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Abstract
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The videos of police brutality in the United States that have been widely distributed across social media platforms in recent years gave rise to a mass movement for racial justice that has taken both nonviolent and violent forms. Government responses to this wave of protest point to discouraging linkages to the genesis of national crime control programs in the context of civil rights gains and the "Long, Hot Summers" of the 1960s. In the face of social science research indicating that addressing mass unemployment, failing public schools, and inhumane housing conditions offered an effective policy path to combat social unrest and collective violence, many policy-makers and officials consistently sought to manage the material consequences of socioeconomic problems (e.g., gun violence and drug abuse) with more police, more surveillance, and, eventually, more incarceration. But with growing awareness and recognition of the problem of systemic racism--grounded in a rich body of scientific and historical research that has illuminated the drivers of inequality--a host of social factors have converged to make the present an opportune moment to expect different results. The challenge is to draw from empirical evidence to enact a set of meaningful structural solutions beyond police.
Beginning with Harlem in 1964, federal policy-makers treated the so-called riots as expressions of mass criminality and reacted by simultaneously expanding and militarizing police forces in targeted low-income Black communities. Studies based on aggregate data, historical and economic changes, social relations, and legal structures--from the federal government's own National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known popularly as the Kerner Commission) to the work of scholars such as Robert Fogelson, Morris Janowitz, and Louis Masotti--warned that escalating police force in the face of political and economic grievances was inadequate to solve the problem of racial inequality and consistently presented alternatives. Officials instead drew from the work of sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, criminologist James Q. Wilson, sociologist Edward Banfield, and others who focused on personal and group behavior, and enlisted the police to manage the disorder. Far from deterring urban unrest, the violence--nearly always precipitated by aggressive encounters with police--only increased in frequency and intensity into the 1970s. The United States evolved into a mass incarceration society over the remainder of the 20th century and into the 21st, as gun violence and crime continued to pervade the same neighborhoods that policy-makers targeted with policing and surveillance measures. At best, these punitive policies came at a tremendous cost to taxpayers, with unsatisfactory results overall; at worst, their severe long-term impacts extended not only to the millions of people ensnared in the criminal legal system but also to their families and communities, with immeasurable humanitarian consequences.
From the killing of Michael Brown by local law enforcement in 2014 to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, millions of people have taken to the streets demanding racial justice and a radical restructuring of law enforcement under the banner of a new and controversial slogan: "Defund the police." Although 93% of the demonstrations remained peaceful, in some cities, protesters engaged in violent encounters with officers, burned buildings, and looted stores (1). The lesson from the fires in Ferguson, Minneapolis, Louisville, and other cities is that violent protest will persist as long as crime control strategies remain at the center of domestic social programs in low-income communities of color...
Language: en |