Police bias is real problem

The death of Daunte Wright in Minnesota is only the latest in a long line of police killings of Black Americans. The media’s focus on whether the officer intended to fire a Taser or a gun dominated coverage of the shooting. But while national attention on police brutality often focuses on guns and violence by armed police, officers also use potentially lethal unarmed tactics that disproportionately target Black people — and these matter as well.

Indeed, the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd epitomizes the dangers of these tactics. The prosecution called more than 30 witnesses, including no fewer than nine police officers who unanimously condemned Chauvin’s use of force as excessive and unnecessary. Multiple witnesses have testified or suggested that Chauvin’s pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck ultimately took Floyd’s life.

Tactics such as chokeholds are not alternatives to violence but simply another expression of it. Even as police departments became heavily armed throughout the 20th century, they also embraced unarmed tactics, drawing on martial arts, to become more effective at control. In fact, Black practices of self-defense fueled developments in the training of police in such tactics. This history reveals how calls only to “disarm” police are inadequate for ending anti-Black policing.

While police shootings rightly garner headlines, there also is a sustained record of unarmed police brutality in the United States. In 1958, the NAACP magazine the Crisis reported on numerous physical assaults and beatings that Black Americans suffered in Detroit. A central theme of the cases was the police initiation of violence during questioning. Ninety percent of complainants “believe[d] they were subjected to unwarranted abuse because of their race.” Physical assaults ranged from hand blows and kicks to the use of objects. When Birmingham, Ala., exploded during civil rights protests in 1963, police beat protesters and unleashed dogs on them. Nationally, the Black Power Movement joined civil rights calls to end police violence and police killings of Black people.

In response to both white supremacist violence and police brutality, Black activists adopted practices of self-defense. Though they are largely remembered for armed self-defense, unarmed struggle became a focal point of groups such as the Nation of Islam, the Panthers and the Congress of African People.

These efforts made law enforcement and the broader public uneasy. Many Americans practiced martial arts, but these activities were taken to be threatening only when Black Americans partook.

Indeed, as part of its argument that the Nation of Islam was advocating violence, the FBI tracked the group’s martial arts training, although members repeatedly said that they used their skills only defensively. The San Diego police had almost no encounters with the group, yet they circulated a training brief that insinuated that the Nation’s martial arts would help incite a bloody revolution and result in members killing a “police officer when the opportunity present[ed] itself.”

Though Black folks had practiced martial arts and defended themselves against violence since arriving in the Americas, Asian martial arts became a more popular foundation for self-defense in the middle of the 20th century. The Air Force, Army and Marine Corps trained thousands of troops in judo, karate and tae kwon do, adapting techniques learned during World War II and subsequent military occupations in the Pacific. Veterans, in turn, rapidly spread martial arts within the United States beyond Asian American communities — something Black Power groups embraced.

But just as Black people learned these techniques to protect themselves, police gained similar knowhow from the military. Police departments came to believe that Japanese methods of restraining people were superior to American ones. While some police departments had exposure to Asian martial arts in the first half of the century, they came to perfect tactics such as chokeholds only as a response to the threat they perceived emanating from Blacks in postwar U.S. cities. The ongoing pathologizing of blackness as “unruly” and difficult to restrain furthered police bias against Black Americans and their displays of protest and self-defense.

This more-militarized police training coincided with attempts to quell Black uprisings in the late 1960s. Though footage often shows the police as armed in confrontations during the uprisings, police did not always need to halt protests by firing shots. A New Jersey commission investigating the 1967 Newark, N.J., uprising agreed that all police tactics needed to be probed, including hand-to-hand combat borrowed from military training rooted in martial arts.

Ironically, the racial integration of police departments reinforced the use of such techniques. Hoping that integration would increase community understanding and decrease disproportionate anti-Black abuse, Blacks optimistically joined police departments in larger numbers in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Some of those joining were martial artists themselves. By 1979, Black and White martial artists were training integrated police forces in cities such as Atlantic City, N.J. They taught techniques that would protect officers and let them handcuff those they were detaining without doing permanent damage.

While such tactics were appealing in a context of sustained attention to police brutality, they also came with their own brutality. During the 1980s, the National Urban League called for bans on unarmed techniques such as the bar-arm and carotid artery chokes that cut off the airway. Civil rights groups demanded that Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates be suspended when he reportedly excused the danger of chokeholds by saying Black Americans were simply more likely to die of them for biological reasons.

Some cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago have banned strangleholds and chokeholds. Minneapolis instituted its own ban after Floyd’s death last summer, and the Missouri Senate just passed a bill. But cases involving unarmed tactics still number in the hundreds — even in cities with bans such as New York.

Numerous encounters have ended in death, including the cases of Shereese Francis and Eric Garner, whose death by a prohibited chokehold sparked a national outcry in 2014. Despite this evidence, police officers and practitioners are confident that such tactics can be deployed “safely.” Activists, by contrast, emphasize that legal bans do not provide solutions to police discretion about deploying these tactics. And the data unambiguously shows that these tactics are deployed more against Black Americans. In California between 2016 and 2018, officers seriously injured 103 people by using carotid chokes. Black people made up 23 percent of the victims, despite being only 6.5 percent of California residents.

History makes clear that unarmed techniques are damaging forms of police violence and that reforms aimed at just preventing police use of guns will not solve the problem of police violence against Black Americans. Giving more funding and training to police can vary the methods of violence that disproportionately affect Black communities. But the problem is not the specific tactic police deploy in a given case, i.e., the gun, chokehold or Taser. It is the anti-Black bias embedded in their traffic stops, searches and seizures, and arrests.