The Police Create Crime

The police cannot continue to exist. They were created on irredeemable values and goals; like reenslaving escaped slaves and enforcing unnecessary terror and violence within communities. Slaves no longer exist, though the police continue the tradition of robbing humans of their own autonomy through the system of keeping people incarcerated. Police presence wreaks havoc on lower-income communities. Our modern policing is just a reframed version of what slave patrollers were told to do hundreds of years ago, which the police continue to create and support through the prison system.  Support for the police stems from the fear of crime. The belief is that when the police are present crime will decrease. An unfortunate truth though is that the places with the highest police presence do not have the highest crime rates, they have the highest white population. Police presence in one community is not the same as the other, over-policing and highly surveilled life has become far too often a common occurrence. If supporters of the police that support law enforcement believe that police presence decreases crime it is simply not true. I’d go further to say that police presence is less of an indication of crime and more of an indication of control. Control of the neighborhood and its inhabitants, a show of power to Latinx, black, and indigenous people of color.   When the police are present crime doesn’t cease to exist, where can we continue to find justification for their presence? Admitting that the police don’t prevent crime means we as a society must admit to ourselves there is a bigger reason we are so reluctant to let go of this branch of government that continues to abuse its citizens. 

Incarceration supporters subscribe to the idea of ‘out of sight out of mind’ when it comes to incarcerated persons. Many continue to subscribe to the rhetoric of ‘The War on Crime’ that created the circumstance of increased police presence across America. According to conservative scholar Arthur Rizer, within Nixon’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 1968, he used the words law and order over 21 times. From our knowledge of history, we know that this is simultaneously occurring with the rise of the civil rights movements that occurred from  1965-1977.  I suggest to my conservative reader to see this as not a coincidence but as a methodical effort of increased policing and incarceration through the dehumanization of black communities.

Arthur Zimmer and Laus Trautman are conservative scholars who believe in conservatism but are also able to recognize incarceration as an issue that advances political beliefs in their article, The Conservative Case for Criminal Justice Reform, even though they are able to recognize the alarming issue of incarceration has created for us as a society. They say, “ Over the course of almost half a century, this war on crime helped to quadruple America’s incarceration rates.” If the government is waging a war on crime, should the goal not be for the crime to cease? In the same article they state,  “363 in the 1960s, then rose further to 548 in the 1970s, then to 663 in the 1980s ‘, about violent crime within the United States. They use this statistic to find justification that the creation of the war on crime was justified but I believe it does the opposite. There was crime that existed before the mobilization of the police but in the efforts of depleting the crime that existed it increased.  If the war on crime is not about decreasing crime we can only conclude that its goal and the goal of the police furthermore is to increase incarceration not prevent crime from happening.

According to J. David Hacker at the National Library of Medicine, at the height of slavery the most people ever enslaved was, “approximately 10 million slaves lived in the United States, where they contributed 410 billion hours of labor.” In 2023, not including those experiencing so many different forms of incarceration, like halfway houses or parole, according to the Prison Policy Organization there are 1.9 million people incarcerated. From Alexi Jones at Prison Policy, “4.9 million people are arrested and jailed each year, and at least one in 4 of those individuals are booked into jail more than once during the same year.” If the point of prison is retribution what is the point if once they get out they are all the more likely to return?   It is understandable why supporters of the police hold the belief that criminals are criminals that just continue to do crime. Looking at the history of the police being figures that recaptured enslaved people, this notion cannot stand as an inalienable fact. Incarcerated people continue to get incarcerated because the police have been grandfathered into a system where they go after people they have already caught.  

In the same stride of the slave patrollers being tools of the master and the system, police have continued to be a tool of white supremacy. Conservative reporter and avid police supporter, Sean Hannity, talked about the quick response the police had to a mass shooting in Nashville and said, “amazing response from law enforcement, you know what, tonight, we don’t know the exact motives, but these guys saved the day” this is the common belief held by conservatives and law enforcement supporters alike, that the police are saviors. Supporters, more specifically white supporters use the police as knights in shining armor calling them whenever they see fit. In areas of mass gentrification like Denver, according to USA Facts, whose white population was 52% in 2010 and rose to an astounding 55% by 2021, within that time police calls and police presence increased exponentially but the crime did not. Five points, a historically black neighborhood in Denver had a black population of 2,011 in 2010 by 2017 this number swindled to 1,724 within this time Black people continued to be 3.4 times more likely to be arrested. 

Police Score Card is an organization connected to the Denver police department that keeps track of its budget including statistics of how much is spent per resident per police officer. From the Police Score Card, we can see that in 2010 the police department’s budget was 202.4 million and in 2020 the budget has ballooned to $279,169,00 from the drastic increase in the budget a supporter would assume that crime increased to the same degree. But from Macro Trends we learn that within these ten years, crime rates went from 542 crimes per 1000,000 to 730. A difference of 188 comes out to each crime being worth a $408,000 increase to the police budget. From a supporter’s perspective if the money is flowing into the police should crime not be decreasing? In this endless loop of supplying police departments with massive budgets crime does not decrease. When does it stop?

White people move into black neighborhoods without checking their bias and project it onto the community around them through the police. Research from Braden Beck shows that “For every 5 percent increase in property values, neighborhoods experienced a 0.2 to 0.3 percent increase in discretionary arrests.” It’s not that crime is increasing. Just that now the population living within this environment is seen as something needing to be controlled, kept, and patrolled. Though the police are controllers of the entire United States population, the police continue to be a burden the Black community has to bare. Generational relations between the black community and the police have not changed. They cannot change. No longer enslaved, we live as free people, why I ask do we allow ourselves to live in a society where we are recaptured and patrolled? 

Refrences

Beck, Braden, As Neighborhoods gentrify, Police presence Increases, 2015 

National Library of Medicine, From ’20. and Odd’ To 10 Million: The Growth of the Slave population in the United States. Accessed 2023 

Crimes, Denver, Compare Denver Neighborhood Crime Rankings,2022 and 2013, Accessed 2023 

Trautman, Laus and Zimmer Arthur, The Conservative Case for Criminal Justice Reform, 2018 

Card, Police Score, Police Scorecard, Denver Co, accessed 2023 

Trends, Macro Denver, Co Crime Rate 1998-2018, Accessed 2023

Policy, prison, How Many people are locked up in the United states?, Accessed 2023  

Facts, USA, Denver County, Co population by year, race and more, Accessed 2023  

Staff, Fox News, Sean Hannity: We need to Armed security at every school in the country, 2023  

Sagner, Wendy and Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023, Prison Policy, 2023