Fruit from a Rotten Tree: The Police Force is Working as it was Designed, and that’s the Issue
- seyannabarrett
- Jun 4, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: May 2, 2024
“I can’t breathe”. Those were his last words.
No, not of Eric Garner who was killed by police in 2014.
No, not of Freddie Gray who was killed by police in 2015.
But of George Floyd, who was killed by police this year, in 2020.
On May 25 in Minneapolis, a deli employee called the police on 46-year-old Black man George Floyd for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. This was not true. However, before that fact could be discovered, he was dead.
A series of videos from bystanders and security cameras reveal in gruesome detail the incident that transpired when officers arrived on the scene. Officer Derek Chauvin can be seen pinning Mr. Floyd to the ground by keeping his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, even as he profusely sputtered “I can’t breathe” and even after he was unconscious with blood dripping from his nose. Chauvin’s fellow officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, can also be seen doing absolutely nothing as their brother in arms takes a life in broad daylight.
This injustice sparked fury in the form of protests all over the nation and the world.
As the New York Times already pointed out, these protests are coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 people and an economic collapse that has put millions out of work. As some protests seem to give way to riots and looting, National Guard troops have been deployed in many states and mayors of multiple cities have imposed curfews in the hope of curbing the violence. However, there have been too many eye witness accounts and reports from peaceful protestors that the violence is instigated and exacerbated by the police and white people.
One protester in Washington D.C, who shall remain anonymous, was willing to share his experience for the sake of this article. “We were talkin’ to them [and] pleadin’.” he said. “We were askin’ them why they were scared of us. Why they had to be in full riot gear when we were unarmed.” He witnessed how the protest quickly shifted from peaceful to violent, not at the hands of protesters truly for the cause but at the hands of troublemakers—counter protestors and undercover cops alike. “Before we even got to the protest they [undercover cops and counter protestors] were trying to get us to set stuff on fire and incite violence.” This instigation took a physical turn at the actual protest. “What I noticed was that a lot of the white people were the ones throwing the glass bottles and bricks …anything but water bottles, and that’s what brought on the tear gas and the rubber bullets” the protestor recalled. He, and plenty others, got tear gassed in their faces, shot with rubber bullets, and flash banged. Some individuals got a more direct form of abuse. “They kicked that girl in her face, left the gate on top of her”, he said, “and the only thing she had on her was a bible.” Even when they tried to leave, this protestor revealed how that too was met with attacks. “We were surround by cops on 3 [out of 4] sides. The crazy part was that they were shootin the tear gas at our only exit.” This eyewitness account, one of many, paints a crystal clear picture, which is summarized so aptly when he said with finality, “It was a peaceful protest that was instigated by officers in riot shields who had tear gas and rubber bullets and flash bangs.”
This violence on the part of police was not only supported by President Trump but also recommended. On the audio of a private conference call, which was obtained by The New York Times, Trump angrily exclaimed at governors, “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time — they’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks.” He went on to say, “You have to arrest people, and you have to try people, and they have to go jail for long periods of time.”
In addition to this call Trump has also made a series of tweets vehemently objecting the protests. The tweet that stirred up special outrage from the public was the one in which he stated, “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” The President of the United States used his personal social media platform to declare that he would authorize the shooting, the death essentially, of American citizens, his own citizens. This response, from the police and the leader of the nation, to predominately Black people fighting for their right to not be murdered in cold blood by police, is in stark contrast to the response to predominately white people protesting COVID-19 stay at home orders back in April.
At these demonstrations numerous protesters, many armed with rifles and not wearing masks , got into the faces of state police officers. In one image that went viral, an angry bearded white man can be seen yelling, with no mask in sight and his face as red as a tomato, at two police officers as they stare straight ahead, masked, not moving a muscle. President Donald Trump praised these mask-absent, armed protestors and urged governors to bend to their will. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little and put out the fire. These are very good people.” Trump tweeted of the Michigan protestors. “But they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”
The prejudice and racism are glaringly obvious in this difference.
To people aware of how deeply entrenched the brutality against Black people is in the policing
system, this treatment comes as no surprise. After all, the system is a descendant of slave patrols.
According to TIME magazine, in the South the creation of police forces was focused 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.” Furthermore, “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.”
The short film Slave Patrols: The Birth of Modern Police very clearly outlines the slave patrol’s metamorphosis. With industrialization coming into the south, slave populations began to grow in the southern cities. As a result, that is where slave patrols moved to and where they became professionalized. Their duties expanded beyond patrolling and capturing slaves, and they became what is now recognized as a modern police force. Two centuries later and the basic function of the police is largely the same—"maintaining the stratified nature of the society. Both in terms of race and class.” In fact, during the Civil Rights Movement the KKK and other groups would work alongside the police to inflict terror as a unit in order to subdue the movement against white supremacy.
While this history dates back to the abolishment of slavery, it had disastrous ripple effects, most notably in the framing of Black people as criminals, or “thugs” as Trump so fondly describes them. A fostering of this stereotype is the fact that “minority, especially black, youth are disproportionately represented at most stages of the juvenile justice system…ending more often than not in incarceration” (Piquero 62). If the criminals seen and represented in the system are mainly Black, then deeming all or the majority of Black people as criminals is made easier because they are depicted as such. This stereotype was exercised through policies such as stop and frisk, where precinct officers (in New York for instance) threatened officers with a “reassignment to an unfavorable task if they did not stop ‘the right people at the right time in the right location’. If there was any confusion as to who the ‘right people’ were, the commander clarified. ‘Male blacks’” (Taylor 126). Additionally, New York state senator Eric Adams “testified that he personally heard [police commissioner] Ray Kelly say that stop-and-frisk should ‘instill fear on them, every time they leave their home, [that] they could be stopped by the police’” (Taylor 126). As the data and testaments reveal, there is blatant unjust targeting of African Americans as criminals. What is more is that people on the police force, those officers who are sworn to protect all Americans, including Black people, are spurred to cultivate this racial profiling, to nourish this criminalization of African Americans, and to sustain their suppressed status.
Looking at the origins, it should come as no surprise that the criminal justice system and its agents (police officers) are not just at all, especially towards people of color; they are literally just a more organized version of slave patrols.
Therefore, when these massive protests arise after yet another innocent and unarmed Black individual is murdered by police, it must be understood that the injustice is not a one-off instance. This uprising, this movement, isn’t solely about George Floyd, or even Eric Gardner and Freddie Gray whose deaths eerily echo his.
It’s about Ahmaud Arbery, the young Black man who was chased and gunned down, on video, by a former law enforcement officer (who used to work for the local district attorney) and his son back in February.
It’s about Breonna Taylor, the young Black woman (an EMT, no less, saving lives in emergency rooms amidst the COVID-19 pandemic) who was shot in her sleep when police entered her home and opened fire back in March.
It’s about the countless names that have become hashtags over the years, and the countless names that haven’t, because they were murdered by those who swore to “serve and protect”.
History, and how it’s so clearly informed the present, reveals that their lives weren’t taken by a few “bad apples” from a tree of numerous good ones. Instead, their life was made disposable because said tree is rotten to the core; it’s sick at the root, therefore it naturally produces bad apples.
The police as an institution is racist and corrupt and has been from its inception. Ergo, it’s working as it was designed to—against Black people. A system can’t “serve and protect” the people it was tailored to capture and destroy. That is the root of the issue. Until the nation—from the public to government officials—acknowledge and take accountability for this systemically racist root, the issue will never be resolved, and the cycle will continue.
We will see another hashtag.
* Here is a master doc of everything from nationwide charities you can donate to, free legal help in case you get arrested per state, mutual aid funds, tips if you attend a protest, etc! https://linktr.ee/NationalResourcesList *
Sources Cited:
Piquero, Alex R. "Disproportionate Minority Contact." The Future of Children, vol. 18, no. 2,
Fall 2008, pp. 59-79.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black liberation. Haymarket Books,
2016.
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