What is the Difference between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color

Introduction

As a society, “we” look to the police, our institutional protectors, to keep our cities, neighborhoods, social spaces, and us, safe within the inside and outside of Anderson’s canopy (2011). At least this is what most Americans generally think. However, our growing awareness of our uniform guardians’ behavior is questionable, as we watch “performances of brutality” that violates for some “our” mutually understood beliefs about police and policing. Murmurs of police brutality are no longer a whispered undercurrent by some in the African American community, but loudly voiced. The behavior of our institutional sentinels has become for them a deafening sound. As “symbolic assailants” generally to the criminal justice system and specifically to the police, African American men described in research by scholars such as Anderson (1990), Bridges and Steen (1998), Kennedy (1997), Quillian and Pager (2001) and Skolnick (1994) face police aggression regularly. This fact of life has become especially salient, given the almost monthly reports of encounters between Black men and police within urban neighborhoods across America.

For the most part, these scholars’ findings are ignored by social policy-makers and police, but appear more true than false after watching the Ferguson Protests during August 2014, and then Baltimore, and Cleveland in 2015. I held my breath as I watched, listened, and heard “breaking news”, once, twice, three, and possibly four times within the last 15 months. I braced myself for more violent incidents in African American communities between their citizens and police. Was Bonilla-Silva’s (2010) and Schuman et al.’s (1997) theorizing about race-neutral ways to explain a social problem finally revealing the explicit and implicit bias against African Americans, Latinos’ and Hispanics’ a reality as policeman after policeman has been found not guilty, despite recordings in at least one case? I agree and think about Drakulich’s (2015) points regarding the two contested social issues that carry racial implication, in America – crime and labor market inequalities. Then, I thought about his contention that since the Civil Rights movement visible expressions of racial bias are less socially acceptable or tolerated, while-and most notably when discussions of race-based social problems are often times framed in indirect statements.

As the media documented these events, my thoughts fast-forwarded to Civil Rights activists’ quest for social equality and violently aggressive police standoffs against the requesting citizens. I thought, they are going to blame “them” or find a rationale for why “they” are at fault. Then, the audio in my head played the names Abner Louima, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Akai Barley, Eric Gardner, John Crawford, and Forrest Gray. I wondered, how different is this from the Carolina Slave Patrols? Is it a return to the “good ole bad days?” Or have the “ethnos” become a scarier element of society, despite the role of the “cosmos”? (see Anderson’s discussion of ethnos and cosmos in The Cosmopolitan Canopy, 2011). Or is Rios’s (2011) youth control process expanded to make each encounter between police and Black and Brown men one in which their ideas of hyper-criminalization are equivalent to “time to catch a slave.” For many of us [me] this is how we sometime feel hearing barely-veiled descriptions and discussions of our communities as “bad areas.” Even before the work of Shaw and McKay (1942), African American communities have been regarded as incapable of maintaining order or collectively assuaging their social problems. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, police science appropriated this idea and successfully harnessed it to African American communities. To smooth the distress I felt, I did my favorite thing, let uplifting music heal my soul. So, I listened to Tom Joyner on WROU (92.1 ) play Marvin Gaye’s “What Going On” and Kirk Franklins “Brighter Day,” I thought of Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” mixed with Johnny Guitar Watson’s “Ain’t that a Bitch” – all describing the current cultural, economic, and social conditions that make these city residents want to “Holla.” Later I promised myself to play Gil Scott Heron’s “B Movie” and The Last Poets’ “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” to remember what brought us here, lest we forget.

Whether the music and the question fueled my thoughts or the question and the music, the rhythm and voices reminded, cajoled, and brought forth a long-standing set of structural issues galvanized by historical disenfranchisement, but brought me back to my original question, “How is police behavior in the 21st century different from that of slave patrollers?” Then, I remembered Mrs. Johnson, my high school Black History teacher instructing our class that slavery was part of the U.S. legal system – sanctioned through and by the Congressional passage of Fugitive Slave Laws (1789, 1850). She emphasized that Virginia, her home state, enacted more than 130 slave statutes between 1689 and 1865, while Connecticut and New York, alongside other colonies promulgated laws to criminalize and control slaves. WOW!, I thought, as I said to myself, although African Americans were no longer slaves, the history of police malice in their [our] communities is too glaring to ignore or dismiss. For me the historical link was clear and contemporarily connected. I marveled at how the more things change, the more they remain the same, for maybe about the 150th time in my short life.

Slave Patrols and Policing

History chronicles the development of policing in Colonial America not just focusing on the North in the 1700s, but also the creation of slave patrols in the South. Samuel Walker (1980) describes these patrols as the first publicly funded police departments in the American South. “Paddy rollers” (slave patrols) were to manage race-based conflict in the southern colonies expressly through the control of slave populations. ¹ Sally Hadden (2003) explains the duties of patrols were to search slave lodges, keep slaves off roadways, and break up slave organized meetings. David and Melissa Barlow (1999) note that by 1837, the Charleston Police Department had 100 officers whose primary function was to patrol slaves by regulating their movement (including free Blacks) checking documents, enforcing slave codes, guarding against slave revolts and catching runaway slaves. Known for their extreme cruelty and mercilessness, white patrollers controlled the slave population through the Civil War and were not completely disbanded after slavery ended.

During early Reconstruction, federal military, state militia, and the Ku Klux Klan emerged from disbanded slave patrols to preserve individual and societal control over African American citizens, being even crueler than their predecessors. Over time, these groups began to operate similarly to newly established police departments in the United States. In patterning this institution after slave patrols, birth was given to the police beat – knowing every square inch of a neighborhood or community for 15 square miles (Porter, 1995). Some historians assert that the transition from slave patrols to publicly funded police departments was smooth in the South and North, while others regard slave patrols as the first formally recognized undertaking of policing in America. Still, others identify the amalgamation of police departments in major cities in the early to mid-1800s as the beginning of modern policing in the United States. ² Newly organized police units adopted three distinct characteristics from their English counterparts: (1) limited police authority: the powers of the police are defined by law; (2) local control: local governments bear the responsibility for providing police service; and (3) fragmented law enforcement authority: several agencies within a defined area share the responsibility for providing police services.

Policing became salient as large numbers of immigrants arrived on American shores and millions of African Americans migrated to northern industrial cities from the South during the Great Migration (1910–1930). Like the newly arriving immigrants, Black citizens’ mass departure from the South was economically and politically tied to their inability to vote, despite gaining that privilege of citizenship in 1867, and the enactment of Jim Crow Laws as a boundary maintenance mechanism between African Americans and Whites (i.e., schools, railroad cars, hotels, restaurants, and other public places). Thus, within American cities African Americans continued to face organized violence at the hands of the police.

Today, a more delicately obscure adaptation of the slave patrols, instituted by municipal governments has introduced aggressive measures such as Stop and Frisk, Racial Profiling, or Driving While Black, but most important is the“Speak When I Tell You Law”. They relive a historically continuous “Nigger Moment,” the time when you realize your social position and location in society comes down to your skin color, embedded in White perceptions, and stereotypes that continue to live, despite the respite of canopies (see Anderson, 2011).

Policing African American Communities

I wondered: had criminal justice scholars asked my question about policing in the African American community? I began to look for articles specifically discussing the police behavior and the African American community. I found the journal Race and Justice. To my surprise, I found that criminal justice scholars had examined this problem, albeit different in context and form, but they had. I was intrigued to find that Hagan and Albonetti (1982) argued that perceptions of the police are stratified by race and ethnicity and beliefs held by police were linked to policing’s “unofficial” efforts to address local problems. According to these scientists, this set of perceptions possesses onerous effects when assessing racial stratification of crime social control. Sampson and colleagues (1997) hypothesize that sizable concentrations of economically disadvantaged and destitute social environments in which racial/ethnic minorities live, obstruct the promotion of social organization. Within such communities, in addition to informal and formal social control, police are used as a way to deter crime. Yet, Fagan and Davies (2000) and Terrill and Reisig (2003) offer the suggestion that police practices and behavior fluctuates in line with the relative conditions of the neighborhood to include its race and class configuration.

What I found most intriguing in my literature review were three structural hypotheses vis-à-vis coercion as a method of social control used by police against racial/ethnic minority populations: (1) The minority threat hypothesis, which argues that the greater the proportion of minority residents in a city, the greater the use of coercive crime control mechanisms; (2) the place hypothesis, which theoretically advances the idea that spatially segregated minority populations are the primary targets of coercive control; and (3) The community accountability hypothesis, which suggests that organizational characteristics of police departments promote the use of excessive force against minorities. Then, Brunson and Weitzer (2009) suggest that for cities with populations of 100,000 or more, the minority threat hypothesis indicates that place effects are dependent on a very high degree of racial/ethnic segregation. This is why minority group threat theories have been particularly successful in explaining police brutality and the use of deadly force (Holmes, 2000; Jackson, 1997; Jacobs and O’Brien, 1998; Smith and Holmes, 2003). But of equal importance for some criminal justice scholars, was the examination of the more routine aspects of police behavior, particularly in the era of proactive, aggressive crime-control strategies (Hemmens and Levin, 2000).

Add to this, Mastrofski et al. (1996) and Terrill (2003) emphasize that with aggressive and/or disrespectful police behavior at the start of a police/suspect encounter, the more likely suspects are to resist or be non-compliant. Second, negative police actions, that is, disrespect, is ecologically patterned and excessively experienced by African Americans (Mastrofski et al., 2002). However, when police demeanor is evaluated by minority citizens, they are more likely to show compliance (Mastrofski et al., 1996), with the highest percentages of compliance being found in white officer/minority citizen encounters (Anderson, 1990). Thus, race and suspect demeanor is problematized by police interaction with members of poverty-stricken minority communities.

Beliefs about Procedural Injustice: A Moral Dilemma

However, the most insightful work was by Drakulich (2015) and Crutchfield et al. (2012) who contend that social capital and neighborhood narratives frame police perceptions of formal control efforts, estimating benefits and costs of informal efforts. For example, when citizens do not believe the police are concerned, willing, or capable of suppressing crime in their neighborhood, they may see their citizen-action as less efficacious, and more perilous – making them less likely to recognize informal social control efforts. Crutchfield et al. also hypothesize that perceptions of procedural injustice by local police is related to citizens’ race, neighborhood setting, and character. Before moving forward in the article, I thought this could be part of the problem. Then, I read … perception of local police value is lower in African Americans neighborhoods, which may be due to contrasting beliefs of procedural injustice. Thus, at the neighborhood level, these authors suggest high levels of police mistrust are associated with a diminished capacity for informal social control. I smiled, thinking they got it right. However, they carefully link neighborhood residents’ mistrust of the police to possibly explain lower levels of informal social control in neighborhoods with greater numbers of racial and ethnic minorities – or as the authors speculate, to describe the leftover relationship between African Americans and police after taking into account the effect of social-structural conditions. Ok! My head bobbed up and down as I did my version of the wobble (last year’s popular dance song and moves).

Within this article, Crutchfield et al. (2012) also discuss the nature of the citizen–police relationship as important for distinguishing interaction by-products of an absence of faith in police from attitudes towards legal institutions, noting that attitudes are serious in discussing injustices in our societal legal apparatus. Thus, these authors suggest, like Hunter (1985), that bad policing does not turn people pro-crime to discourage informal organizing against it. Rather, they suggest, it promotes a need to modify their strategy for successful versus unsuccessful efforts perhaps causing victimization, or wasting time. Their hypothesis is consistent with the notion that only a small number of residents in weighed-down neighborhoods will contribute to a culture organized in support of crime (Anderson, 1999), but, most importantly, as referenced by Crutchfield et al., Merton’s (1938) ends–mean gap or a blockage of opportunity to conventional success pathways occurs.

Along with evidence of these citizens’ lack of faith in the police, Anderson (1999) is cited to highlight a code of violence, emphasizing parallel perceptions of the police as ineffective and bias often being demonstrated in various ways among varying neighborhood residents. If criminal justice policy – including the organization, mandate, and behavior of the police – reflects a relatively deliberate (if not always cohesive) attempt to control African American and other race/ethnic minority populations (Bobo and Johnson, 2004), then the solution to the problem of differential policing and ensuing mindsets about the police in minority communities will not be simple or easy, though Peterson and Krivo (2010) have provided a framework to start the discussion.

Finally, Crutchfield et al.’s (2012) analyses also suggest a potential role for culture in neighborhood organizational processes intended to inhibit crime. After years of focusing on structural explanations of crime, due in part to a fear that cultural explanations will be debatably co-opted to imply that minority communities were/are simply choosing to act irresponsibly, recent scholarship has revived interest in revised accounts of the role of culture (see, e.g., Anderson 1999; Sampson and Wilson 1995; Small et al., 2010). Thus, extending the work of Small (2004), Crutchfield et al. suggest that community-level opinions about the police might act as a “neighborhood narrative frame,” altering how residents act toward or in their community. Suggesting that narrative frames describe a neighborhood as a possible “best chance at success,” but without institutional support, may not be a worthwhile effort.

Conclusion

As I only briefly read the tomes of work by these scientists, I thought, I am developing a class on race and crime, but quickly wondered why results of this scholarship have not been publicized more fully and policy-makers have not embraced them in designing policing legislative reforms. What have legislators been doing? Then, it became apparent to me that “the will” to propose such change was and is perhaps still missing. Damn, I cried, with all of these studies discussing encounters and/or experiences of African Americans with police, why haven’t “we,” members of society, taken these results into account and acted as part of “our” civic duty? As we wonder whether our cities will burn this summer due to continued performances of brutality, I wonder whether the work of these scholars will make their way to policy-makers’ desks. Will “we,” “they,” take action, becomes the question as each day more news reports inveigh episodes of brutality between African Americans and police.