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Sofia Sodhi
Prof. Sarraf
English 1A (Section 8692)
6 July 2022
How Racial Bias Allows for Police Subjugation
After the 2020 high-profile muder of George Floyd by white policemen, many other
similar cases of unwarranted law enforcement aggression came to light. Black Lives Matter, a
social and political movement that began in 2013, gained unprecedented support and more law
enforcement murders came to light, such as Breonna Taylor being shot in her sleep only a few
months before Floyd’s death. People very quickly realized how flawed the justice system was,
enraged at the lack of consequence for the white people claiming they were acting in self-defense
against those that were actually defenseless. The problem of law enforcement acting
unnecessarily aggressive against people of color can only be solved by transferring power to the
targeted communities, so that white people cannot continue abusing theirs to get away with
murder.
The Black Lives Matter movement sparked research and studies revealing that increased
aggression during encounters with police was frighteningly common. While many of the
interactions did not result in the murder of an unarmed victim as media suggests, most of the
incidents involving force were between a younger, nonwhite man and an older, white officer,
which is consistent with the narrative of people of color being overly punished. Furthermore,
when violence does result in death, “among the 94 fatal shootings of unarmed persons, 40
percent were Black men—seven times the rate for White men” (qtd. in Jones, 873). However,
these statistics may be more telling of the frequency of this type of interaction than the biases of
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specific officers. A large majority of police officers are white, likely because the profession fuels
their masculinity whereas nonwhite people would associate police more with injustice than
masculinity. Moreover, research has shown “that police work fosters or reinforces
aggressiveness, authoritarianism, and racial bias on the job (Meinfield, 57). Furthermore, police
are more likely to be stationed in neighborhoods of color, driving “the median probability across
counties of being black, unarmed, and shot by police [to] 3.49 times the probability of being
white, unarmed, and shot by a police officer.” (Meinfield, 58). Unnecessary force against people
of color may be more evidence of the system’s racism for over policing neighborhoods of color
than individual officers’ racism. This violence is exacerbated by “Stand Your Ground” laws
(SYG). While police officers are trained to retreat from a dangerous situation if it is safe, these
laws override this training and allow officers to be more aggressive. In fact, in “SYG states, the
homicide rate increased by 7.1% after SYG laws were enacted. More significantly, racial biases
occur such that a White shooter that kills a Black victim is 350% more likely to be found to be
justified in their actions than with a White victim,” (qtd. in Jones, 876). These laws not only
encourage aggression and give more power to officers, they paint violent officers as law-abiding,
allowing them to get away with more than they would have if these laws were not in place.
While many police officers cite many reasons for their violence, such as crime rates and
self-defense, most of these factors play very little, if not no part in their use of force. Though the
majority of police officers are white, the diversity of specific stations does not affect the number
of incidents using force so, “net of controls, the larger the black population share, the higher the
rate of police homicides” (Meinfield, 58). In fact, when all other factors are held constant,
research shows that racial bias against black people is the only reason white police use force in
an incident. These studies have proven that “police are more likely to shoot a Black suspect than
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a White suspect even in the absence of racial differences in criminal activity” (Jones, 874).
Crime rates and diversity in individual police stations do not deter police from being aggressive;
they are violent simply because black people exist in their neighborhoods and the police can be
biased against them because black people lack the power needed for change.
This bias against black people is not shared by only a few individuals, but by the entire
system. Policy dating back as far as and farther than Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs”
discriminates against black communities and allows for more bias by focusing on drugs used
more often by poor, black people. Policies like this “have been inflamed by American’s taste for
punitive justice, especially for black offenders (Bobo and Johnson 2004; Enns 2016),”
(Meinfield, 59). The precedent of racism is so ingrained that there was “no evidence that
population factors, economic conditions, or local violent crime rates influence police killings. …
[However,] implicit racial bias, measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), of white
residents in the region was significantly associated with the disproportionate use of lethal force
on black suspects.” (Meinfield, 58).
White officers harbor so much bias against black people that even minute details about
the situation will make them perceive black people as more suspicious, and they will be more
likely to use force. For example, when people wore hoodies or other “clothing associated with
Blacks and threat was salient, while in stereotypically safer and White (read nonstereotypically
Black) attire or a safer White context, racial biases were reduced. Alternatively when Blacks are
found in neighborhoods where they are unexpected, they arouse suspicion,” (Jones, 875). In the
shootings themselves, victims were offered less sympathy and justice when they were described
in a more negative, “black” way, such as “ emphasizing that Philando Castile was arrested 52
times for minor automobile infractions or that Trayvon Martin smoked weed, contributes to the
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idea that somehow, they bore more responsibility for their shooting deaths” (Jones, 876). Even
the supposedly impartial media has and perpetuates its own biases against black people. Another
study conducted on voters in California found that when the number was altered to be lower,
people wanted to raise the number of incarcerated black people by keeping an unfairly punitive
law, based on how many black people the Californians thought deserved to be in prison (Jones,
878). Police could be acting in accordance with this behavior, wrongfully punishing many other
innocent people simply due to their biases telling them the black people deserve it. In fact,
“officers in Ferguson in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown found “a pattern or
practice of unlawful conduct”: the department was targeting black residents for fees and fines
and treating them as a source of “alternative revenue” for the city (DOJ 2015),” (Meinfield, 58).
Not only did police view black people as disposable– they viewed these people as profit. This
bias against black people contributed to police disproportionately targeting communities of color,
therefore leading to more deaths.
This hostility toward communities of color, specifically causes them to harbor hatred for
the system that was supposed to protect them. James Baldwin, a prolific black writer described
the effects of racism as a disease: “Once this disease is contracted, one can never really be
carefree again… There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood,” (Baldwin,
592). Law enforcement has created a “complicated at best and outright hostile” relationship at
worst with communities of color (Jones, 879). Baldwin asserts: “the white world is too powerful,
too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too
innocent” it and the black world to peacefully coexist (Baldwin, 603). In order to solve the
problem of disproportionate law enforcement hostility towards black communities, the “white
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world” must relinquish some of their power to the “black world” so the pattern of subjugation
can end.
There have been many approaches to police reform, such as the instrumental approach
focused solely on crime rates and the legitimacy approach focused on trust between police and
communities of color. However, these two approaches fail to address the actual problem: bias
against black people leading to aggression. (Simonson, 777). Violent and punitive policing
practices in black neighborhoods have “become self-reinforcing, independent of “crime rates,”
with a direct impact on political power,” (Simonson, 805). Since these practices have created an
imbalance of power between police and communities of color, so much so that “The laws and
everyday practices of policing preclude poor people of color from being full democratic
subjects,” (Simonson, 805), the most direct solution is to shift the power back to the people of
color, and law enforcement will not be able to get away with the unnecessary violence they have
been.
Shifting power would undermine the entire system of race-class subjugation, asking “as a
preliminary matter, whether the governance or reform arrangements at issue change the balance
of actual power in decisions about whether and how to police,” whereas other approaches are
more surface-level solutions (Simonson, 803). In fact, a big, structural change such as a shift in
power “makes abolition possible, creating space for visions that would divest from policing
altogether through noncarceral methods of providing security—changing, perhaps, the meaning
of “reform” itself.” (Simonson, 809).
Though other approaches to police reform yield some results, the fact of the matter is that
police violence is a deeply systemic problem. Police have no system to hold them accountable,
and the most effective one would be stopping the problem at the source: giving overpoliced
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communities more power would force law enforcement to hold themselves accountable and
would even gradually end the bias against black people. Shifting political power to black people
is an abstract and difficult solution, it is the most direct and would yield the most long-lasting
results.
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Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1955.
Jones, James M. “Killing Fields: Explaining Police Violence against Persons of Color.” SPSSI
Online Library, 2017, https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/josi.12252.
Accessed 5 July 2022.
Menifield, Charles E., et al. “Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?”
Public Administration Review, vol. 79, no. 1, 2018, pp. 56–68.,
https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12956. Accessed 5 July 2022.
Simonson, Jocelyn. “Police Reform through a Power Lens.” Yale Law Journal, 2020.
EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3731173. Accessed 5 July 2022.