48 Time August 17/August 24, 2020
Nation
how those dynamics play out in today’s society. As
protesters took to the streets, speaking out against
racism and law- enforcement violence, some depart-
ments seemed to prove their point; in New York City
in May, police drove an SUV into a group of demon-
strators. In Philadelphia, police teargassed protest-
ers trapped in a channeled roadway.
The recent “militarization” of local police—
with departments nationwide receiving ar-
mored vehicles left over from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan— obscures more than the faces of of-
ficers: the truth is, cops rarely confront violent
crime. Cadets spend most of their average 21 weeks
of training on defensive tactics and firearms. But
time-use studies find that patrol officers mostly deal
with traffic, medical calls, accidentally tripped bur-
glar alarms, arguments and the like. In 1999, when
Baltimore was called the most violent city in Amer-
ica, its mayor said its police spent 11% of their time
on crime, half of that not serious. In smaller places,
studies have found that all crime occupied 7% to
less than 1% of an officer’s time.
“There’s a mismatch between how we’ve con-
structed cops and what they actually do,” concludes
New York University law professor Barry Friedman
in a 70-page paper he wrote in March, titled “Disag-
gregating the Police Function.”
Officers are not only unequipped to handle what
former Milwaukee police chief Ed Flynn has called
the “intractable social problems that are dumped
in the laps of our 25-to-30-year-old first respond-
ers.” They also often arrive heavy with the tools of
forceful control: baton, Taser, firearm. Thanks to
redlining and its reverberations, the neighborhoods
where those social problems tend to run especially
deep are often those where Black and brown peo-
ple have been confined. And as Phillip Atiba Goff,
a co-founder and the CEO of the Center for Polic-
ing Equity, a think tank focused on addressing ra-
cial gaps in law-enforcement impacts, points out,
they are also the areas that tend to be highly po-
liced: Black and Hispanic people are more likely
than white people to have multiple interactions
with the police.
It’s a dangerous mix and has left many minority
communities with scant reason to view the police
as allies. Especially in the years since smartphones
made it easy to share high-quality video, the world
has been treated to a view of a problem that is much
older than that technology, whether it’s an officer
caught on camera shooting someone in the back or
using a choke hold: such incidents define policing for
Black Americans. And beneath the headline- making
moments caught on video lie policies from the Fugi-
tive Slave Act to stop and frisk.
That history is a large part of why many activ-
ists and academics alike have come to believe that
the relationship between Black Americans and U.S.
FROM WITHIN
Two Camden County police officers
on patrol in the city; the department
has made a concerted effort to focus on
de-escalation and relationship building
within the community