Concern 4

 Aren’t the Police Just Trying to Keep the Protests Peaceful?

This section explores how police presence in many ways has heightened violence as opposed to keeping the peace, with officers employing tactics such as flash bangs, rubber bullets, and spraying tear gas indiscriminately into crowds. While we’ve seen officers kneel in solidarity with protesters and don’t deny the fact that there are some good people who may be police officers; this section is concerned more with the flawed structure, training, and system of policing as it exists across the U.S. today. 

01

The problem isn’t individual police, who may be decent people with loving families and good homes, but the fact that their jobs entails acting as an occupying force across the country. Some kneeling may be genuine, some may be a photo op, but the role of police in protests in the United States has historically been to foment violence. This article lists various examples of police who staged that photo op during the protests and then quickly turned on the crowd. 

“Some of the police officers who have been prominently photographed kneeling or praying alongside demonstrators against police violence have turned around and harmed protesters soon afterward”

“Literally 45 minutes later they maced us in the face for the crime of standing in their vicinity.””

“It’s no wonder that many protesters are expressing skepticism about whether the recent flurry of feel-good images showing police officers expressing supposed solidarity with protesters is in fact an attempt to provide propaganda cover”

“Activists are calling for readers to engage more critically and skeptically with them”

02

In Detroit, as in many other American cities, the police are kneeling with protestors to symbolically express solidarity with the larger movement for Black lives. These gestures, however, are necessarily empty and performative as these same police officers continue to arrest and enact violence on those same protestors.  

“Detroit PD officers kneeled for the media's cameras—just minutes after arresting 100 or so peaceful protesters on the east side.”

“None of the protesters had attacked the police officers, as had been the case on previous nights. None of them appeared to be antagonizing the police. And nobody was looting businesses or lighting things on fire, as has been the case in scenes elsewhere in the country for the past few days.”

“The protesters and reporters were simply exercising their First Amendment rights during a nationwide protest movement. DPD could have rerouted traffic around the protesters. Instead, they threw them in jail on bond—during the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit Michigan's prisons particularly hard.” 

“Police across the country cannot kneel and say that they are in solidarity with the movement if they're just going to create 1,000 more unmistakable images of police brutality.”

03

The Broken Policing System 

Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (September 9, 2019)

The United States’ system of policing is fundamentally broken. Minhaj discusses the ways police are trained to think of all people as “lethal threats” who need to be eliminated, and how much funding has gone into training the police into doing their whole job at a state of lethally high alert. Minhaj expertly uses comedy to craft a serious discussion that sheds light on the corruption that plagues the police system. This corruption stems from fear-based training and is perpetuated by “qualified immunity” laws and reticent police unions.

“American police officers are some of the best trained in the world, but what they’re trained to do is part of the problem.”

“Police departments typically spend eight hours training officers in conflict de-escalation and a hundred twenty nine hours training them in weapons and fighting.”

Spoken during Warrior Training: “You fight violence. What do you fight it with? Superior violence. [...] Violence is your tool [...] You are men and women of violence”

“Outside of fear-based training, there’s another structural problem with policing: lack of consequences. After they’re trained, cops get to play by a completely different set of rules than everyone else.”

“Even if cops do face consequences, there are often rules in place to ensure no one ever hears about it. [...] If a doctor commits malpractice, you can look that up.”

“A recent study found that when deputies in Florida got union contracts, violent misconduct complaints went up 40%.”

“Police unions stand by bad cops because they have to. It’s a union’s job to protect their members. But sometimes protection becomes obstruction.”

“Fear-based policing is the exact type of training we don’t need anymore. That’s true everywhere in America.”

“If cops are going to be held to a different standard, it should be a higher one.”

04

When Police View Citizens as Enemies

By Nick Baumann, The Atlantic (May 31, 2020)

This article summarizes the dangers of providing the police with military training and equipment. As a result, the police feel as though they can be more violent towards protestors (and other citizens). It also creates a war-like environment of the police versus the people, instead of police protecting the people.

“The police and the U.S. military are separate institutions because policing a community and fighting a war are supposed to be separate jobs. In traditional ‘wars,’ both sides are heavily armed.”

“When you’re driving an armored vehicle down Main Street, civilians can begin to look like insurgents.”

“‘You’re not just militarizing the police—you equip the police like soldiers, you train the police like soldiers. Why are you surprised when they act like soldiers?’ Rizer, a former police officer and soldier, said. ‘The mission of the police is to protect and serve. But the premise of the soldier is to engage the enemy in close combat and destroy them.’”

“Agencies that use military equipment kill civilians at much higher rates than agencies that don’t, according to a 2017 study.”

05

The Long, Painful History of Police Brutality in the U.S.

By Katie Nodjimbadem, SmithsonianMag.com, (July 27, 2017 I Updated May 29, 2020)

Black Americans have been disproportionately killed by police officers since the creation of the first police department in 1838. Black Americans and their allies have protested police brutality in various forms since the nineteenth century and through the Civil Rights Era. As Nodjimbadem shows, both police brutality and resistance to it have a long history that echo vividly in today's protests.

“The communities most targeted by harsh tactics were recent European immigrants. But, as African-Americans fled the horrors of the Jim Crow south, they too became the victims of brutal and punitive policing in the northern cities where they sought refuge.”

“Aggressive dispersion tactics, such as police dogs and fire hoses, against individuals in peaceful protests and sit-ins were the most widely publicized examples of police brutality in that era. But it was the pervasive violent policing in communities of color that built distrust at a local, everyday level.”

“Modern technology allows, indeed insists, that the white community take notice of these kinds of situations and incidents [of police brutality].”

“What we see is a continuation of an unequal relationship that has been exacerbated, made worse if you will, by the militarization and the increase in fire power of police forces around the country.”

06

This opinion piece from historian and author Rebecca Solnit summarizes how the police, at many of the recent protests, uses activists’ violence and property destruction to justify violence toward “anyone at all”. Solnit argues not to confuse protestors with right-wing authoritarians who bring chaos and seek only their own agenda. She discusses how structural violence (such as lack of access to healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic) is another form of violent oppression that Black Americans face.

“With a few exceptions (seemingly interlopers in the protests) virtually all the violence visited on human beings during this round of civil unrest across the US has been inflicted by police.”

“It is dismaying to see that some are more upset about broken glass than public killing”

“People trapped inside a burning building break down the doors to escape; an estranged husband with a restraining order breaks down a door to further terrorise his ex-wife. The same actions mean different things in different situations. Martin Luther King famously called riots ‘the voice of the unheard’ – and as the outcry of people who have tried absolutely everything else for centuries, property damage means something very different from merely malicious or recreational destruction.”

“When they [police] come out with teargas and clubs to suppress uprisings, they announce that this is who they are and who they want to be: violence in service of violence.”

07

These videos show police in Brooklyn, New York, driving an SUV into a group of protestors holding a barricade. Multiple people were injured. Demonstrating the violence police officers icite while counteracting peaceful protests.

08

Police Rioted This Weekend, Justifying the Point of the Protests

By Anthony L. Fisher, Business Insider (June 1, 2020)

The police are not acting in accordance with their duty to protect the American people, Fisher argues. Various current laws protect and even excuse police against being charged - or often even mentioned - in relation to the crimes they commit, essentially allowing officers to break the laws they are charged with upholding. The article goes on to list multiple instances in which the police incited violence during protests and curfews around the country. It explains why there is little to no police accountability across the U.S.

“Far from a binary good-versus-bad determination, there are myriad issues to unpack. But any conversation focused only on the riots and looting and not law enforcement's penchant for excessive force and institutional resistance to accountability is both disingenuous and unserious.”

“But with the government-sanctioned power to deprive citizens of both life and liberty, they are required to swear an oath that they will be responsible, honest, and lawful in the use of such power. Police officers, by and large, try to uphold that oath. But police unions and many police departments do everything in their power to make that oath empty words by fighting any legitimate attempts at transparency and accountability when it comes to the use of force.”

“72 of the 81 cities' contracts imposed at least one barrier to holding police accountable.”

“In this country, it is disturbingly easy for a police officer fired for abuse, corruption, or other causes to find another job in law enforcement.”

“We need the political will to demand that the law-enforcement community reform itself away from its occupying-army posture and make its disciplinary records transparent to the public.”

09

Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide

By Matthew Dessem, Slate (May 31, 2020)

A view on the riots from the other side: this isn’t an eruption of protestor violence so much as it is an eruption of police violence against protestors, who have mostly addressed their rage against inanimate objects. Some reporters have also been targeted. Various Twitter threads (with images) and a few YouTube videos show police brutality during protests across the U.S.

Extended Readings

  1. Lesley J. Wood, Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing (2014)

  2.  Donatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter, Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies (1998)

  3. Anna North and Catherine Kim, “These Videos Show the Police Aren’t Neutral, They’re Counterprotesters,” Vox (June 2, 2020)

  4. Maggie Koerth, “Why So Many Police Are Handling The Protests Wrong,” The Marshall Project, (June 1, 2020)

5. Alex Horton, “In Violent Protest Incidents, A Theme Emerges: Videos Contradict Police Accounts,” The Washington Post (June 6, 2020)

6. Adam Gabbatt, “Protests About Police Brutality are Met With Wave of Police Brutality Across US,” The Guardian (June 6, 2020)

7. Eli Hager and Weihua Li of the Marshall Project, “White US Police Union Bosses Protect Officers Accused of Racism,” The Guardian (June 10, 2020)