Defunding the Police Is Only Step One
by Junia Howell, PhD
The most recent egregious acts of racialized police brutality in the United States have increased calls for police reform, particularly “Defunding the Police.” A much-needed call given that the increasing budgets and military grade equipment in local police departments has been accompanied with rising racial inequality in arrest, brutality, and deaths.
Yet, funding is not the only factor contributing to racialized policing. Racial inequality in arrest is also closely linked to rising residential segregation—specifically, White segregation.*
Since 1980, the U.S. White population has increasingly clustered in White neighborhoods and towns. This clustering contributes to over policing of Black bodies. This happens in two ways: (1) Black people in White spaces are seen as suspicious and thus more likely to warrant police intervention and (2) communities of color where very few White people inhabit are conceptualized as dangerous requiring more police surveillance.
Two years ago, after the highly publicized arrest of Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson for waiting at a Philadelphia Starbucks, my students and I wanted to look more closely into the correlation between White segregation and racialized policing. To the best of our ability, we wanted to examine incidences where police intervention was likely unneeded and more tied to race than crime. Cases like the Philadelphia Starbucks or the more recent interaction between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper in Central Park or the countless other examples of police being called on Black people barbequing, mowing, canvassing, golfing, swimming, shopping, working out, vacationing, and so on.
To this end, we examined when people got arrested for mundane acts like breaking curfew, standing around (loitering), sleeping in public (vagrancy), running away from their guardians, graffiti, gambling (including betting on sports), drinking in public, and the like. Looking across the entire United States from 1980 to 2015, we discovered some interesting patterns.
First, the rate at which White Americans are arrested for mundane acts has remained fairly constant and considerably lower than Black folk over the whole time period.
Second, unlike White residents, Black arrest rates for minor non-violent offenses began rising in mid-1980s after President Reagan implemented new drug policies that targeted Black communities. These high arrest rates remained till the late 1990s when they began to fall. Yet, since 2010, arresting Black people for mundane acts has once again been on the rise hitting an all-time high in 2015 (the last year in our data). In other words, the high-profile cases in the last few years are just the tip of the iceberg. This phenomenon has been on the rise for four decades.
Third, Black people are more likely to get arrested for minor offenses in Whiter cities and neighborhoods. For example, towns with large White populations like Madison, Wisconsin and Flagstaff, Arizona have the highest rates of Black arrest in the country. Likewise, racial segregation within large metropolitan areas is correlated with high Black arrest rates.
Together these patterns confirm that recent attention to racialized policing is not an anomaly. For four decades, policing policies have increasingly targeted Black residents and this hyper-regulation has led to unjust arrest, brutality, and even murder. As thousands have affirmed, we need immediate, comprehensive reform that demilitarizes the police and funds essential social services. Yet, we also need reforms that examine how current policies and practices financially incentivize and legally enforce White segregation. If we do not address and dismantle residential segregation, simply living while Black will continue to be seen as a crime.
*I deliberately capitalize both Black and White. Echoing W.E.B. Du Bois and aligning with other contemporary race scholars, I reject the notion that Whiteness and Blackness are generic adjectives based on color. Instead, I argue they are socially constructed groups and thus proper nouns that should be capitalized.
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