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The Invention of the Police

By Jill Lepore

To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis —the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia , the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police , which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.

“Abolish the police,” as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded “Fuck tha Police”), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. “To be political, to live in a polis , meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “ The Human Condition .” In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his “ Commentaries on the Laws of England ,” argued that the king, as “pater-familias of the nation,” directs “the public police,” exercising the means by which “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.” The police are the king’s men.

History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.

But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd , in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number who were treated in emergency rooms as a result of injuries inflicted by police and security guards was almost as great as the number who, as pedestrians, were injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.

There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.

That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin , in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn’t work especially well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” Blackstone wrote—and it didn’t work especially well in England’s colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.

The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:

It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.

In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.

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Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England’s posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were “police,” who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.

In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in “law and police” at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that “police” had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. (“No justice, no peace!” Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published “A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.” He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and “the PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES .”

It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.

It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “ An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World ,” calling for violent rebellion: “One good black man can put to death six white men.” Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker’s words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state’s senators, “I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book.” By “police,” he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker’s “Appeal,” North Carolina formed a statewide “patrol committee.”

New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city’s elections.

American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor’s office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.

Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren’t yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.

The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, SWAT teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.

Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.

To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A “police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army,” Detroit’s commissioner of police said. (Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)

Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah’s chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the “whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes—arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances.” African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia’s chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force’s training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.

Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “ The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America .” Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.

More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. “By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision,” Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. “The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.”

Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California’s, began as “highway patrols.” Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. “One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners,” its new chief said.

The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation’s borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants’ protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film “Intolerance,” imagined relics of an unforgiving age.

Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on crime,” and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression.”

As Elizabeth Hinton reported in “ From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America ,” the “frontline soldiers” in Johnson’s war on crime—Vollmer-era policing all over again—spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. “If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum,” Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. “We ain’t rioting agains’ all you whites,” one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. “We’re riotin’ agains’ police brutality.” In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.

Johnson’s Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it “a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria.” James Baldwin attributed its “irresponsible ferocity” to “some pale, compelling nightmare—an overwhelming collection of private nightmares.” The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, “ Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing .” During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency—the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed “the international dimension to the Administration’s War on Crime.” Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.

In 1968, Johnson’s new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson’s Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.

The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book “ Varieties of Police Behavior ,” and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows.” On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called “community policing.” (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the “service functions” of the police—“first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like”—which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson’s work informed programs like Detroit’s STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a “radical college professor,” and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end STRESS arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. STRESS defended its methods. “We just don’t walk up and shoot somebody,” one commander said. “We ask him to stop. If he doesn’t, we shoot.”

For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. “Crime is a national-defense problem,” Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. “You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.

Partly because of Biden’s record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.

In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that “our members believe he will make America safe again.” Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. “We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment,” Trump said at Mt. Rushmore , on the occasion of the Fourth of July. “We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”

Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king’s men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn’t a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.

Those changes won’t address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can’t be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too. ♦

An earlier version of this piece misrepresented the number of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated as a result of police-inflicted injuries in emergency rooms.

Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests

• The death of George Floyd , in context.
• The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
• Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest ?
• A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
• The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments , and what comes next.
• The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.

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By Jessica Winter

By Bill McKibben

By Idrees Kahloon

How the U.S. Got Its Police Force

I t would be easy to think that the police officer is a figure who has existed since the beginning of civilization. That’s the idea on display in the proclamation from President John F. Kennedy on the dedication of the week of May 15 as “National Police Week,” in which he noted that law-enforcement officers had been protecting Americans since the nation’s birth.

In fact, the U.S. police force is a relatively modern invention, sparked by changing notions of public order, driven in turn by economics and politics, according to Gary Potter, a crime historian at Eastern Kentucky University.

Policing in Colonial America had been very informal, based on a for-profit, privately funded system that employed people part-time. Towns also commonly relied on a “night watch” in which volunteers signed up for a certain day and time, mostly to look out for fellow colonists engaging in prostitution or gambling. (Boston started one in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700.) But that system wasn’t very efficient because the watchmen often slept and drank while on duty, and there were people who were put on watch duty as a form of punishment.

Night-watch officers were supervised by constables, but that wasn’t exactly a highly sought-after job, either. Early policemen “didn’t want to wear badges because these guys had bad reputations to begin with, and they didn’t want to be identified as people that other people didn’t like,” says Potter. When localities tried compulsory service, “if you were rich enough, you paid someone to do it for you — ironically, a criminal or a community thug.”

As the nation grew, however, different regions made use of different policing systems.

In cities, increasing urbanization rendered the night-watch system completely useless as communities got too big. The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”

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In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.

In general, throughout the 19th century and beyond, the definition of public order — that which the police officer was charged with maintaining — depended whom was asked.

For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests. For example, people who drank at taverns rather than at home were seen as “dangerous” people by others, but they might have pointed out other factors such as how living in a smaller home makes drinking in a tavern more appealing. (The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places.)

At the same time, the late 19th century was the era of political machines, so police captains and sergeants for each precinct were often picked by the local political party ward leader, who often owned taverns or ran street gangs that intimidated voters. They then were able to use police to harass opponents of that particular political party, or provide payoffs for officers to turn a blind eye to allow illegal drinking, gambling and prostitution.

This situation was exacerbated during Prohibition, leading President Hoover to appoint the Wickersham Commission in 1929 to investigate the ineffectiveness of law enforcement nationwide. To make police independent from political party ward leaders, the map of police precincts was changed so that they would not correspond with political wards.

The drive to professionalize the police followed, which means that the concept of a career cop as we’d recognize it today is less than a century old.

Further campaigns for police professionalism were promoted as the 20th century progressed, but crime historian Samuel Walker’s The Police in America: An Introduction argues that the move toward professionalism wasn’t all good: that movement, he argues, promoted the creation of police departments that were “inward-looking” and “isolated from the public,” and crime-control tactics that ended up exacerbating tensions between police and the communities they watch over. And so, more than a half-century after Kennedy’s 1963 proclamation, the improvement and modernization of America’s surprisingly young police force continues to this day.

A version of this article also appears in the May 29 issue of TIME.

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10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S.

Days of protests across the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police have brought new attention to questions about police officers’ attitudes toward black Americans, protesters and others. The public’s views of the police, in turn, are also in the spotlight. Here’s a roundup of Pew Research Center survey findings from the past few years about the intersection of race and law enforcement.

How we did this

Most of the findings in this post were drawn from two previous Pew Research Center reports: one on police officers and policing issues published in January 2017, and one on the state of race relations in the United States published in April 2019. We also drew from a September 2016 report on how black and white Americans view police in their communities. (The questions asked for these reports, as well as their responses, can be found in the reports’ accompanying “topline” file or files.)

The 2017 police report was based on two surveys. One was of 7,917 law enforcement officers from 54 police and sheriff’s departments across the U.S., designed and weighted to represent the population of officers who work in agencies that employ at least 100 full-time sworn law enforcement officers with general arrest powers, and conducted between May and August 2016. The other survey, of the general public, was conducted via the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) in August and September 2016 among 4,538 respondents. (The 2016 report on how blacks and whites view police in their communities also was based on that survey.) More information on methodology is available here .

The 2019 race report was based on a survey conducted in January and February 2019. A total of 6,637 people responded, out of 9,402 who were sampled, for a response rate of 71%. The respondents included 5,599 from the ATP and oversamples of 530 non-Hispanic black and 508 Hispanic respondents sampled from Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. More information on methodology is available here .

Majorities of both black and white Americans say black people are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police and by the criminal justice system as a whole. In a 2019 Center survey , 84% of black adults said that, in dealing with police, blacks are generally treated less fairly than whites; 63% of whites said the same. Similarly, 87% of blacks and 61% of whites said the U.S. criminal justice system treats black people less fairly.

Black adults are about five times as likely as whites to say they’ve been unfairly stopped by police because of their race or ethnicity (44% vs. 9%), according to the same survey. Black men are especially likely to say this : 59% say they’ve been unfairly stopped, versus 31% of black women.

White Democrats and white Republicans have vastly different views of how black people are treated by police and the wider justice system. Overwhelming majorities of white Democrats say black people are treated less fairly than whites by the police (88%) and the criminal justice system (86%), according to the 2019 poll. About four-in-ten white Republicans agree (43% and 39%, respectively).

Nearly two-thirds of black adults (65%) say they’ve been in situations where people acted as if they were suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity, while only a quarter of white adults say that’s happened to them. Roughly a third of both Asian and Hispanic adults (34% and 37%, respectively) say they’ve been in such situations, the 2019 survey found.

Black Americans are far less likely than whites to give police high marks for the way they do their jobs . In a 2016 survey, only about a third of black adults said that police in their community did an “excellent” or “good” job in using the right amount of force (33%, compared with 75% of whites), treating racial and ethnic groups equally (35% vs. 75%), and holding officers accountable for misconduct (31% vs. 70%).

In the past, police officers and the general public have tended to view fatal encounters between black people and police very differently. In a 2016 survey  of nearly 8,000 policemen and women from departments with at least 100 officers, two-thirds said most such encounters are isolated incidents and not signs of broader problems between police and the black community. In a companion survey of more than 4,500 U.S. adults, 60% of the public called such incidents signs of broader problems between police and black people. But the views given by police themselves were sharply differentiated by race: A majority of black officers (57%) said that such incidents were evidence of a broader problem, but only 27% of white officers and 26% of Hispanic officers said so.

Around two-thirds of police officers (68%) said in 2016 that the demonstrations over the deaths of black people during encounters with law enforcement were motivated to a great extent by anti-police bias; only 10% said (in a separate question) that protesters were primarily motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable for their actions. Here as elsewhere, police officers’ views differed by race: Only about a quarter of white officers (27%) but around six-in-ten of their black colleagues (57%) said such protests were motivated at least to some extent by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.

White police officers and their black colleagues have starkly different views on fundamental questions regarding the situation of blacks in American society, the 2016 survey found. For example, nearly all white officers (92%) – but only 29% of their black colleagues – said the U.S. had made the changes needed to assure equal rights for blacks.

A majority of officers said in 2016 that relations between the police in their department and black people in the community they serve were “excellent” (8%) or “good” (47%). However, far higher shares saw excellent or good community relations with whites (91%), Asians (88%) and Hispanics (70%). About a quarter of police officers (26%) said relations between police and black people in their community were “only fair,” while nearly one-in-five (18%) said they were “poor” – with black officers far more likely than others to say so. (These percentages are based on only those officers who offered a rating.)

An overwhelming majority of police officers (86%) said in 2016 that high-profile fatal encounters between black people and police officers had made their jobs harder . Sizable majorities also said such incidents had made their colleagues more worried about safety (93%), heightened tensions between police and blacks (75%), and left many officers reluctant to use force when appropriate (76%) or to question people who seemed suspicious (72%).

• Criminal Justice
• Discrimination & Prejudice
• Racial Bias & Discrimination

Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at Pew Research Center .

Michael Lipka is an associate director focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center .

Dalia Fahmy is a senior writer/editor focusing on religion at Pew Research Center .

What the data says about crime in the U.S.

Fewer than 1% of federal criminal defendants were acquitted in 2022, before release of video showing tyre nichols’ beating, public views of police conduct had improved modestly, black americans differ from other u.s. adults over whether individual or structural racism is a bigger problem, violent crime is a key midterm voting issue, but what does the data say, most popular.

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The Organizational Reasons Police Departments Don’t Change

• Barbara Armacost

“Rogue cops” are actually an institutional problem.

In early July 2016, police officers killed black men in two separate, high-profile incidents . First, Alton Sterling was shot at point blank range in front of a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And in Minnesota, during a minor traffic stop, a police officer shot Philando Castile as he reached for his license.

• BA Barbara Armacost is a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure, regulation of police and religious freedom. Her most recent paper is on the role of police in immigration enforcement .

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The Origins of the Police

Sir Robert Peel is popularly credited with the formation of the first modern municipal police force. But the Thames River Police did it first.

Sir Robert Peel is popularly credited with the formation of the first modern municipal police force, founded in London, in 1829.  Before him, what passed for policing was really a hodge-podge of part-time volunteers, night watches, “thief-takers” commissioned to hunt for criminals, and other iterations of private, fee-based security. Continental models, like the military-police set up by Louis XIV, were seen as absolutist threats in the Anglo-American world to liberty.

But the Bobbies, as London’s coppers eventually were nicknamed (in tribute to Robert Peel, get it?), actually preceded Peel by a few decades. The Thames River Police were organized in 1798, by magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, a Scot from Glasgow, and master mariner John Harriot. This patrol was initially funded by merchants concerned about losses to theft along London’s docks, but the passage of the Marine Police Act of 1800 turned them into a public force. Renamed the Marine Police, these dockyard cops later were incorporated into London’s Metropolitan Police.

Colquhoun’s Scottish origins are significant because, as the British historian David G. Barrie forcefully argues , his police force was founded on the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. “The Scottish literati were largely preoccupied with protecting commerce and property,” writes Barrie. Colquhoun’s “self proclaimed ‘new science of policing’ was being discussed and debated at length in middle-rank circles in Glasgow several years before its appearance,” for instance in Colquohoun’s influential Treatise on Police (1800). Barrie continues:

He called for the creation of a centralised [sic] police force to prevent and detect crime, as well as the establishment of a public prosecutor in order to relieve victims the trouble and expense of prosecuting criminals.

A centralized police organization was not necessarily welcome in London. As Adam Smith said: “those cities where the greatest police is exercised are not those which enjoy the greatest security.” Smith argued that more prosperity would take away the need for policing. Many members of London’s ruling classes agreed, believing that a centralized state system would infringe upon their traditional prerogatives as justices of the peace and magistrates — in short, their traditional control over local law.

Dock-workers, for their part, responded to the formation of the Thames River Police by rioting. The TRP’s very existence interfered with workers seeking to supplement their wages, appropriating resources from dockside employers that could have gone to the workers. The middle classes, however, turned out to be in favor of the protection of private property by the state. (Before moving to London, Colquhoun was Chairman of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce.)

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According to Barrie, it was David Hume, the foundational thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment who declared it necessary for “men of property to form governments, not just out of common interest, but as a form of collective security motivated out of self-interest.” In Hume’s eyes, property and civil government were dependent upon each other. But what flowed from these ideas of property and liberty—the liberty, as it turned out, mostly of people who already had property—was the practice of policing the unruly working classes. As Barrie puts it:

Improving the morality of the lower orders by general police superintendence was an underlying theme behind the thinking of both Colquhoun and civic leaders in the large urban centers of Scotland as a whole.

One class’s notion of reform is another class’s behavioral control. “Improving the common good,” when defined by the propertied, was a notion to be resisted by those targeted by this first police force.

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The Black Police: Policing Our Own

• Devon W. Carbado
• L. Song Richardson
• See full issue

Introduction

Since Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014, 1 the problem of police violence against African Americans has been a relatively salient feature of nationwide discussions about race. Across the ideological spectrum, people have had to engage the question of whether, especially in the context of policing, it’s fair to say that black lives are undervalued. While there is both a racial and a political divide with respect to how Americans have thus far answered that question, the emergence of Black Lives Matter movements 2 has made it virtually impossible to be a bystander in the debate.

Separate from whether racialized policing against African Americans is, in fact, a social phenomenon, is the contestable question about solutions: Assuming that African Americans are indeed the victims of overpolicing, meaning that by some metric they end up having more interactions with the police and more violent encounters than is normatively warranted, what can we do about it? And here, the answers range from abolishing police officers altogether, to training them, to diversifying police departments. It is on the last of these proposed solutions — the diversification of police departments — that we focus in this essay. The central question we ask is: What are the dynamics that might shape how African American police officers police other African Americans? Asked another way, what do existing theories about race and race relations, and historical and empirical studies on race and policing, suggest about how African Americans will police our own?

Our point of departure is a review of Professor James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own . Though not framed in precisely this way, Forman’s book is, in many ways, about the relationship between diversity and governance. Forman is particularly interested in the role African Americans have played across different sites of governance — as city council members, mayors, governors, prosecutors, police offi-cers — in facilitating and legitimizing the mass incarceration of African Americans. The story he tells is largely a story about choices under constraints — but choices that produced consequences for which African Americans bear some, though not the bulk, of the responsibility. Which is to say, Forman is clear to describe how African American leaders contributed to and participated in the war on drugs, clear to emphasize that many of those leaders had unsuccessfully advocated for interventions, even beyond criminal justice–oriented or law enforcement–oriented ones, to address the growing drug epidemic in African American communities, and clear to highlight the broader racial and political context in which African American leaders acted.

Some might deploy Forman’s book to advance the proposition that race has played less of a role in the mass incarceration of African Americans than liberals and progressives like to admit. After all, black people have been agents, and not just victims, of mass incarceration. Our own view is that Forman’s thesis is more nuanced than the preceding account suggests. Forman’s focus on African American governance is a way of complicating our understanding of how race has mattered in the mass incarceration of African Americans. His analysis of African American decisionmaking across various domains of the criminal justice apparatus reminds us that the persistence of racial inequality in the United States derives from problems of power and structure, rather than simply individual choice and identity.

To recognize the existence of power is not to deny the possibility of agency or the space African American leaders might have had to exercise at least some meaningful control over their choices. The point is rather that the phenomenon of African Americans exercising governance does not eliminate the racial barriers to combating racial inequality. If the two-term presidency of Barack Obama teaches us anything on this issue, it is that the racial identity of a leader — even a President of the United States — is not enough to dismantle or meaningfully mitigate the racial inequality of a society. Does this mean liberals and progressives are wrong to argue for racial diversity? No. It means that if racial diversity is the only game in town we are in civil rights trouble. That, we think, is one of the most important lessons to be drawn from Forman’s book: racial diversity without meaningful reallocations or redistributions of power might not only limit the possibilities for social transformation but also potentially reproduce and legitimize the very forms of inequality the pursuit of racial diversity was intended to address. At least implicitly, Forman advances that insight with respect to the mass incarceration of African Americans. Our focus is on a slice of that criminal justice problem — policing.

Specifically, drawing on empirical, historical, and theoretical literatures, we examine how, if at all, black police officers’ race might shape how they police other African Americans. Fundamental to our approach is a Du Boisian conceptualization of race and professional identity — namely, that African American police officers have to negotiate and reconcile two historically distinct strivings — the strivings to be “blue” and the strivings to be “black” — in one “dark body.” 3 As we will explain, how they perform that negotiation and reconciliation is not simply a matter of individual choice, individual agency, and individual commitment. Structural factors are at play as well, in much the same way that structural factors shaped, though certainly did not fully determine, how the black leaders Forman describes mobilized various dimensions of the criminal justice apparatus to address the proliferation of crime and drug usage in African American communities.

The remainder of the essay proceeds as follows. Part I summarizes Forman’s book, paying particular attention to where in Forman’s account he focuses on individual agency and where he pays closer attention to structure. Part II builds on that summary to discuss the black police. Part of our aim here is to show that the very factors — including Fourth Amendment law, explicit and implicit biases, 4 and racial anxiety 5  — that explain why white police officers might systematically overpolice and deploy violence against African Americans arguably implicate black police officers as well. Moreover, the pressures black police officers likely experience to fit into their departments potentially compound the problem. Some black officers may believe that their failure to share and display fellow officers’ racial assumptions about African Americans will engender the perception that black officers are “soft” on crime and criminality and “hard” on racial affiliation and loyalty. That perception would create an incentive for black officers to “work their identities” 6 to disconfirm assumptions that they will insufficiently identify with being “blue” 7 and overly identify with being “black.” Overpolicing other African Americans would be one way for black officers to perform that work. 8 We conclude by suggesting that just as the pursuit of diversity in the context of higher education has not eradicated the racial dimensions of educational inequality, the pursuit of diversity in the context of policing will not, without more, fundamentally change how African Americans experience the police. 9

I. Locking Up Our Own

In his groundbreaking and insightful book, Forman traces how the incremental decisions made by African Americans as “citizens, voters, mayors, legislators, prosecutors, police officers, . . . and community activists” in Washington, D.C., over a forty-year period shaped criminal justice policy and contributed to the mass incarceration of African Americans (p. 10). To understand how and why African Americans participated in the “punishment binge” (p. 10), Forman foregrounds two issues: the desire of African Americans to protect black lives from the surge in violence and crime ravaging their communities during the 1960s and beyond (pp. 10, 217–18), and the role racism played in limiting their options to do so (pp. 11–13). The African Americans he highlights in the book always intended to address the root causes of crime, including education and employment (pp. 11–12, 64, 76–77). The tough-on-crime responses were simply an expedient and readily available means of tackling the devastating effects of crime and violence in the short term. However, “the incremental and diffuse way the war on crime was waged made it difficult for some African American leaders to appreciate the impact of the choices they were making” (p. 13). Over decades, their decisions helped to create a criminal justice system that became grossly more punitive for indigent African Americans (p. 14), while the social programs they envisioned never came to fruition. In sum, Forman’s account recognizes how “racism’s enduring role” constrained not only African Americans’ options at the front end but also the possibilities at the back end (p. 12). Thus, despite his focus on the role of African Americans, Forman cautions against “minimiz[ing] the role of whites or of racism in the development of mass incarceration” (p. 11).

Were we to offer any overarching criticisms of Forman’s book, we would note two limitations to his analysis. First, Forman could have done more, quite a bit more, to highlight that his book is not first and foremost about black agency and social responsibility. As we have already said and want to emphasize again here, Forman unequivocally states that his book means to take seriously the structural conditions under which black decisionmakers promulgated policy and governed. However, Forman’s near-exclusive focus on what these actors did, with scant attention to the conditions under which they acted, leaves readers with the daunting challenge of articulating those structural factors for themselves. 10

Second, Forman’s analysis does not engage with or evidence a normative sensibility about intersectionality. 11 Which is to say, for the most part, throughout Forman’s book, men figure as the racial subjects of the war on drugs and mass incarceration. The centralization of men in this way elides the particularities of black women’s experiences across sexual orientation and gender/sexual identity. Significantly, in naming this intersectional shortfall we are not simply advancing an argument about inclusion and exclusion — that is, that excluding black women from the analysis further obscures their experiences under “the new Jim Crow” 12 and compounds the difficulty advocates continue to have including black women’s voices in antiracist contestations of criminal justice. Our point is rather that, as black feminists such as Professors Kimberlé Crenshaw, Priscilla Ocen, and Andrea Ritchie have noted, 13 an engagement of black women’s experiences with policing, state violence, and incarceration puts into sharp relief otherwise hidden racialized dimensions of the criminal justice system, particularly how that system collaborates with and expresses itself through various parts of the welfare state. 14 We should be clear to say that we will not, in the remainder of this essay, elaborate on the preceding two criticisms because we do not mean for them to overshadow what we perceive to be the central contribution of Locking Up Our Own — a heretofore largely unarticulated story of how black leaders participated in and negotiated their relationship to regimes of crime and punishment. What we will do instead, then, in the rest of this Part, is summarize Forman’s book, pausing in places to mark its important interventions and the careful archival research that enabled them.

In Part I of Locking Up Our Own , Forman describes the origins of the tough-on-crime stance taken by many African Americans during the period from 1975 through 1978 in Washington, D.C. He explains that many black religious, government, political, and community leaders rallied against marijuana decriminalization and advocated for harsher gun regulations because of their overriding concern to protect black lives from the scourge of drugs and violence decimating their communities (pp. 43–46, 51–57). With the benefit of hindsight, it seems inconceivable that African American leaders would advocate against marijuana decriminalization and for increased penalties for gun-related crimes given the contributions both have made to the mass incarceration of black civilians. Yet, by highlighting the broader context and constraints under which these decisions were made, Forman makes sense of these decisions. “In both cases, elected officials and other community leaders identified an issue plaguing the community, focused on its racial dimensions, and led a political response that emphasized prohibition” (p. 75).

When marijuana decriminalization was proposed in Washington, D.C., the black community was still reeling from the devastating effects of the heroin epidemic. Many black leaders worried that decriminalization would keep drugs in their communities and encourage drug use, leading to more “crime . . . and degradation” (p. 33). Forman relates that many leaders operated on the assumption that criminal punishment would drive drugs and the dealers who sold them out of the community (pp. 31–32). Furthermore, some were suspicious that whites wanted to encourage drug use amongst blacks in order to keep them passive (pp. 35–37). In their view, decriminalization would primarily help white individuals, who could bounce back from addiction to lead productive lives, whereas racism would prevent blacks from ever overcoming the effects (pp. 37–39). The black leaders who opposed decriminalization, many of whom were seen as “guardians of the black community” and “were among the black community’s most dogged defenders” (p. 44), did not foresee the impact their decision to oppose decriminalization would have on the very black lives they were trying to save (p. 45), especially because at the time, most people who were arrested for drug crimes were neither convicted nor incarcerated (p. 45).

Forman explains that Washington, D.C.’s gun control movement was also animated by concerns over protecting black lives. In the 1970s and 1980s, some black leaders sought an expedient solution to the massive increase in violent gun-related crimes destroying their communities (pp. 54–57). Their goals were twofold: to protect black communities from the ravages of guns and to rid the community of the small group of criminals who were terrorizing it (p. 61). To do so, black leaders advocated stricter gun laws and more punitive sentences, including mandatory minimums (pp. 56, 60–61). While they acknowledged that blacks would bear the brunt of these law enforcement responses, they believed it was necessary to pay this price in order to rid neighborhoods of the criminals limiting the communities’ economic viability, safety, and social mobility (p. 61). Black supporters of gun control “insisted that they had not abandoned the struggle against inequality and racial injustice” (p. 63). Rather, gun control was a useful first step (p. 63). Forman explains that while there was a century-old tradition of gun ownership within the black community to protect against the tyranny of white violence (pp. 64–73), the salient problem facing black communities was not racial “genocide” but rather “racial suicide” (p. 73). In the end, “by a 12–1 vote, Washington, D.C., passed one of the nation’s strictest gun control laws” (p. 71).

As we see today, the irony of these decisions is that neither marijuana criminalization, nor gun control, nor more punitive sentences curbed crime and violence in black and brown communities. Instead, homicide rates and drug crime continued to rise while those falling victim to increased penalties and imprisonment were primarily black and brown (pp. 77, 143). 15 Black supporters of the aforementioned three responses did not envision that their short-term calls for law enforcement solutions to crime and violence would become the sole response, while the long-term solution of addressing the social problems that gave rise to the problems in the first place would not follow. As Forman writes:

African Americans wanted more law enforcement, but they didn’t want only law enforcement. Many adopted what we might think of as an all-of-the-above strategy. . . . But because African Americans are a minority nationally, they needed help to win national action against poverty, joblessness, segregation, and other root causes of crime. The help never arrived. . . . So African Americans never got the Marshall Plan — just the tough-on-crime laws. (pp. 12–13)

Forman ends Part I of the book with a discussion of black police. One of the major goals of the civil rights movement was to enlist black police officers (pp. 84–88). The purpose was twofold: to end discrimination in the police force and to curb police brutality against the black community. However, neither goal was realized. Forman highlights structural constraints as well as how class-based and ideological divisions between those advocating for more black police and the citizens signing up to be police created mismatched or opposing goals (pp. 100–01).

Black civil rights advocates made assumptions about the attitudes of black officers and the role they would play to combat discrimination. “The case for black police had always been premised on the unquestioned assumption of racial solidarity between black citizens and black officers” (p. 107). However, Forman’s account reveals that the “blacks who joined police departments had a far more complicated set of attitudes, motivations, and incentives than those pushing for black police had assumed” (p. 107). The reality of employment discrimination meant that many black officers signed up to obtain a good job that was stable, secure, and offered good benefits (pp. 89–90, 110–11). These officers did not conceive of their role within the police departments as an extension of the civil rights movement (p. 111). Indeed, according to Forman, some did not view their work as racially significant (pp. 109–10).

Forman also highlights the racism that many black officers faced in the department. In the 1940s, black officers were segregated in separate and unequal facilities and did not have the same police powers as white officers. For instance, in Atlanta and other police departments across the country, black officers could not exercise power over whites and could only patrol black neighborhoods (pp. 86–87). Both the racism that limited the job prospects of blacks and the racism that existed within police forces “made it less likely that [black officers] would do what many reformers hoped they would: buck the famously powerful police culture. The few who tried paid a high price” (p. 111). “Even those black officers inclined to use their political capital to fight police brutality would often find themselves in the minority. Most of their colleagues — black or white — wanted to fight for wages, benefits, and an equal shot at promotions” (p. 111).

In his discussion of the black police officer, Forman illuminates the influence of class differences within black communities. He argues that middle-class blacks would often advocate for more policing against the lower-class blacks who were engaged in crime (pp. 108–10). Citing a handful of studies showing that black police were just as physically abusive as their white colleagues and sometimes even harsher, Forman concludes that “[i]t turned out that a surprising number of black officers simply didn’t like other black people — at least not the poor blacks they tended to police” (p. 108). 16 Despite this observation, Forman also acknowledges that, “[o]f course, most black officers didn’t share those views. But even those who saw themselves as pro-black . . . engaged in aggressive tactics against black citizens whom they saw as a threat to law and order. In part, their conduct reflected class divisions within the black community” (p. 108). He notes that “[w]hen some blacks (usually middle class) demanded action against others (usually poor), many ‘pro-black’ officers responded with special enthusiasm” (p. 108). We think the issues are more complicated than that, as we discuss in more detail below. But Forman is entirely right to note that black-on-black policing was not characterized by intraracial harmony. The end result was that while many police forces eventually integrated, the goal of reducing police violence against black communities was largely unattained.

In Part II of the book, Forman highlights how the tough-on-crime choices made by some African American leaders reshaped the criminal justice system in ways that contributed to mass incarceration and utterly failed to address the crime and violence decimating black communities. Over and over again, some black leaders responded to crime within their communities with harsher policing practices and more severe punishments (p. 165). Yet violent crime rates continued to rise (p. 178). 17

Black leaders’ actions helped usher in a new era of policing and programs that affected primarily indigent African American communities in negative ways and helped to create a “culture of . . . intrusion[] into the daily lives of black citizens” (p. 171). Police stepped up their weaponry and tactics and adopted “operations” throughout the country to battle drugs and violence (p. 167).

One example, Washington, D.C.’s antidrug initiative, Operation Clean Sweep, gave officers power “to clear corners, establish roadblocks, make undercover purchases, seize cars, and condemn apartments” (p. 167). Clean Sweep also created specialized units, such as the Rapid Deployment Unit (RDU), to carry out these practices (p. 170). RDU officers would conduct aggressive and usually demeaning stops of black citizens, often cursing or yelling at citizens, performing warrantless searches, and giving unlawful orders (pp. 170–71). While one might assume that these officers were white, more than fifty percent of the officers involved in Clean Sweep were black (p. 168).

A majority of black citizens saw Clean Sweep and asset forfeiture as a positive way to regain control of the streets (p. 173). However, rather than targeting kingpins, these measures treated users and street-level dealers harshly, stymieing their ability to vote, find employment, obtain housing, and attend college (p. 174). Furthermore, Clean Sweep completely failed to suppress the drug trade or reduce violence. Instead, murder rates continued to rise (pp. 176–79). By 1995, the murder rate was still three times what it had been in the years before the crack epidemic (p. 194), and “blacks experienced violent victimization at rates fifty percent higher than those for whites” (pp. 194–95).

Once again, the response of many black leaders was to rely on the criminal justice system. The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), while calling for the creation of solutions that would address the root causes of crime, also supported the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentences (p. 114). Furthermore, then–United States Attorney Eric Holder, a highly respected African American prosecutor, advocated the use of pretext stops (pp. 202–03). This controversial policing practice trained police officers to identify suspicious vehicles and to find a reason to search them (pp. 212–13). Holder felt that pretext stops would reduce violence in the short term by getting guns out of the hands of young black men (p. 203). While Holder acknowledged that black drivers would be much more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested than white drivers, he also knew that ninety-four percent of black homicide victims were slain by black assailants, and thus the concerns about discrimination were outweighed by the need to protect blacks from crime (pp. 202–03). Forman explains that pretext stops continue today and have become an integral part of racially disparate policing throughout the United States (pp. 211–13). This is particularly frustrating, Forman argues, because ending pretextual stops is one of the easiest and most direct ways to combat racial disparities in the criminal justice system (p. 213).

Forman’s account of the decisions made by African American leaders to protect their communities from drugs and violence illuminates the dangers of failing to attend to power and structure. They relied upon criminal justice system responses with the belief that more systemic solutions to address the root causes of crime would follow. In hindsight, their choices seem naïve. The question is whether we are being similarly naïve in advocating for racial diversity in policing as a solution to discriminatory and violent policing. Our answer is “yes.” We elaborate below.

II. Policing Our Own

Discussions about race and policing almost always have as their predicate the idea that the agents of racial profiling and police violence are white. The notion, at least implicitly, seems to be that black police officers are not implicated in the race and policing problems we have witnessed from Ferguson to New York to Los Angeles to Chicago, among other places. Broadly articulated, our goal in this part is to challenge that assumption. In the context of doing so, we explore what role, if any, black police officers can play in mitigating, if not eliminating, the overpolicing of African Americans.

Our starting point is the observation that, over the past few decades, the police departments in American inner cities have undergone significant demographic shifts. This demographic change is one of the reasons why Professor David Sklansky has suggested that modern departments are “not your father’s police department.” 18 Consider the data below. 19

Table 1 reveals that in many police departments across the country, and certainly in police departments that are often at the epicenter of debates about race and policing, people of color are part of the force — and in nontrivial numbers. The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, is now a majority-minority police department; 64.6% of the officers are nonwhite. 20 In Chicago, 24.7% of the officers are black and 18.8% are Latino. Police departments in Houston, Philadelphia, and New York similarly have relatively robust levels of racial diversity. This demographic backdrop, even without more, militates against framing racial profiling and police violence solely with respect to white police officers. 21 Other reasons also caution against the conclusion that racialized policing is solely a white officer phenomenon. 22

First, the legal backdrop against which police officers act is the same for black and white officers. In particular, like white officers, black officers can draw on Fourth Amendment law as a source of empowerment to target other African Americans. 23 Second, conscious or unconscious racial biases might lead black police officers to aggressively police other African Americans. Think of these biases as “same-race biases” or “intraracial biases,” because both the victims and the perpetrators of these biases have the same racial identity. 24 Third, black police officers, like white police officers, might experience a set of anxieties or vulnerabilities that increase the likelihood that they will mobilize violence against other African Americans. An example of what we mean is “masculinity threat.” 25 A relatively new body of research demonstrates that police officers who feel that their masculinity is being challenged or undermined in the context of a particular interaction are more likely to use violence than officers who do not experience that masculinity threat. 26 Another example is “racial anxiety.” Research on this concept shows that police officers who worry that they will be perceived as racist in particular interactions are more likely to use force against black citizens than officers who do not experience racial anxiety. 27

Still another reason to believe that black police officers might end up racially targeting African Americans relates to some structural features of policing. If police officers are specifically deployed to proactively police communities in which African Americans live — and if their performance evaluations, pay increases, and promotions are tied to, among other measures, the number of stops and frisks they conduct, the number of citations they issue, and the number of arrests they effectuate — black police officers, like white police officers, will end up having significant contact with African Americans. 28

A final reason to expect that black police officers will be implicated in the range of race and policing scenarios with which the United States has been grappling in the wake of Ferguson is this: to fit into and become a part of the law enforcement community of “blue,” black police officers may have to marginalize the concerns of and disassociate themselves from the community of “black.” 29

We should be clear to note that, notwithstanding what we have said thus far, at the end of the day, the question of whether and how black officers are implicated in racially motivated policing against other African Americans is an empirical question. One of the reasons our arguments are largely, though not entirely, theoretical is because the empirical evidence on the racial quality and effects of black policing points in contradictory directions. 30 In this respect, our goal in the rest of this Part is relatively modest: to suggest that it cannot be so readily assumed that, with respect to African American communities, black policing and white policing look fundamentally different. We begin with a discussion of same-race biases.

The basic point here is that African Americans (and other people of color) have some of the same racial biases against other African Americans that white people have. Think of these as “same-race” or “intra-racial” biases (an intragroup phenomenon analogous to same-sex sexual harassment). Consider, for example, the phenomenon of implicit biases. In order to make sense of our world and our experiences, our minds have developed mental processes that operate automatically, unintentionally, and without our conscious awareness. 31 Research in the field of social psychology reveals that humans have developed unconscious, that is, implicit, associations related to race that consist of ste-reotypes and attitudes about racial groups that often conflict with their consciously held thoughts and feelings. 32 These implicit associations can shape people’s perceptions, judgments, and behaviors in both positive and negative ways.

Over four decades of research reveals that both whites and African Americans unconsciously associate black people with negative values and white people with positive ones. 33 That is to say, African Americans often have negative “attitudes” about other African Americans. Second, both whites and African Americans generally hold negative stereotypes of other black people, including stereotypes of black people as criminally inclined, violent, and dangerous. 34 Professors Sandra Graham and Brian Lowery, for instance, found that priming words related to the category “black” promoted more negative trait ratings of a hypothetical adolescent offender. 35 Importantly, this effect emerged among both black and nonblack police and probation officers. 36 Moreover, the participants’ responses to the prime were not impacted by the participants’ consciously held attitudes toward blacks, 37 suggesting that even well-meaning, racially egalitarian officers may still fall prey to these biases. At least implicitly, then, black police officers likely feel just as unsafe around the average young black man in the inner city as do white police officers.

Studies reveal that police officers are not immune from these implicit racial biases. There is no good reason a priori why we would expect them to be. Moreover, implicit biases are most likely to influence behaviors and judgments in situations where decisionmaking is highly discretionary, information is limited and ambiguous, and individuals are cognitively depleted. 38 These are the conditions under which most police officers, including black police officers, operate on the street.

As an indication of the kind of empirical evidence that bears out the implicit biases of police officers, consider the shooter-bias line of research. In these studies, subjects, including police officers, watch a video that contains photographs of either black men or white men posed in front of different backgrounds and holding either guns or crime-irrelevant objects such as cell phones. 39 Participants are asked to quickly decide whether the men are armed by pressing buttons labeled “shoot” or “don’t shoot.” 40 These shooter-bias studies typically result in subjects mistakenly “shooting” unarmed blacks more often than unarmed whites. 41 They also “shoot” armed targets more quickly when they are black versus white. 42 Studies similarly demonstrate that offi-cers who work in neighborhoods with high percentages of black individuals are more likely to exhibit shooter bias. 43

Relevant for our purposes is the fact that African Americans, including African American police officers, evince shooter bias as well. Multiple studies have shown that white and nonwhite officers do not differ in racial bias on shooting tasks, either with respect to response time (for example, how quickly they “shoot” a black man as opposed to a white target with a weapon) or with respect to stereotype-consistent mistakes (for example, their propensity to “shoot” a black man without a weapon or to “not shoot” a white man who is armed). 44

Moreover, evidence shows that police departments with more black officers engage in more racial profiling than those with fewer black officers. 45 Consistent with that, the Department of Justice (DOJ) uncovered extensive racial bias in the predominantly black New Orleans Police Department. 46 According to the DOJ, police officers in New Orleans failed to articulate sufficient facts to justify stops, searches, and arrests. 47 Finally, data indicates that black officers are just as likely as their white colleagues to form nonbehavioral suspicions 48 about black suspects, and that black officers who stop a black man are more likely to arrest him than they are to arrest a stopped white suspect. 49 The foregoing might explain why there is only limited evidence that police forces with more minority officers show more equitable patterns of policing. 50

This brings us back to our more central point: as a result of implicit racial biases, officers are more likely to focus their attention on black, rather than white, individuals. 51 This is true even when the officers are consciously egalitarian, reject racial profiling, or are black themselves. 52 Finally, these implicit biases may cause officers to evaluate any ambiguous behaviors they observe as more consistent with threat and criminality than innocence and may influence how quickly officers identify, or misidentify, weapons. 53 In sum, the study of implicit bias demonstrates that race influences who will capture an officer’s attention and, once that attention is captured, whose ambiguous behaviors will be perceived as violent and dangerous.

On some level, the fact that implicit biases influence black and white officers alike should not surprise us, particularly because the nature of police work requires officers to think about crime. Researchers have found that simply thinking about crime is sufficient to trigger unconscious racial biases in police officers and that these biases influence their behaviors in ways that disadvantage blacks. 54 The very nature of policing, then, is effectively a racial prime for blackness. Understood in this way, the fact that, across many American cities, black police offi-cers, like white officers, spend a considerable amount of time policing majority-minority communities means that they are always effectively rehearsing the “black as criminal” stereotype. This is important to note because practicing associations — racial or otherwise — strengthens them. This might explain why officers working in these majority-minority areas exhibit higher levels of implicit bias than those who do not. 55

That we have focused on implicit bias in this way is not to suggest that explicit biases are not also at play. Quite likely they are. Our point is to suggest that, even assuming explicit biases away, the existence of implicit biases still leaves African Americans vulnerable to overpolicing.

In this section, we explain how a host of “self-threats” can create conditions that increase the likelihood of officers, including black offi-cers, aggressively targeting black civilians. Both of us have elsewhere laid out the main perceived threats that cause officers to overpolice black men. The analysis here draws on those frameworks and applies portions of them to black police officers to illuminate how they, too, are susceptible to these self-threats. 56 Here, as there, we focus on four main threats: social dominance threat, stereotype threat, masculinity threat, and racial solidarity threat.

1. Social Dominance Threat. — For more than twenty years, social psychologists have been developing and providing empirical support for what they call “social dominance theory.” The basic idea is that the persistence of social inequality derives in part from people’s endorsement of hierarchy-promoting ideologies 57 that effectively lock in extant advantages and disadvantages. 58 Under the theory, people who endorse such ideologies are said to have a social dominance orientation, or SDO. 59

Although scholars typically describe SDO as an individual difference variable, empirical evidence suggests that it is also a group-based phenomenon. In other words, where one is located in a particular social hierarchy partly determines one’s SDO. Members of high-status groups generally have a stronger SDO than members of lower-status groups. 60 For example, men tend to have a higher SDO than women, 61 while whites evidence a higher SDO than blacks or Latinos; similarly, police officers evidence a stronger SDO than civilians, even after controlling for a range of other characteristics, such as gender, social class, age, and educational background. 62 A particular feature of the social dominance literature that bears emphasis is the finding that people’s SDO orientation increases when their sense of relative status in society is threatened. 63

Social dominance theory likely applies to policing. Even beyond police officers’ elevated SDO, police cultures and trainings are fundamentally hierarchical. 64 Moreover, “the criminal justice system is itself hierarchically ordered, with suspects at the bottom, police officers somewhere in the middle, and judges at the top.” 65 Compounding matters is the fact that, “historically, race has been the most perniciously enforced hierarchy in the United States.” 66 Finally, “the criminal justice system and on-the-ground policing have functioned as significant sites in which state actors have enforced this hierarchy.” 67

As one of us has argued elsewhere, the preceding factors could coalesce to create a law enforcement investment in “social dominance policing” 68 — in other words, “policing that consciously or unconsciously maintains the officer’s sense of authority, control, and power and the officer’s sense of the suspect’s vulnerability, diminished agency, and powerlessness.” 69 To put the point another way, “social dominance policing is predicated upon police/civilian encounters in which the police and the suspect know who is in charge, know where power and vulnerability reside, and know how to conduct themselves in ways that affirm and re-inscribe this hierarchy.” 70

Various features of police training instantiate norms of social dominance. For example, officers are instructed to maintain control over every interaction because any threat to their authority is potentially dangerous. They are taught to do so by enacting “command presence,” which involves “tak[ing] charge of a situation” and “projecting an aura of confidence and decisiveness.” 71 This command presence interactional technique is expressly designed to establish and signal the officer’s hierarchical position, a position of dominance that African Americans can “threaten” in any number of ways.

For one thing, simply asserting rights could undermine the hierarchy upon which social dominance policing rests. This is precisely why many black parents expressly instruct their children to overcomply during their engagements with the police. 72 For another, questioning an officer’s authority more directly challenges that dominance and could prompt the officer to express his power by arresting the black citizen. 73 Still a third way an African American might threaten an officer’s social dominance is through some form of confrontation. As one scholar observes:

[B]y approaching people from a dominance perspective, police officers encourage resistance and defiance, create hostility, and increase the likelihood that confrontations will escalate into struggles over dominance that are based on force. The police may begin a spiral of conflict that increases the risks of harm for both the police and for the public. 74

Although not as robust as that of white officers, black police officers typically evidence relatively high levels of SDO. 75 Yet such an orientation does not, a priori, guarantee that black police officers would be committed to social dominance policing. Indeed, research suggests that high-SDO, low-status individuals will show bias in favor of the high-status group only when they believe that the hierarchy on which that group’s high status is based is legitimate. 76 One way to understand this in the context of policing would be to say that black police officers are unlikely to manifest social dominance–oriented policing against other black men unless they perceive the policing practices of their police department to be legitimate. A range of incentives exist for black police officers to view their departmental practices in precisely this way. 77

First, to view policing practices as illegitimate is to tell oneself that one is doing life-and-death work for a system that is not simply unjust but racially unjust. 78 Second, people are more likely to justify systems and organizational cultures when they have a desire to create a common or shared experience. 79 The fact that both police culture and formal training emphasize uniformity in attitudes and behavior 80 means that black police officers likely experience pressure to integrate themselves within and reproduce the department’s epistemic and cultural community. Third, individuals who are dependent on an organization or system tend to justify it. 81 To the extent that black and white police officers alike rely on police authority to maintain their safety, they may take comfort in seeing that system as legitimate and well constructed. 82 Finally, black officers’ explicit and implicit biases of other African Americans would matter here as well. 83 These perceptions would legitimize the utilization of aggressive policing tactics against a group that is presumptively perceived to be violent and dangerous — African Americans generally and black men in particular. 84

2. Stereotype Threat. — Another threat that could impact how black officers police other African Americans relates to stereotype threat. Stereotype threat refers to the anxiety that occurs when people are concerned about confirming a negative stereotype about a social group they value and to which they belong. 85 People can experience stereotype threat even when they do not endorse the stereotype or believe it applies to them. All that is required is that individuals are aware of the negative stereotype and are in a situation that raises concerns that they will be judged in terms of that stereotype. 86

Across a number of studies, researchers have learned that police officers experience stereotype threat arising from the concern that they will be perceived as racist by the civilians they encounter. 87 Disturbingly, these concerns can result in racial violence. Studies demonstrate that the more officers experience stereotype threat, the more likely they are to use greater force against black suspects relative to individuals of other racial groups, both in the lab and in the real world. 88

One of us has previously theorized that the reason stereotype threat is associated with greater uses of force against black civilians is because it influences officers’ perceptions of their moral authority, that is, their sense of self-legitimacy, and thus, their confidence that they can control a potentially threatening situation in noncoercive ways. 89 After all, if officers believe that civilians do not respect their authority, they will be quicker to think that words alone will be insufficient to control the situation and be more likely to use physical force as a result. In fact, one study found that when officers believed that civilians did not respect them and did not view them as legitimate, officers were more likely to believe that interactions with these individuals would be more dangerous. 90 That finding is particularly problematic for African Americans. Because the “police-are-racist” negative stereotype is most salient with reference to black civilians, African Americans are more likely than any other group to generate stereotype threat in police officers, 91 including officers who are black. 92

Recent research provides evidence to support this theory. The study we have in mind involved 514 police officers from a large urban police department. 93 Researchers found that officers’ perceptions of their own legitimacy is tied to their views of how citizens perceive them. 94 The more officers experienced stereotype threat, the less likely they were to perceive themselves as legitimate. 95 Furthermore, officers who experienced stereotype threat felt less confident in their authority. 96 Finally, the study found that the less legitimate officers viewed themselves to be, the more resistant they were to their department’s use-of-force policies, the more approving they were of unreasonable uses of force, and the less supportive they were of using procedurally just policing tactics in interactions with citizens. 97 The officers’ race did not predict these experiences of stereotype threat. 98

Importantly, researchers have not found significant differences between black and white officers’ experiences of stereotype threat. 99 Since stereotype threat influences both black and white officers, simply having more diversity in police departments may not, in and of itself, reduce uses of force against black citizens.

3. Masculinity Threat. — Another phenomenon that may influence police officers regardless of their race is masculinity threat. Masculinity threat refers to the fear of being perceived as insufficiently masculine. 100 Masculinities theorists have rejected the notion of gender as being simply about “biological” differences between sexes, focusing instead on gender as a social construct. 101 Viewed this way, gender is not about one’s innate characteristics, but rather about performing societal expectations of “what it means to be a man.” 102 To put all of this another way, “[o]ne must learn to be a man in this society because manhood is a socially produced category.” 103 Far from being an existential given, “[m]anhood is a performance. A script. It is accomplished and re-enacted in everyday relationships.” 104 Precisely because men do not perceive of their manhood or masculinity “as a developmental guarantee, but as a status that must be earned,” 105 men often experience a kind of masculinity precarity, or what we have been calling masculinity threat. 106 This sense of precarity is compounded to the extent that men work in hypermasculine environments, where exaggerated displays of physical strength and aggression are glorified and rewarded as a means of demonstrating and maintaining one’s masculinity. In those contexts, when a man’s masculinity is threatened, he will often respond with violence 107 because “physical aggression is part of men’s cultural script for sustaining and restoring manhood.” 108

In police departments, “[h]ypermasculinity amongst the rank and file is encouraged, reinforced, and policed in numerous ways.” 109 The departments that do highlight gender diversity often do so in a manner that foregrounds women’s “outsider” status; 110 some scholars have even posited that police academies have “an informal ‘hidden curriculum’ about masculinity,” 111 wherein “[m]en learn[] to disparage women by verbally denigrating and objectifying them”; 112 these academies also emphasize physical fighting and violence inside and outside the classroom. 113 Compounding all of this is the fact that policing is still a male-dominated profession, 114 and “police work is still viewed by police themselves and the public as a masculine pursuit best characterized by aggressive macho crime fighting.” 115 Finally, “officer training continues to emphasize physical strength, danger, and the physical aspects of the job, all of which codes policing as hypermasculine.” 116

Against the backdrop of the gendered dimensions of the practices and perceptions of policing, male officers comment on the necessity of proving their masculinity through performance of a straight, macho identity. 117 For instance, patrol officers may not call for help out of concerns that they will be viewed as insufficiently masculine in the eyes of other officers. As one veteran officer shares, “officers who ‘call for help’ are seen as weak, as vulnerable, and as feminine. . . . The subculture dictates that ‘real men’ will never need to call for help; those who do are often subjected to ridicule and scorn after having done so.” 118 All of this helps to explain why male officers may feel vulnerable to their colleagues perceiving them as wanting in masculinity.

Researchers have found that masculinity threat predicts uses of force by police against black men both in the lab and in the field. 119 One study found that the more officers were insecure in their masculinity, the more likely they were to use greater force against blacks relative to other racial groups. 120

As a theoretical matter, there are reasons to think that black officers are not immune to the masculinity threat phenomenon we have described. Indeed, one might theorize that black officers have a stronger incentive than white officers to defend their masculinity (1) if they are subject to racism within their police departments, 121 or (2) if they believe that their white or nonblack colleagues will think that they are prone to be “soft” on black suspects out of a sense of racial loyalty or kinship.

As an empirical matter, at least one line of research indicates that black police officers experience masculinity threat at similar rates to white officers. 122 Another line suggests that black officers may experience greater levels of masculinity threat. Professors Kimberly Hassell and Steven Brandl, for example, found, in a study of over a thousand Milwaukee Police Department officers, that black officers were more likely than their white colleagues to report that their peers underestimated their physical ability to do police work, an experience of doubt that has clear implications for masculinity. 123 While research in the area of masculinity threat remains relatively new, the bottom line for our purposes is that the phenomenon likely impacts black officers.

4. Racial Solidarity Threat: A Version of Racism Stereotype Threat .  — Black police officers may also experience a version of racism threat that we call “racial solidarity threat.” 124 The notion is that black police interactions with black men potentially threaten these officers’ sense of racial identity and kinship. More precisely, the threat is that the black men with whom they interact will perceive black police officers to be “sellouts,” 125 “Uncle Toms,” 126 or people who disidentify with or disassociate from other black people. 127

There are two reasons to posit that racial solidarity threat could engender aggressive policing. First, a black police officer could expect that black suspects, more than suspects of other races, should understand the difficult position in which black police officers find themselves. These suspects should thus make their encounters with the black police officer go as smoothly as possible by performing a kind of surplus compliance. In the absence of such compliance, the black officer may feel a reduced sense of kinship with his racial group. He may come to believe that the very fact that the black suspect is being noncompliant means that racial affinity or solidarity is doing no work and that the black suspect is invested in giving the black police officer a hard time. Under these circumstances, the officer would not be able to trade on a racially specific form of moral authority — same-race affinity or community. He would thus — consciously or unconsciously — default to a more authoritarian form of engagement.

Second, black officers could think that the reason the black suspect is giving the black officer a hard time is because the suspect believes that the black officer has in fact “sold out.” This perception could engender anger or frustration on the part of the black officer (particularly if the officer himself worries that he has “sold out”), either of which could produce more aggressive police conduct. Although preliminary evidence suggests that black officers worry about being perceived as racist as much as white officers do, 128 whether racial solidarity threat exists in the specific form we have described remains to be empirically determined. 129

Even assuming that black police officers don’t have implicit or explicit biases against other African Americans and are not subject to the various “threats” we have described, there is a strong incentive for them to engage in various forms of racially motivated policing: to fit into the culture of their workplace. Like other employees in workplaces, how black officers are perceived by their peers matters. Indeed, within law enforcement, where cohesion and ability to work with one’s partner are emphasized as critical elements of effective policing, 130 their peers’ perceptions are likely to shape not only black officers’ experiences in the workplace but also their sense of legitimacy and authority as police officers. Thus, it behooves black police officers to get along with their colleagues, to be good team players, and to fit into their work environment. In short, black police officers have an incentive to “work their identities” to demonstrate that they belong. 131

But there are racial constraints on their capacity to do so that could lead them to engage in various forms of racially motivated policing. In part, this bias derives from a potential tension that exists between a black officer’s sense of self and sense of his normative commitments, on the one hand, and his sense of what police cultures require, on the other. The effect of this tension is that race — the very thing that might lead one to surmise that black police officers can change the racial culture of policing — might limit their capacity to do so. The schematic below provides an indication of what this tension might look like. 132 Point One in the Model represents the black officer’s sense of self as a person with racial community ties and kinship who is committed to a progressive antiracist agenda. At Point Two, the black police officer forms a view about the criteria his police department values: in this case, a racially targeted hard-on-crime sensibility. At Point Three, the black police officer experiences a conflict between his sense of identity and his sense of the criteria that the institution values. This conflict has to be negotiated. This takes us to Point Four. Here, the officer has to decide whether to compromise his sense of identity. If he chooses not to do so, he will produce a performance that, from the perspective of what our hypothetical police department values, renders him a “bad cop” — a black police officer with a progressive antiracist/soft-on-crime identity. On the other hand, the officer may decide to compromise his sense of self. Under the terms of the model, this would render him a “good cop” — that is, a black police officer with a hard-on-crime approach to policing.

With the foregoing model in mind, and to make the discussion more specific, imagine that, while driving in a patrol car, a black police officer and a white police officer observe a car change lanes without signaling. Stipulate that the driver of the car is a black male in his twenties. Assume that the white officer says to the black officer, “let’s go check things out.” The black officer is inclined not to do so. Because the officers had observed many white drivers commit traffic infractions and the white officer had not suggested stopping any of them, the black police officer experiences the white police officer’s “let’s go check things out” as an invitation to engage in racially targeted policing. On the flip side, the black officer also believes that if he refuses to stop the black driver, his white colleague will perceive him to be racially conscious and soft on crime. The officer is experiencing Point Three in the model — the conflict — and has to decide how to negotiate it (Point Four).

The table below suggests that this conflict negotiation likely is a more salient dynamic than we have thus far discussed in that there are likely multiple moments of conflict between norms that a police department might value and stereotypical perceptions about black police officers. 133

As the table reveals, each institutional norm of our hypothetical police department is negatively associated with a stereotype about race. For example, the norm of law abidingness is positioned against the stereotype of blacks as lawbreakers. Similarly, the norm of cooperative institutional citizenship is positioned against the racial stereotype of blacks as uncooperative institutional complainers. These oppositional dualities create an incentive for black police officers to align themselves with the norms that the institution values and signal that they do not have the qualities that are in opposition to those values. This could lead black police officers to engage in racially targeted policing, not because they have implicit or explicit biases, but because of a pragmatic desire to survive, fit into, and thrive within a particular institutional setting — police departments. 134

One could imagine these dynamics affecting other officers of color for similar reasons. Think, for example, about the kind of pressure a Muslim law enforcement official would feel to racially profile other Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Think as well about the pressures Latino border patrol agents must experience to racially profile people based on their “apparent Mexican ancestry.” 135

Elements of the model we have described have been substantiated by psychological research. First, work by Professors Jenessa Shapiro and Steven Neuberg supports the idea that officers of color likely feel a conflict between their own values and those of the white majority, and that they may strategically express bias in order to gain esteem among white peers. The researchers found that black men, more than white men, assumed that facially egalitarian white men were likely to hold unstated racial prejudice. 136 Black men further expressed the belief that publicly matching white men’s presumed-racist views would be socially rewarded. 137 Moreover, the researchers found that black men would engage in public displays of bias in contexts where they believed their behavior toward a fellow person of color would be the basis of social evaluation by whites. 138 In other words, though not specifically demonstrated in a police population, this research suggests that blacks engage in precisely the kind of value comparison we describe in Point Two of the model, and further that the choice to engage in bias nonetheless (Point Four) represents a compromising of their true attitudes.

Even more alarming, recent research suggests that racially biased policing by black officers seeking approval from white peers may in fact increase the expression of bias among white officers in the department. Professor Ines Jurcevic and colleagues have found that whites who observe a black person putting down a fellow black person will in turn derogate that target too. 139 Using the ruse that participants would be helping on a hiring committee, the researchers showed white participants negative evaluations of a job applicant, ostensibly provided by a member of a hiring committee. 140 They varied the race of the applicant as well as the race of the committee member and found that participants rated a black candidate more negatively after hearing a black committee member derogate him than after hearing a white committee member give an identical evaluation. 141 In a follow-up study, they demonstrated the mechanism by which this occurred: hearing a black committee member give a negative evaluation, it turned out, reduced whites’ concern about appearing prejudiced, which in turn predicted whites’ own (lower) ratings of the candidate. 142

While none of what we have said conclusively establishes that black police officers engage in racial profiling, at the very least the above cautions against framing the problem solely with respect to white police officers. Black officers and other officers of color likely racially profile as well. They should thus figure more prominently in our discussions of the problem and the interventions we fashion to eliminate it.

Thus far, we have argued that explicit and implicit biases, a number of different “identity threats” — social dominance threat, stereotype threat, masculinity threat, and racial solidarity threat — and the pressures black police officers likely feel to fit into their departments and the culture of “blue” may cause black police officers to police their own — that is to say, other African Americans — aggressively. Below we add two additional factors: (1) the structure and organization of police departments, including how those departments allocate work; and (2) the legal backdrop against which police officers act. With respect to this second factor, our particular focus is on the Fourth Amendment. As we will explain, Fourth Amendment law permits police officers to force interactions with civilians with little or no basis. Black police officers, and not just white police officers, likely take advantage of this power.

Many people would be surprised to learn that police departments are sometimes run like businesses. There are bottom lines, quotas, and benchmarks that must be met. One of the most pernicious examples of this dynamic can be found in Ferguson, Missouri. A DOJ investigation into Ferguson’s Police Department revealed that city officials placed enormous pressure on the police to generate revenue through their enforcement practices. 143 In fact, the city made revenue generation the police department’s top priority, over and above public safety concerns. 144 Patrol officers were pressured to increase their “productivity” by writing more citations to enforce the municipal code. 145 Supervisors monitored “productivity,” provided incentives to increase it, and made it one of the most important criteria for promotions. 146 Moreover, additional officers were hired, and shifts were extended to increase opportunities for municipal code enforcement. 147 These practices occurred primarily in Ferguson’s black neighborhoods. 148

Throughout the nation, policing has become a numbers game, with departments focusing their energies on the “objectification and quantification of police work.” 149 In police departments across the country, officers are routinely evaluated and rewarded for the number of arrests they make, how many tickets they write, 150 and how many stops and frisks they log. 151 This type of proactive policing is typically carried out in indigent, minority neighborhoods. 152

Recall that in his book, Forman highlights how violent crime rates led many African American leaders to embrace tough-on-crime measures, including proactive policing (pp. 202–14). They were not the only ones to do so; on the contrary, those officials were trading on a much broader law-and-order impulse, the intellectual precursors of which were manifested, among other places, in a 1982 essay by Professors James Wilson and George Kelling titled Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety . 153 Kelling and Wilson argued that police could reduce major crimes by focusing on minor crimes that signaled physical and social disorder such as public urination and drinking, loitering, and panhandling. 154 The broken windows theory of policing captured the attention of police chiefs around the country. In cities such as New York, trespassing, marijuana possession, and other low-level offenses went from the least enforced to the most enforced criminal charges, especially in communities of color. 155

Officers quickly learned that enforcing low-level crimes in neighborhoods of color would benefit their careers. For instance, in a program known as “Operation Impact,” the New York Police Department (NYPD) assigned rookie officers to flood “hot spots,” which could sometimes consist of areas as small as a single housing project, in order to conduct stops, frisks, interrogations, and arrests. 156 At the end of these officers’ shifts, they were evaluated on their arrest record and the number of citations they had issued. 157 These rookies learned early on to engage in these policing practices as a means of moving up in the department. 158 These pressures undoubtedly influenced rookies of all races.

Indeed, in August 2015, twelve black and Latino police officers filed a class action lawsuit against New York City and the NYPD on behalf of minority police officers, alleging that the department forced them to carry out precisely the kind of arrest quotas we have described. 159 They claimed that an illegal quota system forced them to issue summonses “regardless of whether any crime or violation” had occurred and to focus disproportionately on areas in which minorities resided. 160 The lawsuit also alleged that the predetermined “performance goals” were used to deny officers vacation, overtime, and career advancement. 161 Edwin Raymond, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, claimed that the NYPD essentially required officers to meet fixed numerical goals for arrests and court summons each month, a policy fundamentally discriminatory against minorities. 162 The lawsuit asserted that commanders would use euphemisms such as “get more activity” or “be more proactive” to try to sidestep the quota ban that had been put in place. 163 The amended complaint gave the example that “a police officer from a precint [sic] located in a predominantly white residential area will receive a positive evaluation while a police officer from a precint [sic] located in a predominantly minority area will receive a negative evaluation for the same exact number of enforcement actions.” 164

Although the city and NYPD explicitly denied such a quota, in 2017 the city agreed to send out department-wide notifications to reiterate its policy that quotas were banned and that officers facing retaliation for failing to comply with quotas should notify the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. 165 NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton also wrote in a 2016 New York Daily News editorial that if the NYPD’s motivation to record enforcement encounters, issue summons, or effect arrests had ever been “driven by numbers and quotas, today’s NYPD is not.” 166 The lawsuit, Raymond v. City of New York , is still being litigated.

Supervisors also face enormous pressure to promote these proactive policing practices in minority communities. 167 One primary reason is the managerial program known as CompStat. Short for “compare statistics,” CompStat identifies areas of heightened criminal activity for targeted enforcement of quality-of-life offenses. 168 In monthly CompStat, NYPD precinct commanders would be grilled and bullied on whether they were able to decrease crime in their jurisdiction. 169 These meetings are infamous for “excoriat[ing precinct commanders] over the crime numbers in their districts.” 170 Because CompStat gathered data on each unit and each officer in the city as well as tracked the number of stops and frisks, vertical patrols, arrests, and so on, it created enormous pressure on commanders to worry about the activity of every single officer within their department. 171 Thus, managers and supervisors put pressure on their officers to increase their productivity because managers’ promotions were also reliant on how well their precinct performed. 172 Again, these pressures existed regardless of the race of the individual manager.

In sum, though the names of these policing strategies have changed, one common thread remains the same — they create incentives for officers who seek to rise within the ranks of their departments to over-police African American communities. Given our earlier point about the pressures black officers likely feel to fit into their departments, these officers may experience stronger incentives than white officers to proactively police. Whether we are right in this respect is less important than our broader takeaway — namely, that the structure and organization of police work shapes the policing of all officers, not just those who are white.

The same is true of Fourth Amendment law. Its impacts, too, transcend the race of individual officers. Like the organization and structure of police work, Fourth Amendment law creates conditions of possibilities for police officers across races to aggressively police African American communities.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits the government from engaging in “unreasonable searches and seizures.” 173 Because of the narrow way in which the Supreme Court has interpreted this prohibition, however, Fourth Amendment law operates more as a source of police empowerment than as a meaningful constitutional constraint. 174 More precisely for our purposes, consistent with Fourth Amendment law, police officers can make any of us — and certainly African Americans — feel in secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects. Consider, for example, the list one of us has compiled indicating the kinds of interactions that the Supreme Court has said are not seizures:

Following a person

Approaching a person

Questioning a person along any of the following lines:

What’s your name?

What are you doing here?

Where do you live?

Where are you going?

What’s in your bag?

Do you have any drugs?

Are you an “illegal”?

Do you have ties to terrorism? 175

The fact that an officer follows a person onto a bus, or into a home, in order to ask some or all of the preceding questions would not change the analysis. The Court would still conclude that those engagements do not rise to the level of a seizure. 176

The Court’s jurisprudence on what constitutes a seizure is important to foreground. Police officers need no evidence of wrongdoing — none whatsoever — to engage in conduct that the Court concludes is something other than a seizure. 177 In this respect, the greater the number of instances in which the Court concludes that police conduct is not a seizure, the greater the forms of contact police officers, including African American officers, can make without any justification.

If the problem with Fourth Amendment law were only that it permits police officers to perform the kinds of interactions we have described without any evidence of wrongdoing, things would be bad enough. But the reality is worse in that the Court’s conclusions about when searches and seizures are reasonable make it relatively easy for officers to justify them. Below we elaborate on this point. We pay particular attention to stops and frisks and the constitutional doctrines that underwrite both practices.

Fifty years ago, the Court in Terry v. Ohio 178 held that officers could detain individuals and conduct a limited frisk for weapons based on reasonable suspicion. 179 While Chief Justice Warren hoped that the standard would adequately balance individuals’ desires to be free from invasion against police officers’ desire to deal effectively with perceived threats, 180 the standard has been more of a sword for police officers than a shield for civilians. 181 Five reasons explain why. 182

First, reasonable suspicion is a low evidentiary bar that police officers can easily satisfy. Thus, police officers end up having tremendous discretion with respect to deciding whom to subject to stops and frisks. Second, implicit and explicit biases likely shape how and when police officers of all races exercise that discretion. 183 Third, assuming that an officer stops an individual, those very same biases will shape whether the officer interprets the person’s behavior as evidence that the individual could be dangerous or carrying a weapon; this might lead the officer to conduct a search that not only invades the individual’s privacy but also humiliates him publicly. 184 Fourth, recall our earlier points concerning identity threats. Once a police encounter is staged, the sense of threat that both police officers and black people experience can feed off each other in ways that increase the likelihood that a particular officer will conclude that a particular African American poses a risk of harm to the officer. Finally, consistent with current Supreme Court doctrine, police officers across race can easily manufacture the very reasonable suspicion that should preexist their decision to stop and frisk a person.

As a reminder, our overarching aim in this section is to suggest that the impact of the Terry regime on African Americans is more a function of the power that body of law allocates to police officers than the racial identity of police officers. We elaborate below.

1. Implicit Bias and Reasonable Suspicion. — There are a number of ways in which implicit and explicit biases and reasonable suspicion interact to increase the likelihood that police officers will stop and frisk African Americans. First, as a result of racial biases that suppose African Americans are both criminally suspect and dangerous, officers’ attention will be drawn more quickly to blacks than to whites. 185 Second, “the reasonable suspicion test actually permits, rather than prevents, actions based upon racial hunches.” 186 It does so by providing officers with the interpretive space to evaluate the ambiguous behaviors of black civilians as aggressive, violent, or suspicious. (We will say more about this dimension of the doctrine later.)

Third, while the reasonable suspicion standard requires officers to justify their suspicions by pointing to the “specific articulable facts” that formed the basis for their suspicion, 187 courts, including the Supreme Court, have watered down that requirement to mean very little indeed. Because an officer can rely on an individual’s appearance and demeanor, as well as the neighborhood in which he is located, those factors can easily function as the rhetorical means through which implicit or explicit biases are both expressed and legitimized. The end result is that reasonable suspicion can provide constitutional cover for both conscious and unconscious biases.

2. Reasonable Suspicion and Identity Threats. — The points we made earlier about identity threats also help to reveal the racially fraught dimensions of the Terry doctrine. Consider, for example, ste-reotype threat. During any given encounter, stereotype threat may cause both officers and individuals to exhibit behaviors that the other party will interpret as signs of danger, suspicion, or aggression. 188 To appreciate how this dynamic might arise, let’s focus first on the civilian’s sense of threat.

In the context of a police interaction, an African American civilian might worry that he will be the victim of police racism, leading him to anticipate harsh treatment or even excessive force being used against him. 189 That person might also be concerned that the officer will perceive him as a criminal because of the deeply entrenched black-crime stereotype discussed earlier. Under these conditions, the black individual may go into the police interaction with a heightened sense of anxiety. 190 That sense of racial anxiety has cognitive and physiological effects. 191 “It can cause individuals involved in interracial interactions to feel self-conscious, and to become hyper-vigilant” during these encounters. 192 “Additionally, the stress of racial anxiety is associated with a variety of physiological responses including sweating, increased heart rate, facial twitches, fidgeting, and avoiding eye contact.” 193

Let’s turn now to the police officer’s sense of threat. To begin with, the officer might interpret the black person’s behavioral manifestations of anxiety — fidgeting, eye-contact avoidance, and sweating — as signs, reasonable-suspicion signs, that the individual poses a threat. 194 This is not at all farfetched. After all, the very behaviors we have just described are among the ones police officers are trained to interpret as suspicious. 195 That interpretation could lead the officer to effect “command presence,” a posture police officers are encouraged to assume in the face of a possible threat. 196 More particularly, the officer might attempt to take control of the situation by exercising precisely the kind of dominance we previously discussed. 197

But the officer’s show of dominance and control can compound the individual’s sense of anxiety and increase the likelihood that the individual will challenge the officer’s authority. 198 Any such challenge on the part of the individual could end up confirming the officer’s initial stereotypical view of the person as non–law abiding and dangerous. Through all of this, the officer may have no sense of the role he played, nor the role of background racial biases, including stereotypes, in producing this recursive dynamic.

The short of what we are saying is that (1) the ease with which police officers can satisfy reasonable suspicion, and (2) the potential for identity threats on the part of both the civilian and the officer create feedback loops and signals about racism, criminality, dangerousness, and authority. These loops and signals increase not only the likelihood of stop-and-frisk contact between African Americans and the police, but also the possibility that those moments of contact will escalate into violence. Admittedly, there are racial particularities to the identity-threat dynamics we have described (recall, for example, that black officers, but not white officers, will experience racial solidarity threat). Put those to one side. Our broader point is that the recursive feedback loop between African Americans and police officers transcends the racial identity of the officers. 199

3. Promoting Negative Interactions and Constructing Suspicion . — Rather than constraining police behaviors, post- Terry doctrine allows officers to construct the very reasonable suspicion they require to justify seizing a person in the first place. 200 The ostensible right of every citizen to avoid police contact so long as police do not have reasonable suspicion or probable cause 201 rings hollow for people of color living in communities made up predominantly of racial minorities. To appreciate why, it’s helpful to know that the Supreme Court has given police officers license to view an individual’s decision not to engage with an officer as suspicious . 202 The relevant case here is Michigan v. Chesternut . 203

In Chesternut , the Supreme Court found nothing problematic with officers’ pursuing people even in the absence of reasonable suspicion or probable cause. 204 In that case, Chesternut ran away upon observing four officers in a patrol car; the officers pursued him (for an unspecified amount of time) until they established probable cause to arrest him for drug possession. 205 Chesternut argued that the police had effectively seized him during the chase, doing so without either reasonable suspicion or probable cause. 206 The Court disagreed, 207 opining:

[T]he police conduct involved here would not have communicated to the reasonable person an attempt to capture or otherwise intrude upon respondent’s freedom of movement. . . . While the very presence of a police car driving parallel to a running pedestrian could be somewhat intimidating, . . . [it] was not “so intimidating” that respondent could reasonably have believed that he was not free to disregard the police presence and go about his business. 208

Consistent with this decision, officers seem free to pursue individuals “based solely on a mere hunch of criminality.” 209 Given all that we have said about explicit and implicit biases, police officers will be more likely to pursue black civilians, rather than white civilians, when acting in the absence of reasonable suspicion or probable cause. 210

The problem is worse given the factors on which police officers may base their reasonable suspicion. In Illinois v. Wardlow , 211 officers were patrolling a so-called “high crime area” in search of criminal activity. 212 When officers noticed Wardlow running, they pursued him. 213 While the Court did not quite rule that fleeing in a high-crime area gives rise to reasonable suspicion, it came quite close, expressly identifying “the relevant characteristics of a location” and “evasive behavior” as part of the reasonable suspicion determination. 214

Nothing in the above analysis changes if, prior to the civilian’s flight, the police did not have sufficient cause or suspicion to seize the civilian. Thus, in “high-crime neighborhoods,” officers can create the reasonable suspicion necessary to act on their racial hunches simply by goading people into fleeing. Doing so is easier than you might think. Exhibiting aggressive behavior, without more, may cause people to flee. Ordering people to stop might cause people to flee. And using lights and sirens to follow people walking down the street might cause people to flee. Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list. The point is that, without much difficulty, officers can increase the likelihood that any particular person will flee. The more aggressive their behaviors, the greater the likelihood that people will flee. In and of itself, that’s one of the troubling dimensions of Wardlow .

The other is that, if a person runs away, then officers have effectively created reasonable suspicion to conduct a forcible seizure. Recall that at the outset of the encounter, the officer did not have reasonable suspicion and therefore could not have legally seized the person. The officer created that reasonable suspicion by provoking the person into running. In sum, “in high crime neighborhoods, officers can easily transform their inchoate racial hunches into reasonable suspicion to conduct a seizure simply by engaging in aggressive shows of force that scare people into fleeing.” 215

For reasons alluded to in the preceding sections, officers’ ability to construct reasonable suspicion in this way is easier with black individuals than white individuals. Consider, for example, the fact that the phrase “high-crime area” is primarily used to describe urban, majority-minority neighborhoods. 216 Which is to say, the designation is not typically based on objective measures but on the attribution of criminality to black and brown communities. 217 Indeed, empirical evidence demonstrates that people view majority-black neighborhoods as more disordered than majority-white neighborhoods, whether or not those neighborhoods are otherwise similarly situated. 218

The history and contemporary realities of racialized law enforcement offer another reason why police officers may have an easier time developing reasonable suspicion for African Americans than white Americans — because black Americans, from a young age, learn not to trust the police. 219 Black people’s longstanding contestatory relationship with the police creates an incentive for them to avoid police contact altogether. Fleeing, of course, is one way for them to do so. But against the backdrop of stereotypes of black criminality, fleeing reinscribes the perception of black non–law abidingness. As Justice Scalia put it, quoting Proverbs, “[t]he wicked flee when no man pursueth.” 220

Perhaps the solution, then, is for African Americans to walk rather than run away? Presumably, there is nothing “wicked” about that. And indeed, police officers may not, at least as a formal matter, draw an adverse inference from a person’s decision to walk (rather than run) away. That, it’s fair to say, is the good news.

The bad news is that if the individual chooses to walk away, the officer may follow him, even without evidence that the person has done something wrong. Remember: following a person is not considered a seizure. In other words, when a police officer follows you, you are technically free to ignore the officer and go about your business. You are, in the parlance of Fourth Amendment doctrine, “free to leave.” 221 At the same time, the officer is free to follow and even question you! That is the meaning of Fourth Amendment freedom.

This logic of ostensible freedom also, as we have discussed, applies when the officer’s decision to follow you takes the form of a chase. Here, too, you are technically free to leave — in this instance by running away. Recall, though, that if you are fleeing in a high-crime area, the officer ends up having what he did not have at the outset of the interaction: reasonable suspicion. Armed with reasonable suspicion, the officer is now legally empowered to seize and possibly even frisk you. When one adds the fact that officers are more likely to use physical force against black individuals after a chase, 222 it becomes clear that the Terry regime exposes African Americans not only to being stopped and frisked by the police, but also to being shot and killed by the police. 223

As we have already said and want to repeat here, black police offi-cers are potentially — even likely — implicated in the doctrinal state of affairs we have described. Our analysis of the racial boundaries of Terry v. Ohio and its progeny is not first and foremost about white police officers. That is to say, our aim has been to highlight police power, not the racial identity of police officers. When one incorporates into our discussion of Terry our earlier points about implicit biases, identity threats, and the organization and structure of policing, the vulnerability of African Americans to police contact and violence — including at the hands of black police officers — is put into even sharper relief.

This brings us back to a central theme in Forman’s book — namely, that diverse governance is not necessarily enough to disrupt patterns of inequality. We’ve advanced that claim vis-à-vis the racial dimensions of policing. We have done so because it is critically important to intervene in the debate about the racial diversity (or lack thereof) of police officers given that one of the solutions people continue to proffer for police officers’ racial profiling of and violence against African Americans is the diversification of police departments. 224

At the same time, we should be perfectly clear to note that we are not arguing against efforts to diversify the police. Our point is that it would be a mistake to stop there. As we have explained, there are broader factors, factors that transcend the racial identity of police offi-cers, that explain the exposure of African Americans to police contact and violence. We will not in this conclusion even gesture in the direction of articulating our own solution to a problem whose history is rooted in perhaps the most pernicious system of racial inequality — slavery. 225 Instead, we will conclude by noting that just as the diversity rationale has not ended racial inequality in the context of education, 226 the redeployment of the rationale in the context of policing will not fundamentally change how African Americans experience the police. Which is to say, whether or not police officers are policing their own, if the broader structural forces we have discussed remain the same, the racial dimensions of policing with which the nation continues to grapple are likely to persist.

* Associate Vice Chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

** Dean and Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine School of Law. For conversations about or comments on this essay we thank LaToya Baldwin-Clark, Paul Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Aziz Huq, Genevieve Lakier, Richard McAdams, John Rappaport, and the attendees of the University of Chicago Law School’s Public Policy and Legal Theory Workshop. We also thank Megan Brownlee, Zackory Burns, Alison Korgan, Emmanuel Mauleon, and Patrick Rock for excellent research assistance. Finally, we thank the editors of the Harvard Law Review for their thoughtful comments, careful editing, and patience. All errors are our own.

^ See Danielle Cadet, Darren Wilson Identified as Officer who Fatally Shot Michael Brown , Huffington Post (Aug. 15, 2014, 9:47 AM), https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/15/darren-wilson-michael-brown_n_5681340.html [ https://perma.cc/H22G-VJE6 ].

^ Find a Chapter , Black Lives Matter , https://blacklivesmatter.com/take-action/find-a-chapter/ [ https://perma.cc/7H58-G9WF ].

^ W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 45 (Signet Classic 1969) (1903).

^ See L. Song Richardson, Arrest Efficiency and the Fourth Amendment , 95 Minn. L. Rev. 2035, 2038–39 (2011).

^ See Rachel D. Godsil & L. Song Richardson, Racial Anxiety , 102 Iowa L. Rev. 2235, 2237 (2017) (defining the concept of “racial anxiety” in the context of interracial relations).

^ On the theory of working identity, or intentionally signaling certain traits or identities, see Devon W. Carbado & Mitu Gulati, Working Identity , 85 Cornell L. Rev. 1259 (2000).

^ See, e.g. , Jerome H. Skolnick, Corruption and the Blue Code of Silence , 3 Police Prac. & Res. 7, 7 (2002) (describing the idea of an internal code of loyalty among police officers that can have both beneficial and harmful effects); Louise Westmarland, Police Ethics and Integrity: Breaking the Blue Code of Silence , 15 Policing & Soc’y 145, 155–57 (2005) (explaining how survey results support the existence of an informal police code of conduct).

^ Cf. Devon W. Carbado & Patrick Rock, What Exposes African Americans to Police Violence? , 51 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 159, 163–65 (2016) (delineating the systemic factors leading to overpolicing of African Americans) .

^ See Devon W. Carbado, From Stopping Black People to Killing Black People: The Fourth Amendment Pathways to Police Violence , 105 Calif. L. Rev. 125, 127–28 (2017) (discussing the multiple ways in which African Americans are exposed to police contact and violence).

^ See Darren Lenard Hutchinson, Who Locked Us Up? Examining the Social Meaning of Black Punitiveness , 127 Yale L.J . (forthcoming 2018) (reviewing James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own (2017)) (expressing concern that readers might interpret Forman’s argument as a critique of or challenge to antiracist contestations of the criminal justice system).

^ For a definition of intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics , 1989 U. Chi. Legal F. 139, 149; Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color , 43 Stan. L. Rev. 1241, 1242–44 (1991); and see also Devon W. Carbado, Colorblind Intersectionality , 38 Signs 811, 845 (2013).

^ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012).

^ See generally Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie & Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (2011); Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (2017); Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, and Social Control , 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1418 (2012); Priscilla A. Ocen, Punishing Pregnancy: Race, Incarceration, and the Shackling of Pregnant Prisoners , 100 Calif. L. Rev. 1239, 1312 (2012); Priscilla A. Ocen, The New Racially Restrictive Covenant: Race, Welfare, and the Policing of Black Women in Subsidized Housing , 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1540, 1583 (2012); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw & Andrea J. Ritchie with Rachel Anspach et al ., African Am. Policy Forum & Ctr. for Intersectionality & Soc. Policy Studies, Columbia Law Sch., Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (2015), http://www.aapf.org/sayhernamereport/ [ https://perma.cc/FF44-NYZZ ]. Of course, there is a broader literature that highlights how black women experience the criminal justice system. See generally, e.g. , Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1988); Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016); Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (2012); Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (2012); Beth E. Richie, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women (1996); Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons (Robin Levi & Ayelet Waldman eds., 2011); Paula C. Johnson, Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison 4–6 (2003); Kim Shayo Buchanan, Impunity: Sexual Abuse in Women’s Prisons , 42 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 45 (2007); Natalie J. Sokoloff, The Effect of the Prison-Industrial Complex on African American Women , in Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives: The Racism, Criminal Justice, and Law Reader 73 (Manning Marable et al. eds., 2007); Julia Sudbury, Women of Color, Globalization and the Politics of Incarceration , in The Criminal Justice System and Women 219 (Barbara Raffel Price & Natalie J. Sokoloff eds., 3d ed. 2004).

^ See Carbado, supra note 9, at 164 (framing this phenomenon as part of a broader problem of mass criminalization).

^ Drug prosecutions increased by 300% from 1982 to 1984, and arrests for sales, as opposed to possession, increased from 3% to 45% of drug arrests between 1980 and 1984 (pp. 143–44). The same people were being arrested, but now prosecutors were charging them with more serious offenses, and the harsher sentencing guidelines increased pressure on them to plead guilty (pp. 144). During the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s, homicide rates tripled over one seven-year period (p. 160).

^ Forman references a study conducted by the University of Michigan that found some level of anti-black prejudice in 28% of black officers in precincts in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., as well as a report put out by the Katzenbach Commission (p. 108).

^ Many African American leaders adopted the “war” rhetoric, and some requested troops be sent to their streets while others asked President Ronald Reagan “to declare a state of emergency and to deploy the National Guard” (pp. 165–66).

^ David Alan Sklansky, Not Your Father’s Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of Law Enforcement , 96 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1209 (2006).

^ Governing, Diversity on the Force: Where Police Don’t Mirror Communities 7–10 (2015), http://media.navigatored.com/documents/policediversityreport.pdf [ https://perma.cc/GZJ5-UBSP ] (gathering data about black, Hispanic, and Asian police officers across major American cities); see also Police Department Race and Ethnicity Demographic Data , Governing , http://www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/police-department-officer-demographics-minority-representation.html [ https://perma.cc/7PRL-ZVKG ]. For 2015 demographic statistics in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, see Jeremy Ashkenas & Haeyoun Park, The Race Gap in America’s Police Departments , N.Y. Times (Apr. 8, 2015), https://nyti.ms/2jVoad2 [ https://perma.cc/B49T-NSHS ].

^ The data excludes all non-Hispanic whites, but it is worth noting that some of the officers captured in the “Latino” column above may also be white.

^ In 2007, black officers represented 11.9% of officers in local police departments across the nation. Jeff Rojek, Richard Rosenfeld & Scott Decker, Policing Race: The Racial Stratification of Searches in Police Traffic Stops , 50 Criminology 993, 995 (2012) (citing Brian A. Reaves, Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, NCJ 231174, Local Police Departments, 2007 , at 14 (2010), https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/lpd07.pdf [ https://perma.cc/T9PA-DP73 ]).

^ For a more extended analysis, see Carbado & Rock, supra note 8, at 163–65.

^ See infra section II.E, pp. 2015–23.

^ See infra section II.A, pp. 1992–95.

^ L. Song Richardson & Phillip Atiba Goff, Interrogating Racial Violence , 12 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 115, 128 (2014).

^ Id. at 130–31. Masculinity threat further exacerbates racial violence because “black men are perceived as more masculine than men from other racial groups.” Id. at 136; see id. at 135–38.

^ Godsil & Richardson, supra note 5, at 2248–51.

^ See Saki Knafo, A Black Police Officer’s Fight Against the N.Y.P.D ., N.Y. Times Mag . (Feb. 18, 2016), https://nyti.ms/2jVQZXA [ https://perma.cc/F9CG-UPFQ ].

^ See, e.g. , Kenneth Bolton Jr. & Joe R. Feagin , Black in Blue: African-American Police Officers and Racism 202–04 (2004) (noting that officers who stood up to injustice were viewed as oversensitive, troublemakers, or radical); R. Alan Thompson , Career Experiences of African American Police Executives: Black in Blue Revisited 73 (2003) (explaining the view of some black officers that “speaking out on sensitive issues had the potential to limit future opportunities for promotion”).

^ See Thompson , supra note 29, at 81–83 (discussing early studies and their limitations); see also, e.g. , Joscha Legewie & Jeffrey Fagan, Group Threat, Police Officer Diversity and the Deadly Use of Police Force 33–36 (Columbia Law Sch. Pub. Law & Legal Theory Working Paper Grp., Paper No. 14-512, 2016), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2778692 [ https://perma.cc/G987-6T3T ] (reporting no conclusive finding regarding the overall influence of black officers in the department on the rate of officer-involved killings of black civilians); Sean Nicholson-Crotty et al., Will More Black Cops Matter? Officer Race and Police-Involved Homicides of Black Citizens , 77 Pub. Admin. Rev. 206, 211–12 (2017) (finding no significant relationship between proportion of black officers and police-involved killings of black civilians in 2014, but finding a significant — and positive  — relationship in 2015).

^ For a more robust discussion of implicit biases, see generally Richardson, supra note 4, at 2052–56 (describing how implicit biases can affect interactions between police officers and citizens).

^ See id. at 2042–43.

^ That is, they associate blackness with negativity and whiteness with positivity. See, e.g. , John T. Jost et al., A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo , 25 Pol. Psychol. 881, 897–98 (2004) (finding that forty percent of blacks show implicit negativity toward their ingroup, contrasted with less than ten percent of whites).

^ See Sandra Graham & Brian S. Lowery, Priming Unconscious Racial Stereotypes About Adolescent Offenders , 28 Law & Hum. Behav. 483, 486–87 (2004); Kelly Welch, Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling , 23 J. Contemp. Crim. Just. 276, 278 (2007) (“[A] clear majority of both Whites and Blacks agreed with the statement ‘blacks are aggressive or violent.’”).

^ Graham & Lowery, supra note 34, at 487.

^ See id. at 493 (police officers); id. at 496 (probation officers).

^ Id. at 496–97.

^ See, e.g. , Joshua Correll et al., The Police Officer’s Dilemma: A Decade of Research on Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot , 8 Soc. & Personality Psychol. Compass 201, 210 (2014); Tiffani J. Johnson et al., The Impact of Cognitive Stressors in the Emergency Department on Physician Implicit Bias , 23 Acad. Emergency Med. 297, 302 (2016).

^ Correll et al., supra note 38, at 202–03; Joshua Correll et al., Across the Thin Blue Line: Police Officers and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot , 92 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 1006, 1009–10 (2007).

^ Correll et al., supra note 38, at 203.

^ See id. at 206 (summarizing prior research).

^ See, e.g. , Joshua Correll et al., The Influence of Stereotypes on Decisions to Shoot , 37 Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 1102, 1103 (2007).

^ Correll et al., supra note 38, at 202.

^ See Correll et al., supra note 39, at 1011 & n.3 (finding that white and nonwhite officers did not differ in response times); Melody S. Sadler et al., The World Is Not Black and White: Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot in a Multiethnic Context , 68 J. Soc. Issues 286, 299 (2012) (finding that Latino officers did not differ from white officers in response time or accuracy); see also Joshua Correll et al., The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals , 83 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 1314, 1324 (2002). These studies show no difference between white and nonwhite participants in community samples.

^ Vicky M. Wilkins & Brian N. Williams, Black or Blue: Racial Profiling and Representative Bureaucracy , 68 Pub. Admin. Rev. 654, 660–61 (2008).

^ See Civil Rights Div., U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Investigation of the New Orleans Police Department (2011). The DOJ noted that the record of arrests in New Orleans “reflected on [its] face apparent constitutional violations.” Id. at viii.

^ A nonbehavioral suspicion includes such criteria as the suspect’s location or appearance, and, according to Professor Geoffrey Alpert and his colleagues, “do[es] not necessarily provide a clear justification for a stop.” Geoffrey P. Alpert et al., Police Suspicion and Discretionary Decision Making During Citizen Stops , 43 Criminology 407, 419 (2005).

^ Robert A. Brown & James Frank, Race and Officer Decision Making: Examining Differences in Arrest Outcomes Between Black and White Officers , 23 Just. Q. 96, 119 (2006).

^ See generally id. at 97 (discussing the lack of evidence of behavioral differences between minority and white officers).

^ For more in-depth analysis of the concepts discussed in this section, see Richardson, supra note 4, at 2085–86.

^ See Jennifer L. Eberhardt et al., Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing , 87 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 876, 886–87 (2004).

^ See Correll et al., supra note 39, at 1013–15; see also Correll et al., supra note 44, at 1325–26.

^ Eberhardt et al., supra note 52, at 876–77, 883.

^ Cf. Correll et al., supra note 39, at 1021 (noting that officers “who reported working in communities with . . . high proportions of minority residents showed particularly strong patterns of bias”).

^ See Carbado & Rock, supra note 8, at 175–85; Godsil & Richardson, supra note 5; Richardson & Goff, supra note 25. We are immensely grateful to our respective coauthors in those articles for their contributions to this essay.

^ Felicia Pratto et al., Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes , 67 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 741, 741 (1994) (“The theory postulates that societies minimize group conflict by creating consensus on ideologies that promote the superiority of one group over others. . . . To work smoothly, these ideologies must be widely accepted within a society, appearing as self-apparent truths; hence we call them hierarchy-legitimizing myths.” (emphasis omitted) (citation omitted)).

^ Daria Roithmayr, Locked in Inequality: The Persistence of Discrimination , 9 Mich. J. Race & L. 31, 33 (2003).

^ Pratto et al., supra note 57, at 741–42.

^ Id. at 758.

^ Id. at 747.

^ Jim Sidanius et al., Social Dominance Orientation, Hierarchy Attenuators and Hierarchy Enhancers: Social Dominance Theory and the Criminal Justice System , 24 J. Applied Soc. Psychol. 338, 348–51 (1994); see also Carbado & Rock, supra note 8, at 176.

^ Eric D. Knowles et al., On the Malleability of Ideology: Motivated Construals of Color Blindness , 96 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 857, 860, 863–64 (2009). The researchers contrasted the distributive justice colorblindness principle (the belief that one’s race should not matter for outcomes in life) with the procedural justice colorblindness principle (the belief that race should not be a factor in how individuals are treated, even in situations where inequality exists and differential treatment could ameliorate it). Id. at 859. While the former has the potential to effect change, the latter tends to entrench inequality. Professor Eric Knowles and colleagues found that whites who perceived more threat from blacks tended to endorse procedural colorblindness more strongly. Id. at 862. Moreover, asking whites to identify their ethnicity, which was shown in pretesting to cause whites to think about racial threat, was associated with spontaneous generation of procedural (as opposed to distributive) descriptions of what colorblindness is. Id. at 860. The authors interpreted these findings as evidence that whites feeling threatened would selectively endorse ideologies that maintained their high social status. Id. at 863.

^ See Carbado & Rock, supra note 8, at 177 (citing Sidanius et al., supra note 62, at 342).

^ Id. at 178.

^ Frank Rudy Cooper, “ Who’s the Man?”: Masculinities Studies , Terry Stops, and Police Training , 18 Colum. J. Gender & L. 671, 674 (2009) (citing Mary Newman, Comment, Barnes v. City of Cincinnati : Command Presence, Gender Bias, and Problems of Police Aggression , 29 Harv. J.L. & Gender 485, 491 (2006)); see also Geoffrey P. Alpert, Roger G. Dunham & John M. MacDonald, Interactive Police-Citizen Encounters that Result in Force , 7 Police Q. 475, 476 (2004) (explaining the difference between “dominating force” and “accommodating force”); L. Song Richardson, Implicit Racial Bias and Racial Anxiety: Implications for Stops and Frisks , 15 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 73, 80 (2017).

^ See Devon W. Carbado, (E)racing the Fourth Amendment , 100 Mich. L. Rev. 946, 1020 (2002) (describing this as “surplus compliance”).

^ See, e.g. , Christy E. Lopez , Am. Constitution Soc’y for Law & Policy, Disorderly (mis)Conduct: The Problem with “Contempt of Cop” Arrests 2 (2010) (“There is abundant evidence that police overuse disorderly conduct and similar statutes to arrest people who ‘disrespect’ them or express disagreement with their actions.”); Douglas A. Smith & Christy A. Visher, Street-Level Justice: Situational Determinants of Police Arrest Decisions , 29 Soc. Probs. 167, 175 (1981) (“Police work involves controlling people, and this task is facilitated by the inequality of power and authority between police and the public. Some of our findings suggest that police act in ways to maintain this disparity.”); see also Carbado & Rock, supra note 8, at 178.

^ Tom R. Tyler, Trust and Law Abidingness: A Proactive Model of Social Regulation , 81 B.U. L. Rev. 361, 369 (2001).

^ See Sidanius et al., supra note 62, at 350 (“[E]ven after the effects of ethnicity were accounted for, police officers were still found to be significantly and quite strongly more dominance oriented than civilians . . . .”). Note that the social dominance literature deals in relative endorsement of statements used to gauge SDO, rather than absolute endorsement, limiting what is known about exactly how strongly officers, or civilians, openly endorse dominance attitudes.

^ Shana Levin et al., Social Dominance Orientation and Intergroup Bias: The Legitimation of Favoritism for High-Status Groups , 28 Personality & Soc. Psychol. Bull. 144, 149–50 (2002).

^ A closely related theory to social dominance theory, system justification theory, explores why some low-status group members would endorse hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and engage in other behavior that runs counter to their group interests. For instance, research suggests that low-income individuals tend not to support income redistribution efforts, a perplexing phenomenon. For further discussion of this point, see John T. Jost, System Justification Theory as Compliment, Complement, and Corrective to Theories of Social Identification and Social Dominance , in Social Motivation 223 (David Dunning ed., 2011). This sort of behavior is problematic in the context of classic psychological theories like social identity theory, which predict that individuals will generally act to elevate the status and esteem of themselves and their group. See generally Michael A. Hogg, Social Identity Theory , in Contemporary Social Psychological Theories 111 (Peter J. Burke ed., 2006) (for an overview); Henri Tajfel & John Turner, An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict , in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations 33 (William G. Austin & Stephen Worchel eds., 1979) (for the original formulation of the theory). For a more in-depth discussion of system justification theory and its applications to law, see Gary Blasi & John T. Jost, System Justification Theory and Research: Implications for Law, Legal Advocacy, and Social Justice , 94 Calif. L. Rev. 1119, 1126–44, 1155–62 (2006). The particular overlaps and distinctions between system justification theory and social dominance theory are beyond the scope of this paper. For excellent discussions of the two theories, see Jost et al., supra note 33, at 888; Jost, supra ; Felicia Pratto et al., Social Dominance Theory and the Dynamics of Intergroup Relations: Taking Stock and Looking Forward , 17 Eur. Rev. Soc. Psychol. 271 (2006); and Jim Sidanius et al., Social Dominance Theory: Its Agenda and Method , 25 Pol. Psychol. 845, 868–70 (2004) .

^ Our reference to life and death here is particularly relevant because system justification is predicted by mortality salience, such that individuals who consider their own death frequently tend to system justify more than those who do not. Erin P. Hennes et al., Not All Ideologies Are Created Equal: Epistemic, Existential, and Relational Needs Predict System-Justifying Attitudes , 30 Soc. Cognition 669, 671, 675–77 (2012).

^ Id. at 675–77.

^ Eugene A. Paoline III, Taking Stock: Toward a Richer Understanding of Police Culture , 31 J. Crim. Just. 199, 203 (2003).

^ See Aaron C. Kay & Justin Friesen, On Social Stability and Social Change: Understanding When System Justification Does and Does Not Occur , 20 Current Directions Psychol. Sci. 360, 361 (2011).

^ This should not be taken to suggest that black and white officers experience system justification similarly, however. To the contrary, an important element of system justification theory is that system justification operates fundamentally differently for high- as opposed to low-status individuals. Specifically, for high-status individuals, system justification motives and group esteem motives act in concert, such that believing one’s group to be highly motivated or talented (and thus legitimately deserving of high status) is complemented by the belief that one’s system works effectively and fairly to reward deserving parties. Note how different a calculus is necessary for low-status individuals, however. For these individuals, system justification motives act counter to group esteem motives. For a Latina woman, for instance, believing that the system is just requires that she endorse the view that women, Latinos, and particularly Latina women are less able or less motivated (and thus less deserving of high status) than whites, men, and particularly white men. Likewise, maintaining a high opinion of her group’s worth demands that she reject the system as unjust and ineffective at elevating appropriate parties to high-status positions, a rejection which may cause her substantial anxiety. Thus, whereas for high-status members of a social system, endorsement of legitimizing myths like meritocracy should be relatively consistent across individuals and situations, for low-status members, the theory dictates that contextual or personal factors will predict whether legitimizing myths are endorsed. See, e.g. , Arnold K. Ho et al., Social Dominance Orientation: Revisiting the Structure and Function of a Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes , 38 Personality & Soc. Psychol. Bull. 583, 584–85 (2012) (suggesting that SDO is more accurately conceived of as two component parts: a preference for unequal social relations (SDO-E, for equality) and a preference for some groups to dominate over others (SDO-D, for dominance)); see also John T. Jost & Erik P Thompson, Group-Based Dominance and Opposition to Equality as Independent Predictors of Self-Esteem, Ethnocentrism, and Social Policy Attitudes Among African Americans and European Americans , 36 J. Experimental Soc. Psychol. 209, 222–23, 229–31 (2000) (demonstrating for the first time that these concepts are related to one another differently for high- as opposed to low-status groups).

^ To appreciate how explicit biases might be operating here, it is helpful to distinguish between intentional discrimination on the basis of animus and discrimination on the basis of stereotype. For the most part, black police officers will not harbor racial animus toward other African Americans. That is, blacks do not, on average, associate blackness with negativity and whiteness with positivity. See, e.g. , Brian A. Nosek et al., Pervasiveness and Correlates of Implicit Attitudes and Stereotypes , 18 Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 1, 17 (2007). This claim, however, can be understood fully only in context: whereas blacks on average do not show an implicit bias against their group, they also do not (on average) show an implicit bias toward their group. Rather, they show no evaluative preference at all, which contrasts them with whites, who show a strong implicit preference for their own group. Id. But, for some of the reasons we have already discussed, blacks may harbor racial stereotypes that could cause them both to use violence against other African Americans, on the one hand, and to legitimize the practice more generally, on the other. All of this is to say that high-SDO, low-status individuals will sometimes push back against systems that enhance hierarchy. However, there are reasons to think that this “push-back” dynamic may have little impact on the policing of black police officers.

^ See sources cited supra note 34. One study of police officers found that an exception to the racial tension that existed between black and white officers was when they came to each other’s aid. According to the author, police officers of both races “viewed the public as a common enemy.” Thompson , supra note 29, at 37.

^ See Claude M. Steele, A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance , 52 Am. Psychologist 613, 614 (1997); Claude M. Steele & Joshua Aronson, Ste-reotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans , 69 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 797, 797 (1995). For an in-depth discussion of stereotype threat, see Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 124–28.

^ See Steele & Aronson, supra note 85, at 798.

^ E.g. , P hillip Atiba Goff et al ., Protecting Equity: The Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity Report on the San Jose Police Department 1–3 (2013).

^ Id. at 3.

^ Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 127–28.

^ Phillip Atiba Goff et al., Illegitimacy Is Dangerous: How Authorities Experience and React to Illegitimacy , 4 Psychology 340, 342–43 (2013).

^ Godsil & Richardson, supra note 5, at 2251–52.

^ Goff et al ., supra note 87, at 5 (observing that nonwhite officers frequently mentioned occasions when citizens of the same race accused them of racism).

^ Rick Trinkner & Phillip Atiba Goff, The Force of Fear: Police Stereotype Threat, Self-Legitimacy, and Support for the Use of Force 3 (2017) (unpublished manuscript) (on file with the Harvard Law School Library) (citations omitted).

^ Id. at 5.

^ Id. at 5–6.

^ Goff et al ., supra note 87, at 5. As Professor Phillip Goff notes, the study’s findings could be attributed either to the small sample size of nonwhite officers or to the concerns white officers may have had with admitting to a fear of being judged to be racist. Id.

^ For an in-depth discussion of masculinity threat, see Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 128–31.

^ Candace West & Don H. Zimmerman, Doing Gender , 1 Gender & Soc’y 125, 137 (1987); see also Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 128.

^ Deborah Kerfoot & David Knights, “ The Best Is Yet to Come?”: The Quest for Embodiment in Managerial Work , in Men as Managers, Managers as Men 78 , 86 (David L. Collinson & Jeff Hearn eds., 1996); see also Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 128.

^ Devon W. Carbado, Straight out of the Closet , 15 Berkeley Women’s L.J. 76, 93–94 (2000).

^ Id. at 94.

^ Jonathan R. Weaver et al., The Proof Is in the Punch: Gender Differences in Perceptions of Action and Aggression as Components of Manhood , 62 Sex Roles 241, 242 (2010).

^ Joseph A. Vandello et al., Precarious Manhood , 95 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 1325, 1335 (2008) (“When faced with feedback that they did not measure up to others of their gender, men (but not women) showed increased anxiety- and threat-related thoughts . . . . Given that manhood is precarious, requiring action and success in all ‘manly’ endeavors, it is not surprising that many men feel anxiety over what they perceive as an unattainable standard.” (citations omitted)).

^ See Jennifer K. Bosson & Joseph A. Vandello, Precarious Manhood and Its Links to Action and Aggression , 20 Current Directions Psychol. Sci. 82, 83 (2011); Angela P. Harris, Gender, Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice , 52 Stan. L. Rev. 777, 784–85 (2000) (identifying this phenomenon in the instance of class dynamics); Vandello et al., supra note 106, at 1334 .

^ Weaver et al., supra note 105, at 247.

^ Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 131; see also Michael F Aiello, Policing the Masculine Frontier: Cultural Criminological Analysis of the Gendered Performance of Policing , 10 Crime , Media , Culture 59, 59–60 (2014).

^ See Aiello, supra note 109, at 72–74. Seven of the twenty-two departments studied overtly highlighted these gender differences. Id. at 74; see also Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 132 & n.104.

^ Anastasia Prokos & Irene Padavic, “ There Oughtta Be a Law Against Bitches”: Masculinity Lessons in Police Academy Training , 9 Gender, Work & Org. 439, 440 (2002).

^ Id. at 452.

^ Id. at 449; see also Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 132.

^ Susan L. Miller & Emily Bonistall, Gender and Policing: Critical Issues and Analyses , in Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology 315, 316 (Walter S. DeKeseredy & Molly Dragiewicz eds., 2012).

^ Richardson & Goff, supra note 25, at 133 (quoting Miller & Bonistall, supra note 114, at 316).

^ Id. (first citing Jennifer Brown et al., Appropriate Skill-Task Matching or Gender Bias in Deployment of Male and Female Police Officers? , 3 Policing & Soc’y 121, 121 (1993) ; then citing Aiello, supra note 109, at 70–71).

^ See Susan L. Miller et al., Diversity in Blue: Lesbian and Gay Police Officers in a Masculine Occupation , 5 Men & Masculinities 355, 369 (2003).

^ Thomas Nolan, Essay, Behind the Blue Wall of Silence , 12 Men & Masculinities 250, 255 (2009).

^ Goff et al ., supra note 87, at 11 (referring to the phenomenon that we call “masculinity threat” as “male gender role stress”); see also Phillip Atiba Goff et al., Voices of Dominance, Deaf to the Death of the Dying Dehumanized (unpublished manuscript) (on file with the Harvard Law School Library).

^ Goff et al ., supra note 87, at 11.

^ This is all the more likely given that being exposed to racism can cause black men to engage in compensatory performances of masculinity. Phillip Atiba Goff et al., Racism Leads to Pushups: How Racial Discrimination Threatens Subordinate Men’s Masculinity , 48 J. Experimental Soc. Psychol. 1111, 1111, 1113 (2012).

^ Phillip Atiba Goff & Karin Danielle Martin, Unity Breeds Fairness: The Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity Report on the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department 20–21 (2012), http://fliphtml5.com/sgkv/vlgl/basic/ [ https://perma.cc/2Y9L-7HNQ ] (finding no racial differences in responses to a masculine gender role stress scale).

^ Kimberly D. Hassell & Steven G. Brandl, An Examination of the Workplace Experiences of Police Patrol Officers: The Role of Race, Sex, and Sexual Orientation , 12 Police Q. 408, 417–20 (2009).

^ For arguments about the importance of racial solidarity in the context of the black community, see Stephen L. Carter, The Black Table, the Empty Seat, and the Tie , in Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation 55, 66–67 (Gerald Early ed., 1993), which argues that racial solidarity is essential for the professional success of the black community in modern America; and David B. Wilkins, Identities and Roles: Race, Recognition, and Professional Responsibility , 57 Md. L. Rev. 1502, 1556–62 (1998).

^ For a thoughtful discussion of the politics of this term among the black community, see generally Randall Kennedy, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008), which details the suspicion of racial betrayal in the black community and examines its manifestations in contemporary politics and culture.

^ The phrase “Uncle Tom” is a derogatory term that refers to African Americans who betray the black community through their relationships with whites. See Jacquelyn L. Bridgeman, Defining Ourselves for Ourselves , 35 Seton Hall L. Rev. 1261, 1265–68 (2005). See generally Brando Simeo Starkey , In Defense of Uncle Tom : Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty (2015) (tracking the historical development of the term “Uncle Tom” in black communities).

^ Thompson , supra note 29, at 44 (citing John L. Cooper , The Police and the Ghetto 116–19 (1980)) (“The competing demands of emotional separation versus the expected role of representing the ghetto community’s views thus caused black officers to eventually withdraw and turn their backs on racial peers just as Judas Iscariot was depicted in his betrayal of Christ.”).

^ Goff & Martin , supra note 122, at 17.

^ Black officers might experience even more threat when confronted by African American community members who make it known that they view the officer as a race traitor and a sellout, as in Thompson , supra note 29, at 43 (citing Cooper , supra note 127, at 111). One study provides evidence of this: researchers found that when officers believed that civilians did not respect them and did not view them as legitimate, officers experienced concerns that interactions with these civilians would be more dangerous than interactions with civilians who they believed respected their authority and their legitimacy. Goff et al., supra note 90, at 343.

^ See, e.g. , Andrew Hawkes, Camaraderie on Patrol: A Recipe for Success , PoliceOne.com (Jan. 26, 2012), http://www.policeone.com/police-jobs-and-careers/articles/4976250-Camaraderie-on-patrol-A-recipe-for-success/ [ https://perma.cc/8P6S-YWJB ].

^ Professors Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati developed this theory on “working identity” in the context of theorizing workplace discrimination. See Devon W. Carbado & Mitu Gulati, Acting White?: Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America 21–45 (2013); Carbado & Gulati, supra note 6, at 1267–78 .

^ This decision tree was first developed, though not in the context of police officers, in Carbado & Gulati, supra note 6, at 1267.

^ This table, too, is drawn from previous research on negotiating racial identity in the workplace. See Carbado & Gulati , supra note 131, at 36.

^ Bolton & Feagin , supra note 29, at 193–95 (providing accounts of black officers who stood up to racial injustice being viewed as oversensitive, troublemakers, or radicals); id. at 202–04 (observing that black officers are reluctant to report brutality for fear of retaliation and ostracism).

^ United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 877 (1975).

^ Jenessa R. Shapiro & Steven L. Neuberg, When Do the Stigmatized Stigmatize? The Ironic Effects of Being Accountable to (Perceived) Majority Group Prejudice-Expression Norms , 95 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 877, 881 (2008).

^ Id. at 882–83.

^ Id. at 883–88.

^ Ines Jurcevic et al., Using Racial Minorities’ Opinions to Justify Prejudice Expression (June 2014) (paper presented at the tenth biennial convention for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) (on file with the Harvard Law School Library).

^ Civil Rights Div., U.S. Dep’t of Justice , Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department 2 (2015), https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf [ https://perma.cc/5AFD-WEJV ].

^ Id. at 9–11.

^ Id. at 2, 10.

^ Id. at 11.

^ Id. at 10, 13–14.

^ Id. at 2, 16, 62–78.

^ Jerome H. Skolnick & James J. Fyfe , Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force 189 (1993); see also id. at 189–90.

^ Id. at 189–90.

^ See, e.g. , Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540, 601 (S.D.N.Y. 2013).

^ See id. at 602–03.

^ James Q. Wilson & George L. Kelling, Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety , Atlantic Monthly , Mar. 1982, at 29.

^ Id. at 29–30.

^ M. Chris Fabricant, War Crimes and Misdemeanors: Understanding “Zero-Tolerance” Policing as a Form of Collective Punishment and Human Rights Violation , 3 Drexel L. Rev. 373, 376–77 (2011). Scholars suggest that broken windows “policing is not about disorderly places, nor about improving the quality of life, but about policing poor people in poor places.” Jeffrey Fagan & Garth Davies, Street Stops and Broken Windows: Terry , Race, and Disorder in New York City , 28 Fordham Urb. L.J. 457, 457 (2000).

^ Fabricant, supra note 155, at 384.

^ Id. at 392–93.

^ See id. at 395.

^ Selim Algar & Josh Saul, NYPD Set Arrest Quotas for Minority Cops in Their Own Communities: Suit , N.Y. Post (Sept. 1, 2015, 1:59 PM), https://nypost.com/2015/09/01/cop-suing-over-minority-arrest-quotas-says-he-faced-retaliation/ [ https://perma.cc/XFB3-8AES ]; Knafo, supra note 28.

^ Benjamin Weiser, New York City to Pay up to $75 Million over Dismissed Summonses , N.Y. Times (Jan. 23, 2017), https://nyti.ms/2jR44V5 [ https://perma.cc/GT25-RP2L ]; see also Raymond v. City of New York, No. 15-CV-6885, 2017 WL 892350 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 6, 2017).

^ John Surico, A Former Cop Describes Racist Police Quotas in New York , Vice (Apr. 4, 2016, 12:00 AM), https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvx8v7/a-former-cop-describes-racist-police-quotas-in-new-york [ https://perma.cc/RS2R-98GV ].

^ Knafo, supra note 28.

^ Amended Class Action Complaint and Jury Demand at 12, Raymond , No. 15-CV-6885 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 10, 2015), ECF No. 31.

^ Weiser, supra note 160.

^ Bill Bratton, The NYPD: Winning the War on Crime , N.Y . Daily News (Jan. 20, 2016, 4:00 AM), http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-winning-war-crime-article-1.2502562 [ https://perma.cc/ZRP3-U5ZZ ]; see also Conor Friedersdorf, The NYPD Officers Who See Racial Bias in the NYPD , The Atlantic (Jan. 7, 2015), https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/the-nypd-officers-who-see-racial-bias-in-the-nypd/384106/ [ https://perma.cc/88FG-GZNS ]; Rocco Parascandola & Thomas Tracy, NYPD Demands All Uniformed Officers Undergo “No Quota” Training for Arrests, Tickets , Daily News (Feb. 15, 2018, 8:24 PM), http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nypd-demands-uniformed-officers-undergo-no-quota-training-article-1.3823160 [ https://perma.cc/68AG-2MP7 ].

^ For an example of contemporary policing practices in one major city, Boston, including CompStat, see Jeffrey Fagan et al., Stops and Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, and Race in the New Policing , 43 Fordham Urb. L.J. 539, 543–44, 611–14 (2016).

^ Fabricant, supra note 155, at 375 (citing Adam Benforado, The Geography of Criminal Law , 31 Cardozo L. Rev. 823, 860 n.144 (2010)); see also Graham A. Rayman , The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage 19 (2013).

^ Rayman , supra note 168, at 19–20.

^ Id. at 20; see also Eli B. Silverman , NYPD Battles Crime 97–124 (1999).

^ Rayman , supra note 168, at 23.

^ John A. Eterno & Eli B. Silverman , The Crime Numbers Game 109–21 (2012).

^ U.S. Const . amend. IV.

^ Of course, the Fourth Amendment is not the only legal constraint on police conduct. We focus on the Fourth Amendment to highlight dimensions of stop-and-frisk jurisprudence to which scholars have paid insufficient attention.

^ See Carbado, supra note 9, at 132–49.

^ See id. at 135–37 (bus); id. at 139–44 (home, via “voluntary interviews”).

^ See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 11 & n.5 (1968) (distinguishing between a limited stop and a seizure, and noting that “the right to stop and inquire is to be justified for a cause less conclusive than that which would sustain an arrest,” id. at 11 n.5 (quoting People v. Rivera, 201 N.E.2d 32, 35 (N.Y. 1964))). This logic applies to searches as well: police officers need no evidence of wrongdoing to engage in conduct that is not a search.

^ 392 U.S. 1.

^ Id. at 30–31; see also Richardson, supra note 71, at 82.

^ The decision authorizes officers to conduct stops and frisks as long as they can “point to specific and articulable facts,” Terry , 392 U.S. at 21, that “lead[ them] reasonably to conclude . . . that criminal activity may be afoot,” id. at 30, and that the individual with whom they are interacting is “armed and dangerous pre,” id. at 27.

^ Devon W. Carbado, From Stop and Frisk to Shoot and Kill: Terry v. Ohio ’s Pathway to Police Violence , 64 UCLA L. Rev. 1508, 1537–42 (2017).

^ This analysis draws from work that each of us has done separately, and in particular relies on insights from a 2017 article by Dean Richardson. For a fuller discussion of these systemic factors and how they influence police officers more broadly, see generally Richardson, supra note 71.

^ For a more complete articulation of some of the interaction between implicit biases and reasonable suspicion, see Richardson, supra note 4, at 2059–72; and Richardson, supra note 71, at 75–81.

^ Richardson, supra note 4, at 2080.

^ Id. at 2062 (noting that implicit bias can cause officers to notice activity in black individuals that “go[es] unnoticed” in white individuals).

^ Id. at 2063.

^ Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21 (1968).

^ For a comprehensive discussion of how stereotype threat might influence police-citizen interactions, see Godsil & Richardson, supra note 5, at 2247–53.

^ Richardson, supra note 71, at 80; see Tom R. Tyler & Yuen J. Huo , Trust in the Law: Encouraging Public Cooperation with the Police and Courts 139–65 (2002).

^ See Birt L. Duncan, Differential Social Perception and Attribution of Intergroup Violence: Testing the Lower Limits of Stereotyping of Blacks , 34 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 590, 590 (1976) (finding that humans “tend to perceive what [they] . . . expect to perceive”); Charles G. Lord et al., Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence , 37 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 2098, 2098–99 (1979); Richardson, supra note 71, at 80.

^ See Jennifer A. Richeson & J. Nicole Shelton, Stereotype Threat in Interracial Interactions , in Stereotype Threat 231, 236–37 (Michael Inzlicht & Toni Schmader eds., 2012).

^ Richardson, supra note 71, at 78 (first citing Derek R. Avery et al., It Does Not Have to Be Uncomfortable: The Role of Behavioral Scripts in Black-White Interracial Interactions , 94 J. Applied Psychol. 1382, 1383 (2009); and then citing Jennifer A. Richeson & J. Nicole Shelton, Negotiating Interracial Interactions: Costs, Consequences, and Possibilities , 16 Current Directions Psychol. Sci. 316, 318–19 (2007)); see also Mary C. Murphy & Valerie Jones Taylor, The Role of Situational Cues in Signaling and Maintaining Stereotype Threat , in Stereotype Threat, supra note 191 , at 17, 18–19; Richeson & Shelton, supra note 191, at 232–34, 236–37.

^ Richardson, supra note 71, at 79 (first citing Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Imaging Race , 60 Am. Psychologist 181, 182 (2005); then citing J. Nicole Shelton, Interpersonal Concerns in Social Encounters Between Majority and Minority Group Members , 6 Group Processes & Intergroup Rel . 171 , 178–79 (2003); then citing Sophie Trawalter et al., Predicting Behavior During Interracial Interactions: A Stress and Coping Approach , 13 Personality & Soc. Psychol. Rev. 243, 244 (2009); and then citing id. at 252, 256).

^ Philip Atiba Goff & Rachel Godsil, The Moral Ecology of Policing: A Mind Science Approach to Race and Policing in the United States , in The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics 348, 358 (Jonathan Jacobs & Jonathan Jackson eds., 2017) (citing Cynthia J. Najdowski, Stereotype Threat in Police Encounters: Why African Americans Are at Risk of Being Targeted as Suspects (2012) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at El Paso) (on file with the Harvard Law School Library)).

^ See Lucy Akehurst et al., Lay Persons’ and Police Officers’ Beliefs Regarding Deceptive Behaviour , 10 Applied Cognitive Psychol. 461, 467–68 (1996); Richard R. Johnson & Mark A. Morgan, Suspicion Formation Among Police Officers: An International Literature Review , 26 Crim. Just. Stud. 99, 108 (2013); Richardson, supra note 71, at 80; see also Nick Jacobellis, How to Spot a Concealed Firearm , Police Mag . (Nov. 1, 2007), http://www.policemag.com/channel/patrol/articles/2007/11/how-to-spot-a-concealed-firearm.aspx [ https://perma.cc/F6AA-RY3X ].

^ L. Song Richardson, Police Racial Violence: Lessons from Social Psychology , 83 Fordham L. Rev. 2961, 2969 (2015) (quoting Cooper, supra note 71, at 674).

^ Cooper, supra note 71, at 674; see also Phillip Atiba Goff et al., Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences , 94 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 292, 301–03 (2008); Richardson, supra note 71, at 80; Richardson, supra note 196, at 2969.

^ Jacinta M. Gau & Rod K. Brunson, Procedural Justice and Order Maintenance Policing: A Study of Inner-City Young Men’s Perceptions of Police Legitimacy , 27 Just. Q. 255, 269–70 (2010).

^ For a fuller discussion, see Richardson, supra note 71, at 84–88.

^ City of Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41, 53 (1999) (plurality opinion) (“[The] ‘right to remove from one place to another according to inclination’ [is] ‘an attribute of personal liberty’ protected by the Constitution.” (quoting Williams v. Fears, 179 U.S. 270, 274 (1900))).

^ See Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 124 (2000) (“Headlong flight — wherever it occurs — is the consummate act of evasion: It is not necessarily indicative of wrongdoing, but it is certainly suggestive of such.”). But see Florida v. Royer, 460 U.S. 491, 498 (1983) (“[R]efusal to listen or answer does not, without more, furnish . . . grounds [for reasonable suspicion].”). Royer ’s asserted protection, however, is rendered all but meaningless in light of police officers’ wide latitude to identify other actions as purportedly “suspicious.”

^ 486 U.S. 567 (1988).

^ Id. at 575–76.

^ Id. at 569.

^ Id. at 570.

^ Id. at 572–73.

^ Id. at 575–76 (citations omitted).

^ Richardson, supra note 71, at 86.

^ 528 U.S. 119 (2000).

^ Id. at 124.

^ Id. at 121–22.

^ Id. at 123–24.

^ Lenese C. Herbert, Can’t You See What I’m Saying? Making Expressive Conduct a Crime in High-Crime Areas , 9 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y 135, 136 (2002); see also Ben Grunwald & Jeffrey Fagan, The End of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas , 106 Calif. L. Rev . (forthcoming 2018) (manuscript at 44) (on file with the Harvard Law School Library) (concluding that the NYPD’s use of high-crime areas is “virtually uncorrelated with actual crime rates” and that “[t]he suspect’s race, the racial and socioeconomic composition of the area, and the identity of the officer are all stronger predictors of whether an officer deems an area high-crime than the actual crime rate itself”).

^ See Grunwald & Fagan, supra note 216, at 44.

^ Robert J. Sampson & Stephen W. Raudenbush, Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of “Broken Windows ,” 67 Soc. Psychol. Q. 319, 330–33 (2004) (“[T]he contextual effect of racial composition is largely independent of the observer’s ethnicity. Specifically, blacks were not significantly more or less likely than whites to view predominately black neighborhoods as high in disorder . . . .” Id. at 332.); see also Richardson, supra note 71, at 86.

^ In fact, negative “[a]ttitudes toward the police begin crystallizing during adolescence when youths have greater opportunities for direct and indirect contact with officers . . . .” Jamie L. Flexon et al., Exploring the Dimensions of Trust in the Police Among Chicago Juveniles , 37 J. Crim. Just. 180, 181 (2009); see also Craig B. Futterman et al., Youth/Police Encounters on Chicago’s South Side: Acknowledging the Realities , 2016 U. Chi. Legal F. 125, 125–26. And this distrust can be born not only of personal experience, but also through secondhand trauma. For instance, one study found that when high school students simply “observed other youths [being] stopped and treated with disrespect,” they were less likely to trust police. Flexon et al., supra , at 185–86. The bottom line is that while fleeing from police on the part of African Americans is completely consistent with innocence, the Terry doctrine permits police officers to draw an adverse inference from the practice.

^ California v. Hodari D., 499 U.S. 621, 623 n.1 (1991) (quoting Proverbs 28:1 (King James)).

^ United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 554 (1980); see also Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429 (1991).

^ See Chris Mooney, The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men , Mother Jones (Dec. 1, 2014, 11:00 AM), https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/science-of-racism-prejudice/ [ https://perma.cc/84RW-9F43 ].

^ See Carbado, supra note 181; see also Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 127 n.1 (2000) (Stevens, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (“The resentment engendered by [this] intrusion is aggravated, not mitigated, if the officer’s entire justification for the stop is the belief that the individual is simply trying to avoid contact with the police or move from one place to another — as he or she has a right to do (and do rapidly).”).

^ Typically, people do not advance diversity as the sole solution. We should be clear about that. At the same time, the diversity rationale quite often figures as one of the solutions. See President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing 16–18 (2015); U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Equal Emp’t Opportunity Comm’n, Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement (2016); Mary D. Fan, Violence and Police Diversity: A Call for Research , 2015 BYU L. Rev. 875, 876–77; Sunita Patel, Toward Democratic Police Reform: A Vision for “Community Engagement” Provisions in DOJ Consent Decrees , 51 Wake Forest L. Rev. 793, 794 (2016); Sklansky, supra note 18, at 1239–41; Yamiche Alcindor & Nick Penzenstadler, Police Redouble Efforts to Recruit Diverse Officers , USA Today (Jan. 21, 2015, 9:07 PM), http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/21/police-redoubling-efforts-to-recruit-diverse-officers/21574081/ [ https://perma.cc/C7GN-ZZZ8 ]; Ashkenas & Park, supra note 19; Shaila Dewan, Mostly White Forces in Mostly Black Towns: Police Struggle for Racial Diversity , N.Y. Times ( Sept. 9, 2014), https://nyti.ms/2ktsYqL [ https://perma.cc/Q2LR-4JKY ] .

^ For discussions of the extent to which modern policing is rooted in slave patrols, see generally Sally E. Hadden , Slave Patrols (2001); Mitchel P. Roth , Crime and Punishment: A History of the Criminal Justice System (2005); Neil Websdale , Policing the Poor: From Slave Plantation to Public Housing (2001); Marlese Durr, What Is the Difference Between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color , 41 Critical Soc. 873, 874–75 (2015); Philip L. Reichel, Southern Slave Patrols as a Transitional Police Type , 7 Am. J. Police 51 (1988); Margaret Vandiver et al., The Tennessee Slave Code: A Legal Antecedent to Inequities in Modern Capital Cases , 4 J. Ethnicity Crim. Just. 67 (2003); and Stephen L. Carter, Policing and Oppression Have a Long History , Bloomberg View (Oct. 29, 2015, 6:19 PM), https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-29/policing-and-oppression-have-a-long-history [ https://perma.cc/4CC8-BX25 ].

^ The diversity rationale emerged from Justice Powell’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , 438 U.S. 265, 315–20 (1978) (opinion of Powell, J.). For decades, scholars have criticized the rationale for insufficiently attending to the structural problems of education inequality. See Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice 102–22, 147–61 (1987); Trina Jones, The Diversity Rationale: A Problematic Solution , 1 Stan. J. C.R. & C.L. 171, 189–214 (2005); John E. Nowak, The Rise and Fall of Supreme Court Concern for Racial Minorities , 36 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 345 (1995); see also Derrick A. Bell, Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma , 93 Harv. L. Rev. 518 (1980); Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, The Social Construction of Brown v. Board of Education : Law Reform and the Reconstructive Paradox , 36 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 547 (1995). For an effort to infuse diversity with more progressive possibilities, see Devon W. Carbado, Intraracial Diversity , 60 UCLA L. Rev. 1130 (2013).

• Civil Rights
• Criminal Procedure
• Critical Legal Studies
• Critical Race Theory
• Discrimination
• Fourth Amendment
• Race and the Law

May 10, 2018

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Solving racial disparities in policing

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Experts say approach must be comprehensive as roots are embedded in culture

“ Unequal ” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. The first part explores the experience of people of color with the criminal justice legal system in America.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform.

This is not the first time in recent decades that high-profile police violence — from the 1991 beating of Rodney King to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 — ignited calls for change. But this time appears different. The police killings of Breonna Taylor in March, George Floyd in May, and a string of others triggered historic, widespread marches and rallies across the nation, from small towns to major cities, drawing protesters of unprecedented diversity in race, gender, and age.

According to historians and other scholars, the problem is embedded in the story of the nation and its culture. Rooted in slavery, racial disparities in policing and police violence, they say, are sustained by systemic exclusion and discrimination, and fueled by implicit and explicit bias. Any solution clearly will require myriad new approaches to law enforcement, courts, and community involvement, and comprehensive social change driven from the bottom up and the top down.

While police reform has become a major focus, the current moment of national reckoning has widened the lens on systemic racism for many Americans. The range of issues, though less familiar to some, is well known to scholars and activists. Across Harvard, for instance, faculty members have long explored the ways inequality permeates every aspect of American life. Their research and scholarship sits at the heart of a new Gazette series starting today aimed at finding ways forward in the areas of democracy; wealth and opportunity; environment and health; and education. It begins with this first on policing.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people.

Photo by Martha Stewart

The history of racialized policing

Like many scholars, Khalil Gibran Muhammad , professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School , traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people. This legacy, he believes, can still be seen in policing today. “The surveillance, the deputization essentially of all white men to be police officers or, in this case, slave patrollers, and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning,” he  told NPR  last year.

Slave patrols, and the slave codes they enforced, ended after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th amendment, which formally ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” But Muhammad notes that former Confederate states quickly used that exception to justify new restrictions. Known as the Black codes, the various rules limited the kinds of jobs African Americans could hold, their rights to buy and own property, and even their movements.

“The genius of the former Confederate states was to say, ‘Oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that’s what we’ll do.’ And that’s exactly what the Black codes set out to do. The Black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn’t criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man’s terms.” In particular, he said the Ku Klux Klan “took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling Black people. … The Klan totally dominates the machinery of justice in the South.”

When, during what became known as the Great Migration, millions of African Americans fled the still largely agrarian South for opportunities in the thriving manufacturing centers of the North, they discovered that metropolitan police departments tended to enforce the law along racial and ethnic lines, with newcomers overseen by those who came before. “There was an early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks whom they were focused on policing,” Muhammad said. “And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish or the Germans are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles.” And then arrived a wave of Black Southerners looking for a better life.

In his groundbreaking work, “ The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America ,” Muhammad argues that an essential turning point came in the early 1900s amid efforts to professionalize police forces across the nation, in part by using crime statistics to guide law enforcement efforts. For the first time, Americans with European roots were grouped into one broad category, white, and set apart from the other category, Black.

Citing Muhammad’s research, Harvard historian Jill Lepore  has summarized the consequences this way : “Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

“History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful sense,” Muhammad wrote. Instead, crime statistics were “weaponized” to justify racial profiling, police brutality, and ever more policing of Black people.

This phenomenon, he believes, has continued well into this century and is exemplified by William J. Bratton, one of the most famous police leaders in recent America history. Known as “America’s Top Cop,” Bratton led police departments in his native Boston, Los Angeles, and twice in New York, finally retiring in 2016.

Bratton rejected notions that crime was a result of social and economic forces, such as poverty, unemployment, police practices, and racism. Instead, he said in a 2017 speech, “It is about behavior.” Through most of his career, he was a proponent of statistically-based “predictive” policing — essentially placing forces in areas where crime numbers were highest, focused on the groups found there.

Bratton argued that the technology eliminated the problem of prejudice in policing, without ever questioning potential bias in the data or algorithms themselves — a significant issue given the fact that Black Americans are arrested and convicted of crimes at disproportionately higher rates than whites. This approach has led to widely discredited practices such as racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk.” And, Muhammad notes, “There is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.”

Gathering numbers

In 2015 The Washington Post began tracking every fatal shooting by an on-duty officer, using news stories, social media posts, and police reports in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. According to the newspaper, Black Americans are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans, and Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Such efforts have proved useful for researchers such as economist Rajiv Sethi .

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard  Radcliffe Institute , Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, a difficult task given that data from such encounters is largely unavailable from police departments. Instead, Sethi and his team of researchers have turned to information collected by websites and news organizations including The Washington Post and The Guardian, merged with data from other sources such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Census, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Rajiv Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers,

Courtesy photo

They have found that exposure to deadly force is highest in the Mountain West and Pacific regions relative to the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states, and that racial disparities in relation to deadly force are even greater than the national numbers imply. “In the country as a whole, you’re about two to three times more likely to face deadly force if you’re Black than if you are white” said Sethi. “But if you look at individual cities separately, disparities in exposure are much higher.”

Examining the characteristics associated with police departments that experience high numbers of lethal encounters is one way to better understand and address racial disparities in policing and the use of violence, Sethi said, but it’s a massive undertaking given the decentralized nature of policing in America. There are roughly 18,000 police departments in the country, and more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices, each with its own approaches to training and selection.

“They behave in very different ways, and what we’re finding in our current research is that they are very different in the degree to which they use deadly force,” said Sethi. To make real change, “You really need to focus on the agency level where organizational culture lies, where selection and training protocols have an effect, and where leadership can make a difference.”

Sethi pointed to the example of Camden, N.J., which disbanded and replaced its police force in 2013, initially in response to a budget crisis, but eventually resulting in an effort to fundamentally change the way the police engaged with the community. While there have been improvements, including greater witness cooperation, lower crime, and fewer abuse complaints, the Camden case doesn’t fit any particular narrative, said Sethi, noting that the number of officers actually increased as part of the reform. While the city is still faced with its share of problems, Sethi called its efforts to rethink policing “important models from which we can learn.”

Fighting vs. preventing crime

For many analysts, the real problem with policing in America is the fact that there is simply too much of it. “We’ve seen since the mid-1970s a dramatic increase in expenditures that are associated with expanding the criminal legal system, including personnel and the tasks we ask police to do,” said Sandra Susan Smith , Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at HKS, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. “And at the same time we see dramatic declines in resources devoted to social welfare programs.”

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson, but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work,” said Brandon Terry, assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies.

Kris Snibble/Harvard file photo

Smith’s comment highlights a key argument embraced by many activists and experts calling for dramatic police reform: diverting resources from the police to better support community services including health care, housing, and education, and stronger economic and job opportunities. They argue that broader support for such measures will decrease the need for policing, and in turn reduce violent confrontations, particularly in over-policed, economically disadvantaged communities, and communities of color.

For Brandon Terry , that tension took the form of an ice container during his Baltimore high school chemistry final. The frozen cubes were placed in the middle of the classroom to help keep the students cool as a heat wave sent temperatures soaring. “That was their solution to the building’s lack of air conditioning,” said Terry, a Harvard assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies. “Just grab an ice cube.”

Terry’s story is the kind many researchers cite to show the negative impact of underinvesting in children who will make up the future population, and instead devoting resources toward policing tactics that embrace armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and spy planes. Terry’s is also the kind of tale promoted by activists eager to defund the police, a movement begun in the late 1960s that has again gained momentum as the death toll from violent encounters mounts. A scholar of Martin Luther King Jr., Terry said the Civil Rights leader’s views on the Vietnam War are echoed in the calls of activists today who are pressing to redistribute police resources.

“King thought that the idea of spending many orders of magnitude more for an unjust war than we did for the abolition of poverty and the abolition of ghettoization was a moral travesty, and it reflected a kind of sickness at the core of our society,” said Terry. “And part of what the defund model is based upon is a similar moral criticism, that these budgets reflect priorities that we have, and our priorities are broken.”

Terry also thinks the policing debate needs to be expanded to embrace a fuller understanding of what it means for people to feel truly safe in their communities. He highlights the work of sociologist Chris Muller and Harvard’s Robert Sampson, who have studied racial disparities in exposures to lead and the connections between a child’s early exposure to the toxic metal and antisocial behavior. Various studies have shown that lead exposure in children can contribute to cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, including heightened aggression.

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson,” said Terry, “but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work.”

Policing and criminal justice system

Alexandra Natapoff , Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism.

“Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.”

Unpacking such a complicated issue requires voices from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and fields of expertise who can shine light on the problem and possible solutions, said Natapoff, who co-founded a new lecture series with HLS Professor Andrew Crespo titled “ Policing in America .”

In recent weeks the pair have hosted Zoom discussions on topics ranging from qualified immunity to the Black Lives Matter movement to police unions to the broad contours of the American penal system. The series reflects the important work being done around the country, said Natapoff, and offers people the chance to further “engage in dialogue over these over these rich, complicated, controversial issues around race and policing, and governance and democracy.”

Courts and mass incarceration

Much of Natapoff’s recent work emphasizes the hidden dangers of the nation’s misdemeanor system. In her book “ Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal ,” Natapoff shows how the practice of stopping, arresting, and charging people with low-level offenses often sends them down a devastating path.

“This is how most people encounter the criminal apparatus, and it’s the first step of mass incarceration, the initial net that sweeps people of color disproportionately into the criminal system,” said Natapoff. “It is also the locus that overexposes Black people to police violence. The implications of this enormous net of police and prosecutorial authority around minor conduct is central to understanding many of the worst dysfunctions of our criminal system.”

One consequence is that Black and brown people are incarcerated at much higher rates than white people. America has approximately 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails, according to a 2020 report from the nonprofit the Prison Policy Initiative. According to a 2018 report from the Sentencing Project, Black men are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 3.1 times as likely.

Reducing mass incarceration requires shrinking the misdemeanor net “along all of its axes” said Natapoff, who supports a range of reforms including training police officers to both confront and arrest people less for low-level offenses, and the policies of forward-thinking prosecutors willing to “charge fewer of those offenses when police do make arrests.”

She praises the efforts of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins in Massachusetts and George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, Calif., who have pledged to stop prosecuting a range of misdemeanor crimes such as resisting arrest, loitering, trespassing, and drug possession. “If cities and towns across the country committed to that kind of reform, that would be a profoundly meaningful change,” said Natapoff, “and it would be a big step toward shrinking our entire criminal apparatus.”

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner cites the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

Sentencing reform

Another contributing factor in mass incarceration is sentencing disparities.

A recent Harvard Law School study found that, as is true nationally, people of color are “drastically overrepresented in Massachusetts state prisons.” But the report also noted that Black and Latinx people were less likely to have their cases resolved through pretrial probation ­— a way to dismiss charges if the accused meet certain conditions — and receive much longer sentences than their white counterparts.

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons. She points to the way the 1994 Crime Bill (legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware) ushered in much harsher drug penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. This tied the hands of judges issuing sentences and disproportionately punished people of color in the process. “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.”

The First Step Act, a bipartisan prison reform bill aimed at reducing racial disparities in drug sentencing and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, is just what its name implies, said Gertner.

“It reduces sentences to the merely inhumane rather than the grotesque. We still throw people in jail more than anybody else. We still resort to imprisonment, rather than thinking of other alternatives. We still resort to punishment rather than other models. None of that has really changed. I don’t deny the significance of somebody getting out of prison a year or two early, but no one should think that that’s reform.”

 Not just bad apples

Reform has long been a goal for federal leaders. Many heralded Obama-era changes aimed at eliminating racial disparities in policing and outlined in the report by The President’s Task Force on 21st Century policing. But HKS’s Smith saw them as largely symbolic. “It’s a nod to reform. But most of the reforms that are implemented in this country tend to be reforms that nibble around the edges and don’t really make much of a difference.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Smith, who cites studies suggesting a majority of Americans hold negative biases against Black and brown people, and that unconscious prejudices and stereotypes are difficult to erase.

“Experiments show that you can, in the context of a day, get people to think about race differently, and maybe even behave differently. But if you follow up, say, a week, or two weeks later, those effects are gone. We don’t know how to produce effects that are long-lasting. We invest huge amounts to implement such police reforms, but most often there’s no empirical evidence to support their efficacy.”

Even the early studies around the effectiveness of body cameras suggest the devices do little to change “officers’ patterns of behavior,” said Smith, though she cautions that researchers are still in the early stages of collecting and analyzing the data.

And though police body cameras have caught officers in unjust violence, much of the general public views the problem as anomalous.

“Despite what many people in low-income communities of color think about police officers, the broader society has a lot of respect for police and thinks if you just get rid of the bad apples, everything will be fine,” Smith added. “The problem, of course, is this is not just an issue of bad apples.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice Harvard Kennedy School.

Community-based ways forward

Still Smith sees reason for hope and possible ways forward involving a range of community-based approaches. As part of the effort to explore meaningful change, Smith, along with Christopher Winship , Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at HKS, have organized “ Reimagining Community Safety: A Program in Criminal Justice Speaker Series ” to better understand the perspectives of practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, activists, and academics engaged in public safety reform.

Some community-based safety models have yielded important results. Smith singles out the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program (known as CAHOOTS ) in Eugene, Ore., which supplements police with a community-based public safety program. When callers dial 911 they are often diverted to teams of workers trained in crisis resolution, mental health, and emergency medicine, who are better equipped to handle non-life-threatening situations. The numbers support her case. In 2017 the program received 25,000 calls, only 250 of which required police assistance. Training similar teams of specialists who don’t carry weapons to handle all traffic stops could go a long way toward ending violent police encounters, she said.

“Imagine you have those kinds of services in play,” said Smith, paired with community-based anti-violence program such as Cure Violence , which aims to stop violence in targeted neighborhoods by using approaches health experts take to control disease, such as identifying and treating individuals and changing social norms. Together, she said, these programs “could make a huge difference.”

At Harvard Law School, students have been  studying how an alternate 911-response team  might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

The forthcoming report, compiled by two students in the HLS clinic, Billy Roberts and Anna Vande Velde, will offer officials a range of ideas for how to think about community safety that builds on existing efforts in Boston and other cities, said Viscomi.

But Smith, like others, knows community-based interventions are only part of the solution. She applauds the Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of Brown. The 102-page report shed light on the department’s discriminatory policing practices, including the ways police disproportionately targeted Black residents for tickets and fines to help balance the city’s budget. To fix such entrenched problems, state governments need to rethink their spending priorities and tax systems so they can provide cities and towns the financial support they need to remain debt-free, said Smith.

Rethinking the 911-response system to being one that is “more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” is part of the student-led research under the direction of Law School Professor Rachel Viscomi, who heads up the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Jon Chase/Harvard file photo

“Part of the solution has to be a discussion about how government is funded and how a city like Ferguson got to a place where government had so few resources that they resorted to extortion of their residents, in particular residents of color, in order to make ends meet,” she said. “We’ve learned since that Ferguson is hardly the only municipality that has struggled with funding issues and sought to address them through the oppression and repression of their politically, socially, and economically marginalized Black and Latino residents.”

Police contracts, she said, also need to be reexamined. The daughter of a “union man,” Smith said she firmly supports officers’ rights to union representation to secure fair wages, health care, and safe working conditions. But the power unions hold to structure police contracts in ways that protect officers from being disciplined for “illegal and unethical behavior” needs to be challenged, she said.

“I think it’s incredibly important for individuals to be held accountable and for those institutions in which they are embedded to hold them to account. But we routinely find that union contracts buffer individual officers from having to be accountable. We see this at the level of the Supreme Court as well, whose rulings around qualified immunity have protected law enforcement from civil suits. That needs to change.”

Other Harvard experts agree. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe last June, Tomiko Brown-Nagin , dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, pointed out the Court’s “expansive interpretation of qualified immunity” and called for reform that would “promote accountability.”

“This nation is devoted to freedom, to combating racial discrimination, and to making government accountable to the people,” wrote Brown-Nagin. “Legislators today, like those who passed landmark Civil Rights legislation more than 50 years ago, must take a stand for equal justice under law. Shielding police misconduct offends our fundamental values and cannot be tolerated.”

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Chapter 8: The Culture of Law Enforcement

8.1 Police Subculture

At the root of all that is good and bad in law enforcement, there is a strong subculture that permeates most agencies. While a common theme in academic discourse is that police culture is negative, entrenched in cynicism, masochism, loyalty above all else, and an “us versus them” mentality, it has positive aspects that are often overlooked. Members of the law enforcement subculture share values that enable officers to survive what at times is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. Values such as supportiveness, teamwork, perseverance, empathy, and caring enable officers to cope with post-traumatic stress; they are part of team of colleagues who care for their coworkers. The support received from other officers is the result of shared values within the culture. Officers who are faced with dangerous situations are able to rely on their comrades because of other values they believe these members also possess. Values such as bravery, camaraderie, and sacrifice will embolden members to place themselves in harm’s way.

The following table outlines both positive and negative attributes within the police culture.

In spite of the positive aspects of police subculture, what society may define as ethical or good conduct may not be viewed within the subculture as relevant to the task, which is, among other things, to continue the mission of “safe-guarding social order” (Reiner, 2010, p.120). The tactics that are relevant to the police subculture may include using trickery and lies to elicit confessions and receiving minor gratuities to foster community relations (Reiner, 2010). Examining ethics and its relation to the police subculture is important to help delineate not only the grey area of ethics but also the grey area within which the police operate.

Once selected and hired by municipal police agencies, police recruits are exposed to police subculture during their training partially due to the instruction they receive from police officers who are recently retired or seconded to the police academy. However, the choice to become a police officer is not made in a vacuum. When recruits start their training, they often think like police officers on a visceral level, because generally certain individuals are drawn to the occupation (Conti, 2010). In an ethnographic study observing police recruits at an American police academy, Conti (2010) observed that the evolution of recruits into members who reflect the police mindset likely started at an early age when they formed the belief that they would become police officers. As potential officers enter the selection process, they become involved in an extensive application process, which is their first introduction into the police subculture. Rokeach, Miller, and Snyder (1971) concluded that a police personality distinct from others does exist, and proposed the idea that individuals come into an occupation with predetermined attributes that are identified with their new occupation. However, Rokeach et al. (1971) also found that this distinct police personality is attributed to predispositions of personality that are present before the recruits’ induction into the police subculture. These distinct predispositions are conducive to a career in policing and allow the individuals to comfortably choose and fit into the subculture (Conti, 2010; Rokeach et al., 1971). While the police subculture is distinct, at times it does attempt to catch up to the norms of the mainstream culture and can shift from negative attributes to positive attributes (Skolnick, 2008).

A historical look at the police subculture offers a view into the changing nature of how police officers see the world. In analyzing the police subculture in the 1940s, Myrdal (1964) observed in an ethnographic study of police officers in America that officers behaved in an overtly bigoted fashion toward African Americans. Myrdal (1964) observed that these were the norms of the day and that the police subculture reflected the attitude of mainstream society toward African Americans. While not supported empirically, it would be a logical conclusion that police recruits or rookie police officers would have shared the same cultural bigotry as mainstream society and their fellow police officers. More recently, when we see and question incidents involving police use of force on racial minorities, it is important to look broadly at society as well. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, is an example where prominent civic leaders pointed out that the incident was merely a manifestation of a broader issue of racism that is widespread throughout the United States.

As society has evolved so too have law enforcement agencies. Ethical conduct and diversity play a large role in recruiting and are considered important attributes of potential officers. Crank and Caldero (2010) have concluded that due to society’s emphasis on ethics and the stringent hiring process, recruits are typically very ethical. The subculture, they argue, is not only present but also highly influential; the recruits’ ethical orientations are formed earlier, well before their application process commences (Crank and Caldero, 2010). Conversely, Conti (2010) and Banish and Ruiz (2003) argue that the police subculture is present when the officers start at the police academy and that its influence on recruits’ ethics is negative and destructive.

Conti views a recruit’s induction into the police academy as a transformation of the recruit into the “organisational ideal” (Conti, 2010). It is in this way, Conti (2010) argues, that the police subculture, ever-present at the police academy, assists in the conversion of the recruit from civilian to police officer. These cultural nuances are passed on through a variety of means such as:

• Parades and drills (Campbell, 2007)
• Marching (Davis, 1996)
• Storytelling (Banish and Ruiz, 2003; Ford, 2003; Newburn and Reiner, 2007).

Storytelling by instructors in the police academy can be a valuable and effective teaching tool, as demonstrated by Conti’s (2010) study of an American police academy. Stories told by trainers must reflect ethical conduct and be relatable to the lesson plan goals and outcomes. Conversely, stories by instructors may inflate the recruits’ perception of danger (Banish and Ruiz, 2003) or cynicism (Ford, 2003), but instructors’ stories can also serve to relay positive outcomes, such as surviving life and death situations confronted by police (Conti, 2010). Ultimately, storytelling perpetuates the police subculture by passing on both truisms as well as not-so-true legends (Newburn and Reiner, 2007). Banish and Ruiz (2003) further contend that storytelling affects the police culture negatively by instilling negative traits of cynicism, suspicion, conservatism, and authoritarianism.

These negative traits are often associated with a police subculture that affects senior police officers, and it is specifically these traits that define an individual as a police officer. Skolnick (2008) considers the police vocation as being similar to that of a priest or the clergy: the culture wholly defines what it means to be a police officer by the traits that police officers share. These traits, according to Skolnick, include “skepticism, cynicism, mistrust of outsiders—all are traits observers of police apply to them and that they apply to themselves” (2008, p.36). Twersky-Glasner (2005) concurs, noting that the police are members of a unique occupation in which they are the insiders and the rest of society are the outsiders. The insiders are those who are trustworthy while outsiders are viewed with suspicion (Skolnick, 2008). This is reflected not only in the culture in which recruits find themselves, but also in the training they receive and the way in which they as civilians are accepted into the academy to begin training.

In a qualitative study of police officers, Loftus (2010) followed officers on the street and determined that two characteristics are ever-present in the police culture: cynicism and moral conservatism. While older officers exhibit these traits, Loftus (2010) did observe that newer officers are hired from a more diverse background that includes different sexual orientations, cultures, and races. This may enable the police subculture to adapt and overcome its more negative characteristics.

Ethics in Law Enforcement Copyright © 2015 by Steve McCartney and Rick Parent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Culture of Policing Is Broken

Brutality and dehumanization are deeply embedded in many departments.

I t’s one of the most remarkable poll results of the current moment. From May 29 to June 2, a Wall Street Journal /NBC News poll asked voters whether they were more troubled by the actions of the police and the death of George Floyd, or by protests that had turned violent. By a more than two-to-one margin, they said they were more troubled by the actions of the police.

This is not how Americans reacted to the riots of 1968, when they swung to Richard Nixon’s law-and-order message. This is not how they reacted to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Something is different in America. In that WSJ /NBC News poll, 80 percent of respondents said they think the country is spiraling “out of control,” and people are more worried by police than by protesters.

James Fallows: Is this the worst year in modern American history?

This is not the only poll question that reveals a seismic shift in public opinion in recent years. After a grand jury didn’t indict the officer who killed Eric Garner in 2014, only 33 percent of Americans felt that police were more likely to use excessive force against black people than against white people. Now, after George Floyd was killed in 2020, 57 percent of Americans believe that. According to a June Monmouth University poll, 76 percent of Americans now think racism and discrimination are “a big problem,” up 25 points since 2015. In January 2018, more registered voters said they opposed Black Lives Matter than said they supported it. Now supporters outnumber opponents by a 26-point margin.

What has shifted?

The killings of the past few years and the Black Lives Matter movement, which has arisen in response to them, have given all Americans an education in the systematic mistreatment of black people by police forces across the country. Videos of police brutality are washing across everyone’s phones: videos of cops running over young women with police horses, pushing down old white men for no reason, rushing into crowds of peaceful demonstrators, and raining blows on young people and reporters. Videos that show the deadness in the eyes of an officer as he kicks a young woman in the face, a woman who is just sitting there peacefully on the street.

Where does this brutality come from? And what can we do about it?

Two theories are now dominating public debate. The first sees the problem on the individual level. There are a number of “bad apples” in every police force—authoritarian, racist bullies who take pleasure in pummeling defenseless black men. We need to take away union protections, increase sanctions,  remove them from the force, and prosecute them when appropriate.

The second theory sees the problem on the systemic level. There’s something inherently oppressive about neighborhoods being ruled by men and women with guns, batons, and mace. In a systemically racist society, the use of force in that way is bound to be unjust. We need to “defund the police” and try softer, more communal models.

Both theories contain some truth. Some cops, like George Floyd’s killer, Derek Chauvin, rack up a lot of complaints and infractions. It’s also true that over the course of American history, law enforcement has constantly been used to enforce racial hierarchy. Police brutality reflects the legacy of racial lynchings, and some of the habits of mind that are still embedded in American society and in its police departments.

Adam Serwer: Trump gave police permission to be brutal

But the evidence suggests that the bulk of the problem is on a different level, neither individual or systemic. The problem lies in the organizational cultures of some police forces. In the forces with an us-versus-the-world siege mentality. In the ones with the we-strap-on-the-armor-and-fight culture, the ones who depersonalize the human beings out on the street. All cruelty begins with dehumanization—not seeing the face of the other, not seeing the whole humanity of the other.  A cultural regime of dehumanization has been constructed in many police departments. In that fertile ground, racial biases can spread and become entrenched. But the regime can be deconstructed.

M any people go into policing because they are idealistic. A study of NYPD recruits found that one of their most common motivations was the “opportunity to help people in the community.” In 2015, a group of researchers led by the police psychologist Daniel M. Blumberg studied police recruits, using what they called the “integrity scale” to measure honesty, trustworthiness, and incorruptibility. The police recruits scored higher on average than the college students who had participated in earlier studies. As Blumberg wrote in a later paper, “Law enforcement agencies generally do not hire ‘bad apples,’” because of their rigorous screening of recruits.

Then they enter training, where a core theme is that it’s a threatening world out there. Recruits are told that a guy with a knife 21 feet away can run up and stab you before you have the chance to draw your gun. Even when your gun is drawn on someone with his back turned, he can pivot and pull his trigger before you have the chance to fire. Recruits listen to the desperate radio cries of officers killed in the line of duty, and the message is: Don’t ever let this happen to you . When in doubt, as the saying goes, it is “better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.”

About 70 percent of police officers say they have never fired their gun while on the job, but on average, 71 hours of their training are devoted to firearm skills and 60 hours to self-defense, according to a 2013 Bureau of Justice report, while only 43 hours are spent on community-policing measures, such as cultural-diversity training, human relations, mediation, and conflict management.

Annie Lowrey: Defund the police

Many training programs take recruits out of civilian life and put them in a boot-camp atmosphere. Years on the job have a tendency to reinforce this separation. I left the University of Chicago to become a police reporter on the South Side of that city. The first thing I learned, during that brief stint, was that the detectives in the Chicago Police Department were just as intelligent as the professors back at school. The second thing I learned is that cops have a profound sense of service, but have to spend their days among people who are at their worst moment, and often among individuals when they are at their worst—responding to domestic violence, rape, drug dealing, and murder.

“Because police officers are frequently exposed to traumatic events such as death, being shot at, and physical assault, rates of PTSD among police officers have been reported to be as high as 15 percent," the epidemiologist Erin McCanlies and her co-authors wrote in a 2017 paper. The pressures are intense. Though quotas are illegal in some states, many cops are urged by their superiors to ramp up their production—issuing more tickets and making more arrests. Officers are also encouraged to respond to calls more swiftly. Constant hyper-vigilance and stress become the background tone of life.

The organizational culture of their departments too often turns them into street warriors, occupying soldiers. Decades ago, the social scientist James Q. Wilson wrote that there are three types of police officer: the watchman, the legalist, and the service provider. Today there’s a fourth, the gladiator.

In the videos, we saw cops armored in riot gear. American law-enforcement agencies have acquired billions of dollars in surplus equipment, including bayonets and grenade launchers.

Casey Delehanty, Ryan Welch, Jack Mewhirter, and Jason Wilks have studied the relationship between militarization and public safety. In The Washington Post , Mewhirter and Welch wrote about their findings: “When a county goes from receiving no military equipment to $2,539,767 worth (the largest figure that went to one agency in our data), more than twice as many civilians are likely to die in that county the following year.” Problems are more likely to be seen as acts of war. The person on the other side of the equipment is rendered less visible.

We’re tracing the etiology of dehumanization here, the gradual closing-off of natural sympathy between one person and another. Almost all cops resist this pressure most of the time, and we owe them our respect, honor, and gratitude. Many of us know warm and compassionate police officers, who have rejected the worst parts of their environment—but the cultural pressures are there, nonetheless.

Some organizational cultures take a final few steps to instill a depersonalized worldview: The use of jargon, nicknames, insults, and euphemisms, all the linguistic tricks people use when they want to achieve moral distance from their surroundings and turn off the personal lens. The collective repression of emotion—the masks of cynicism, constant irony, and dark humor that groups adopt together. Cultural norms encourage officers to ignore their own vulnerability.

Then there is the constant presence of unacknowledged fear. As Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor, wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, police officers “shoot because they are afraid. And they are afraid because they are constantly barraged with the message that they should be afraid, that their survival depends on it.” They’re in somebody else’s space. They don’t know what onlookers are going to do. They often feel like they are desperately trying to impose order on chaos.

And so, in moments like the ones we’ve been witnessing in the past weeks, it all becomes us-versus-them. Some officers no longer see a human being. They see a perp.

Even hiring a diverse police force is no panacea. A 2016 Justice Department investigation into the Baltimore Police Department found consistent racially biased policing, in a force where, in 2015, more than 40 percent of the cops were African American. The problem lay not only in the minds of individual police officers, but also in the culture of the departments into which the officers entered.

Rosa Brooks: Stop training police like they’re joining the military

We all construct reality according to the way we see the world. If the culture around you induces you to see others not as fully human, but as objects, that’s how you’re going to see them. Cops are human, and live on the jagged edges of a society that has deep racial disparities. The social construction of the reality too many officers inhabit is a core problem here—when the woman sitting cross-legged on the street is not a daughter or a sister, when the man on the ground is not a Christian or a neighbor—some officers start to see them as just objects they can kick or crush.

T hree lines of reform have been popping up these days. The first and most famous is “defund the police.” This means different things, many of them quite sensible, to different people. But if it means reducing police spending so there are fewer cops around, it will not happen, and it will not help.

Over the decades, Americans have consistently said they want more police officers. A 2019 Civis Analytics poll for Vox found that 60 percent of African Americans, 65 percent of Latinos, and 74 percent of whites would like to see an increased number of police officers in high-crime areas. In 2015, just after the protests in response to Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, Gallup asked Americans whether they would prefer to see a larger police presence in their neighborhood or a smaller one. Thirty-eight percent of African Americans said they would like to see a larger police presence, 51 percent said they wanted no change, and only 10 percent said they wanted a smaller police presence.

Fewer cops does not mean less brutality. Officers often use force more when they are tired. A 2017 study of the Sheriff’s Department in King County, in Washington State, found that if an officer works four additional hours of overtime in a week, the odds that he or she will discharge a firearm the following week rise by 15.2 percent. If you have fewer tired officers working longer shifts with more overtime, you will have more incidents. And, as Matt Yglesias has argued in Vox , research clearly shows that the presence of more cops leads to less crime, fewer police stops, a reduced likelihood of abuse when stops do occur, and less incarceration.

The other, more promising reforms involve changing procedures during an encounter and building a community-rooted police force in the first place. It’s striking how much procedural changes can achieve. Las Vegas police worked with the Center for Policing Equity, co-founded by the psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff, to examine the department’s use of force. Their study led to a new policy, mandating that in a foot chase the officer leading the chase would not be the first person to lay hands on the suspect. That alone produced a 23 percent reduction in total use of force and an 11 percent reduction in officer injury. One study found that police departments that banned chokeholds and strangleholds experienced a 22 percent reduction in the rate of police killings.

Read: Who will hold the police accountable?

But the big thing is changing the organizational culture of departments. It’s interesting that states with the highest numbers of police shootings per capita are in the West, where the gun ethos is more common: New Mexico, Alaska, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. The states with the lowest rates are in the East: Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

Culture is invisible but all-determining. The police forces that have done well in reducing crime do not train their officers to see themselves as superheroes attacking bad guys. They have a stronger community-service ethos. Camden, New Jersey, became something of a model for reformers a few years ago when the entire police department was disbanded. It was replaced with a county-level agency less encumbered by union rules, which then hired more cops—411 officers, up from 250—and moved them out of their cars and back to walking the beats. Newark has handled the past few weeks reasonably well in part because it has not militarized its force, but also because in 2014, the city created the Newark Community Street Team, consisting of community leaders who take a public-health approach to violence and, in moments of tension, work to prevent looting and violence.

The relational things that are soft and squishy are actually hard and practical. And there’s evidence that this approach has been spreading over the years. In New York City, the NYPD has managed to dramatically reduce the number of shots fired each year. Police officers fired 1,292 bullets in 1996. By 2018, that number was down to 136. In 2014, 64 unarmed black people were killed by police and in 2015, 78 were. But in 2018 and 2019, 28 unarmed black people were killed each year. The pressure brought by Black Lives Matter, and the reforms that police departments are instituting in response, is having an effect.

Even the best police reforms can't erase the poison of racism in American society. But the changes in public opinion over the past three weeks have been astounding. Changing a culture, in the nation and in its police departments, is usually slow and necessary work. But norms can shift gradually and then all at once, and when they do, the effects can be historic.

Police Reform Is Necessary. But How Do We Do It?

By Emily Bazelon June 13, 2020

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A discussion about changes in policing, moderated by Emily Bazelon.

Emily Bazelon --> A discussion about how to reform policing. Moderated by Emily Bazelon Photographs by Malike Sidibe

On Memorial Day, the police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man. Three officers stood by or assisted as a fourth, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd said he could not breathe and then became unresponsive. His death has touched off the largest and most sustained round of protests the country has seen since the 1960s, as well as demonstrations around the world. The killing has also prompted renewed calls to address brutality, racial disparities and impunity in American policing — and beyond that, to change the conditions that burden black and Latino communities.

The search for transformation has a long and halting history. In 1967, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of uprisings and rioting that year, recommended ways to improve the relationship between the police and black communities, but in the end it entrenched law enforcement as a means of social control. “Neighborhood police stations were installed inside public-housing projects in the very spaces vacated by community-action programs,” writes the Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton , author of “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.” In 1992, after the acquittals of three Los Angeles police officers who savagely beat Rodney King on camera, unrest erupted in the city. The police were ill prepared , and more than 50 people died. In 1994, Congress gave the Justice Department the authority to investigate a pattern or practice of policing that violated civil rights protections.

Since 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement has made police violence a pressing national and local issue and helped lead to the election of officials — including the district attorneys in several major metropolitan areas — who have tried to make the police more accountable for misconduct and sought to decrease incarceration. The killing of George Floyd in police custody shows how far the country has to go; the resulting protests have pushed the Minneapolis City Council to take the previously unthinkable step of pledging to dismantle its Police Department. But what does that mean, and what should other cities do? We brought together five experts and organizers to talk about how to change policing in America in the context of broader concerns about systemic racism and inequality.

The Participants

Alicia Garza is the principal of Black Futures Lab, the director of strategy and partnerships for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a founder of Supermajority, a new women’s activist group. Between 2013 and 2015, she helped coin the phrase #BlackLivesMatter and helped found the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Her forthcoming book, “The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart,” will be published in October.

Phillip Atiba Goff is a founder and the chief executive of the Center for Policing Equity, a research-and-action think tank at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he is also the Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity.

Vanita Gupta is the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She led the Justice Department’s civil rights division from 2014 to 2017.

Sam Sinyangwe is a founder of We the Protestors, which created a database that maps police killings, and Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence. He is also a host of the “Pod Save the People” podcast for Crooked Media.

J. Scott Thomson served as the police chief in Camden, N.J., from 2008 to 2019 and was the president of the Police Executive Research Forum from 2015 to 2019. He is now executive director of global security for Holtec International.

This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity, with material added from follow-up interviews to address developing news.

The Use of Deadly Force

Emily Bazelon: The conversation about how to invest our tax dollars to keep the public safe has broadened a great deal in the last few weeks, but let’s start with a relatively narrow question — what kind of change can take place within Police Departments? Phil, your Center for Policing Equity worked with the Minneapolis Police Department from 2016 to 2018. Over the past five years there, the police have used force against black people at seven times the rate it has been used against white people. Chief Medaria Arradondo, the city’s first black police chief, who took over in 2017, quickly fired Derek Chauvin and the three officers who were with him. But for years, complaints of misconduct and excessive use of force rarely resulted in discipline. Chauvin had a record of at least 17 misconduct complaints over his 19 years in the department, yet he was a training officer for new recruits, including two of the officers present at Floyd’s death. What do you take from your work in Minneapolis?

Phillip Atiba Goff: After Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, we, along with partners, got a grant from the Justice Department to address racial bias in policing. We invited Minneapolis to be one of the six cities we would work with. Our trainings were designed to help the police recognize interactions that are likely to result in discriminatory behavior, or undermine trust, and practice not to do that. And later we also used analytics to put resources back into the community. For example, in North Minneapolis, the police were giving out a lot of tickets for broken taillights, so we recommended they give out vouchers to get those lights fixed instead.

But the Minneapolis police have struggled for a long time with pockets of resistance to those kinds of changes. One terrible lesson of George Floyd’s death is that we don’t have mechanisms to stop terrible officers from doing terrible things on a given shift.

Bazelon: The Supreme Court has given the police a lot of leeway to use force. In 1989, in the case Graham v. Connor , the court held that officers could use force if doing so was “objectively reasonable” from their point of view in the moment.

Sam Sinyangwe: The police in Minneapolis put George Floyd in a neck restraint. Their department’s policy allowed them to do this if someone was exhibiting what’s called active resistance, which really means they’re trying to get up, or the police officer says they are, as he’s pressing them down. We’ve known for a long time that these neck restraints are dangerous. There was no reason for the Minneapolis police to authorize that tactic. In early June, the city banned it, as some others have.

J. Scott Thomson: The Supreme Court standard allows for a lot of situations that should never develop. Think about the mentally ill individual who refuses to drop a knife when a police officer tells him to. The law as the Supreme Court defines it allows the officer to advance on him and then shoot him — not because someone is necessarily in danger but because the person didn’t comply with the officer’s verbal commands. But why advance in the first place if it’s not necessary? How can any industry be considered legitimate, professional or trusted if it holds itself to only the absolute lowest permissible standard?

Bazelon: Alicia, you’re a longtime activist, and you live in Oakland, Calif. In 2009, a police officer there shot and killed a 22-year-old black man, Oscar Grant, who was lying face down on a BART station platform. This was one of the first police shootings to be filmed by a bystander on a cellphone. After that, activists worked hard for civilian review of the police, with real enforcement mechanisms. How has that worked?

Alicia Garza: There’s a deep sense in the black community that when the police commit harms, they’re not held accountable, and of course that erodes trust. People in these communities often ask why the police fight so hard to keep investigations and complaints in the shadows. The continual push to shield the police from responsibility helps explain why a lot of people feel now that the police can’t be reformed. Civilian review boards are one way to address that, but they often lack teeth. If you can’t hire and fire officers, or even make a recommendation for discipline that sticks, then you don’t have real power. That is a big frustration.

Bazelon: Sam, you’ve tracked police killings and nonfatal shootings around the country. What have researchers found?

Sinyangwe: In 2013, when the Black Lives Matter protests began, we didn’t have the data to understand what policy interventions could address the problem of police violence. Now we do, and the data nationwide show that about 1,000 people were killed by the police in 2019, which is about the same number killed each year going back to 2013. The overall numbers haven’t gone down. That’s because in suburban and rural areas, police killings are rising.

But if you look at the 30 largest cities , police shootings have dropped about 30 percent, and some cities have seen larger drops. In some of these cities, like Chicago and Los Angeles, activists with Black Lives Matter and other groups have done a lot of work to push for de-escalation, stricter use-of-force policies and greater accountability.

Thomson: In 2019, when I was chief of the Camden police force, we adopted a use-of-force policy with the help of Barry Friedman, a law professor at New York University, and the Policing Project he started there . The policy mandates that the police de-escalate a conflict, use force only as a last resort, intervene to stop excessive force and report violations of law and policy by other officers.

Bazelon: I can see why that’s a starting point, but Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island in 2014 by a police officer who used a chokehold that was banned by the New York Police Department more than two decades earlier . And Minneapolis had a policy in place that required officers to intervene if they saw an officer use excessive force, but the three who were with Chauvin — who were much more junior than he was — didn’t step in to save George Floyd. What else does it take to prevent more of these deaths?

Thomson: Within a Police Department, culture eats policy for breakfast. You can have a perfectly worded policy, but it’s meaningless if it just exists on paper. You get trained in it when you’re a recruit in your three to six months at the police academy. But in too many departments, officers never receive more training on the policy or even see it again unless they get in trouble. They are then befuddled by being held to account for behaviors that regularly exist among their peers, and they feel scapegoated.

At the Police Executive Research Forum, we released a survey in 2016 that found that agencies spend a median of 58 hours on training for recruits on how to use a gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics, but they spend about only eight hours on de-escalation and crisis intervention.

To change the culture around the use of force, you have to have continuous training, systems of accountability and consequences. In Camden, when an officer uses force in the field, supervisors review the body-cam footage. The following day, internal affairs and a training officer also review it and either challenge or concur with the supervisors’ findings. If they see something wrong, they bring the officer in and go over the tape. If the supervisors had approved something unacceptable, they, too, are held to account.

Vanita Gupta: Let’s talk about Congress. There are 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in this country, and I don’t think we’ve seen major federal legislation for police reform pass since the 1990s, when Congress gave the Justice Department the power to investigate departments for civil rights complaints. This is why civil rights groups are pushing for several measures. These include a national registry of police misconduct — for infractions like excessive use of force or falsifying a police report, as well as terminations and complaints — to stop the cycling in and out of officers who have poor disciplinary records. There also needs to be a national standard for force to be used only as a last resort, a ban on chokeholds and an end to qualified immunity, a doctrine from the Supreme Court that shields the police from being sued when they break the law.

A few weeks ago, none of this was at the forefront. For several years now, there has been a growing bipartisan consensus for addressing mass incarceration. But policing has been this untouchable area outside it, even though police stops and arrests are the front door to the rest of the system. Now, with these massive, multiracial protests across the country, House Democrats have introduced a sweeping bill , the Justice in Policing Act, to address police misconduct and racial discrimination, reflecting the accountability framework of the Leadership Conference, the civil rights coalition that I help lead, signed by 430 groups.

Bazelon: Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, has asked Tim Scott, the party’s only black senator, to come up with a legislative response to the protesters’ alarm about the police that their party can back. That’s striking in itself, given how aligned Republicans have been with a conservative message about law and order.

Gupta: My fear is that Republicans will just go for mealy-mouthed, piecemeal measures. This is a real moral moment, reminiscent of the moment on the eve of the passage of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, which Republicans ultimately joined in supporting. If they are serious this time, they should be adopting the Justice in Policing Act.

Bazelon: Some states are starting to act. California legislators have introduced a bill to ban chokeholds, for instance. After years of resistance, on June 12, New York repealed the law that kept secret the disciplinary records of police officers.

Gupta: Granted, this is about reforming the police, not reinvesting the money that is spent on them. But so long as we are going to have policing, this is a big deal.

The Power of Police Unions

Bazelon: After George Floyd’s death, a member of the Minneapolis City Council, Steve Fletcher, tweeted about the city’s police union as an obstacle to change. “They distort hard-earned labor laws to defend indefensible behaviors,” he wrote.

It’s a common complaint. The police began organizing in earnest to improve their working conditions in the 1910s. Today, the largest union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has more than 2,000 local chapters and nearly 350,000 members.

Because Police Departments are often strongly hierarchical, rank-and-file officers tend to rely on unions to give them a voice and shield them from what they see as arbitrary or punitive enforcement of the rules, in a job that relies heavily on officer discretion. But protection for the police, through collective-bargaining agreements or state laws lobbied for by unions, often “exceeds that provided to workers in other industries,” the law professors Catherine Fisk and L. Song Richardson wrote in a 2017 article in The George Washington Law Review. In Minneapolis, the union president, Bob Kroll, followed a common path when he defended the officers involved in Floyd’s death and lashed out at protesters as a “terrorist movement.”

On June 10, the police chief in Minneapolis, Medaria Arradondo, withdrew the department from contract negotiations with the union. He said he wanted to restructure the contract for “flexibility for true reform,” regarding not salaries but rather the use of force and the discipline process. Phil, when you were working with the police in Minneapolis, how did you see the department’s relationship with the union?

Goff: Arradondo wanted to work with us on reforms. He was one of five black officers who sued the department for racial discrimination in 2007. One person they named in that suit is the current head of the police union, Bob Kroll. When Arradondo’s suit was settled in 2009, the two sides didn’t get together and hold hands. So that’s not a unified culture. And if you have a strong union with a union head who says, “We’re not doing any of this because it’s bunk,” the chief of police can’t change the culture.

Gupta: Here’s an example: Arradondo’s department doesn’t do warrior-style trainings, which teach officers to see themselves as fighting an enemy who could kill them at any second. Last year, after it became clear that the officer who shot and killed Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul during a routine traffic stop had gone to a warrior-type seminar, the chief said officers who went to these trainings outside work would be disciplined. And then the union president, Bob Kroll, offered this training free for his members.

Sinyangwe: One thing that’s important, and often overlooked, is that police unions enjoy broad bipartisan support. Republicans are generally pro-police, and the left is hesitant to criticize unions. So you see things like Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, exempting most police unions from the union-busting legislation he pushed through in 2011. And last year, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. pushed Congress to pass a bill that would allow the police to unionize in states where they can’t currently expand, which many Democrats supported.

The whole idea that the police should be able to unionize in the first place needs to be interrogated. One study shows that when sheriffs’ unions were allowed to bargain collectively in Florida in the early 2000s, based on a State Supreme Court ruling, complaints about violent misconduct rose 40 percent.

The language of the contract with the union in Chicago requires misconduct records to be destroyed after five years; in Cleveland, it’s two years. Louisiana has a law, which the police unions lobbied for, that says investigators have to wait 14 days to question an officer who used a weapon or seriously injured or killed someone and 30 days to question an officer accused of other misconduct.

Investigations and the discipline of officers — basic on-the-job accountability — should not be within the purview of collective-bargaining agreements between police unions and cities. One big problem is that cities cannot negotiate a new union contract unless the union votes to approve it, so they’re stuck with old contracts, which include concessions they’ve made to the unions on accountability and oversight over decades. We can’t hold the police accountable for use of force or misconduct if the unions continue to have veto power over change.

Bazelon: Scott, you’re known for making changes in Camden in the decade you were chief. What role did the police union play?

Thomson: I started as a police officer in Camden in 1994. Camden is a city in New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, that is almost entirely black and Latino, and it had extremely high rates of poverty and crime. The department I came up in was largely apathetic and struggled with corruption. Early on, the police union was almost all older white guys. They wielded power through the collective-bargaining agreement and by collecting dues, which gave them the ability to build a war chest. They thought they could outlast any politician or police leader.

When I became chief in 2008, we’d had five chiefs in five years. Camden had one of the highest murder rates in the country. The rate for solving murders was only 17 percent, and there were open-air drug markets all over the city. There was borderline hatred between the community and the police. It was very hard to make any progress.

In 2011, when Camden was in a fiscal crisis, the state threatened huge layoffs to the police force unless the union made major concessions to the contract. The union refused, and nearly half of the department was laid off. Over the next two years, the Republican governor, Chris Christie, worked with Democrats in the county and city governments to disband the city Police Department and start a new county force.

In 2013, everyone in the city Police Department had to reapply for a new job. But about 50 hard-line union folks decided not to reapply. They encouraged people to follow them so that a county force couldn’t be formed. Fortunately, most officers did not follow the union advice. Even more fortunately, these 50 folks who were the impediment to change selected themselves out of the hiring process. I was able to accomplish in three days what I couldn’t in three years. That allowed me to reset the culture.

Camden is not a utopia. There are still huge social inequities there, and before I left last year, we fired and prosecuted a cop for excessive force. But it’s far less violent. Homicides have fallen by more than 50 percent, and the rate for solving them is more than 60 percent, because people are more willing to trust and talk to the police.

Goff: It’s important to know how rare Scott is in having stayed in his job as chief for so long. The average tenure for a police chief in a major city department is two and a half years. So if I’m an officer who thinks that a neighborhood needs somebody to crack a couple of skulls to keep everybody in line and keep crime down, and someone like Scott Thomson comes in as chief, usually all I have to do is wait him out. My job is secure. He can’t fire me for disagreeing. He can’t fire me for doing almost anything, unless I get caught on camera doing the most egregious thing, and even then often not. So in many places, we haven’t given reformers the tools to actually make reform happen.

Bazelon: What else helped change the culture in Camden?

Thomson: Some cops valued the secondary jobs they got, working in security for private businesses or road construction on the side, more than their primary job of police work. They could make an extra $2,000 a week. Guys who worked many hours would use their police job to get rest. New Jersey addressed that problem and in 2013 tightened state oversight. It has been an issue in Minneapolis.

Bazelon: A city audit there last year showed that officers working outside jobs were regularly exceeding the maximum hours they were allowed for the week. In 1994, when the mayor tried to tighten the rules to increase oversight, the union sued.

Gupta: The Justice Department can help create the necessary pressure on the union to participate in reform. When I was there during the Obama administration, we went into cities like Ferguson, Chicago and Baltimore, where there was substantial evidence about a pattern or practice of unconstitutional policing, like racially discriminatory practices or excessive use of force. Over the course of several months, we talked to hundreds of residents, activists and community leaders and hundreds of police officers, digging into every document you can think of in the Police Department, to really come up with a picture of what was happening. Then the Justice Department can negotiate an agreement with that city that contains a lot of reforms around use of force, discriminatory policing, accountability, supervision and training. The agreement is filed in court with a federal judge, sometimes as a consent decree, which has more teeth for enforcement and has often run for five years.

The consent decree forces the hand of the union and the rank and file. It can create the political will, over years, to actually see reforms through. That sustained focus really matters.

Bazelon: In a TV interview in June, Attorney General William Barr said, “I don’t think that the law-enforcement system is systemically racist.” The Justice Department will investigate George Floyd’s death, but Barr said he doesn’t think a larger pattern-or-practice investigation is currently warranted in Minneapolis.

Gupta: From 1994 to 2017, there were 69 investigations into patterns or practice in Police Departments, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, which resulted in 40 consent decrees or settlement agreements. But the Justice Department during the Trump administration has abandoned this work.

Where Should Funding Go?

Bazelon: In one poll this month , 74 percent of Americans supported the protests, and in another , the same number said they thought George Floyd’s death was connected to a broader problem with how the police treat black people. That was a major rise from when a similar question was asked six years ago about two killings. It has taken a long time, but the numbers suggest that a majority in the country have begun to absorb the lessons of Black Lives Matter. Alicia, what do you want to see happen next?

Garza: Most immediate, we need accountability for the death of George Floyd. Increasing the charges to second-degree murder for Derek Chauvin, and also charging the other three officers involved, was really important. Most of the time, there is unrest, and then there is a quick move to convene a grand jury, and people think there is no way that they couldn’t hold these officers accountable. And time and time again, as in the cases of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, grand juries have decided not to indict. So the elemental first step is to show that law and order applies equally to the police.

A demand to defund policing is also sweeping the country. People in Oakland are re-evaluating its budget, and several other cities are, too. We can do that by narrowing the focus of what policing is intended to do.

Bazelon: The United States spends more on public safety than almost all its peer countries and much less, relatively speaking, on social services. In Los Angeles this month, Black Lives Matter activists and members of the City Council succeeded in getting the mayor to propose moving $150 million of the Police Department’s nearly $2 billion operating budget to health and job programs. ( The police union said the mayor had “lost his damn mind” and warned that spending cuts would result in more crime.) In New York, more than 230 current and former members of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s staff signed an open letter pointing out that the police budget has grown since he took office by almost $1 billion (to a total of $6 billion) and demanded that $1 billion be reallocated to “‘essential social services,” like housing support and health care, as a coalition of advocacy groups are urging.

Gupta: That’s why this moment feels different to me than the moment after Ferguson, when Black Lives Matter changed the conversation in this country. Now we’re having a conversation that’s not just about how black communities are policed, and what reforms are required, but also about why we’ve invested exclusively in a criminalization model for public safety, instead of investing in housing, jobs, health care, education for black communities and fighting structural inequality. Budgets are moral documents, reflecting priorities and values.

When I went to Baltimore to investigate policing for the Justice Department, after Freddie Gray died from injuries he got in police custody, in every community meeting that I went to, folks were not just talking to me about concerns about police abuse. They wanted the Justice Department to fix the schools, to fix public transportation so they could get to their jobs more easily. Policing problems — police violence, overpolicing — were often the tip of the spear.

Garza: In 2018 and 2019, my organization, Black Futures Lab, did what we believe is the largest survey of black communities in America. It’s called the Black Census Project. We asked more than 30,000 black people across America what we experience, what we want to see happen instead and what we long for, for our futures. About 90 percent of our survey respondents said that the No.1 issue facing them, and keeping them up at night, is that their wages are too low to support a family. People want to see an investment in an increase of the minimum wage to $15 an hour. About 80 percent of respondents said that college costs were too high. In cities like San Francisco, we have made city college free for residents. These are things people can do right now to invest in black communities, by diverting resources from some of the ways we use law enforcement.

Goff: I’ve been saying for years that the No.1 thing you can do to help law enforcement is to call them less often. But I’m concerned about the slogan “Defund the Police.” It’s so much easier, time after time, for white people to take money out of communities than it is to put it back into communities, particularly when those communities are black.

Bazelon: In a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center , black people were much less likely than white people to say that the police do an excellent or good job. Yet in a 2019 survey for Vox , they were almost as likely to support hiring more officers. Maybe that’s partly because they don’t see the government providing other resources for making their neighborhoods safe. But it seems really important to think carefully about how change should happen.

Goff: Imagine that you have a tool chest for solving social problems. It gives you options. Then you lose the tool of mental-health resources. You lose the tool of public education. They take out the tool of job placement. And then all you’ve got left is this one rusty hammer. That’s policing. Right now, the only money flowing into some black communities is law-enforcement money. There are many black activists doing this the right way. But there are also a bunch of white people saying, “Let’s defund the police,” because they like the police as an enemy, but then when it comes to investing in black communities, they are silent.

Simply defunding the police cannot be a legacy of this moment. I want to hear about investing in black communities more than I want to hear about defunding.

Garza: There has been such a massive disinvestment in the social safety net that should exist to give black communities an opportunity to thrive, whether it’s access to health care or housing or education or jobs. It’s really powerful to see the impact of the organizing that groups have been doing in Minneapolis in the City Council’s promise to disband the Police Department and then rebuild a different kind of public-safety system. My understanding is that they will rehire some officers. The details matter, and we don’t know what they are yet, but I think there’s reason to be hopeful.

I think people in this movement are more aligned in their goals than I’ve seen for the last seven years. I feel a deep level of responsibility not to let the moment pass and then all we get is better police training and chokehold bans. That’s what keeps me up at night.

Reimagining 911

Bazelon: The current protests are justifiably focused on the problems of overpolicing, including black and Latino people being stopped a lot for no good reason. But I’m going to also make an obvious point: Every society needs some way to prevent lawlessness and deter and investigate violent crime. Because civilians have an estimated 400 million guns in the United States — more than one for each of us — we probably need armed responders more than other countries that we might otherwise compare ourselves to, like Canada or Britain.

As people like Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Jill Leovy, the author of “Ghettoside,” have argued, black communities have often been underpoliced for serious crimes, because law enforcement doesn’t treat solving murders and shootings in their neighborhoods as a high-enough priority. In Baltimore, when the police got a lot of negative attention after Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, there was a “pullback” in policing, as the writer Alec MacGillis described in these pages, which some officers thought the union encouraged. Homicides surged in the rest of 2015, and 93 percent of the victims were black.

Is this a danger in Minneapolis, and elsewhere, if cities fundamentally challenge their Police Departments and unions?

Gupta: I’m wary of making assumptions about depolicing. In 2015, I fielded calls from some police chiefs asserting that Department of Justice investigations and consent decrees were causing depolicing. But they had no evidence. A study by Richard Rosenfeld and Joel Wallman from 2019 found no evidence linking police killings of black people in 2014 to an ensuing homicide spike from depolicing. In New York, the big reduction in stop-and-frisk has been good, and crime has continued to decline.

Thomson: There is a prevailing sentiment in policing that “you can’t get in trouble for doing nothing.” But police officers take an oath and don’t get to decide whether they’ll follow it or not. This doesn’t necessarily mean writing tickets or making arrests, but if you are actively visible and engaging the public in your patrol area, flagrant criminal activity is far less likely to occur.

A tiny percentage of people are the ones destabilizing communities. They cause others to be armed, out of fear, who shouldn’t have to worry about defending themselves. So when I became chief of police, we worked with the F.B.I. and state investigators to arrest violent gang members. Then we put cops out walking the beat and on bicycles to prevent a cycle of violence over new turf. As a result, people started coming out of their homes, which is what you really need to start making a neighborhood safe.

Bazelon: I’m going to shift to other kinds of police work. In many cities, the police spend a lot of time “on traffic and motor-vehicle issues, on false burglar alarms, on noise complaints and on problems with animals,” the law professor Barry Friedman writes in a forthcoming article in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review. When a police report leads to criminal charges — only a subset of the whole — about 80 percent of them are for misdemeanors. Friedman argues that we should hand off some of what the police do to people who are better trained for it.

What if Americans retrained ourselves to expect armed officers to come only if they truly think there’s a real risk of someone getting hurt? The dispatcher would route calls that aren’t about crimes or a risk of harm to social workers, mediators and others.

Goff: In a sense, it’s not that hard to imagine. People already know that to some extent, 911 isn’t just for the police. In cities, it includes fire and emergency medical services.

Sinyangwe: There are a host of things that the police are currently responding to that they have no business responding to. If you have a car accident, why is somebody with a gun coming to the scene? Or answering a complaint about someone like George Floyd, who the store clerk said bought a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill?

Thomson: Perhaps, in a different city, the police wouldn’t have been sent in Floyd’s case. In Camden, I had a supermarket that called the police a lot about shoplifting. People would go in — and I’m not saying it’s right, but they’re taking food because they’re hungry or they need to feed their family. Then the security guards at the store engaged them; they would get in a fight, and now it turns into a robbery. It got to the point where I asked them to design their store to make it more difficult for people to steal and to stop calling us constantly. Because we’re not going to continue to charge our entire population with robbery on these minimal offenses.

Similarly, if you have a homeless man panhandling at a red light and you say to a cop, “Go fix it,” he’ll arrest the man. And now he has a $250 ticket. And how does he pay that? And what does any of this accomplish?

Bazelon: Let’s talk about domestic disputes. They’re the subject of 15 to more than 50 percent of calls to the police, according to Friedman’s article. He points out that such conflicts can turn serious quickly and unexpectedly. “We may well want force on the scene,” he writes. “But might we get further in the long run if someone with other skills — in social work or mediation — actually handled the incident?”

Monica Bell, who is a Yale law professor and sociologist, interviewed 50 low-income mothers in Washington about the police for a 2016 article in Law & Society Review. The women were deeply wary of the police in general, but 33 of them had called them at least once, often for help with a teenager. “Calling the police on family members deepens the reach of penal control,” Bell wrote. But the mothers in her study have scant options.

Garza: I lived in an apartment complex in Oakland for almost two decades. And we had incidences of harm, but we had a kind of ethos of not calling the police, not because people were organizers or activists but because of their experiences. They knew that if they called the police that real harm could come, and they didn’t want that.

Gupta: When I did investigations for the Justice Department, I would hear police officers say: “I didn’t sign up to the police force to be a social worker. I don’t have that training.” They know they’re stuck handling things because there is a complete lack of investment in other approaches and responses.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police put out a statement in June in which it said “defunding the police” was misguided. But it also said that funding cuts in social and medical welfare often put officers in an “untenable position,” because they are “often the only ones left to call to situations where a social worker or mental-health professional would have been more appropriate and safer for all involved.” On that, police leaders and protesters would agree.

Bazelon: In Eugene, Ore., some 911 calls are routed to a crisis-intervention service called Cahoots, which responds to things like homelessness, substance abuse and mental illness. Houston routes some mental-health calls to a counselor if they’re not emergencies. New Orleans is hiring people who are not police officers to go to traffic collisions and write reports, as long as there are no injuries or concerns about drunken driving. I’m borrowing these examples from Barry Friedman’s article. The point is that some cities are beginning to reduce the traditional scope of police work.

There are alternatives for crime-fighting too. New York has had some success by funding groups that do what’s called “violence interruption” in East New York and the South Bronx. They train people who live in the community, and who have often been involved with gangs in the past, to talk to younger people when there’s a conflict brewing that could turn violent.

One of the most interesting studies about policing is a randomized comparison of different strategies for dealing with areas of Lowell, Mass., that were hot spots for crime. One was aggressive patrols, which included stop-and-frisk encounters and arrests on misdemeanor charges, like drug possession. A second was social-service interventions, like mental-health help or taking homeless people to shelters. A third involved physical upkeep: knocking down vacant buildings, cleaning vacant lots, putting in streetlights and video cameras. The most effective in reducing crime was the third strategy.

Thomson: I would trade 10 cops for something like a Boys and Girls Club in my city. Those types of investments are crucial to safer, more stable communities. You clean up a vacant lot and turn it into a playground, and if people feel it’s a nice place, they bring their kids there. And then they are outside, looking out for one another. They are the eyes on the neighborhood. You have to have that, because the police can never be everywhere all the time.

Garza: We also shouldn’t accept a zero-sum game. An overwhelming majority of people we surveyed said they strongly support increasing taxes on people who are making $250,000 or more as a way to fund the services that are disintegrating in our communities.

I think there is a danger now that when protests start to die down, which they always do, when the blue-ribbon panel is dismantled, which it always is, black communities won’t necessarily be in a more powerful place than where we started. The country has to deeply invest in the ability of black communities to shape the laws that govern us.

As a country, we have to redistribute our resources. It’s not out of our reach. But it requires political will over the long term. Some of us have been running this race for a while now. We need you, if you’re newer to this fight, for the rest of the marathon.

Additional design & development by Shannon Lin.

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Management. Organizations: Why Do They Exist? Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Nature of organizations, list of references.

An organization is essentially a faction of the populace clustered mutually to achieve a familiar aspiration (Daft, 2009, pp. 14). They form courses and controls to distinguish them from other parts of the surroundings, and are habitually governed by an executive who directs authorized activities. Currently, several organizations subsist to realize revenue and develop lucrative endeavors. However, there are some organizations which are not after minting cash, but rather to fashion awareness in the society (Maxwell, 2008, pp. 62). Organizations should exist to augment the competence of individuals and mask their limitations. They are indeed basic to ensure professional and profitable use of assets, and be better able to compensate the broad society.

Recognized organizations are shaped when technical conditions dictate stamina, swiftness or stability beyond the capabilities of a personage (Garvin, 2000). The assemblage of products recurrently occurs in organizations due to the long-established observation that persons functioning together are more prolific than individuals. For any fruitful work, there needs to be an organizational body which will allow partition of labor linking the personnel. An organization is thus indispensable, to guarantee that individuals concentrate on a focused intensity of expertise, thus permitting them to be more accomplished and dedicated in their careers.

Other organizations survive to nurture their sizes and accrue more experience (Hagel & Brown, 2009). It is easier to marshal people to buy products from establishments with a commercial body, and more resourceful to fabricate goods in large scale, which can only be achieved in a group structure. Resources can be used more efficiently, and waste abstracted to other manufacture factors, unlike individuals who may not emphasize on proficient production.

Individuals do not posses the aptitude to govern convoluted situations which may entail acute decision making and immense Organizations thus craft opportunities for people, who will foresee and control fundamental decisions which distress the society resources. (Hagel & Brown, 2009). In a company, a personality would augment his potential, for example, through promotions or other forms of remuneration for competence in fabrication.

Online businesses, conversely, exist to publicize their services over the net. EBay is an example of such an organization, which provides global individuals with a platform to exchange commodities. Unfortunately, such organizations cannot monitor and lobby for their members despite their daily mushrooming (Maxwell, 2008, pp. 62).

Despite the benefits of working in a directorial setting, managers must give employees autonomy to be pioneering. This will fashion a setting where they will be an attachment to the company, and hence value for work. Organizations have been allotted exclusive status by the administration, depicted by the decrees responsibilities they hypothetically follow (Bakke, 2005, pp. 152), for example BP is required to guarantee proficient values by cleaning up any ecologically contaminating materials. For an organization to be measured productive, it must augment the welfare of the population by rewarding the needs of both staff and clients through optimizing their brilliant advantages and curtailing their confines (Daft, 2009, pp. 14).

Bakke, D 2005, Joy at work: a revolutionary approach to fun on the job , Washington, PVG, pp. 151-153.

Daft, R 2009, Organization theory and design , Ohio: Cengage learning, pp. 14-15.

Garvin, D 2000, Learning in action: a guide to putting the learning organization to work, Massachusetts: Harvard business school press. Web.

Hagel, J & Brown, J 2009, “Why do companies exist?”, Harvard Business Review .

Maxwell, J 2008, leadership gold: lessons I’ve learned from a lifetime of leading , New York: Thomas Nelson Inc, pp. 62.

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IvyPanda. (2021, December 30). Management. Organizations: Why Do They Exist? https://ivypanda.com/essays/management-organizations-why-do-they-exist/

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IvyPanda . 2021. "Management. Organizations: Why Do They Exist?" December 30, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/management-organizations-why-do-they-exist/.

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IvyPanda . "Management. Organizations: Why Do They Exist?" December 30, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/management-organizations-why-do-they-exist/.