- Modern policing just took a DNA test.
Turns out it's 99-100 percent racist.
Previously on Decoded, we talked about how the cops
don't exactly spend their time keeping us safe,
despite how often they tell us that's their job.
Here's the TL;DR.
Addressing violent crime makes up
a very small percentage of police work.
Most crimes go unsolved,
and the Supreme Court affirmed that officers
don't actually have a constitutional obligation
to intervene if you're in danger.
They're about as legally bound to your wellbeing
as the stranger you asked to watch your laptop
at the coffee shop.
So what exactly are the police here to do,
and how did we end up where we are now?
Well, to answer to those questions,
we have to look at the history of policing
and the institutions that provide the blueprint
for modern law enforcement.
And to all of our "What about the white people?" commenters,
don't worry, unless you were uber wealthy,
the police were initially formed
to suppress your rights too.
When we look back as far as the 1700s,
policing has largely been centered around
protecting property and maintaining a status quo
shaped by white supremacy and capitalism,
and that hasn't changed much over the last few centuries.
Policing got its start regionally
from slave patrols in the South
to union strike breakers in the North,
and the Texas Rangers in the early Western U.S.
And as history shows,
the police have been pretty terrible everywhere.
So let's get started with one of the most
horrifying ancestors of modern law enforcement:
slave patrols.
During the early 1700s, plantation owners in the South
developed slave patrols, the first form of law enforcement
that resembles the police we see today.
The thing is, at the time, the law treated Black people
as property, not humans.
So these groups were designed to punish and return runaways
or those who were seen as rebelling,
aka people just trying not to be enslaved.
Slave patrols restricted Black people's freedom of movement
by employing lower and middle class white men who,
armed with whips and guns,
would patrol from sunup to sundown.
According to historians,
the duties of patrollers included apprehending runaways,
monitoring Black movement,
breaking up gatherings of Black people,
randomly searching slave quarters,
inflicting impromptu punishments,
and suppressing insurrections.
I wonder where the ideas for programs like stop-and-frisk
and no-knock warrants could have possibly come from.
As historian Sally Hadden explained in her book
on slave patrols, quote,
"The history of police work in the South
grows out of this early fascination by white patrollers
with what African American slaves were doing."
And by the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era,
local sheriffs became the primary law enforcement
in the South,
and they picked up right where the slave patrols left off
by enforcing segregation and disenfranchisement.
Despite the abolition of slavery in 1865,
the giant gaping loophole in the 13th Amendment
enabled police in the South to find new ways
to force Black people into exploitative labor.
Because remember the 13th Amendment states,
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude
shall exist within the United States,
except as a punishment for crime."
As a result, lots of new anti-Black laws
emerged in the South, such as the Black Codes,
which restricted Black freedom
and compelled newly freed slaves to work for low wages,
as well as Jim Crow laws,
which legally enforced segregation.
There were also a host of other laws, such as vagrancy laws,
that criminalized being unemployed,
as well as localized legislation
that prohibited Black communities
from gathering in groups to worship.
These laws were passed in order to criminalize
and push Black people into prisons and convict leasing,
a system of prison labor where prisoners were a source
of free labor for white-owned businesses
as punishment for a crime.
Police used these racist rules as a pretext to surveil,
abuse, and detain Black people under the guise of justice.
It's no coincidence that the focus on punishment
and control during this time paved the way
for the expansive systems of mass incarceration today.
Because, thanks to the 13th Amendment,
prisons are still allowed to use inmates for labor
and their own profit,
often paying them less than a dollar per hour.
Or in states like Georgia and Texas,
paying them nothing at all.
This is still legal.
Sorry, let me rephrase.
How in the (beeps) is this still legal?
Well, constitutional amendments only go as far
as the people in power are willing to let them,
but the racist pro-capitalist roots of policing
aren't geographically limited to the South.
So let's move on to Northern strike breakers.
During the 1800s,
shippers and business-owners in Northern states
convinced local governments to publicly fund forces
to protect their assets and financial interests,
which often translated to breaking up worker's unions.
In other words,
the earliest forms of police in the North
were paid for by taxpaying citizens
so the richest of the rich could have the government
fight against terrible things like eight-hour workdays,
child labor laws, and having a weekend.
For example, in 1877,
a Chicago business group called the Citizens Association
raised $28,000 to buy rifles, cannons,
and cavalry equipment to combat worker strikes in the city.
But why spend your own money when you can spend tax money?
Fast-forward 20 years to the city of Lattimer, Pennsylvania.
When over 300 coal miners went on strike
and refused to disperse,
police under the direction of a Pennsylvania county sheriff
opened fire on demonstrators, killing 19 people.
When organized workers threatened the wealth
of the rich and powerful,
they were framed as violators of the law,
which provided an opening for police to squash dissent.
But the North-South divide still doesn't encompass
the full scope of the racist and xenophobic institutions
that provided the foundation for police today.
So up next is the colonialist West.
As far back as the 1830s, police entities
like the Texas Rangers were on the front lines
of the United States' violent expansion westward,
working to dispossess land through the brutalization
and murder of Indigenous populations.
There's a reason Walker Texas Ranger was played by
a Chuck Norris and not a Chuck Berry.
After the Mexican Revolution in 1910,
the Texas Rangers grew rapidly
until the organization expanded to more than 1,300 officers.
Then from 1915 to 1917,
Texas Rangers working with local law enforcement
killed over 100 Mexican residents,
rising out of the criminalization
of Mexican people near the border.
All of this culminated in the 1918 Porvenir massacre,
when the Texas Rangers murdered 15 unarmed locals
under the false pretense that they were harboring bandits.
One army official at the time called it wholesale murder.
And it caused such a public stir
that it prompted state-level legislative hearings
into the misconduct of the Rangers throughout Texas.
The statehouse investigation concluded
that the Texas Rangers had committed many atrocities
and extrajudicial killings,
particularly of ethnic Mexicans.
And one action the statehouse took
was to reduce the size of the Texas Rangers,
which is kind of like an early version of defund the police.
The racist and xenophobic legacy of the police runs deep,
meaning the violence we see enacted today isn't by accident.
The criminal justice system isn't broken.
It's working exactly as designed,
an institution built not for public safety,
but for race and class control,
one that's done little to change the racist frameworks
that informed its popularization.
That is why many activists are calling to defund, reform,
or abolish policing and prisons,
and for the development of models of safety
that actually act in the interest of the general public,
not just those who are white and rich.
In the coming episodes,
we'll look beyond the roots of modern policing
to how we can transform it.
Until then, thanks for watching.
And we'll see you next time right here on Decoded.