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gear and the additional weight of three centuries of
racialized law enforcement. The new system would
look for solutions from the very communities that
the old system regarded as the sources of problems
and guide investment accordingly. Law enforce-
ment would not disappear, not in a country with
more guns than people. But the officers who re-
mained would be highly professional and trained in
an ethos of valuing life. They would be focused on
solving people’s problems rather than locking peo-
ple up and would work alongside those they serve.
Countless hours have been spent in the past few
weeks discussing what has gone wrong in policing,
but Minneapolis voters may take action as early as
November, in the form of a referendum that would
allow city lawmakers to continue exploring a new ap-
proach to safety. Everyone already knows it’s going
to be hard. Camden, N.J., a city more than a thou-
sand miles away, has been held up by many as an
illustration of what the existing model can be. But
the experiences of citizens there reveal not just the
potential for real change but also the limits of what
has been possible—at least so far—while still keep-
ing residents safe.
“As an elected official, I will not make any
decisions whatsoever that will decrease safety,”
says Cunningham. “Everything that I do is about
increasing the safety of the residents. And it is
very clear that this system that we have now is not
doing that.”
One thing the system does have is longev-
ity. Today’s modes of policing in the U.S. can be
traced back hundreds of years, and with them an
understanding of why, in 2020, according to the
database Mapping Police Violence, a Black per-
son is three times as likely as a white person to be
killed by police.
In America’s early years, towns protected them-
selves informally, with the help of a part-time night
watch—though night watchmen were notorious for
simply using their shifts to get drunk. The country’s
first publicly funded police department started in
Boston in 1838, with the primary goal of protecting
property.
But in some places, “property” included human
beings. “In this country, for the years that cover the
1600s to the mid–19th century, the most dominant
presence of law enforcement was what we call today
slave patrols. That’s what made up policing,” Har-
vard history professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad
told NPR this year. These patrols were tasked with
providing swift punishment for runaways and en-
slaved people who broke the rules, and assuaging the
white population’s fear of a revolt.
Long after the Civil War, sheriff ’s departments
administered slavery’s post bellum by-products, seg-
regation and Jim Crow oppression. During World
War II, after thousands of African Americans moved
to Oakland, Calif., to find work in the shipyards, the
city responded by recruiting Southern police officers.
In the postwar boom, redlining—which prevented
home loans from going to Black people— enforced
segregation of neighborhoods and denied Black peo-
ple homeownership, the primary route to middle-
class wealth. Maintaining that system reinforced the
imperative of the slave patrol: vigilant oversight of a
population perceived as threatening despite, or per-
haps because of, its being oppressed.
The modern civil rights movement in the 1960s
changed laws but not the fundamental nature of
policing. Black and brown people have been dis-
proportionately targeted by programs like the New
York police department’s street-stop effort known
as stop and frisk, which a federal judge ruled in
2013 was used in an unconstitutional way. The past
few months have served as a searing reminder of
NORTH SIDE
The Rev. Jerry
McAfee, left, and
Minneapolis
city council
member Phillipe
Cunningham,
above, embody
a generational
change in
activism, but both
call community
the key to public
safety
RAHIM FORTUNE FOR TIME
