If you ask Americans what the most feared thing in life is, the first thing in the list is probably not a school shooting, nor a racial riot. In fact, Americans who have nothing to fear even about COVID-19 have only fear of the police. In many American travel guides, the first of the safety reminders for tourists is to obey the requirements of the police. Otherwise, the light end will be beaten to the nose and face, and the heavy may be shot.
The phenomenon of police brutality in the United States is by no means a superfluous move of the travel strategy. The New York City police launched a campaign on Facebook to call on citizens to publish and share photos of "police and civilian families". As a result, most of the pictures of police officers beating civilians in the streets and alleys of New York were posted, forcing the campaign to end hastily. To be fair, new York's security is quite good in all major cities in the United States, much better than in Midwest cities such as Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans. In areas with poor security, if you provoke the police, the end may not be a fat beating, and it is likely to pay a more painful price.
Blacks are much more likely to die from police guns than whites (the four bars in the picture show that the number of ethnic people killed by the police as a proportion of the total number of people in that ethnic group, from left to right, black, Hispanic, white, other ethnic groups) (Image: The Washington Post)
Distrustful of the FBI's official statistics (which the FBI itself admits are "incomplete"), the Washington Post began in 2015 independently counting cases of citizens victimized by police enforcement in various regions, based on news reports from local media. Its data shows that nearly a thousand people die each year from police enforcement, much higher than the FBI published.
The roots of racism among American police officers
In black families in the United States, educating children will always tell one thing: as blacks, the probability of being interrogated by the police for reasons is very high, and you must not resist in this situation, otherwise the consequences will be very dangerous. The Washington Post's investigation report shows that the proportion of black people who died at police guns is much higher than that of other ethnic groups. In fact, not only the death cases, but also the targeted violent law enforcement of black people by the police cannot be explained by the relative poverty and high crime rate of the black community. Because in the United States, the police industry has been inextricably linked to racism since its inception.
One of the origins of the American police system was the Patrol Corps in the South responsible for capturing and monitoring slaves. The picture in English is "Slave Patrol, Militia Protected by the Second Amendment." The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowed citizens the freedom to carry weapons, and Southern slave owners used it to organize armed militias to maintain law and order and capture fugitive slaves. (Image source: Wikipedia)
The United States is a federal state, and the relationship between local governments and the federal government is not hierarchical, and the federal government's ability to influence the affairs of each state is very limited. Specific to public security, the state, county, and municipal governments at all levels have completely independent police forces, funded by local finances, and not subordinate to each other. The earliest police departments in the United States were not formed by the central government, but by vigilant units spontaneously formed by local communities, dating back to the British colonial period in the early 18th century. At that time, the most important functions of the security forces in many regions, especially in the southern colonies, were to capture fugitive black slaves and suppress slave uprisings.
After the Civil War, slavery was abolished in the United States, but the police forces of the former slave states in the South not only did not respect the rights of blacks, but became a tool for racists to restrict black rights by "legal" means. Blacks were often imprisoned by the police for various minor offenses and then transferred to farm or forestry for forced labor in farms and forest farms associated with the local judicial system, and slavery continued in a new way in the South. While not acknowledging it on the surface, the tradition of racism is deeply rooted in the U.S. police force.
American police serve the wealthy
Because police departments across the United States are funded by local finances, the police priority is how to serve the local wealthy, their financiers. This also means that the local police in the United States still have a strong class attribute innately.
△ Badge of the Beverly Hills Police Department in Los Angeles County, California, USA. The Beverly Hills Police are famous for a movie called "Beverly Hills Police", the city is full of rich people, the police are diligent and strict in law enforcement, so the security is good, the city is orderly, and the surrounding Hispanic, black cities form a sharp contrast. (Image source: Beverly Hills Police Department official website)
Historically, large corporations like Ford have openly called on the police to violently suppress workers, causing serious casualties among workers. Looking at the current United States, on the road outside the Thousand Marriott House in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles County, California, there are police cars patrolling at any time, afraid that thieves will walk from which big guy's house. Also in the Hispanic slums of Los Angeles County, the streets are a different story. Shootings, drug trafficking, gang fires are not a common occurrence, and the police don't want to waste too much time in these dangerous areas.
The security situation in the United States is seriously polarized, with the rich and middle class being safer and the poor being dangerous. This situation is largely related to the uneven intensity of police enforcement.
U.S. police have no obligation to keep citizens safe
The police in the United States not only have strong racist and class rule tools, but they are also a group that cannot be regulated, which makes them very arbitrary in enforcing the law. Although many police departments use "Protect and Serve" as a team slogan, the police in the United States are legally under no obligation to protect the safety of citizens. The inability of the police to protect the people stems from the "care" of the U.S. judiciary for police violence.
In the 1981 case of Warren v. District of Columbia, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals held that the police were under no obligation to protect the safety of specific citizens in enforcing the law. In a series of similar cases, including Desany v. Winnibago County in 1983 and Gonzalez v. Fort Stone in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly confirmed that police officers and government officials who fail to fulfill their obligation to protect citizens do not need to be prosecuted, that is, have so-called Qualified Immunity.
Qualification immunity is one of the legal bases on which U.S. police officers can do whatever they want. (Image source: NPR)
Qualification immunity is a product of the period of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. At that time, slogans against apartheid rose and fell, and the police brutally suppressed the protesters, resulting in many legal proceedings.
In Pierson v. Ray Ray), known as the leader of the liberal constitutional revolution, Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court, who repealed the U.S. Apartheid Act, and other justices, voted overwhelmingly (8-1) to affirm the police's ability to enforce the law. In simple terms, as long as there is no evidence that government officials know that the law is illegal and deliberately unconstitutional, then when they perform their duties, they "unintentionally" break the law and are exempt from civil litigation. This gives the police the green light and gives them a high degree of freedom to dispose of them when enforcing the law.
These actions of the police are not only protected by the US judiciary, but also tacitly approved by legislators and executives. Police unions large and small across the United States are the staunchest conservatives in elections and are in line with the conservative Republican Party. Not only that, but the police unions are highly united and adept at using their control over local policing power to boycott all legislative and administrative attempts to limit police behavior. For example, since last year, radical progressives have been demanding a reduction in police spending, and the police will force politicians who eat by the ballot box by "reducing enforcement of middle-class neighborhoods," leading to a deterioration in law and order, provoking popular discontent. As a result, Republican support for the police union's claims, Democrats' fear of the ability of police unions, and the fact that the local police are inherently out of central control have changed the police force that should have acted as a legal shield.
△ Shawan's conviction only provides a channel for the long-accumulated dissatisfaction of the American people to vent. Without major reforms in the U.S. political and judicial systems, police violence will continue for a long time. (Image source: ABC)
Not long ago, the trial of Freud's case finally ended with Shawin being found guilty, but this does not mean that American society can truly solve the problem of police violence, more because the jury involved in the trial of the case was forced to sacrifice the "head bird" Shawan under pressure to calm the anger. Freud's case is not so much a victory of the "Black Life Noble Movement" as it is that American society has given ordinary people an outlet to vent their dissatisfaction.
We can see that even as the case is being tried, violent police enforcement incidents continue to occur across the United States. This shows that the various actions of the American police are actually problems with the state system. What's more, because the police control the policing power, once the local or federal government promulgates policies that hinder the vested interests of the police, such as cutting police funding, they use sabotage to worsen security in middle-class and poor neighborhoods, stimulate voter dissatisfaction with the authorities, and thus push their own supported parties (usually Republicans everywhere) to come to power. If the connivance of the U.S. judicial system with the police is not changed, and the political influence of the police union is not limited, the violent law enforcement of the police will continue to be like other persistent diseases that plague American society.
Contributed by Jing Zhao
Editor 丨Liu Xuanyu