When a relationship begins like this, can citizen mistrust of police ever fully be overcome? Has policing as an institution evolved far enough away from its origins to warrant Black communities’ trust? As per Professor Michael Robinson (2017) of the University of Georgia, the first deaths in America of Black men at the hands of law enforcement “can be traced back as early as 1619 when the first slave ship, a Dutch Man-of-War vessel landed in Point Comfort, Virginia.” Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory-one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. While this narrative is correct, it only tells part of the story ( Turner et al., 2006). This is the history that doesn’t make us feel bad. As written by Professor Gary Potter (2013) of Eastern Kentucky University, by the late nineteenth century, all major American cities had a police force. It’s true that centralized municipal police departments in America began to form in the early nineteenth century ( Potter, 2013), beginning in Boston and subsequently established in New York City Albany, New York Chicago Philadelphia Newark, New Jersey and Baltimore. The more commonly known history-the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course-is that American policing can trace its roots back to English policing. How did we get here? There are two narratives of how U.S. The protests, and mistrust, continue to this day (see, for example, the 2016 documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement). African Americans took to the street to say, “enough is enough.” Yet, tenuous police/Black community relations arguably haven’t improved that much during the past 50 years.
Centuries of suppressed anger-over systemic racism, housing discrimination, Black/white income disparities, poverty, police harassment-finally boiled over in 1965 in Watts, a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Perhaps it was the possibility that ending discrimination against African Americans might be possible that caused frustration that was previously tamped down to finally became unbearable. Building on this, the Voting Rights Act targeted legal barriers that states and municipalities had erected (e.g., poll taxes, literacy tests) to prevent African American men from voting in the wake of the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. The Civil Rights Act banned segregation in public spaces, as well as employment discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, or religion. The Watts Riots occurred in August 1965, days after the Voting Rights Act was signed, months after the Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights march occurred, and a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
#AVA FREDDY APPILY EVER AFTER DRIVER#
Before the 1992 Los Angeles riots came the 1965 Watts Riots (also in Los Angeles) after an African American driver and his stepbrother were pulled over by the police. Before the summer of 2020 #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations nationwide following the death in May of George Floyd from a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck before the 2015 Baltimore, Maryland, protests after the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody and before the Ferguson, Missouri, protests after the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer (and the lack of indictment of the officer who shot Brown) there were the Los Angeles riots of 1992 after the acquittal of police officers for beating up Rodney King.
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