How We Got Here

—RODGERS& HAMMERSTEIN, “DO RE MI”

To understand the distrust that exists between minorities and law enforcement today in the United States, we have to go back to the very beginning. Policing evolved in two primary ways in America: Night watchmen in cities, looking out primarily for fires, and slave patrols in Southern slave states. The latter drew a direct nexus to a real, visceral mistrust of police today in many communities. The slave patrols were men commissioned with the power to arrest, detain, and transport escaped slaves; they made their livings helping an establishment that imprisoned people of free will and forced them into servitude. Many of the patrols were state-sponsored, comprised of militia members, themselves coming from state military institutions. Even the name survives today. The slave patrols of the pre-Civil War era were known by several nicknames, including patrols and patrollers. We see that same title today, just in a different order—patrol officer.

Generation after generation of slaves existed in an environment in which enforcers of the law existed to keep them in bondage. Those are learned, generational experiences that pass down from one family member to the next. To ignore that fact is to ignore our own history as a country and the foundation of law enforcement in the United States. It is a history well remembered and understood in the African American community today.

Sadly, as I have traveled across the country teaching law enforcement, I have learned it isnot common knowledge among today’s police officers. This gap in understanding is a critical component in the mistrust that exists. As a country, we are only four (in some cases five) generations removed from slavery. In fact, in our cultural heritage, slavery on this continent existed for a longer period than has elapsed since its eradication. Families share the stories of their heritage with pride. For African Americans, too many have a shared family history rooted in white-controlled slavery, enforced by the rule of law, enforced by men of law enforcement.

After slavery ended, during the period of Reconstruction, the patrols and their tactics of abuse and intimidation did not.1 As more and more municipal police organizations were formed, many of the tactics that had been previously used found their way into daily existence, now used against free men of color. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which used barbaric tactics including murder and beatings, flourished across the South in the years immediately following the Civil War. They targeted freedmen of color and white sympathizers. It was a reign of terror that led to the enactment of federal legislation in 1870 and 1871 to stop the group.

While the KKK may have been temporarily stymied, the ideology of white supremacy was rampant. Starting shortly after the demise of the first iteration of the KKK, Southern s