Introduction

Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré and Alana Yu-lan Price

 

“To Protect and Serve” won the Los Angeles Police Department’s motto contest in 1955, and in the decades since, the slogan has been slapped on patrol cars across the country.1 Though it’s catchy, the motto is remarkably unspecific: Who—or what—is being protected? Who is being served? What are police actually doing in the United States, and toward what ends?

At Truthout we’ve consistently endeavored to address these questions through a journalistic lens. Historically, the most harmful impacts of policing have often been kept from the news headlines. In fact, journalism’s systematic failure to report on police violence has fueled the continuation of this violence. However, since the murder of Mike Brown, we’ve seen a surge in media attention to anti-Black police violence. In this climate of heightened media awareness, Truthout has continued its longstanding attention to these issues. Instead of simply reporting on current instances of violence and compiling shocking statistics, we’ve striven to draw a more comprehensive picture of policing in the context of American racism—particularly anti-Black racism—and oppression. The question, for us, is not “How do we confront the fact that police are doing things that are wrong?” but rather “How do we confront the institution of policing as a whole—an institution whose entire grounding and current practice is wrong?”

To confront this question, we must focus in on how recent police killings of young people of color in the US fit into the historical and global contexts of anti-Black racism, as well as racism and xenophobia more broadly. In this collection, we’ve pulled together essays from a wide range of Truthout contributors, probing at questions about the purpose of the police and what they accomplish in the United States. In addition to focusing on anti-Black violence, this book explores police violence against Brown, Indigenous and other marginalized communities, drawing connections between these overlapping manifestations of oppression.

Influenced by the work of Mariame Kaba, Beth Richie, Michelle Alexander, Angela Y. Davis, Fania Davis, Che and Reina Gossett, Dean Spade, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and Mimi Kim, and inspired by the work of restorative and transformative justice activists across the country, we have drawn together articles that not only expose the racism and violence of policing in the United States but also report on efforts to develop alternative methods to keep each other safe.

The past couple of years have been a time of mass action, movement building and collective struggle. The pieces in the latter part of this collection delve into these movements and their long-term meanings, exploring what is being struggled against and what is being built. The second half of this book also asks: If not the police, then what? We can’t fully challenge the institution of the police without discussing alternative ways of fostering safety in our communities.

Policing, Racist Violence and False Notions of Safety

The book’s first essay, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” by Nicholas Powers, tackles the significance of anti-Black police violence head-on, examining how Black children “aren’t seen as part of the future” and are deemed “disposable” by both the police that bully them and the society that incarcerates them en masse. In Chapter 2, an investigation into police coercion and framing in Detroit, Aaron Cantú demonstrates how police orchestrated false murder convictions for a number of Black men using jailhouse informants—convictions that resulted in decades-long and sometimes lifelong prison sentences. One of these men is now fighting to be released—and that fight has revealed a deep-seated culture of racist, systemic corruption.

Of course, police corruption is not confined to one city or one department. In their investigative report in Chapter 3, Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers uncover the failure of the City of Chicago to acknowledge the continued presence of repeat perpetrators of violence on its police force. The city’s almost universal failure to fire or otherwise hold accountable officers who kill people—some officers have even been granted awards for it—is not unique or anachronistic; it ties in with a larger culture of white-supremacy-based policing, in which brutal violence against people of color is simply considered part of the job.

Also zeroing in on an example of larger structural dynamics drawn from Chicago, Adam Hudson traces the historical roots of police torture in the United States in “Beyond Homan Square” (Chapter 4). Hudson points out that whenever it becomes known that the US is perpetrating torture—whether in CIA black sites abroad or in police torture sites at home, such as Chicago’s Homan Square—these instances are framed as anomalies. They are not anomalies; Hudson locates them within a long tradition of institutionalized torture, a practice embedded in the slavery, imperialism and colonialism on which the US was constructed.

On a similarly historical note, in Chapter 5, Roberto Rodriguez examines the “many tentacles” of violence against communities of color, including the deportation of large numbers of Latino migrants and the rarely publicized killings of undocumented and Indigenous people. He traces these intertwined strains of violence back to the era of colonialism and its racialized hierarchies, noting, “There has never been a time in the history of this country in which people of color were treated by the legal system as full human beings with corresponding full human rights.”

In “Killing Africa” (Chapter 6), William C. Anderson notes that the struggles of Black people against police repression and violence are hardly specific to the United States: “In many different ways,” he writes, “much of the world is invested in killing Africa.” To combat this global web of violence, Anderson calls for an international movement that centers the needs of the African diaspora, addressing not only policing but also colonialism, imperialism and economic violence.

In addition to being deeply racialized, policing and police violence are deeply gendered. Looking at the stories of Sandra Bland, Mya Hall, Janisha Fonville and others, Andrea J. Ritchie examines the patterns of police violence against women and trans and queer people of color in Chapter 7. Ritchie rightly insists that we must center the experiences of women and trans people of color in conversations around police violence—as well as in discussions of how to move toward a radical reimagining of public safety.

Gendered police violence also plays out in the acts for which people are criminalized. In Chapter 8, Victoria Law reports on the vulnerability that pregnant people face in their encounters with police, exposing police encroachment into the lives of pregnant people of color and other marginalized groups. Of course, policing weighs heavily not only on pregnancies but also on parenting. Eisa Nefertari Ulen’s essay “Black Parenting Matters” (Chapter 9) explores the terror and sadness that many Black parents experience in the face of the realization that their children may face racist policing, and dreams of liberation for her own son.

A Police-Free Future?

What does “being free” mean, in relation to the police? Rachel Herzing has an answer: Instead of “police reform”—slapping Band-Aids on torture and death—we must find ways to shrink the role of police in our lives, striving toward the eventual abolition of the institution of police. In Chapter 10, Herzing lights the way down that path.

The role of youth has been central in the current struggle against racist police violence. The Chicago-based group We Charge Genocide, founded and led primarily by Black youth, made its way to the United Nations to present testimony on the killing of young Black people by Chicago police. Asha Rosa, Monica Trinidad and Page May chronicle the group’s journey in “We Charge Genocide: The Emergence of a Movement” (Chapter 11).

Not only are Black women some of the primary targets of police violence, they are also at the forefront of the struggle against it, as Thandi Chimurenga describes in Chapter 12. In fact, it was three Black queer women who originated the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and led its transformation into a movement.

Indigenous people are killed at a higher rate by police than any other racial group, and the role of Native activists in the movement for Black lives has underscored the intersection of Native and Black struggles against rampant state violence. In Chapter 13, Kelly Hayes highlights the groups’ intersecting oppressions—and also acknowledges the rifts that have built up over the centuries between Black and Native communities, as each has struggled against multiple types of state violence. Nevertheless, Hayes writes, “Many of us believe that neither of our communities can be free without the liberation of the other.”

In Chapter 14 Mike Ludwig urges readers to consider making an unusual New Year’s resolution: “Don’t Call the Police.” Ludwig isn’t saying that those who do call the police are somehow betraying their communities; rather, he holds that resolving to avoid unnecessary 911 calls is simultaneously a protest against a racist and brutal system and a challenge to create vibrant new structures with which to build safety.

What would a world beyond policing look like? In Chapter 15, Candice Bernd profiles community groups that are working to provide “first-response” care in ways that minimize contact with the police, particularly in the case of mental health emergencies and other situations in which police have a proven record of exacerbating the immediate circumstances of those involved. These experiments—grounded in the principle of neighbors caring for neighbors—provide glimmers of how we might create our own modes of safety and security.

This book ends with “Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation,” in which Ejeris Dixon takes on the question often avoided by even the most adamant opponents of policing: How do we confront violence, if not by deploying armed state forces to fight it? Dixon, drawing from her own community organizing experience, instructs us to build alternative forms of community safety with as much energy as we fight police violence, even when the fruits of our organizing aren’t immediately, vividly apparent.

Challenging the police as an institution must involve asking big and unsettling questions. What does being safe even mean? How many of our society’s assumptions about safety are grounded in racism, injustice and violence? If we can’t count on an ever-present state “service” to “protect” us, what can we count on?

Is it possible to build toward a world in which we can count on each other?