Comprehensive Notes on Race, Law, and Policing

Race, Law, and Policing

History of Police/Policing

• Early Emergence of Night Watch (Watchmen)

  • Boston: Created night watch in $1636$

  • New York: Established in $1658$

  • Philadelphia: Formed in $1700$

  • Theoretically, this was a volunteer service; however, many individuals reportedly joined to evade military service.

• Rise of Centralized Municipal Police Departments

  • The first centralized municipal police departments began to emerge in the $1830s$. These marked a significant shift from informal watch systems to more structured law enforcement.

• Policing in Southern States: The "Slave Patrol"

  • Policing in the southern states developed distinctly from the institution of "Slave Patrols."

  • The first slave patrol in the Carolina colonies was established in $1704$.

  • Key Functionalities of Slave Patrols:

    • To chase down, apprehend, and forcibly return slaves to their owners.

    • To serve as a form of organized terror, aiming to deter potential slave revolts.

    • To maintain strict discipline among enslaved people (viewed as a labor force).

  • These were vigilante-style organizations that eventually evolved into municipal police departments, particularly in the South.

• The American Police Force's Fundamental Origin

  • The growth of the American police force was primarily a response to disorder, rather than a direct response to an increasing wave of crime.

  • There was a significant overlap between maintaining order and addressing crime.

  • Example: The night watch was often involved in policing individuals who were presumably drinking in public, a matter of social order rather than serious crime.

Post-Civil War Policing

• Shifting Focus to Strike Breaking

  • Following the Civil War, municipal police departments increasingly turned their attention to strike-breaking activities.

  • In the late $19^{th}$ century, union organizing and labor unrest became widespread across the nation.

  • The private sector, particularly industrial manufacturers, began to offload the responsibility of protecting their economic interests (e.g., preventing strikes and ensuring production) to public employees (the police).

• Rationale for Police Involvement in Strike Breaking:

  • Legally Ordained Force: Police intervention provided a legally sanctioned use of force against striking workers.

  • Cost-Effective: It was more cost-effective for manufacturers to have public police forces suppress labor unrest than to hire private security.

  • Politically Useful: This intervention was politically convenient for authorities and industrialists who sought to maintain economic stability and suppress labor movements.

  • Conflation of Worker Rights with "Crime": A critical outcome was the conflation of workers' rights to organize and protest with criminal activity, essentially criminalizing labor movements.

• Conclusion on Policing Roots: The roots of American policing are intrinsically tied not to the problem of crime itself, but to the demands of the nation's political economy, particularly concerning class and labor struggles.

Policing Today

• Primary Activities of Police Officers

  • Police often spend the majority of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other non-criminal issues.

• New York Times Review of 10 Major City Police Departments (Key Statistics):

  • Serious Violent Crimes: Constituted only about $1\%$ of all calls for service.

  • Arrests for Violent Offenses: Out of $10.6$ million arrests made by police yearly, only $5\%$ were for violent offenses.

  • Crime Reporting Rates: Only around $40\%$ of all crime victims report their experiences to the police.

  • Clearance Rates for Reported Crimes: Only about $25\%$ of reported crimes are cleared by arrests.

  • Murder Case Clearance Rates: Approaching $60\%$ of murder cases are cleared. This rate drops significantly to $45\%$ when the homicide involves a gun.

  • Sexual Violence Reporting Rates: Less than $25\%$ of sexual violence cases are reported to the police.

  • Reasons for Underreporting (Sexual Violence): $13\%$ of victims cite fear that the police could not, or would not, provide help in such cases.

• Police Misconduct and Intimate Partner Violence

  • Police officers themselves are found to commit sexual assault and domestic violence at alarmingly high rates.

  • Around $40\%$ of officers have intimate partner violence in their households, a significantly higher rate compared to roughly $10\%$ of the general public.

Legal Scholarship on Policing

• Narrow Focus: Current legal scholarship on policing is often too narrow in its scope.

• Emphasis on Crime Control: It primarily focuses on crime control or criminality, and examines techniques designed for crime suppression.

• Neglected Areas: This narrow focus notably overlooks the substantial non-criminal functions of policing, which, as evidenced by current statistics, constitute a large portion of police activity.

Police Reform and Systemic Inequality

• Interconnectedness: Police reform cannot be effectively separated from other central strategies and mechanisms of American (racial) inequality.

• Holistic Approach: True reform requires addressing the deeper systemic issues of racial inequality that are intertwined with the history and ongoing practices of policing in the United States.