The Discontinued Police Targeted Black People

The Discontinued Police Enforcement of Mask Compliance Became an Excuse to Target Black People Tells Us A lot About the State of Policing in America.

The Discontinued Police Targeted Black People Tells Us A lot About the State of Policing in America. A few mediations could assist with lessening prejudice and rein in the utilization of superfluous power in police work, however, the proof base is as yet developing. 

For 9 minutes and 29 seconds, Derek Chauvin squeezed his knee into the neck of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. This dangerous utilization of power by the now-previous Minneapolis cop has revived an extremely open discussion about police ruthlessness and bigotry.

As fights have spread all over the planet, the strain is on police offices and government officials, especially in the United States, to follow through with something – from improving policing to undermining or in any event, nullifying police divisions.

Police Ruthlessness And Which Changes Could Work

Furthermore, in spite of the fact that specialists are empowered by the force for change, some are additionally worried that, without adequate proof to help new approaches, pioneers could come up short. Many have been contending for a really long time about the requirement for better information on the utilization of power by the police in the United States, and for thorough investigations that test intercessions, for example, preparing the most proficient method to de-raise tense associations or ordering the utilization of body-worn cameras by officials.

That information and review have started to emerge, prodded by fights in 2014 after the dangerous shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the passing by the stranglehold of Eric Garner in New York City.

I think we should have paid more attention to that moment when we asked police officers to enforce mask compliance. How they responded to that missive was instructive and the perfect analogy for what everyday American policing looks like.

People of all demographics struggle with mask compliance. National and local leadership misled about their efficacy of them for way too long; not everybody has access to them; and frankly, the damn things are unsightly and uncomfortable. But rather than enforce the policy evenly, police officers could not help but embrace the same racial biases they maintain on a regular basis. There is no rational justification for targeting black and brown people for the mask policy.

The Data On Traffic Stops And Searches

This is consistent with the data on traffic stops and searches: brown and black people are subject to a hugely disproportionate amount of police contact, but officers are way more likely to find contraband and ticket able offenses amongst white motorists (because the researchers hypothesize, police only stop white people when they are actually committing crimes, rather than just profiling them). Also, police officers could have been imaginative about how they enforced mask compliance. Failure to wear a mask could have been conceived of as a public health issue, not as an issue of crime.

  But to enforce mask compliance, officers resorted to the only tools they seemed comfortable with: force, control, arrests. This is similar to how they often conceive of a vast array of social issues. What looks like hunger, mental health, substance abuse, disability, and homelessness to us looks like a crime to them.

The Need For Complete Domination

They see arrests, force and jails, the need for complete domination. This is why they kept beating the shit out of people who weren’t wearing masks—a baffling strategy to many of us. Lastly, upon arresting people, police officers (many of them unmasked themselves) removed people’s masks and jailed them in cramped and unsanitary conditions that increased the likelihood of coronavirus transmission.  

The mask policy was defeated by the very method of enforcing it (under this fantasy assumption that arrests would somehow be an effective deterrent). This is of course precisely the irrationality of mass incarceration as a whole. In prisons, we incarcerate substance abuse, mental health issues, disabilities, feelings of unsafety and poverty. Incarceration exacerbates and increases those issues—and further destabilizes people by making them infinitely sicker, less employable, and less housed. We then dump the people we break back into the communities they were incarcerated for harming. It’s an irrational, expensive, ineffective cycle. Just like jailing unmasked people. Police’s inability to fairly, safely, and rationally enforce mask compliance was so obvious, cities had to discontinue the practice. That says a lot.