Policing is not a public good
For decades, we’ve been told that policing is a public good: available to all, for the benefit of all. But in practice, that’s never been true.
One of the basic measures of a “public good” is that it’s accessible to all people in a society, regardless of ability to pay. But from the beginning, policing in this country was designed to protect the assets of the most privileged.
Boston merchants were the first to persuade lawmakers in 1838 that a fulltime, publicly funded police force would serve the “collective good.” In reality, they wanted to get the public to pay for protecting their shipped goods and routes.
In the South, where the economy depended on enslaved labor, publicly funded slave patrols were created in 1704 to surveil, track, and punish Black people who attempted to escape. As historian Sally Hadden notes, “Most law enforcement was, by definition, white patrolmen watching, catching, or beating Black slaves” — who were legally considered the property of wealthy white men.
Today, all across the United States, landlords and property managers enlist law enforcement to forcibly evict low-income tenants. Police regularly remove homeless individuals from parks and public spaces. And cops routinely stop, search, and threaten Black and brown people when they drive or walk through white neighborhoods.
We’ve seen these disparities in policing increase since the outbreak of COVID-19. And soon, with eviction moratoriums lifting across the country, tens of thousands of struggling tenants will be sent eviction notices. When families have no place else to go and landlords call in law enforcement, who do you think the police will serve and protect?
Police have never protected Black lives as much as they protect white property. And when people protest having their safety threatened — as in the nationwide protests after the murder of George Floyd — they’re met with further violence from police.
Safety is born out of investment in true public goods. Policing in America reveals a lack of it.
Ravi Mangla is political education program manager for Citizen Action of New York, part of the People’s Action national network of grassroots groups. This op-ed was adapted from OurFuture. org and distributed by OtherWords.org.