Policing Letter

Dear Policy for the People,

I hope that this letter finds you all well and that you are safe. It is likely that you all have been following the national and now international protests regarding the unjust murder of George Floyd at the hands of multiple complicit officers.

I emphasize “multiple” and “complicit” because although Officer Derek Chauvin will be the one to absorb the murder charges, several officers at the scene stood there passively and allowed this to take place. In reality, multiple people and an entire system were responsible for taking George Floyd’s and countless other lives. This incident is a deadly and honest metaphor that resembles the institution of policing as a whole.

Why is this fitting? We need to only look at the U.S. system of policing that originated from slave patrols and how that role still serves a similar purpose. In the words of legal scholar and author of “The New Jim Crow” Michelle Alexander: “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” The police serve as the sentinels of this caste system. This may sound dramatic, but who protects the resources that have been unjustly distributed through racist policies?

As policy makers, we must reconcile with a history of policies that have come to the detriment of BIPOC folks. One of the most influential modern-day policies that I believe has shaped so much of this inequitable landscape is redlining. When I learned about the history of redlining, this raised additional questions: who will protect these redlined communities? Who will protect how these resources are unjustly redistributed to certain communities and not others?

Furthermore, who will be ready to arrest people when they protest these unfair advantages, or evict them when they lose their homes because they lost their jobs due to Covid-19? Who will essentially uphold the status quo? You do not have to be brutal to be violent.

In the case of the police, even their silence is violence. The aptly named “blue code,” or “blue wall of silence” cultivates a culture of corruption wherein having a particular job alone is considered reason to silence honest reporting and cover up objectively immoral behavior, making the social identity constituted, in part, by a play-ignorant mentality in the face of investigation. The first line of defense in absolving police officers who choke cigarette sellers (Eric Gardner) or shoot reachers for wallets (Philando Castille) is usually the representatives of the police unions. They are unfailingly dedicated to the side of police shooters, no matter how apparent the guilt. These defenders are selected by the police bodies at large and paid by all cops. They are union officials emboldened to do this specifically.

Also, I believe it is important to dispel the myth that the police protect and serve. The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals. Police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you do not do exactly what they tell you. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force, even death into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked.

The police are complicit in the privatization of public space, thus acting as the guardian for private interests and private property that have colonized our public spaces. There remains very few spaces without the expectation of having to buy something. Through enforcing the very infractions like loitering, this is an extension of white people often behaving as gatekeepers of space, protecting the business class that owns private property.

The reason why I am going into all of this is to equip us with knowledge so we can start having this dialogue with our peers, professors, and administrators. Academia is responsible for shaping the unjust economic system and legitimizing the national security forces deployed domestically and around the world. It is up to us to challenge our professors’ and peers' often problematic and misguided assertions.

The onus is also on us to demand for better from our program and nation. I know this is a lot to process friends and please do not forget to take care of yourself and check in with your mental health. Self-care and community care are critical at a time like now. It is also becoming increasingly evident that we must take care of our communities. The safest communities have resources. We have an opportunity to create an alternative to policing that involves mutual-aid, autonomous social movements, reparations, a regenerative and sustainable economic model versus the extractive, imperialist neoliberal system we are embedded in that relies on the police for its protection.

Take care everyone and in solidarity,

Narissa Jimenez-Petchumrus