The History of Policing

The past is the future. I think that our conceptual understanding of time as well as our need to be better or to perceive ourselves as better helps us deny that. We tend to believe that our benevolent present or the possibility of our unblemished future can erase or make up for the noted lurid or deplorable things we did in the past. We attempt to erase what happened in our past (or the past) with supposed magnanimous deeds done or the good we hope to do. The past is easy to deny because we cannot help but be focused on a present that must lead to a prosperous future. We seemingly evolve without a perceived negative incident and we think that we have changed. We think that our roots have changed and how we got to where we are today has nothing to do with the negativity of our past, except when our negativity is expressed as a redemption story, as to why we're better now.

Frankly, that is fucking bull shit! I will not deny true redemption. I cannot deny that we all make mistakes. Are mistakes indicative of our character or what we believe? Has every mistake we make, made, or will make, been influenced by all of our actions before the perceived blunder? If there is a pattern, if what we're being shown and what we're experiencing seems much much greater than coincidence (history as the guide) is the past not our present? It's the present, time immemorial, and we should not let our valuation of time mask that we're living in the past. Simply, man's history, that woman's history, that child's beginning is not only influenced by the past, they are a continuation of the past, the past is also the present.

I will skip the history of policing in the southern United States and how it is rooted in slave patrols and post slavery/reconstruction/post-reconstruction militias and white supremacist groups policing small backwards shitty ass towns that should have been used as nuclear weapon testing grounds, and how prejudice in policing is passed down from generation to generation. I will focus on the history of policing as rooted in creating the propaganda of a criminal ridden society that purposely decides what a criminal looks like. The authors of how to envision criminality refuse to acknowledge that their isn't any visual marker that identifies a criminal. There truly isn't any class or racial marker for criminality.

People way more read than me will tell you that modern policing began at the crux of industrialization. The larger cities became, the more laws and ordinances that had to be created and enforced. The industrialists and their property needed protection. What isn't being admitted is that modern policing never came from a place of nobility or protection of the common populous. It came at the behest of the industrialists, who are propagated nowadays as the job creators. What industrialization did was sharply stratify and exploit the "bottom" of society. Before industrialization most of the United States was still pastoral. What is also never admitted is that there is never an infinite amount of jobs. People moved from the country to the city and as populations of cities exploded, so did crime. City and state governments with American industrialists followed the model of England's industrial revolution and how those proponents for an organized centralized police force in England would write and promote the rise in crime and how the need for a centralized police force was essential to maintaining order and comfort in cities and in the republic.

Comfort is very important. That is why we wake up in the morning and go to work. No matter if you make $5.00 an hour or $300,000 a day. Comfort is your motivation. If you have a job based upon caring, you are underestimating your privilege. How do you get to give a fuck all day? You're on some other shit (I understand that depends on mindset and how you budget your money and a whole bunch of other factors that I haven't quantified but intelligence understands me).

What was, and is, at the forefront of policing is preventing crime. Industrialization created an obvious detector of the propensity of crime and that is poverty. Factories were in newly formed neighborhoods filled with the workers and their families. Those neighborhoods were also victims of the symptoms of poverty; crime, homelessness and vagrancy. The cost of living, taxes, and other new realities that are prominent in city living were newly introduced to a society dependent upon a self sufficiency offered by the job creators. The Jewish, Irish, Italian, and other European groups were all subjected to propaganda that allowed for them to be targeted by their fellow citizens, the local media, and by the newly formed police force. There had to be a face of crime or an easy identifier for those who have the propensity or an inherent trait to commit crime. That was the mode of preventing crime, policing stereotypes created by the factory workers looking to protect their jobs and new neighborhoods and fostered by the politicians. Putting a foreign face or easily identifiable face on crime helped change public support from weary of an occupying force in their communities to willing to pay taxes to grow a police department. In fact, politicians would commit entire campaigns to demonizing the new migrant population. Newspapers would highlight stories of crimes committed by members of the migrant groups and frame a singular moment of criminality as an epidemic and as a predilection of the people of the same ethnic or national background. So now, if the police harass any member of the group with the same national or ethnic background of the criminal it is warranted and actually supported by the community. This is how modern police precincts operate.

I congratulate Bill and Hillary Clinton on establishing post-modern criminality and determining how the public should fund police departments and the criminal "justice" system. How they influenced bull shit laws that grouped people together in criminal conspiracies because of where they lived. The laws in cities where three or more black kids dressed similarly were considered a gang and worthy of a stop and frisk or being thrown in jail or harassed by police officers, because of the threat of them sagging their pants, has been cause to militarize police departments and give them budgets that are the envy of the department of defense, because the police receive no scrutiny for how they spend their money and why they need the same weapons that are on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Clinton's bolstered police departments by giving them a new blueprint for criminality and preventing crime, and that was demonizing black society, mainly the youth.

"But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs... Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel." - Hillary Clinton

That quote from Hillary Clinton is touted by many as the beginning of the new policing propaganda that put a new face on criminality in the United States. A statement that gave orders to police departments (coupled with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act) to occupy black neighborhoods and generate revenue for a multi-billion dollar criminal "justice" system. What is interesting is that statement did not have to say black or mention black but if you think about the culture at that time; gang, like thug, had a natural black inference attached to it. That was the height of gangster rap and also of black movies that portrayed inner city life and the images those two black art forms portrayed were the new representation of gangs in the United States. This was also on the heels of the Los Angeles Riots which further criminalized black society, like the media often does, they use images to create the narrative and don't put any context behind why they're even their to take the pictures. 

What Hillary Clinton wittingly admits in that statement is that there are underlying reasons why gangs exist and continue to persist. The accountability of the systemic problems that exploit a people's natural survival instincts are dismissed in order to promote an image of criminality. She allowed for the targeting of black people and brown people, we cannot forget that a lot of brown people are victims of the criminal "justice" system as well. When you promote an image to an ignorant, supposedly disassociated public, they believe the negative narrative framed and then will allow any type of injustice to happen to those who look like the propagated criminals because they believe that society is being protected. Every person who lives in a neighborhood deemed a gang ridden neighborhood can be criminalized based upon the bull shit propaganda that criminalizes dress, colors, and how clothes hang off your body. What the Clinton's did was unprecedented. Hillary Clinton wanted to attack street gangs like the FBI did the mafia but they didn't criminalize leather jackets or three piece suits or their culture.

Personally, my friends and myself dressed like these supposed criminals. I have pictures of two doctors, a financial analyst, a corporate supervisor, a hardworking union man, and a shitty writer (myself), dressed in the garb relegated to criminality. It was perfectly okay to demonize culture and it was perfectly okay because it was black culture. Society takes solace in that deduction because it allows them to believe they're living comfortably in white society, when they are actually blinded to the criminality that surrounds them because it isn't being propagated as such. The true criminals who affect their everyday lives, the bankers, politicians, and modern day industrialists that influence policy that creates and exploits economic scarcity get a pass. All that black society (and brown society) does and says promotes and engages in is to be judged by an obviously prejudiced audience. Our roots as black people begin in the south of the United States. Our ancestors were subjected to slavery and post-slavery militias that made it their duty not to police blacks, but to terrorize blacks, and that is exactly how the police function today. That is why I refuse to get into the unique history of policing in the southern United States because two people from Arkansas have taken that model and spread it across the country. Thank you Clintons.

Blacks and our history are what society is policing. Our every breath needs to be accounted for and regulated because those who molded our history here understand what their ancestors did to us and what continues to be done to us. They fear the day that we understand and comprehend what was done to us. So we must be kept subjected and subjugated by policies and propaganda that black people are inferior and worthy of being criminalized. We must be eliminated by these police officers who were never ever meant to serve and protect people, they were meant to enforce a protocol that ensures that black people are deemed inferior by every race and creed, even our own. They were meant to protect property, and the property owners utilize stereotypes to prevent crime that they perceive as imminent by a person's dress, skin color, and the neighborhood they come from.

The history of policing is ensuring that there is a jail cell or death for a black person, especially a black male, at the beckon call of an officer trained and conditioned to identify criminality as black. A sequential evolution that ensures that the future is the past.