Answer to Policing, Race, and Structural Inequality

Introduction

• Hook: Open with the image of Derek Chauvin's conviction in April 2021 — widely celebrated as a rare moment of "accountability" in American policing — and immediately complicate it: does one conviction change a system?

  Contextualizing the Question:

  • Briefly describe Chauvin's killing of George Floyd (May 25, 2020) and the subsequent conviction

  • Introduce the "bad apple" framework: the dominant popular narrative that attributes police violence to individual racist officers

  • Introduce the systemic/structural counterargument drawn from course materials

  Thesis Statement:

  While Derek Chauvin's conviction was a meaningful moment of legal accountability, it should not be understood primarily as the actions of a "bad apple." Rather, the conviction — and the broader conditions that produced it — reveals deep structural and historical problems within U.S. policing. Drawing on Bornstein's concept of institutional racism, Burton's genealogy of antiblack policing rooted in slave patrols, and Police on Trial, this essay argues that Chauvin's actions were the visible apex of an iceberg: a policing system shaped by centuries of racial domination, color-blind institutional racism, and an order-maintenance logic that criminalizes Black life by design, not by exception.

Body Paragraph 1: Historical Foundations

• This section demonstrates that antiblack policing is not an aberration but a foundation.

• Slave Patrols as the Origin of Order-Maintenance Policing (Burton)-South Carolina's 1704 law creating the first slave patrol — organized armed white men surveilling both enslaved and free Black people. Ultiamtly, their core functions was to check papers, disparese gatherings, and asminsiter corporal punishment. We tend to romanticizes early American policing ("the earliest days of the nation") while erasing its explicitly antiblack function

• patrolling signaling that this was a "defense of white supremacy...was their civic obligation

• 1793 Fugitive Slave Law: expanded the geography of policing powers, empowering slave owners to seize fugitives across state lines

• 1850 Fugitive Slave Act: penalized whites who failed to capture escaped slaves — policing Blackness became a national civic duty

  • implemented the logic of treating Black bodies as inherently suspicious, mobile threats

• Black Codes: laws against vagrancy, unemployment, loitering, public drunkenness — enforced almost exclusively against Black people (Burton, citing Davis)

• Result: "crime" became a legal cipher for Blackness; Black people ensnared in the system were leased as prison-slaves to corporations and state governments

Body Paragraph 2: Policing as a protection of whitness (Burton)

• Police are "structurally placed in opposition to blackness" regardless of individual intent

• The Black body is "circumscribed as dangerous, prior to any gesture" — a Black teenager practicing wrestling moves in a public park is perceived as a threat within Burton

• Chauvin's knee for 9:29 despite non-resistance = the logic that Black bodies must be contained until "threat is stopped." Not aberration; slave patrol logic updated.

Body Paragraph 3 (Bornstein)-institutional racism in practice

• Explain Compstat (1994, Commissioner Bratton): statistics-driven management system that maps crime and holds precinct commanders accountable for bringing numbers down

•  this system makes no mention of race — it deploys officers to "high crime neighborhoods" which, due to decades of redlining and residential segregation, are Black and Brown neighborhoods

• Eric Garner example: killed during an aggressive but routine arrest for selling loose cigarettes — a minor quality-of-life violation under the zero-tolerance logic

• Bornstein's argument: police motivation is institutional racism operating mechanically, without requiring individual officers to be consciously racist