What is the Difference between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color

Abstract

Do performances of brutality have to be part of institutional social control in African American communities? Are these communities haunted by historical beliefs, practices, and stereotypes that once disenfranchised them? More important, if so, why in a post-civil rights era do African Americans receive abuse from our institutional sentinels – the police? Why do our guardians utilize informal and formal social control mechanisms, similar in nature, type, and in some instance in kind to slave patrols? This article examines criminologists’ analyses of policing in the African American community. Despite a substantial amount of work addressing the complaints of violence and distrust in the Black community, policy-makers as well as police departments have ignored their findings. Does the will exist to bring about a different form of social change in the configuration of justice or does African American marginalization persist as one of the strongest elements of social stratification.

What Do the AMCD Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies Mean in the Context of Black Lives Matter?

“…Black Lives Matter is a burgeoning sociopolitical movement that interrogates the stigmatization of Black people and how militarized police forces across the country routinely incarcerate and extinguish Black lives (Bailey & Leonard, 2015; Garza, 2014). More than a reductionist indictment of individual officers, Black Lives Matter is predicated on the belief that policing, as an American institution, has historically operated to maintain the existing racial hierarchy, no matter the cost (Alexander, 2012; Durr, 2015).…”

Class Politics and the Reactionary Electorate

“…The consequences of perpetuating and defending persistent white privilege is clearly manifest in the assault on non-white bodies, on the institutional violence that seems readily accepted by society writ large even as voices cry out in opposition. Whether it reflects a long tradition of violence against African-Americans (Durr, 2015) or racism among forces of social control (Hayes, 2015), institutional racial violence can be seen everywhere (Hughey, 2015;Hamer and Lang, 2015). Whiteness, as a statement of social organization, helps us understand inequality (Beeman et al, 2011) and race-based gender outcomes (Rio, 2012).…”

Green vs. White

“…This can be seen in the birth of the American police department out of slave patrols (Walker , 1980). Slave Patrols were disbanded during early reconstruction and replaced with federal militaries, state militias, and the KKK in an effort to maintain individual and societal control over African Americans (Durr, 2015). These then gave way to the first major police departments in the mid-nineteenth century (Walker, 1980).…”

“…Examples can include the early slave patrols (which can be seen as an early form of modern policing), to Jim Crow laws, and convict leasing. These early forms of oppression, partly born out of a capitalism based on free labor and oppression of Black Americans, helped to eventually shape hegemonic whiteness that we now live with (Durr, 2015;Alexander, 2010;Wacquant, 2000). One of the ways that the criminal justice system has worked to maintain the subordination of black and brown bodies is through the various forms that moral reformers have maintained the War on Drugs for the last one hundred years (Gray, 2000).…”

“…The unwillingness of the media to activate a terrorist framework for WS groups speaks to the reluctance of the state and media to utilize the same tools listed above to silence WS groups. This lack of labeling white supremacy as a form of terrorism, and allowing it to prosper, has historical foundations including entrenched white superiority in the U.S. and the infiltration of WS into law enforcement (Speri, 2017) combined with the historical role law enforcement plays in the maintenance of racial hierarchies (Alexander, 2010;Durr, 2015). While there is a significant spike in the terrorist framework use in 2015, more research will be needed to determine whether this readiness to label WS as terrorists is a new trend or a response to a singular event (the Charleston church shooting) and federal prosecution of Roof.…”