Law enforcement’s history of racism goes deep
There was no place to hide, no place to truly be safe. Across the U.S., black Americans lived in fear of law enforcement officials armed with weapons who monitored their behavior, attacked them on the street and in their homes, and killed them for the slightest alleged provocation.
These organized groups of white men known as slave patrols lay at the roots of the nation’s law enforcement excesses, historians say, helping launch centuries of violent and racist behavior toward black Americans, as well as a tradition of protests and uprisings against police brutality.
That history has again become the subject of national debate as millions of Americans in recent days gathered in cities large and small to denounce police brutality and racial bias after the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man in Minneapolis, at the hands of a police officer after allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. In a video of the encounter, Floyd gasped for breath as police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck while three other officers looked on. Chauvin was fired along with the officers in the video, and all four were eventually arrested for their role in his death. Floyd’s last words were “I can’t breathe,” recalling the death of Eric Garner, 43, who also gasped “I can’t breathe” before he died during an arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes in New York City in 2014.
Both deaths, as well as the deaths of other black men, women and children across the U.S. during interactions with police officers, have inspired protests and calls for police reform, along with the rise of the Black Lives Matter social justice movement. But law enforcement officials across the U.S. have a much longer history of killing black people, says Jennifer Cobbina, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University.
“Too often people look at the contemporary issue, the issue that is going on right now but not understanding that all that is happening is seeped in 400 years of legacy of injustice,” she said, adding,
Dating to the 1600s, the British colonies used a watchman system, where citizens of towns and cities would patrol their communities to prevent burglaries, arson and maintain order. As the slave population increased in the U.S., slave patrols were formed in South Carolina and expanded to other Southern colonies, according to Sally Hadden, a history professor at Western Michigan University.
Slave patrols were tasked with hunting down runaways and suppressing rebellions amid fear of enslaved people rising up against their white owners, who were often outnumbered. The patrol was a volunteer force consisting of white men who surveyed and attacked black people and anyone who tried to help them escape.