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Systemic Police Racism in America: Some Sources

Tumblr has stopped talking about BLM and Defund the Police way too fast for me, so here’s a spiel on the necessity of police reform. In Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2015 article, “The Paranoid Style of American Policing,” he explains how American police lack proper training in de-escalating conflicts and instead frequently resort to their guns, escalating the conflict.He states, “…Nor will it do to point out that most black citizens are killed by other black citizens, not police officers, anymore than it will do to point out that most American citizens are killed by other American citizens, not terrorists. If officers cannot be expected to act any better than ordinary citizens, why call them in the first place? Why invest them with any more power?” Recent protests show how thousands of Americans have lost faith in the American police system. Over and over again, police have failed to protect the American people and have killed them instead. Over and over again, those same police get away with murder and suffer few consequences, if any. Until police are held accountable for their actions, drastic reform is needed. Until police are trained to de-escalate conflict instead of escalating it, drastic reform is needed. Until *every* American citizen can trust that government officials employed to protect them will actually protect them, drastic reform is needed. Lack of accountability and training in de-escalation tactics, among other issues within the American police system, have led to the deaths of George Floyd and many others across the nation, including children and students such as Darius J. Tarver, a criminal justice major in Denton, Texas who was shot and killed by police this past January. Here is a 2018 article on the lack of accountability for militarized police units Here is a 2019 article on the lack of police accountability in general Here is a link to Osagie K. Obasogie’s 2019 article “The Bad-Apple Myth of American Policing” where he discusses the vague laws and policies that encourage the use of excessive force by police.  A quote from the above article as an example: “my co-author and I analyzed use-of-force policies from the 75 largest U.S. cities and showed that they regularly fail to provide meaningful instruction to police on when to use force, or how to do so in ways that increase the likelihood that people will survive. For example, only 31 percent of the policies required officers to exhaust alternatives before using deadly force, and only 17 percent had policies that instructed officers to use force that is proportional to a person’s resistance.” Want more? The Atlantic has compiled a list of all its articles on race in America over the past 150+ years, organized by topic.