[Author’s Note: I looked at how the police act as an arm of patriarchy. The image is of Ieshia Evans facing down police officers before being arrested on July 9 during a protest over the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La. Photo credited to Jonathan Bachman/Reuters.]
Can we, the people, restore American trust in the police? Can the cops rebuild the faith of the society, minorities, the powerless, if there continues to be no oversight of police departments and no repercussions for officers who protect corrupt cops? These questions have been asked for decades. And the past few weeks, they have become even more relevant and are shaping the presidential election conversation. The answer we have been told has always been to restructure the existing system. To tweak it a little bit with civilian oversight committees, mandatory body cams, and town halls with police officials. However, none of these proposals will solve the underlying problem which plagues the system.
There are corrupt cops. Officers who refuse to take a citizen’s report after they have been harassed or attacked by an off-duty policeman. Officers who ignore reported rapes, even of children, and downplay or dismiss the allegations. Officers who smile and joke when women they have detained are crying or having panic attacks. It is funny to them because if a fellow officer approached them, they would not be handcuffed and searched before any questions were asked. They would not be forced to sit on a curb, a position where you cannot quickly escape from if an attack comes.
Cell phone recordings and YouTube channels make videos of police interactions easy to find, and this has made us sit up, with jaws open, shaking our heads, asking what the hell is going on. It is the callousness and the easy excuses that are used to justify the actions — the lip service civilian oversight boards that might as well not exist for all the authority they have to change things. Why is this? There have been decades of effort made to clean-up police departments. Millions of dollars spent on training, advisors, and consultants. So why does nothing change?
A simple explanation is because the police, from their inception, have been the physical tool of patriarchy and all it entails: racism, discrimination, sexism, harassment, oppression of minorities, and those without power. That is the heart of patriarchy, it is a hierarchy of abuse, and the more privilege you have, the less violence you will experience. But that will change the second you oppose the system. Stand with Black Lives Matter or protest at Standing Rock and very quickly the whitest, most middle-class person will be hit with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Early police departments were not meant to protect the rights of average citizens. They were meant to protect the property of the wealthy. Police rounded up people who were suspected of crimes, and immigrants and minorities were easy scapegoats. These scapegoats were the source of social ills. The bonds of brotherhood bound the all-white, all-male departments. All white, all-male juries listened to white lawyers, were instructed by white judges, and rendered verdicts on people of color. Working-class whites were largely left alone by police departments because their crimes could be blamed on blacks or did not interfere as much with the hierarchy.
However, the formation of the unions brought white working-class men and women into direct conflict with the police. Unions were against a capitalist slave system. I should correct that; slave owners had an investment to protect, factory owners could always find another body to throw into the mill. But these unions were a problem for those in power in the city or state. They agitated in the streets and disrupted the working day. They gave a face and a voice to the hierarchy, the patriarchy, which was oppressing the non-white community; and allowing some alliances to form between whites and people of color. Unions were a direct threat to the patriarchy. If one group could end their oppression, so could others.
The Coal and Iron Police, which eventually became the Pennsylvania State Troopers, were formed solely to break up unions and intimidate union leaders and agitators. Homes of union members were broken into, possessions destroyed, lists of members stolen, men arrested, and held for weeks but never charged. Due to the perseverance of the working-class unions were established, though many still had racism and sexism built into them. Many unions banned women and people of color from becoming members. Then, most of the people were satisfied, the hierarchy readjusted itself, and things went back to normal.
The 1960s saw the anti-war and civil-rights movements, the Hippies, the Black Panthers, the Socialists, and other groups agitating for change. These groups protested for a major shift in the county. They fought against a government that used the police to control the people. Police used tape to hide their badge numbers, so they could not be identified. Staged arrests led to murders; zero-tolerance laws were created to incarcerate people of color in higher numbers. Calling someone a socialist was akin to calling them a terrorist or traitor. For white America, there was absolute trust in the police and palpable fear of those who opposed the established order,
Now in the 21st-century, technology allows the public a front-row seat to the actions of the police. People being detained by police for refusing to show their ID, when they are not legally required to show ID, are arrested for resisting an unlawful arrest. This same technology shows us a child being shot within 2 seconds of police arriving, like a drive-by except the cops parked on the sidewalk. The videos show African American men calmly talking to officers and following their directions, only to be shot as they did what the officers requested. And the patriarchy is on display as the officers who are recording killing unarmed men and women are not charged or are found not guilty. The power wielded by the police in the hierarchy trumps the supposed civil rights of the people. “You have the right to remain silent” might just as well be said, “Shut up, I don’t want to listen to you.”
These videos also show us that whiteness is the best defense against police brutality. White nationalists freely point guns at federal agents, while local police act as the strong men of a corporation and maim peaceful protestors desperate to protect Native Americans’ land and water. A Black Site in Chicago originally proposed to house suspected terrorists quickly became a hole in which to drop black and brown suspects where their families and lawyers could not find them. The American hierarchy is fully supported by police who choose which legal gun holder they fear. Because in their minds, some people do not have the right to own guns. Police choose which people have a first amendment right to protest, and which can be gassed and shot at for not moving away quickly enough. Police choose which news reporters will get left alone on the street, and which will get a baton aimed at their head when they are fleeing an attack.
Law enforcement has always been an instrument of oppression of the weak and the dispossessed. Their training tells police that they are more important than the people they are supposed to protect. The people are the other, the poor other, the black other, the brown other. Police do not patrol their own neighborhoods because people like them do not commit crimes. Instead, it is “Those People” who deserve jail time for whatever. They are probably guilty of something, right? The court system reinforces this belief when officers can be caught in a lie on the stand and not then charged with perjury. The police are not held to the same standards of law. They are above minorities of any sort; color, class, sex, gender, orientation, it does not matter. Police are ranked higher than those they are supposed to control.
Politicians and the media also support the hierarchy. We are told that those who are brutalized deserve it and that they brought it on themselves. Victims of police violence are smeared on the news. A teenager was given detention, so he deserved to die. A man had a decades-old conviction for drug possession but had been a model citizen since then; obviously, he had to die. A man might have robbed a convince store, been a burglar, had a weapon somewhere on him. The message is that “Those People” are lesser than the good sitting at their home in the suburbs. “Those People” are animals, thugs, criminals, to be controlled.
It is not the supposed criminality of people of color that encourages police brutality. It is their lack of power in the hierarchy which justifies their treatment. For police, their dominance in the system stems from the fact that there rarely consequences to an officer’s actions. They are above the citizenry no matter what they do, which laws they break, or who they kill. A majority will get paid administrative leave, a paid vacation. At worst, they will have to resign and join another department, sometimes getting a better position than they previously held.
Black Lives Matter and other protestors are calling for a dismantling of the system which supports the patriarchy. Defunding the police means no longer having the police arrest the homeless, be called out to deal with the mentally ill person who needs medical help, arrest students in a school who act like teenagers always act. Cutting the budgets means no more tanks for small departments, no more military-grade equipment deployed while executing a warrant. It means the money will be used to fund schools, job programs, mental health, rehab services, community-based programs. Defunding the police will have far-reaching consequences outside of the community. Consequences which will cost corporations money and cost officials power.
Police who abuse and attack and kill the unarmed will face actual consequences. Prosecutors who depend on plea deals to pad their conviction numbers will no longer be given an endless supply of defendants who cannot afford a lawyer. Private prisons will no longer be packed full of the mentally ill, the homeless, or non-violent offenders. Elected leaders will not be able to propose new laws to “crackdown” on crimes committed by the poor. There will be a top to bottom restricting of the hierarchy, and a massive loss of power for those at the top.
Defunding the police will remove one of the legs on which the hierarchy is balanced. Corporations will not be able to push for laws that criminalize those who protest them. Citizen investigators who record their wrongdoings will not be arrested when they show the footage. Voting rights will not be summarily removed from citizens who have committed no crimes or committed non-violent crimes. Additionally, if people of color are no longer the targets of police, if their mug shots are no longer a staple of the evening news, it will influence the psyche of the populous. If black faces are no longer blatantly associated with crime in the media, they may, eventually, no longer be associated with crime in the minds of white Americans.
If there is a complete, top-down, overhauling of the entire policing and the criminal justice system in the United States, there will be changes. If money is put into schools and jobs programs, we will have less unemployment. If drug users are given treatment instead of jail time, the demand for specific drugs will drop, cutting into the profits of gangs and dealers. If we fund social services and mental health programs, then the police will no longer be called on to deal with every homeless or mentally ill person who needs to be taken to a hospital. Then the police will have the time and resources to focus on actual violent crimes, and perhaps reduce the backlog of untested rape kits. Rapists will go to jail, women, and children will be safer. And another weapon will be removed from the arsenal of sexism.
Imagine all this good happening for America. And all we need to do to make it happen. Is to make Black Lives Matter.
(Meet Mago Contributor) Francesca Tronetti, Ph.D.