How Race Obscures The Problems With Policing

Most people must have seen the video footage of multiple Memphis police officers simultaneously pummelling a man in a seemingly unprovoked traffic encounter. The scene reminiscent of what could only be found in movies was as gory as could be made by the imagination of the most creative movie writer and director depicting a gang of criminal cops in operation. The footage sparked outrage as it deservedly should.

However, there is an unexpected, but expected twist to the outrage the incident has sparked. And that is, the incident has become racialized. Despite the fact that most if not all of the participants involved, both victim and perpetrators were of the same race.

In typical fashion, the left blamed the incident on racism, invoking systemic racism as the explanation for why the cops would brutalize someone of their own race. CNN even had a headline that read “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism”. The amount of mental gymnastics it takes for anyone to come up with such a sentiment no less a headline is astonishing but not surprising. CNN has shown that there is no low to which it cannot go.

The most surprising thing to me however was that even the right also made the incident to be about race. Some conservatives on Twitter blamed the acts on affirmative action. One user wrote, “Don’t hire criminals as police officers to meet diversity quotas”. Alluding that the Black police officers were unfit to be policemen and were only hired for diversity points because they were Black. In essence, these conservatives evoked a racial stereotype that Black people only get into certain positions because of affirmative action and that they are almost never qualified for any position without affirmative action. I don’t think anyone could get any more racist than that.

Even if these Black cops were affirmative action hires, even if they had low IQs, as they like to tie affirmative action hires to IQ. A low IQ doesn’t automatically turn someone into a criminal, into a gangster, into a monster, or an unfeeling bastard who would mercilessly beat a man to death. If that were the case, there would be far more criminality and animalistic behavior as there exist in humans many people with low IQs who are properly functioning non-violent individuals. So where does this argument even come from in the first place?

In essence, if the cops are White, its racism, if they are Black, its affirmative action, both of which are expressed in racial terms.

What has become drowned in all this noise of racial accusations and counter-accusations by the left and right, is the fact that this behavior was a police behavior, not a Black or White behavior. This is consistent with what has happened in the past. Black police officers and White police officers act alike. Keenan Anderson was manhandled by a team of Black and White cops. George Floyd was killed by a White cop in the presence and with the accomplice of Black police officers. Tony Timpa was killed in a similar manner as George Floyd by White Cops. What this shows is that this is a policing problem, but people are too busy fighting pointless racial culture wars to see the problem for what it truly is. And because of that, the problem yet again will be misdiagnosed, and an incorrect solution would be offered, just for a similar incident to repeat itself again in a few days’ time.

Some people have posited that the cops were on a vengeance mission against Nichols for an alleged love triangle gone wrong. If that is true, then that establishes motive. But that these officers felt comfortable committing a crime while on duty and in police uniforms shows that they knew or suspected that they could get away with such behavior and possibly have gotten away with such in the past. This is a not a race problem, this is a policing problem.

The police are too quick to respond with unreasonable force, too quick to draw a weapon, too quick to end a life. I recently saw a video of a policeman body-slamming a female suspect as they were walking her to their patrol car because she threw a blow at one of the officers. Another video showed a policeman tasing a stray dog endlessly even when the dog had been secured with a leash around its neck. Reports later showed that the dog died from the excessive tasing. So, we can see that from White men to Black men, to women, and even to animals, police violence has been consistent. This must reveal something broken about the nature of policing in the US itself.

I can understand the dangers of their job, but it is their job, and they should be held to the highest standard of behavior, conduct, and professionalism that the occupation requires. Is it in the fundamental and constitutional nature of police to behave in such a manner? Perhaps there should be a review of what exactly the police are supposed to do because as these incidents have revealed time and again, to protect and to serve are the furthest things depicted in the behavior of these criminal cops.

The point I’m driving at is that race obscures the real problem which is the rot, corruption, outdated, highhanded militaristic tactics of the police force. The police can and should do better.

Some conservatives argue that police are being demonized and this demonization leads to many officers resigning or simply not doing their job, which then leads to more crime and more crime then leads to police brutality and the cycle continues. That seems to me to be a very weird argument. It’s like saying that just because the police are being criticized—fairly or unfairly—for doing a piss poor job, they have decided to blackmail the public by either resigning or by not doing their jobs properly. This is a police problem, police can and should do better.

A typical leftist response is to say abolish the police as one Twitter user writes “There is nothing left to write about police abuse and violence. Abolish the police.” Conservatives on the other hand think that the police can do no wrong. Why are the options always oscillating between these two extremes? I fundamentally reject both premises as they are flawed and false. On the one hand, the police for all their troubles are an absolute necessity for a functional society. You don’t want to live in a state without adequate policing. On the other hand, the police are not always right, and they can do better and should do better. Conservatives like to throw their hands up in the air as if there is nothing the police can do to improve, but that is certainly not true.

In conclusion, race obscures the problem and if people looked at it critically enough, they would find that the problem isn’t White racist cops or Black cops with low IQs. The problem is the police institution itself, its tactics and practices, methods and behavior, and those things need to change. The more you look at the problem through a racial lens, the less you see its actual cause.