In the foreword to his poetry anthology on police violence, Resisting Arrest, Tony Medina writes that the killing of Black people by police officers is “an American pastime way past its prime.”
On Memorial Day in Minneapolis, that depraved American pastime Medina describes happened again. George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, was slowly killed for all the world to see by four police officers. It was the same day that Amy Cooper, a white woman, called the police on a Black birdwatcher in New York City’s Central Park, falsely alleging that he was threatening her while knowing the danger that such a call would put him in. The man, Christian Cooper, had asked her to put her dog on a leash.
Stinson, a former police officer, says police are often disconnected from the neighborhoods and even the cities they serve.
When protests and marches over Floyd’s killing erupted in Minneapolis and dozens of other American cities, I reached out to A. Raphael Johnson, a friend of mine who lives in Minneapolis, to find out what was happening right in the epicenter. Johnson described how the mostly peaceful protests there were soon met with nasty pushback from the police. The streets descended into chaos, with widespread destruction and looting met with weapons of war: rubber bullets, tear gas, concussion grenades, and drone surveillance.
“I really hadn’t ever seen anything like it,” Johnson told me, despite having experienced his share of violent confrontations between dissenting citizens and their government, including in Liberia where he was once stationed as an aid worker. One night, during the Minneapolis unrest, as Johnson and some of his neighbors sought to put out a fire in a building that was threatening nearby homes, police officers on patrol fired upon them.
Teresa Padron, a student at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, experienced a similar atmosphere around the Twin Cities. Padron, a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, the scene of the violent and tragic “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, participated day after day in protests over the killing of Floyd. It was the Charlottesville experience that made her sense that, this time, the lid was about to blow.
“The killing was really cut and dry,” she told me. “No one could understand the delay in arresting the officers.” But the police, according to Padron, did everything they could to prevent the officers from being arrested. Minneapolis suspended bus and light-rail traffic, closed highways in and around the Twin Cities, and turned one of the nation’s most militarized police departments loose to wreak havoc, even destroying a medic tent that protesters had set up.
It was not much different in other cities. Protesters in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were also met with military-style force from their police departments. The National Guard was activated in some states.
But this repressive response has not stopped the push for dramatic police reform, which now enjoys unprecedented public support. Why did this happen, and what lessons can we learn from it?
On a certain level, the killing of George Floyd feels like an Emmett Till–Rosa Parks moment all in one. A social and political trigger for radical change. There have been other high-profile police killings caught on camera (Eric Garner, Alton Sterling) but the public execution of George Floyd broke the political levee. The Black Lives Matter movement has now been joined by millions of people, all over the world.
And because of the racist nature of the killings, the protests have evolved also into dissent against white supremacy and imperial domination in all of its forms. During the protests, statues of Christopher Columbus were vandalized or destroyed. Symbols of the Confederacy and white supremacy are coming down, one way or another.
Jean Beaman, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote in 2015 that the Ferguson protests amounted to “a community reframing of dominant narratives.” The new generation is fully aware of what it sees, according to Beaman—“individuals from often ignored communities are [being] devalued.” There are statistics to back up these sentiments.
Black people today are three times more likely to be killed by the police in the United States and 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed when it happens, according to Mapping Police Violence, a website that provides “the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013.” During this time, Black people accounted for 28 percent of the police killings, and just 13 percent of the population.
In all of 2019, there were only twenty-seven days where the police somewhere did not kill someone in the United States. In the first half of 2020, police killed 598 people of all races. On the same day George Floyd was killed, at least five other people died at the hands of police in other cities and towns.
Soon after Floyd’s murder, the public learned of how Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency medical technician from Louisville, Kentucky, was shot to death in her home by police officers serving a no-knock warrant. In February, Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man out jogging, was shot and killed in Brunswick, Georgia, by an ex-police officer and his son; a video of the killing became public only in early May.
These reminders of the nation’s legacy of racist violence came just as forty million Americans had filed for unemployment due to COVID-19. President Donald Trump, who fumbled the country’s response to the deadly pandemic, remained sympathetic to the instruments of white supremacy throughout the unrest, especially in his ardent defense of statues that celebrate enslavers and even Confederate officers.
The Democrat-led House of Representatives passed a bill to ban chokeholds, prohibit no-knock warrants, end qualified immunity for police officers, and create a federal database of misconduct of police officers. The legislation, known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020, has little, if any, chance of becoming law, given resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Other, more localized efforts show some promise. The state of Colorado just enacted a law that eliminates qualified immunity for police officers in certain cases, addresses use of force issues by officers, and sets requirements for body cameras for all officers within a three-year period. The Republican-controlled legislature in Iowa passed a police anti-chokehold law in one day after the protests over the killing of Floyd.
But Phil Stinson, a Bowling Green State University professor of criminal justice and a collector of data on police misconduct, is skeptical of these piecemeal reform efforts. The author of Criminology Explains Police Violence sees the need for more of an overhaul.
“This type of thing keeps happening because many police officers have a fear of Black men and Black boys,” Stinson says. “It is learned behavior through the police socialization process into the police subculture. It is institutional racism.”
Stinson, a former police officer, says police are often disconnected from the neighborhoods and even the cities they serve. “They live in different parts of the cities where they work, or maybe in the suburbs, or maybe in rural towns many miles away,” he explains. “Their children attend different schools than the children in the communities where they patrol as police officers. Their families worship in different places, and their families shop in different stores and eat in different restaurants.”
Making matters worse is the warrior mentality embedded into police culture. Police, Stinson says, “wear quasi-military uniforms, work in law enforcement organizations with military rank structures, and act like warriors each shift to go and fight the ‘war against crime,’ the ‘war against drugs,’ or some other war. Warriors need enemies, and those are most easily found in the people they fear the most: Black men and Black boys.”
Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing, doesn’t believe simple reforms will work because policing is a “system of managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor people and nonwhite peoples.”
Policing today, Vitale argues, is “a structural, political project of criminalizing the poor and most marginal communities in our society, rather than dealing with their problems.” Vitale advocates removing police from schools, mental health facilities, and ending the war on drugs to reallocate public funds to address these problems differently. This is fundamentally what defund and abolish advocates are proposing.
Charlotte Colantti, a housing rights organizer in the Twin Cities, also gets to the heart of the problem and highlights the racial dynamic in play. She notes that Floyd’s murder took place in a part of Minneapolis that is diverse, multiracial, and thriving. But the reality, she says, is different.
“Minneapolis’s progressive affluence [for white residents] is premised on intensive segregation and startling racial disparities maintained through police violence,” Colantti says. “That’s part of the reason the protests blew up; because of the naked hypocrisy between the city’s liberal self-image and the deeply racist reality.”
Minneapolis is one of the nation’s most racially unequal cities. Black families there earn, on average, less than half as much as white families. The city also does poorly on racial equality in homeownership rates and education.
All of this should help explain why calls to defund or abolish the police have resonated throughout the country. The overall demand by protesters is for a new society in the United States. The goal, says Ruth Wilson Gilmore (no relation), a prison abolitionist scholar, is to “realize a new way of being, given what it is we already know how to do.”