Context #MATTERs: The Police Origin Story

Part One, in a two-part documentary follow-up to the audio drama #MATTER, traces modern policing down to its roots, and considers unexamined repercussions joined by some of the nation's leading activists, historians, and thinkers. This episode is brought to you in collaboration with ONEOPP, a social justice coalition working to end police brutality.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hashtag Matter is a production of Shonda Land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio and an association with Wolf
at the Door. This episode was brought to you in
collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition working to
end police brutality, and there's two part documentary follow up
to Hashtag Matter will trace modern policing down to its roots,

(00:23):
and we'll consider unexamined repercussions, joined by some of the
nation's leading activists, historians, and thinkers. Maybe by contextualizing our past,
we can better define our future, a future that includes
an exciting new normal where we invest in resources that
build safe communities and healthy kids. Listen up, your boy,

(00:45):
Pooch Hall in the building, and this is context matters.
We should all agree. The answer is not to defund
the police, is to fund the police. PARMA from How

(01:07):
Did We Get Here? Part one, the Police Origin Story.
Conversations that we think are about policing are often about
much more policing, and particularly in the US, here is
sociologist Nikki Jones. One thing that I think is is
necessary is an understanding of the institution of policing that

(01:30):
we have right now in this moment, and how it
is reflective of a fifty year investment in training and
reform and professionalization. So today we have the most well armed,
well trained, and in fact well funded police departments in

(01:51):
big cities in this country than we've had in our
nation's history, and yet we still have the problems that
we have in part because of the ways that systemic
racism is embedded in the routine practices of policing. Author, thinker,

(02:15):
and speaker on issues of identity and race in America
for the entirety of American history, of US history, UM,
from the moment that you know, white Colinears, colonizers landed
um in this country, that fear of populations of color,

(02:39):
of Native and black populations has been stoked. That fear
has been nurtured, and the idea that you have to
have an armed response of the ready for it is
something that has been written into law. Even before we
had a country, there were colonies here in the United
States where you could not leave your home without a gun.
And this was all part of this fear of Native

(03:01):
people's that we're working out there to get you right.
Here's Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History, African American Studies in
Law at Yale University. In the Antebellum South, the kind
of predecessor to modern police departments as we know them
are slave patrols, which basically empowered any white person to

(03:26):
arrest and detain any person of African descent. And the
slave patrols had three primary duties. They were supposed to
remove contraband from enslaved people, contraband being books or guns.
They were charged with raiding slave dwellings and slave homes,

(03:47):
and also kind of policing and maintaining social control and
surveillance around the area of the plantation. Slave patrols a
part of this big sort of legal oppressive system. Historian
Manacious Sinha Basically, many of the slave codes and the

(04:08):
fugitive slave laws did what we call today the criminalization
of blackness. So when the police force grows in America,
it grows in tandem with very imperilous ideas about nine
non white people and policing non white people. Black people
were treated in law in the South as property. It's
human property. When you had emancipation in many slave societies,

(04:32):
slaveholders were losing their human property, leave alone talking about
compensating enslaved people for generations of unpaid labor. But it
was an economic system. We've always viewed things in terms
of property, and we're hyper capitalist nation that you know,
broke off from another from like the O G hyper

(04:53):
capitalist station right where you had landowners that literally owned everyone.
The truth is that the actual function of police and
policing is around property, and the people who know that
most are often the people who love the most property. Right.
But what we've had to do in order to get
people to participate in capitalist systems is we've had to

(05:15):
romanticize the idea of property. We've had to turn that
into love. You love your children, they're your children, and
you keep them safe, and you get pride and what
they accomplish and how much wealth they will bring in
one day. Right, your home is your American dream, is
piece of land that you own, and we say that

(05:36):
that's love. But the truth is is that the ways
in which we've weaponized police to protect a violent capitalism
build the story that the property is love, that the
property is sacred, that that's the goal and the dream.
So that then we can say, these are the people
who threaten that, and they threaten not just your home,

(05:57):
they threaten your love, They threaten you know everything that
you are, that you have. So I think people feel
as if we are tackling these problems for the first time,
but in fact, activists, abolitionists and of course African Americans
themselves have fought against this for the longest time ever

(06:18):
since slavery was instituted in this country. Here's militia again
now in areas like in the District of Columbia, Washington,
d C. When emancipation comes. During the Civil War, slaveholders
were given around three hundred dollars each as compensation for
loss of property. One can see that people were much
more concerned about protecting property than they were in protecting

(06:40):
human lives in you know, the human rights of black
people in this concept of value in and protecting property
above human life doesn't end with emancipation. During reconstruction, Southern
states swiftly passed their own versions of black codes. In
ninete century America, we didn't have the kind of police

(07:01):
forces that we have today in modern America. They started
emerging in the nineteenth century in some cities, and they
grow bigger, bigger later on. Many times in the South
it is used to enforce Jim Crow passing laws that
discriminate against black people economically. So there's already the antagonistic

(07:22):
relationship between the police and black people. It's not as
if things never change, but each decade, you know, moves differently.
Once again, Elizabeth Hinton, one of the lost opportunities in
US history, and I think certainly with respect to the
future of racial inequality and the policing crisis, was the

(07:47):
Coroner Commission's report. And Lyndon Johnson called the Coroner Commission
in the middle of the Detroit Rebellion of nineteen sixty seven.
This was the long hot summer where there was unprecedented
violence in Americans at ease. No society can tolerate massive
violence any more than a body can tolerate massive disease.

(08:07):
But just saying that does not solve the problem. What happened,
Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent
it from happening? Again and again? Johnson calls the Kronner
Commission in this televised a dress to investigate the causes
and make recommendations about how to actually stop this violence
from continuing to happen. Those charged with the responsibility of

(08:31):
law enforcement should and must be respected by all of
our people. The violence must be stopped quickly, finally and permanently.
The Kroner Commission releases its report, and what the Kroner
Commission said is, okay, if you actually want to address
the inequality and the despair and the anchor that's leading

(08:52):
people to feel as if they have no other recourse
but to burn buildings and plunder stores and take to
the streets, you've got to go, President Johnson, way beyond
the war on poverty. You've gotta go beyond job training programs,
and you actually have to create jobs. You've got to
go beyond these remedial education programs, and you need to
completely overhaul urban public schools. You need to create more

(09:14):
housing opportunities for people because public housing institriating and some
landlords are continuing to exploit tenants. We've got to address
these issues. What's needed is essentially a martial plan for
American cities, massive massive investments into completely transforming institutions and
resources that people have access to in low income communities

(09:37):
of color. And this really full vision for domestic policy
never of course, came to fruition. Johnson said, you know,
this is too radical, and instead of that job creation
program for low income Americans, we get a job creation
program for police. For the first time in US history,
the federal government starts investing in local police departments and

(10:02):
uh promoting or assisting state and local governments in making
crime control a priority. This was the first time the
two years of US history that the federal government was
taking an active role in crime control, and the result
was the expansion of police in targeted low income communities

(10:23):
of color as the War on Crime then and these
new policing programs, policing measures, the surplus army technologies and
weapons that local police in turn led to increase arrest
rates by the end of the nineteen sixes, in early
nineteen seventies, and mass incarceration by the mid nineteen seventies on.

(10:44):
And now we know that this investment um has not
worked as a public safety model. The hundreds of billions
of taxpayer dollars of our money that have been allocated
to this project since Johnson called the War on Crime
in nineteen sixty by, in fact, it's one of the
biggest domestic policy failures in the history of the United States.

(11:07):
Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll return after this break. Welcome back.
This is context matters in the eighties and nineties, the
wars on drugs in the War on on on gun
violence in the city. It was based and reflected in
large part based on a very thin theory uh, the

(11:30):
idea that if you take on and address minor offenses,
low level offenses, that will prevent the escalation of of
offending in a particular place. Uh. And so policing became
what characterized by what people would described as proactive policing,

(11:51):
broken windows approach to policing, which so now you have
the presence of the police, they're there all the time.
They are from the perspective of young for these days,
harassing them for for otherwise, you know, petty kinds of things. Uh.
And people continue to die. But it wasn't until much
later in my um life, my little young life as

(12:15):
a teenager, early teens, late teens, and early twenties, that
I began to know that black folks get treated differently.
And a lot of that learning came once I joined
the l a p D. In night retired Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey,
she spent twenty years in uniform in patrol on the
Los Angeles Police Department between nineteen eighty and two thousand

(12:37):
her book is Black and Blue The Creation of a
Social Advocate, and having worked twenty years, having spent all
my time in patrol, I have the benefit of having
worked in each of the four bureaus that the city
is divided into, South, Central, West, and Valley Bureau. I
often talk about the two police departments, the one north

(13:01):
of the Santa Monica Freeway the more affluent areas, and
the police department that's south of the Santa Monica Freeway.
And one of the things that is a known fact
is that white officers who were coming on the l
a p D would often be heard saying that they
want to go to the south end, south of the

(13:22):
Santa Monica Freeway. They want to go to a busy
division south of the Santa Monica Freeway code talk busy
division where black folks were not so much brown, but
certainly black folks were. Why because they wanted to kick
ass and take names, because they expected a lot of
crime to be occurring in seventy seventh southeast Southwest. When

(13:45):
I transferred to Pacific Division, which is north of the
Santa Monica Freeway Venice Beach area, I noticed that the
way the officers dealt with the community in that part
of town was very, very different than the way officers
dealt would folks down in seventy seven and Southeast Division

(14:06):
south of the Santa Monica Freeway. The types of things
that officers did at seventy seventh Division they would never
do in Pacific or West l A Or Devonshire or
North Hollywood because the community wouldn't tolerate it, and because
those who are in a position of authority would not
allow certain things to occur in those areas. And so,

(14:29):
so what does this mean? Sociologist Nikki Jones. It means
that officers think, for example, about people in in the
quote unquote projects, so people in the projects and the
projects as a space, differently from other parts of the city, white,
wealthier or middle class settings in which the people there

(14:50):
are described as as normal, normal families, prime time civilians,
business owners, nice people, and those people they get service
oriented policing. The police are in fact there to serve them,
which is one of the reasons I think that the
critiques of the police that emerge over the last couple
of years are so confusing for people because they don't

(15:11):
want less of that policing. In fact, they want more
and in some cases they'll pay for more of that
kind of policing. And people in the projects who are
framed as a perpetual problem, who are framed as oppositional
to towards the police, who are framed as potentially more dangerous,
get a different kind of policing. They get a more
aggressive policing, a more heavy handed policing. Uh. And how

(15:36):
is that justified? Right? How do officers make sense of
that in an error of fair and unbiased policing? Because
they see themselves as experts and professionals in the same
way that other people imagine themselves as experts and professionals
in their field. Uh. And so because of that, because

(15:57):
of that, it's really difficult to talk about the ways
in which that kind of thinking in fact creates and
reproduced reproduces racial and spatial inequalities. I think about all
of the situations that I got in two with police
where I felt my life was threatened, where my life

(16:18):
actually was threatened, and where other people that I loved
their lives were threatened. Kendred Sampson, an actor and activists
co founder of Build Power. I also know that even
when they're not present, that they're present unfortunately today, and
that they are lurking around the corner at any moment
for us. Right. That's you know, how black people and

(16:40):
brown people UM have to exist. You know that in
in it informs the way that we behave in the
way that we think. Throughout the course of my work,
I've studied, sometimes at a very micro interactional level, the
ordinary ways that violence is distribut did onto the bodies

(17:01):
and minds of black people, UH and how people adapt
to that. One example is the kind of embodied expertise
that they gather over their adolescents right through both observing
experiences of young people UH and adults in their neighborhood
interact with the police, and then their their own experiences

(17:24):
as they become targets of this surveillance. And so I
draw on one short video clip, UM that I acquired
through a local videographer who had who had documented life
in his in his neighborhood for years, and one of
them is quite striking, and that you have a young
black man who is being searched by a task force

(17:50):
officer and there's some talk, some some some brief exchanges
over the course of the search, and what you notice
is that at no point is the officer instructing the
young man how to conduct the search. He's not telling
him to lift up his shirt, but he lifts up
his shirt. He's not telling him to lift up his arms,

(18:11):
but he lifts up his arms. He's not telling the
young man that he's about to search his pockets, but
the young man anticipates that he is and tells him
that he doesn't have anything in his pockets. He doesn't
have anything sharp, which he understands would be a legitimate
reason for the officer to go deeper into his pockets.
The officer doesn't tell him to turn around, but he does.

(18:31):
And so what you see is this performance of the
dance that this young man has learned only through observation
and experience, and he's he's so so the system itself
becomes embedded in his body. Uh. And that is not
true for for people in other settings we can imagine. Uh.
For for for those of us who haven't had those
kinds of encounters with the police, we need a step

(18:52):
by step instruction, right, We need to be told. And
in some ways, not having the expertise makes people vulnerable
to violence, because officers then see it as resistance and
so in the work that that I do, I really
want us to to trouble how we think about the
impact of the system and what does it mean to
be touched by the system. And so what we've seen
is a generation of young people who have lived with

(19:14):
this approach, this proactive, aggressive approach, this focus on minor
or low level offenses, and they don't accept it anymore.
If they ever did, they simply don't accept it. That
is part of I think the motivation behind the uprisings,
particularly among young people who have had direct experience with

(19:38):
law enforcement. Once again, after an activists Kendrick Sampson, when
we're out there in the streets and we're honoring the
work that was done before us, the ancestors that came
before us. People think it's some far away thing, but
it's our grandparents, our parents, you know, um that we're
fighting so hard, their generations that were fighting so hard,

(19:59):
and we honor that work because it was incomplete because
of whatever reason. These these uprisings are cyclical where we are.
You know, there's economic injustice, there's racial injustice, there's all
of this these unanswered problems and no accountability um to
colonization and slavery that continues in systems today. I've been,

(20:23):
you know, thinking a lot about this because a lot
of people think that equity is the goal, or equality
is the goal UM or that you know, being allowed
into spaces and being at the top is the goal,
or high profit and success and wealth is the goal.
Those are not the goals. That's not liberation. Liberation is

(20:45):
actually having the resources that we need to be autonomous
over our wellness and our communities. To have autonomy overwellness
of our communities. That I believe is true liberation. So
it's really important that we have these conversations, zoom out
see the bigger picture, and then zoom back into where

(21:06):
your lane is, what your influences. My lab space has
evolved in that way and will continue to do that
to continue to be UM an alignment closer to the community,
to the work of of imagining. What I want my
research and work to do now is to imagine that

(21:29):
world from the perspective of the young people that I
talked to, who certainly want to be safe. Certainly you
want to be safe from from violence and want the
people that they care about to be safe from violence,
but also understand the limitations of policing to provide that,
and so it's a space of dreaming, of thinking, of experimenting,

(21:49):
of innovation. And I know that I'm not the only
one who's doing this, and I do know that that
will have an impact in the future. We do have
people who are committed to that, and so that's where
I am spending my time and trying to train a
cohort of students who can do that work now into
the future. How can we track real change and what

(22:10):
does the future look like? Join us for the next
episode of Context Matters, where we'll talk to the thought
leaders and activists of today about how we can reshape
a world for future generations. This episode was brought to
you in collaboration with One Up, a social justice coalition

(22:30):
working to end police brutality. Hashtag Matter is a production
of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio
and an association with Wolf at the Door. For more
podcasts from shot land Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.