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  German, the former FBI agent, has pointed out in his work for the Brennan Center that law enforcement officers with connections to white supremacist far-right militant groups have been uncovered in “Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere.” Most often those officers are disciplined. Sometimes they are fired. And sometimes courts overturn those firings.

  “Leaving officers tainted by racist behavior in a job with immense discretion to take a person’s life and liberty requires a detailed supervision plan to mitigate the potential threats they pose to the communities they police, implemented with sufficient transparency to restore public trust,” German said.

  In most departments, though, those supervision plans are inadequate at best.

  After the September hearing, Raskin said that the United States’ “social contract” must have “fair and neutral enforcement of the laws to protect the whole citizenry against criminal violence and state violence. We must work to disentangle the police power of the state from groups and individuals that subscribe to the violent white supremacist ideology and seek to inflict harm on African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Jewish Americans, LGBTQ Americans, and anyone who stands in the way of a race war and the civil war that the extreme right is calling for in America today.”

  Such allegations from a Democratic House committee chair about law enforcement, and the FBI in particular, might seem like just so much political rhetoric spewing from the nation’s capital, where the two major political parties stake out positions at such extremes that they seldom, if ever, agree on anything. But much of what Raskin said about the FBI is backed up by the Mirror Project, a group of Black, former FBI agents who in 2020 decided to speak publicly about race problems inside the Bureau.

  The group noted that in 2020 white men held the top ten FBI leadership positions, those that make the Bureau’s most important decisions. It noted that Black people hold about 4 percent of the 13,000 agent jobs, numbers that have been consistent for decades. Promotions largely go to white, male agents. The lack of diversity at the FBI, the Mirror Project said, raises doubts about the Bureau’s ability to fairly investigate cases of police use of deadly force in the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, or the case of Jacob Blake, who was shot seven times in his back by a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer. Some of what the former agents point out are the same type of issues pointed out by Chief Walker in Mississippi.

  How can the Black community rely on the FBI—the top agency in the country for investigating police actions and protecting peoples’ civil rights—to fairly investigate cops when there is a scarcity of Black agents involved in reviewing those cases? As one Black former agent put it: A white male growing up in Nebraska is not going to have the same life experience as a Black female growing up in New York City.

  But the issue of policing and police use of force is more complex. It isn’t as simple as black and white. Take the early September 2020 case of Deon Kay. He was an eighteen-year-old Black man shot and killed by a Washington, D.C., police officer in a majority Black neighborhood in the southeast section of the city. Police said Kay was among a small group of men inside a parked Dodge Caliber who were openly displaying handguns—actions that were livestreamed on social media. When police arrived, the group of men scattered from the car, including Kay. An officer shot Kay as the young man was running toward the officer.

  The shooting in the summer of 2020 sparked immediate protests, with hundreds of people, Black and white, demonstrating at the local police precinct. The next night, protests continued there. But this time an overwhelming majority of the protesters were white. What happened in that short time to change the racial makeup of the group of demonstrators? Police released body cam footage of the shooting that showed Kay pulling a handgun from his waistband as he was running toward the officer, Alexander Alvarez, who drew his service weapon and shot Kay.

  Sandra Seegars, a Black community activist in that part of the city, posted the video on social media. Hundreds commented on the video, most of them—but not all—in fact offering cautious understanding for why the shooting happened.

  “One thing I am sure of,” Seegars said, “is that because I posted it, they respect me and they respect what I think. The video showed Deon Kay pulling the gun from the back of his waistband and running toward the officer. You cannot determine whether something like this is right or wrong based just on emotions. I am sorry the young man was killed. Everyone is. But you can’t run at police holding a gun.”

  In late November, federal prosecutors declined to charge the officer who shot Kay, saying in a statement that the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia “is unable to disprove a claim of self-defense or defense of others by the officer involved, who fired a single shot at Mr. Kay within one second of Mr. Kay holding a gun in his hand and raising his arm.”

  Seegars has one brother who was shot and killed in 1978 and another brother serving a life sentence for murder. She believes that Kay and other young men like him would benefit from more government investment in programs such as job training and counseling services—part of what proponents of the “defund the police” movement propose.

  “Defund the police” means different things to different people. A majority of its supporters say that the words do not mean ridding towns, cities, counties, and states of police and sheriff’s departments. It means diverting money from law enforcement budgets that in some larger jurisdictions take up almost one-third of the municipal budget. For example, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the city of Los Angeles budget for police is $3.4 billion out of a $10.5 billion operating budget. The ACLU also cites the budget in New York City, where the city spends about $6 billion annually on policing—more than what the city spends on the combined budgets for homelessness, health services, housing development, and youth and community development.

  In some instances, “defund the police” means prohibiting spending funds on military-style equipment for police forces. In others, it means ending police officers’ involvement in traffic enforcement. In the broadest sense, it means to rethink the role of policing in the United States while diverting some funds from police departments to social programs that in the long run would promote safer communities. A majority of the Minneapolis City Council, in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing that sparked both peaceful protests and rioting, pledged to dismantle the city’s police department and come up with a different way of policing. Details were scarce.

  In December, the council ended up cutting about $8 million from the police department budget—less than 5 percent of its operating expenses. Camden, New Jersey, often is held up as the city that successfully defunded its police department. But the changes in Camden were driven by politics and economics, not desires for social justice. Essentially because of budget shortfalls driven partly by costly police union contracts, the city of Camden dissolved its police department and replaced it with a Camden County department. That new department’s officers worked under a less costly union contract.

  Seegars said that she disagrees with most efforts to defund police, however the proponents define it. “We need to let the police be the police. We have way more good ones than bad ones, but the bad ones get all the attention and publicity.”

  Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has authored more than twenty books about policing. She describes herself as “pro police” and teaches many law enforcement officers in her classes at John Jay College. She said in spite of what seem like constant reports about police using deadly force, “The numbers are not trending upwards. The numbers are relatively low when you consider them in the context of the numbers of police officers in the United States and the numbers of encounters with civilians.” Haberfeld noted that there are about 18
,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States.

  Christy Lopez is a Georgetown University law professor and a former deputy chief in the Justice Department’s Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division. She led the Justice Department group that conducted pattern-or-practice investigations of law enforcement agencies, including the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department after police shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014. Defunding police is not the final answer when it comes to police reform, but the discussion is as necessary as such reforms as banning choke holds and reducing the use of no-knock warrants. “Take away police, however imperfect, and bad as it is, there always will be some people who say they’ll take their police because it is better than nothing,” Lopez said.

  She said most people misunderstand how much communities over-rely on police for things such as traffic accident reports, drug overdoses, controlling the homeless, resolving family arguments, and, in some school districts, managing student discipline problems. “Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need,” she said. “It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence-interruption programs.”

  Defunding police in the thousands of law enforcement agencies in the United States is not likely to happen soon, Lopez said, so it is imperative that advocates work simultaneously on reforming police work. She points back to the fatal police shooting of Kay, the Black eighteen-year-old in Washington, D.C., in Seegars’s neighborhood. “Think about how police handled that situation. There were teenagers in a car with guns. They were Black. So, police cars speed up to the car and jump out. So, of course the teenagers are going to run. If they had been white teenagers doing the same thing in a white neighborhood, you know police would have responded differently. They would have approached the car in a whole different manner,” Lopez said.

  If ever there was any doubt about the different ways in which law enforcement deals with white and Black communities, the Capitol riots are illustrative, Lopez said.

  On the day of the riot, only unarmed National Guardsmen had been activated to help out Capitol Police. And that morning, only about one-fourth of the 2,200-member Capitol Police force was on duty. When the mob pushed against barricades to gain entry to the Capitol, officers offered little resistance. A single shot was fired, and it was fatal, killing a white woman insurrectionist. But that happened only after rioters had gotten inside the building and were forcibly trying to get further access to an area that housed congressional leadership.

  In June 2020, Black Lives Matter planned a protest at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Scores of armed National Guardsmen were activated and deployed all over the steps leading up to the monument. And days before, guardsmen used chemical irritants and rubber bullets to disperse a BLM demonstration in a park near the White House, a heavy show of force that included military helicopters buzzing over the heads of the demonstrators. That was all done to allow Trump to walk along that path from the White House to a nearby church for a photo opportunity.

  The president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Houston police chief Art Acevedo, said two days after the Capitol riot that he worried that law enforcement’s lack of preparedness was related to police perception of the overwhelmingly white crowd.

  “They see Black Lives Matter and go, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to be ready.’ But, hey, these people have their blue lives matter flags all over the place,” Acevedo said. “And that bias and that false sense of security bit them. And it bit them in a historical fashion.”

  Lopez sees the law enforcement reaction to rioters as a lesson to learn. “What you saw at the Capitol is what police restraint looks like,” Lopez said. “That kind of restraint in policing should happen for everyone.

  “We cannot wait to make changes that will save lives and reduce policing harm now.”

  U.S. Slave Patrols

  Policing as we know it today, according to historians, dates to the 1830s in the United States in Boston, which had the first department that was fully funded by the government and offered full-time work as a police officer. But the roots of policing in the United States go back further, into the 1700s with the formation of slave patrols that were created to track runaway slaves, capture them, and return them to their owners. They were used to strike fear into slaves to deter revolt against slave owners and to help with keeping slaves in line, especially when the enslaved were outside of the direct control of their enslavers, since the slave patrols could dispense punishment at will.

  In other words, slave patrols kept slaves in check, since in many areas enslaved Black people outnumbered white people, who lived in fear of insurrections by the enslaved. The National Law Enforcement Museum says that slave patrol “routines included enforcing curfews, checking travelers for a permission pass, catching those assembling without permission and preventing any form of organized resistance.”

  The first slave patrols came about in 1704 in South Carolina and ended on paper in 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, though groups that functioned much like slave patrols took part in enforcing Jim Crow in the South and ensuring that the Black Codes were being enforced, according to historian Keisha Blain.

  We still see similar tactics used today by law enforcement in Black neighborhoods. Traffic stops. Stop and frisk tactics that were used in New York City and targeted mostly Black and Latino males. Creating reasons to question Black men and women: not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign; broken brake lights on vehicles; obscured license tags. These policing attitudes reinforce stereotypes about Black people as criminals and thugs, which factors into the implicit bias that some researchers believe leads police officers—both white and Black—to more quickly draw their weapons on Black people. In the hands of a Black person, a mobile phone looks like a gun. Food looks like a gun. Empty hands hold guns. Hands cuffed behind a Black man’s back magically maneuver to his front, grab a handgun, point it at an officer with a finger on the trigger.

  Aggressive policing in Black communities—officers working to control Black people instead of protecting and serving them—could be changed by the mayors, county executives, and other top local elected officials who on paper are in charge of police departments. But even those elected officials who are well-meaning fall victim to the same issues that led to the creation of slave patrols. That, said Blain, Lopez, and others, is structural, systemic racism.

  “This is something that we have not actually dealt with,” said Blain, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “And so we keep having conversations about how we might tweak this or tweak that. Maybe we’ll pass some policy that’s anti-chokehold, and that sounds wonderful. But if you don’t actually get to the root of the problem, then you’ll find yourself in the same place over and over again, even if you pass a hundred different policies that say, don’t choke a person; don’t place your knee on a person’s neck.”

  Lopez said that it is important to remember that policing “didn’t invent America’s institutionalized racism.

  “If we were to get rid of policing tomorrow, those pathologies would remain,” Lopez said. “And they would continue to be deadly. Race bias in our health care system has likely killed far more Black and Latinx via COVID-19 than the police have this year. Successful police reforms help us learn how to identify and mitigate the harms of these structural features, even as we work to remake them.”

  In her experience teaching many law enforcement officers, Haberfeld said, she has found that no one hates bad cops more than good cops. “They are not supporting bad behavior,” she said. “They are just not reporting it.”

  But officers who do not intervene, who fail to step in to calm other officers whom they see using excessive force, are supporting bad behavior in two largely important ways—by not stopping the violent officer and by not reporting it to supervis
ors.

  When Eric Garner died in 2014 after being put in a choke hold by a New York City police officer, Randall-Williams—the retired New York City police detective—said there was a Black female sergeant on the scene. Randall-Williams said the Black sergeant, who did not intercede to stop the choking as Garner yelled, “I can’t breathe,” was demoted after only a couple of months—while it took the U.S. Justice Department almost five years to determine the offending officer would not face federal charges. In her opinion, Randall-Williams said, “She should have taken some action to stop it. It’s not easy. You join the force, you want to be accepted. It’s a stressful job, and you don’t bring that home. You talk it through with your partner. Officers play together. You do inappropriate things together. You eat together. You drink together.”

  When an officer does report bad behavior—or intervenes to stop it—sometimes the consequences are career-ending. Take the case of former Buffalo, New York, officer Cariol Horne. She stepped in to stop her white partner, Officer Gregory Kwiatkowski, from applying a choke hold on David Neal Mack, a Black man. The two officers were among several police who responded to reports of an argument between a man—Mack—and a woman who said that Mack, her boyfriend, had stolen her $646 Social Security check. Inside the home, officers used pepper spray to subdue Mack. That failed. Horne, her partner, and other officers worked in unison to push Mack out the front door. Once outside, Horne’s partner cuffed Mack with his hands in front of his body. From behind Mack, Kwiatkowski reached around Mack and held his right forearm tight against the front of Mack’s throat.