-I think there's a lot of people who say,
"Yeah, I know the police are broken.
Let's just enact the reforms that will fix it."
But the question for me is,
if the police are broken, when did they break?
What year in American history did the police break?
-It seems really trite to say if you don't study history,
you're doomed to repeat it.
But nothing illustrates
that more than the history of policing.
-Policing in one form or another has existed since Colonial days.
In the form of night watches, local sheriffs, and militias.
But it wasn't until the 19th century that Northern cities
such as Boston created modern police departments
as we would recognize them today.
These Northern departments
were not the first example of a uniformed,
publicly funded law-enforcement institution in America.
-By the time the Northern colonies were were afoot
in the 17th century, the idea of keeping track
of the most valuable asset in the United States,
that is enslaved Africans, animated much
of what we recognize today as law enforcement.
-In the 1700s, the South saw the rise of official,
salaried slave patrols,
whose task was to capture control,
and brutalize enslaved people.
[hoofbeats]
-The initial acts that empowered slave patrols and militias
were acts that basically empowered all white people
to surveil and punish all black people.
-These slave patrols were required
to serve a tour of duty, usually up to a year.
Individuals were compensated for their time,
but they were also penalized
if they did not show up for their required service.
-All white people, including white children,
were expected to enforce so-called slave codes.
These laws were meant to prevent enslaved people
from organizing or rebelling.
It was against the law, for example,
for enslaved people to leave their plantations,
gather without a white person present, learn to read or write,
or even defend themselves if attacked by a white person.
After the Civil War,
the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery
except as a punishment for a crime.
-The South immediate moves to exploit this loophole
by passing a series of crime bills known as "Black Codes,"
which essentially criminalized all forms of Black freedom.
They criminalize unemployment
by adopting these very broad vagrancy laws
that essentially criminalize any Black person
who can't prove that they're working.
Any African-American who challenges the terms of work,
barters or brokers for a better deal,
turns down a terrible offer,
walks away from an abusive employer
or a relationship with a landowner
by definition becomes a vagrant,
and by definition becomes a criminal.
They could then be sold at sheriff's auction back
to the very person who had just claimed
that they were a criminal by virtue
of not accepting a fair-labor deal.
-This practice of convict-leasing earned revenues
for the states who lent out their prisoners,
and huge profits for the companies using
this prison labor in mining, railroads, and other industries.
The new laws effectively re-enslaved those who had
just gained their freedom and required new police
to take over the former duties of the slave patrols.
-When you have Black people serving in political offices
for the first time,
when you have Black landowners in abundance,
when you have Black professionals,
there are reconstructionary judges,
the stakes are even higher for this everyday performance
of Black subservience to white domination.
It is the police who will ultimately serve
that function of reminding
Black people, in many cases, their lower status in society.
-What we see is that that general way
of thinking about race
and thinking about disorderly people never really changes.
It's kind of woven into the DNA.
But it's not just because individual police officers
are racist.
It's because the institution was literally created
to make sure that wealthy and powerful people
could extract labor.
-Early police departments in the North had a similar goal
to control labor and were notoriously corrupt.
-The police functioned as an expression
of political elites and powerful,
affluent people who essentially wanted poor people to stay
in their segregated slum communities.
Police often functioned as enforcers of political machines,
functioned one step removed from gangs.
-Police often worked in the service of business owners,
who were faced with growing unrest among their labor
forces in the wake of mass European immigration
and rapid industrialization.
-One of the best examples of this
is the Pennsylvania State Police.
The institutions that precede the Pennsylvania State Police
are actually private police forces
which are owned by people who are running cons.
And their job is explicitly to control the workers
who are trying to unionize for rights.
-The story of policing in the United States
is the story of systems meant to protect
and serve only a fraction of Americans.
It is this history that many of today's activists point
to when calling for the defunding
or even the abolishment of police.
-The cops not protecting us! We got to protect us.
-The ability to police crime or inequality or poverty
or races or whatever was the social problem to be solved
by law enforcement
was always an act of political power and discretion.
And it just so happens that African-Americans
have stood in that position
for the longest of any other population.
-What the history does is it allows us
to decouple the idea of public safety
from the idea of police.
What actually protects women from rape
and from sexual assault, right?
What actually stops people in communities,
both Black and white, from killing each other?
What kinds of things actually help people
who are mentally ill?
Are those things police?
And I think very quickly once you reflect on that,
you realize the answer is no.
We have to stop saying police are broken.
We have to say police are working,
and we have to create another institution to do public safety.