The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same: Race, Ethnicity, and Police Brutality

The work of Edwards et al. (p. 1241) in the current issue is among the first to describe police-involved deaths by race/ethnicity and place. An essential contribution is the recognition that “the risk of being killed in a violent interaction with the police depends not only on idiosyncratic circumstances and individuals’ choices, but also on the interplay between one’s race/ethnicity and the broader contextual environment in which policing occurs.”^(p11) Context does not magically appear, it emerges from history. I use excerpts from a compilation of narratives and testimonies about American slavery¹ and from a study of historical violence against Latinos in the United States² to add to the context that Edwards et al. acknowledge is important in interpreting their findings.

Present-day policing echoes the role of patrollers who were paid to monitor and often harm Black people during the era of enslavement. In his narrative about the horrors of slavery, Nehemiah Caulkins, a White carpenter who worked on the plantations side-by-side with enslaved people wrote:

A patrol is kept upon each estate, and every slave found off the plantation without a pass is whipped on the spot. I knew a slave who started without a pass, one night, for a neighboring plantation, to see his wife: he was caught, tied to a tree, and flogged.^1(p14)

Similarly, in the late 1800s, Latinos were often monitored, stopped, whipped, and sometimes hanged by mobs who perceived them to be trespassers. A California newspaper published this: “We would advise our mining friends to keep a sharp look out for ‘hombres’ who are in the habit of visiting such claims by moonlight and panning out.” The recommendation was to “string them up and apply the leash freely.”^2(p66)

Edwards et al. quantify present-day dangers of policing to racialized groups. Black and Latino men are significantly more likely than are Whites to be killed by police. The testimony of Horace Moulton, who held enslaved people under his control for several years, tells us that the impunity that these killings are met with is not new: “Should the hunters who have no dogs start a slave from his hiding place, and the slave not stop at the hunter’s call, he will shoot at him, as soon as he would at a deer.”^1(p21) Likewise, hundreds of Latinos are estimated to have been killed by mobs in the United States between 1848 and 1928, with postcards of lynched Mexicans captioned “Adios Amigos” distributed widely.³ In their study of violence against Mexicans, Carrigan and Webb assert, “Duly appointed law officers played such a prominent role in leading and encouraging extralegal executions”^2(p84) by securing the victims or even making sure that their bodies were brought to the center of the city as a warning to others.

Edwards et al. also found that police-involved homicide risks among Black men are significantly greater in metropolitan areas. But they dispel myths about cities by demonstrating that police kill Black men in rural areas too. They demonstrate that place matters, but it is beyond the scope of their single article to explain why. I suggest we explore race/ethnicity and place-specific policies and practices. White flight and racial residential segregation are related to increased police presence in urban neighborhoods. The size of police forces in Black urban neighborhoods is neither proportional to crime rates nor similar to police force size in neighborhoods that are disproportionately White.⁴

Racialized policing and “stop and frisk” practices are bound to thrive in these areas. New York City is known for its stop and frisk policies. It is no surprise that all five of its boroughs are among the counties with the greatest risk of Black police homicide in the analysis. Similarly, counties in Arizona have significantly high Latino police homicide risks. Immigration raids and crime suppression sweeps fueled by laws such as Arizona SB 1070 (Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act Senate Bill, April 23, 2010) are conducted by both police and immigration officials who target Latinos on the basis of skin color.⁵ Current routine stopping, searching, questioning, and arresting of people of color are extensions of our country’s history, as evidenced by Horace Moulton’s testimony: “Every colored stranger that walks the streets is suspected of being a runaway slave, hence he must be interrogated by every negro hater whom he meets, and should he not have a pass, he must be arrested and hurried off to jail.”^1(p22)

Today, it is no longer an issue of being suspected of being a runaway slave; it is just generally being “suspected”—whether while sleeping in a common room in a university dorm, barbequing, walking home while wearing a hoodie, driving, wanting to use the washroom in a coffee shop, and so on. Being non-White is suspect. This reflects and cements a culture in which, as Edwards et al. find, our chances of being the victim of police homicide are much higher if we are Black or Latino.

What can be done? First, better data are critical. As Edwards et al. point out, there are limitations to data collected by federal agencies. As a social determinant of health, police brutality determines how people of color live, work, and play. Context is important. If we can document the number of adults who live within a mile of a park and keep counts of workers who get injured or die on the job, we can systematically collect data about injuries and homicides caused by police brutality. We have only recently begun to quantify and qualitatively describe the history of lynching in the United States; we should not wait until we erect monuments decades hence to describe the prevalence of police brutality.

Second, we should consider structural interventions that are place based and that involve key institutions. Edwards et al. suggest targeting areas with high police homicide risks. I agree but also argue for a more upstream approach. Policies define specific communities and shape the distribution of social determinants of health, including police homicides. We know that the abolition of laws such as Jim Crow reduced mortality among Blacks. We should advocate ending harmful policies that directly and indirectly cause police brutality. Examples include reintroducing school vouchers that foster segregation, rolling back federal programs that provide technical assistance to local police agencies that want to build trusting relationships with communities, establishing the Task Force for Crime Reduction and Public Safety that entangles police officers and immigration agents, and our being uncertain about DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy, June 15, 2012). We have work to do.

In 1834, William T. Allan, the son of a slaveholder, wrote, “At our house it is so common to hear their (the slaves’) screams, that we think nothing of it.”^1(p65) I worry that we will soon become so desensitized to the disproportionate killing of people of color that we too will think nothing of it. I also worry that our discomfort in confronting racism will get in the way of closing racial gaps in morbidity and mortality. But racism is the risk factor that helps contextualize the findings reported by Edwards et al. We must confront racism because in its absence, a person’s race/ethnicity would be irrelevant when it comes to health outcomes, including police homicides. Our scholarship should interrogate what it is about our society, our communities, and our culture that enables and normalizes the killing of people of color.