meetings ago we discussed that Broken Windows may not have caused the drop in crime of the 90s. In this meeting, we will discuss how Broken Windows may be the underlying cause of the current conflict between the police and their community. In particular, excessive policing of minor offenses results in an overwhelming economic burden on the underclass due to excessive penalties.
Emmy Award winning comedian John Oliver gives three examples of excessive policing:
It’s hard to imagine how the police practices as characterized by John Oliver could do anything but damage general police/community relations. However, if we’re trying to understand relations specifically between the police (whatever the race or ethnicity of a particular police officer) and black communities, there are many other factors that may have more relevance to the violence occurring between them.
ReplyDeleteNot least among these is “the peculiar institution” of slavery. It seems to me that the full effects of America’s history of slavery have never been adequately addressed. We don’t fully understand the long-term personal and social consequences of forcibly taking people from their homes, their families, and communities, turning them into property, preventing them from forming new families and communities once deposited in chains in a confusing and foreign land, using them as free labor to amass personal wealth and promote economic growth, and officially defining them as less than human. And this set of conditions prevailed for almost 250 years, more time than has passed since Emancipation. Few if any Americans would endorse the practice today, but many want to treat slavery as if it were a thing best left in the past, like someone who used to drink and smoke heavily now struggling with lung and kidney disease while ignoring what got them there. If you have no idea what permanent impact your habits had on your internal organs, you’re handicapped in managing your treatment. As many white folks quite accurately proclaim, they never owned any slaves, but slavery was a toxin stirred into the mix that became America, and ignoring that reality will not make its consequences disappear, whatever they may be.
Racism was a critical part of the extreme practice of prejudice and discrimination that was slavery. How else could the beneficiaries of slavery have justified to themselves the above practices? But racism did not disappear when slavery was abolished. Blacks were victimized by laws that gave states the right to imprison people for not having any productive activity (e.g. loitering and vagrancy) and then to rent those same prisoners out to private industry. The state raised some needed revenue and industry had ready access to very cheap labor. Thousands of blacks were lynched for the entertainment of white people, and the perpetrators never received so much as a slap on the wrist. Then blacks and whites were murdered for having the temerity to try to do something about this injustice. While it’s impossible to say how much these factors have contributed to current levels of violence, it is also a fact that blacks have generally faced obstacles—both formal and informal—in accessing quality education, healthcare, employment, insurance, housing, home ownership (the ticket to wealth accumulation for the middle class), and just about everything that society would consider necessary to a good quality of life.
One does not have to exercise much imagination to see why some blacks are cynical and angry, particularly the young stuck in poorer inner cities. It is also not hard to imagine why that anger might manifest itself as violence. (Need I point out that one can understand it without condoning it.)Throw guns into the mix, threatening the lives of anyone who gets in the way, and we have two groups, the police on one side and some portion of the black population on the other, who might be forgiven for seeing themselves as armed enemy combatants.
Just knowing our history doesn’t by itself change anything, but honestly assessing any problem is usually a necessary first step to resolving it.