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Five, four, three, two, one.
The movie usually starts now,
but I want you to know this film offers an analysis of police history
that I'd like you to consider.
This film requires curiosity or, at least, suspicion.
I'll leave that choice up to you.
Police power is immediate power.
It's right now.
It's... "Do what I told you to do, right now."
"No waiting. No... Ain't no phone calls. None of that. Or else."
"I decide what happens next."
There's only one thing you gotta have to be a good cop. You gotta have a heart.
But you gotta be a... At times, you've gotta be a bitch.
At times, you gotta come on like a mean man.
Police! Don't move!
What did I do?
Do you understand what I'm saying to you?
I don't have the time for you.
On toes. Ten.
Knee-high, ten.
Waist-high, ten.
Like many institutions, there is a sense of,
"This is how we've always done it, so this is how it's supposed to work,"
with no one ever rewinding to the beginning of the tape
to figure out, "What were we setting out to do when we started?"
When we think of the word "police," where does it come from?
It comes from the word "polis."
The idea is that we are a self-governing people,
and that we believe in the principle of self-government.
But the problem is we never can figure out who polices the police.
We never can figure out what gives the police authority over the people.
The police in our community occupy, uh, our area, our community,
as a foreign troop occupies territory.
There are a lot of people that feel that policing is out of control.
But it's also the case that there's horrific crime and violence
in some communities in this country, and it also is out of control.
The brutality of police
indicates that we have not achieved full citizenship.
And that is why the police are the spark for such outsized protests,
because it is a direct affront to our belonging,
to our ability to be here.
You need to disperse immediately,
or you will be subject to arrest!
Do it now!
If we were starting a country tomorrow,
and part of what we had to invent was a system of law and order,
of criminal justice, of... of police,
there's almost no chance we would invent the system we currently have.
And yet, we continue to have it every single day.
Police power is enormous,
omnipotent, and hard to pin down.
It is the might of one million police wielded everywhere, all at once.
Yet police power is extraordinarily intimate.
The same massive institution can search your pockets,
trace your cell phone, demand your identification,
watch you with surveillance cameras, or collect your DNA.
In the United States, police power is essentially unregulated.
In this kind of democracy, who is more powerful?
The people?
Or the police?
What kind of crime is most prevalent in the north side?
What do you deal with, uh, in this precinct?
We deal with violence... a lot of violence, murders.
This is North High School, my high school.
Yeah, we deal with a lot of violence.
We just had one of our athletes from here...
Our quarterback was shot and killed a couple weeks ago.
What happened?
Well, they thought they would release school early
so kids could go down and protest the Amir Locke shooting.
So, uh, D Hill...
left the school with some of our other players.
He was headed home or to a friend's house,
and he ended up, uh, passing a guy over here on Golden Valley Road...
And we'll drive by the site.
And, uh, just passed this guy.
And the guy turned around, and we don't know if they bumped each other or what,
but D kept walkin', and the guy went in his backpack,
pulled a gun out and shot him in the back of his head.
Killed him right there.
- Bring 'em in, boys. - Here we go.
- Okay, guys. Take care of each other. - Concentrate, focus.
Front door's open. I'll get it.
Our police department, law enforcement, is... is a paramilitary organization, right?
Police department! Search warrant!
Ah, hit it, hit it!
- Mind your head!
- Go! - Go, go, go, go!
Police department! Search warrant! Get down!
- Get down on the ground!
With you, with you, with you!
And people don't realize why it became a paramilitary organization.
It's because police came from the slave patrol.
Up! Up, up, up!
Up, hon! Get up!
All these enslaved folks are walking in town.
If they don't have a... a note from Master, they end up getting beat, severely.
And the masters are just fed up with these slave patrols, right?
So they asked The Citadel,
"Can you train these people? Give them some type of structure?"
Well, guess... guess what the structure is?
Paramilitary.
Where do you live?
- 80th and... - Put your hands down.
- Where? - 80th and Figueroa.
Go there.
I think if our officers understood that,
and had that conversation and was taught that,
I think they'll know why, when an African American says,
"Yeah, you're a product of slave patrols,"
he would understand what they meant by that, right?
Because some words like "patrolling," you know, we haven't changed that, right?
We talked about gettin' a letter goin' into town from Master, right?
What do cops do when they see a group of Black males standing there?
"Hey, let me see your ID." What's the difference?
When we think about the origins of policing in America,
there's a temptation to find a single point.
But, in fact,
policing is something that develops from multiple sites over time.
One point of origin would be the frontier,
where white settlers find themselves in a place
where land claims are being contested with Indigenous people.
And white settlers are trying to establish their own rights and ownership over land.
So the frontier militia we could see as one origin point
for what we come subsequently to know as policing.
In the South, you had a somewhat different system.
It was essentially a slave patrol system that was tied to militias.
These were essentially groups of men
who were tasked with going around plantations
and making sure the slaves that were living in dwellings around the plantations
weren't up to trouble,
and they were essentially policing these groups.
So the slave patrol grows up into an institution
in relationship to slavery
that we can also see as a kind of incipient police force.
You guys will let me know when it's clear?
Yeah, we're set. Great. Action.
In the 18th and 19th century, we see municipal policing
that's mostly aimed at regulating order among working people,
so working-class people.
So that would be the third sort of site
in which police develops as a way of essentially managing the class order.
Fire and auto accessory workers strike in Toledo.
State guardsmen had to resort to tear gas, lead, and cold steel
to curb the temper of the strikers, spurred by radical agitators.
Tear gas and knockout gas in a stifling barrage.
A veritable battle zone where two were killed and seven wounded
before the ranks of the strikers broke and their ringleaders could be rounded up.
Warfare in the streets! Civic strife at its worst.
Police, throughout the 1800s, into the 1900s,
one of their major roles was in breaking strikes, when workers went on strike,
and protecting the property of employers.
We go back to what we've talked about all along.
We have these three dimensions of the American political project.
The one that flows out of slavery
and the capture and coercion of Black labor.
One that grows out of the frontier and the expansion
and land hunger and conquest of Indigenous people.
And one that grows out of the development of American capitalism
and its... and its demand for labor.
It always begins from these sets of relationships to property.
It always begins from the idea that people without property,
or people who are property, in the case of enslaved people,
are a threat to the social order built on property,
because they don't have a stake in that order,
and, in fact, they are the victims of that order.
It's likely that everyone in this scene is dead.
The dead, beating or being beaten.
Violence that lives in the distant past.
Does that violence stay in the past or move through time?
There is a dance here,
movement across the line of violence and back again.
I wonder, what did these men feel in this moment?
How do they feel after the fighting stops?
- Righteous? Powerful?
When you contain and control other people for a living,
what does this power do to you?
We're gonna knock over every speakeasy, hook shop, wheel joint,
and gin mill from South Canal to North Haven.
We're gonna keep pulling in every monkey until they get so tired of it,
they'll all want to lie in the tanks and leave town.
Leave the country! Not the town, but the country!
No, no.
Never mind those open hands.
Close them up into fists and use 'em.
Historically, law and order
has meant subjugating small portions of the population
to the benefit of the larger swaths of the population.
We look at the phrase "law and order,"
and law and order are two different things.
Right? So how much of our policing is about the enforcement of the law?
And how much of it is about orderly society,
and orderly society as defined by whom?
Policing is inextricably linked to the racial history of this country.
And in order to understand that underlying framework,
you really have to go back to the very heart
of the cultural logics of Europe itself.
That's not Ferguson.
That's not whatever.
This is Baltimore City!
So the philosopher David Hume, for an example,
said that if you're Black, or a Negro, you only mimic speech.
Why can't I walk to the store without being stopped?
So you're like... just like a parrot, an exotic bird.
We... Black people don't come up with original ideas.
The same as, of course, Thomas Jefferson held that we have no creativity at all.
Immanuel Kant held that to be Black from head to toe
is clear proof that whatever a Black person says is stupid.
The German philosopher Hegel said that Black people don't possess what...
The German word is "Geist," or "spirit."
We're just eternal children,
primitive in the regions of Africa with the exception, of course, of Egypt.
That's right! That's right! Y'all caused it to be this way!
So there's... there's a way in which the white imaginary
has structured the Black body against itself
so that, in the end,
whiteness turns out to be that which is human as such,
person as such,
and where Black people are always deviant,
always troubled or dangerous or disorderly bodies.
- Get off my back.
If you don't get off my back...
Here we go, here we go.
Move!
What does it mean to disturb the peace?
Talk too loud?
Stand too close?
Ask too many questions?
Refuse to do as you are told?
Maybe you've been called dangerous or deviant.
Maybe you've been made uncomfortable
by some disorderly body that got too close.
How did you respond?
Can this be the man
who, less than 24 hours ago...
risked his life for less money per hour...
than this man earns?
The idea of a police function and its responsibility to the group
could be compared to what happened millions of years ago
when the ancestors of these ants evolved their own version of a police function,
so that now, after millions of years of evolution,
the ant has a social system in which certain ants
stand guard and check out other ants trying to get into their anthill home.
If considered an enemy, these police or guard ants signal,
and other ants arrive and help destroy the intruder.
I think there's very good reason to believe
that the very founding of these modern police departments
that started in the 19th century
were founded in response to people in American society
who were seen as, uh, different and other.
There's a good case to be made, for example,
that the first New York City Police Department in 1844
was a direct response to the influx of immigrants from Europe,
and particularly the Irish, who were seen as less than,
who were seen as inferior.
In fact, we think of Irish populations today as "white,"
but in the mid-19th century, they weren't considered fully white.
In the United States, especially in the late 19th century,
when the United States was seeing a tremendous amount of immigration,
there was a lot of disagreement about who belonged to what race,
what the boundaries between different races were.
So the act of being targeted by police
was often one of the ways that people were marked as non-white.
So when police were policing
Italian-Americans or Greek-Americans or Irish-Americans
and they were subject to the kinds of abusive or discriminatory policing
that many non-white folks are subject to today,
they were not necessarily seen as another ethnicity within whiteness
but as occupying a non-white racial status.
Policing is a pathway to power.
And so what we've seen over the course of American history
is different white ethnic groups, as they've arrived in the United States,
initially being the targets of American policing
and working to assimilate themselves not just into American whiteness,
but into American policing itself.
When you look at the police forces of many major American cities,
you see that they are made up of many of the white ethnic identities
that previously would have been the victims
of harsh, discriminatory, aggressive policing tactics.
Just before slavery and just after slavery,
people who were white indentured servants or poor white people,
indentured servants before slavery, poor white people after,
were offered what historians call a racial bribe, which is,
"Come away from your class peers. Don't form solidarity networks with them."
"Instead, we will bestow upon you this thing called whiteness."
"And through very concrete laws and practices,
that will confer a series of privileges on you."
"And the police will be crucial to conferring those privileges."
In the 1690s in Virginia,
the governors of Virginia colony have the idea in their head,
"Ah! The way we'll make sure that slaves and servants
don't get together and try to overthrow us is we'll tell them
that the servants get to keep their clothes on when they're whipped,
but the slaves can be stripped naked."
What that tells you is a couple of things.
It tells you white privilege isn't that great, if you can still be whipped.
But it also tells you there's an effort to make a differentiation,
to make sure that Black people are going to be exposed, literally,
as being the most vulnerable to the force and violence of the state.
To the extent to which one is not Black
is the extent to which one is closer to white.
And in virtue of being closer to white, the level, the frequency,
the danger of policing will be fundamentally different.
I tell the story how, when I was a rookie cop,
I was chasing a guy in a stolen car, on foot.
And I tackled the guy, caught him.
Next thing I know, I get a flashlight to my head, right?
I turned, looked at the cop, and said, "What did you do that for?"
He's like, "There was two Black kids down there."
"I just took the first one I could take." Right?
You know, that was... And he did that without no regret, right?
We don't hate the Negro.
God made him Black, and He made us white.
And you will find this laid out in the 11th chapter of Genesis
in which He segregated the races.
And we, knowing that for 5,000 years, the white man has been the supreme race,
we, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, intend to keep it the white race.
Because of segregation,
because of the way that race marks African Americans,
many immigrants who also suffered indignities
and oppression and exclusion
could eventually turn into something else.
You could change your last name. You could lose your accent.
You could become white in this society
in ways that could never happen for African Americans
because you can't change your skin color.
Police have tried to employ tear gas upwind of the mob, if possible.
If the wind is blowing against you,
use a gas gun to drop long-range CN projectiles behind the crowd,
so the wind will carry it through the mob.
At the outset of the 20th century,
police in many cities across the United States
were totally integrated with the political system in the city.
When police were part of the political machines,
they were ineffective at crime control.
In fact, they were part of criminal organizations.
And so a generation of police reformers tried to change that.
Many of them had military experience overseas.
And they came back to the United States, and they wanted to transform police
in the same way that the military had transformed
in colonial military operations
in the Caribbean and the Philippines and other places.
They wanted to make police into professionals
the way that soldiers were becoming more and more professional.
In order to understand policing today, you really do have to go back
to some of these early American interventions overseas.
When I think about this, I think of a guy named August Vollmer.
Now, August Vollmer is a fascinating character.
He's well known among police.
He's considered the father of modern policing.
August Vollmer served in the military,
and he particularly served in the Philippines
during the Spanish-American War.
The United States doesn't say, "The Philippines is our colony."
But it holds the Philippines under occupation
that lasts almost half a century.
And the establishment of that occupation is a brutal counterinsurgency war.
One thing about this colonial war in the Philippines
is that the American military perfected a lot of techniques and tactics
to deal with insurgents,
to deal with rebels, to deal with, um, their...
their "little brown brothers," as they called Filipinos.
August Vollmer was a crucial player in that campaign.
He was handpicked to serve
in one of these elite mobile counterinsurgency units,
where they used these mobile forces to go into the interior
and essentially search and destroy Philippine insurgents.
Vollmer is one of these really great figures to look at
because he is a policeman,
he spends time in the Philippines thinking about designing policing institutions,
and then he becomes an academic.
So he is one of the people who's kind of writing up
how to think about what a police apparatus looks like.
Inspired, perhaps, by the forty-and-eight transports of war days,
the mounted division of the police department has acquired truck equipment.
Within the cab are accommodations for ten officers, machine guns,
tear gas bombs, and other riot equipment.
Vollmer does this kind of thing
where he crosses these different domains we've been talking about.
He's oriented on thinking about the domestic, uh... order.
He... he's gaining his experience in a counterinsurgency situation,
so a situation that we might think of as being akin to war
but really is about pacification.
And he's trying to think about, um,
how do you ensure that policing retains its legitimacy?
To avoid physical confrontation,
police again used tear gas,
this time driving the crowd back to the monument grounds.
The use of these counterinsurgency tools and tactics instills in police
the idea that citizens, or potential criminals,
are like insurgents abroad,
and therefore, are enemies of the state,
and therefore, you can mete out whatever violence upon them that is necessary.
When you talk about the characteristics of the police,
it's almost exactly a colonial institution.
This is a power of a government ruling over people
who have no say in the way they're ruled.
So, for me, the implications are
that police, as a colonial institution,
is going to be primarily oriented towards serving the interests
of the so-called colonizers,
the settlers, who tend to be associated with wealth and whiteness.
There is a wealth of beauty in this land of ours.
Every conceivable type of coloring can be found in American women.
Miss America takes her appearance seriously,
and her beauty of mind and body is her great American heritage,
her birthright by virtue of the fact that her forefathers came to this country
to make a new world for their children and for their children's children.
On this free soil,
all the many peoples of the many countries met and married
and brought forth their children as Americans.
Police are fundamentally unlike any other part of government
in that they most clearly crystallize the fundamental power of the state
to claim a monopoly on legitimate violence,
to say, "This violence is okay. This violence is not okay."
So what it means to look at policing, then, is to look at power
and the way that police function in a society
to maintain a particular status quo.
And this is whether the police officers are conscious of it or not.
So we're looking at power,
and we're looking at how do officers become participants
in the inequities of power in this particular society?
Stop, stop, stop.
- I'm just gonna spray him. Watch out. All right.
I'm gonna spray you. For what?
Get out or you get sprayed. Get out for what?
Reach around. You take off in this car, I'ma shoot you.
I'm gonna make it super easy on you.
You put this car in drive, you get one right to the chest.
I don't care what you got. I don't care if you got bullshit on you.
But guess what? Now you gotta deal with it.
If you pull some bullshit, you'll take one to the chest.
Now you gonna shoot me? Absolutely.
For what? Absolutely.
If you don't listen, you're done.
Violence work is not violent work.
Hands on top of the car, both of yous.
- Right now! Right fuckin' now! Come on!
It is the work of state violence.
And it functions best when violence is withheld,
when violence is a threat that is actually not inflicted
but is understood as able to be inflicted at any moment.
They pulled a knife out on me! Pull that, I'll split you open.
- You understand me? - Jackie, stop!
All of yous, go up in the front. Now. Get up there! Get up there!
- All right, all right. Come on!
When I talk about marginalized people as being sort of dystopic threats,
I really should qualify this by saying that they're also considered a contagion,
and they will essentially affect others.
So the goal, then, is to force them back in their place,
not just in their social place,
but also the physical geographies which we have set aside for them.
The group that has really defined how carceral logic has developed
have been Black people in the United States.
And that's in part because policing grew up
within the context of enslaving Black people.
Once slavery was outlawed,
that was very scary to a lot of people.
And so first, they came up with these Black Codes,
which were literally laws that only applied to Black people.
So it was very explicit that, "We are going to try to control you
in a way we're not gonna try to control any other group."
This march will not continue. Is that clear to you?
It is quite clear that this carceral logic
doesn't only impact Black people, doesn't only impact brown people.
Everyone is wrapped up in it.
But if we didn't have that history of fear,
of "What will we do when we have Black people who are no longer enslaved?"
"And if we can't control them that way, how will we make sure they act right?"
If we didn't have that particular history in this country,
I think we might have seen a public safety system
that evolved very differently.
How did we get here?
The question breaks down as soon as you ask it.
Who is "we"? Where is "here"?
Ready... front!
You and me,
we may share this country, but are we close enough to be "we"?
Is your America and my America the same place?
Has it ever been?
Is this police brutality?
Or self-defense?
What do you think?
Unless you said you didn't know, you were prejudiced,
either for or against the police.
And we'd better get all the facts,
as many facts as it takes to arrive at a real understanding of the police,
their function, and their responsibility to all citizens.
So, insects or mankind,
the idea of a police force or function came out of necessity.
Even the human body has its police force, when in the event of illness or injury,
white blood cells such as these protect us from harmful bacteria
and other substances that threaten the body.
Fire, here!
When mankind grew more civilized,
it became necessary to live by more elaborate rules, laws.
Laws to protect the weak from the aggressive strong.
In this arrangement, the power and strength of the group
was given to individuals to use on behalf of the group.
The same principle applies to today's modern police force.
This is North Minneapolis. This is Plymouth Avenue.
Plymouth Avenue is known for, back in the '60s after, you know, the...
We had an uprising in the '60s. I believe it was '67, '68.
These used to be all stores, delicatessens, uh, all kinds of things.
And, you know, Black folks got upset.
They burnt it down.
I can clearly remember. I was probably five at the time.
But I could remember the incident 'cause I remember the day after,
my uncle put us in the car and we drove down here,
and he went into the Jewish deli, and he... he looted it, right?
He took meats and all that stuff out.
I still can remember my mom telling my uncle not to do that
'cause that man used to let my mom get stuff on credit.
What was going on in the community that was... that had people upset?
Well, there was... there was a police incident.
It was just not a stable environment for Black folks.
Police harassment in North Minneapolis.
There was... there was an incident at a bar where one of the bar owners,
you know, brutally beat up a Black man, and, you know...
and officers didn't do anything about it,
which triggered "enough is enough," right?
We had all these different businesses on Plymouth Avenue,
and one night, they set it on fire, you know,
like many scenes across America that year.
Gutted shells of buildings, flames raging out of control,
and an atmosphere of apprehension
still hover over the quieting Watts section of Los Angeles.
Drop that purse and get your hands up.
Hey, hands up!
- Hands up. - Get 'em up!
Get your hands up. Let's go.
Negro leaders blamed it on a variety of social ailments.
Poverty and unemployment, poor schools and bad housing,
all of which add up to discrimination.
But most of all, said the Negro spokesman, police brutality.
While the conventional wisdom is that somehow the residents,
Black residents in particular,
started these violent episodes against police
and against institutions in their community,
when we actually look at the history
and we look at the prevalence of this form of political protest,
there were some 2,000 rebellions between 1964 and through 1972.
We see that, actually, it was police that provoked these incidents.
Absolutely incredible scene.
A gun battle in the middle of Broadway.
- Grenade in the streets of Los Angeles.
And I submit to you that we shall not see a Harlem or a Rochester or a New York.
We can solve it. It is yet time.
I tell you, tonight there's gonna be another, whether you like it or not.
- No, no, wait. Wait.
Come on! - Listen. Listen.
See, they...
We... we, the Negro people down here, have gotten completely fed up.
You know what they'll do tonight? They don't care.
They not... they not gonna fight down here no more.
You know where they going? They after white people.
Ain't nobody in this society
ever sought to stop them when they burnt our church down.
But when we retaliate, everybody is upset.
In many ways, we think of the riots of the 1960s
as just a response to police brutality.
But they are also a response
to a prolonged period of white mob violence.
Don't you worry about it, 'cause we're not gon' take it anymore.
In Lowndes County, Alabama, last month, they burned two churches to the ground.
They were Black churches.
A week later, a white church was burnt to the ground.
Either we will all worship inside, or we will all worship outside.
Rebellion occurred in the industrial Midwest,
in the Sun Belt, in the Rust Belt, the East Coast, and the Southern states.
Essentially, in any place where Black people lived
in segregated, unequal conditions, on top of being policed more frequently
and policed in new ways during the era of the war on crime in the 1960s,
led to a cocktail where rebellions erupted
across the country in cities large and small.
Gettin' tired of being pushed around by you white people, that's all.
How pushed around? How badly? In what way?
You're stoppin' us on the street, kickin' in the doors,
takin' to the police station, you're kickin' your teeth in.
They're stopping people on the street now.
- Yeah. I'm not speakin' about now. They weren't before.
Oh, they've been doin' it a long time before now.
The police, they're not to... in our community,
not to promote our welfare or for our security and our safety.
But they're there to contain us, to brutalize us, to murder us,
because they have their orders to do so.
The police in our community couldn't possibly be there,
uh, to protect our property because we own no property.
Uh, they couldn't possibly be there to see that we receive the due process of law
for the simple reason that the police themselves deny us the due process of law.
And so it's very apparent that the police are only in our community,
not for our security, but the security of the business owners in the community,
and also to see that the status quo is kept intact.
Once you realize that you are payin' taxes.
All right. - Taxes for the cops to whoop your ass.
- You are payin' 'em.
You're payin' them to whoop your ass.
You are payin' them to come in and beat your children.
You're payin' them to run you off the corners.
And you're payin' them to kill you.
Don't be afraid. Don't be ashamed.
We want Black Power!
- We want Black Power!
We want Black Power!
Stokely Carmichael, a 25-year-old revolutionary.
It was here in Mississippi this summer
that Carmichael, with his cry for Black Power,
first became a national figure, and to many, a frightening one.
Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow
to get rid of the dirt.
From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell 'em!
- What do you want? Black Power!
What do you want? Black Power!
Police understood Black radicalism
in the 1960s as a global formation.
Police understood the threat of communism
that seemed to go hand-in-hand with Black radicalism
as a global problem,
a problem that was not confined to "over there."
Security officials in the United States
looked at what was happening on the streets of American cities.
They saw all of these movements as tantamount to
and similar to the liberation movements that were happening across the globe.
There was enormous fear of radicalism, of communism.
To the idea of the militarization of the police,
we need to add
a notion that might be an awkward phrase,
but we need to think about how the military became policified.
One thousand.
Stand by. Stand by.
Mark, mark.
Really, police is the more important category.
The military's job becomes about policing.
It doesn't become about fighting wars for national defense
with other sovereign powers after World War II.
It becomes about projects of overseas counterinsurgency,
pacification.
The military aspects are kind of infiltrating the police,
and the policing kind of rationale is entering into military action.
People keep coming to more and more radical conclusions,
and in the United States,
those conclusions are fueled and fed by international movements,
anti-colonial movements.
In those countries,
people are adopting radical political frameworks.
They are calling themselves socialists.
They are challenging and demanding the right to govern on that basis.
And those are ideas that make sense to radicals in this country where
maybe you're not exactly a colonized population in the same sense,
but your conditions look something like that.
It might not be traditional colonialism,
but it's something that looks remarkably similar.
And so people begin to take up the same kind of ideas and rhetoric,
and also begin to question capitalism.
Our Negro community leaders are--
- Where are they?
They are not here, and they are not comin' down, because...
- Ah, right. That's right.
They are selling us again, and we're tired of bein' sold as slaves.
- He's on the floor...
- Please don't kill me. Please! Get up out of the gutter.
- Please don't kill me. Come on!
When it was all over, a young member of the demonstration
had been shot to death.
At least 30 were injured, 19 by gunshot wounds.
Eighty-eight were arrested.
Throughout the 1960s,
many police officials believed that the civil rights movement
and then the Black Power movement were dupes of the Soviet Union.
They were being manipulated.
There were agitators feeding ideas into the heads
of African-American people across the country,
convincing them to rebel.
Samuel Cartwright was a doctor
who would often be consulted by white plantation owners
because the plantation owners noticed that Black people
would run away from the plantations, which you would think is natural, right?
You wanna be free. Hence, you would flee a plantation.
Well, the white plantation owners didn't understand this.
If Black people were naturally inferior, if they were like chattel,
then why should they flee?
They go to Samuel Cartwright. He thinks about it.
He says, "I think I have an answer."
He says Black people suffer from what he called "drapetomania,"
and "drapetomania" is the disease of running away from plantations.
The Black body is being fixed according to the image of white people
because Black people can't possibly want to be free.
Because if they actually flee plantations because they desire freedom,
then that puts a lie to the claim that Black people are naturally slaves.
Wait a minute.
All we want is jobs.
We get jobs, we don't bother nobody.
We don't get no jobs, we'll tear up Los Angeles, period.
What... what you think, brother, about the police situation? Do you--
Police?
The police? We'll burn them up too.
Police didn't see these movements as organic, as justified,
as based in real injustice.
And that meant that these movements were treated
as if they were an enemy plot.
And for that reason,
the tools they used to suppress those movements overseas,
these were appropriate to use at home as well.
My fellow Americans,
we have endured a week such as no nation should live through.
We need to know the answer, I think,
to three basic questions about these riots.
What happened? Why did it happen?
What can be done to prevent it from happenin' again and again?
I'm tonight appointing a special advisory commission on civil disorders.
Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois has agreed to serve as chairman.
...coat down a little bit again...
- Ten seconds.
The Kerner Commission report is a massive document.
It's an important watershed in the history of American government.
For the first time, you have a really clear recognition
of the way in which the policing of American society
is deeply interwoven
with the creation of a society that is divided along racial lines,
and as the commission clearly states, separate and unequal.
The report turned out to be a runaway bestseller.
740,000 copies were sold the first three weeks.
More than a million are now in print.
Bantam Books, which published the first edition,
called it the fastest-selling paperback since Valley of the Dolls,
which it does not precisely resemble in style.
Buy your books on the riot commission. On the riot commission.
Several young priests in Bushwick are active behind the scenes,
urging sales of the report as a first step by whites
toward recognizing what the priests and the report see
as the fundamental problem, white racism.
What's going to be the answer to this report?
What answer in the form of action in Washington?
Here's Roger Mudd, who covers Congress.
Roger, what's the impact down there?
As yet, nothing has come from the White House but silence.
- Why is that? There hasn't been a word? - I think this is perhaps calculated.
The president wants time for the report to soak in,
and also he has some fairly precise political calculations he must make.
A couple things ought to be remembered about Congress.
That the Congress is made up mainly of white middle-class, small-town America.
So already you've got certain resistance to, uh, such a report as this,
pointing the finger at these men on the Hill as the main cause of the riots.
The fact is that the Kerner Commission had something for everyone.
For people more on the left,
it had lots of analysis of the root causes of crime.
And for people on the right, it had lots of recommendations for shoring up policing
and police techniques.
The suggestions on the right overwhelmed the analysis on the left.
Johnson really ran with the recommendations,
especially in the Kerner report, for more police.
Crime is usually considered a big-city problem.
Now suburbia is feeling the impact of soaring crime rates.
Lakewood, California, uses helicopters the way most cities use prowl cars.
Called Project Sky Knight, the Lakewood experiment
links the car on the ground with the policeman in the air.
The federal government infusion of cash
grossly expanded the number of people
who were hired as uniformed and civilian police.
136, this is Sky Knight. We're rolling from Compton and Downey.
And it grew the technology and the material
that they used for policing.
Sky Knight, I have 'em now. I'm going to effect the stop.
All right, we'll hover overhead till we get a call...
Johnson's intervention
is not just about the professionalization of the police,
but it really inserts the federal government in policing,
local policing, in an unprecedented way.
The American people
have had enough of rising crime and lawlessness in this country.
The people also recognize that the national government can
and the national government should help the cities and the states
in their war on crime.
When people invoke war in general,
what that does is to ask the public to authorize the government
to do whatever is necessary,
take any step as necessary.
It's a way of framing the issue to ask people not to push
for too much oversight, too much accountability,
to allow police the license to do anything,
uh, and to trust that they will judge that appropriately,
because in theory, they're fighting an existential threat
against the community that they were charged with protecting.
The problem of crime has become increasingly serious.
It is freighted with graver menace to the nation
than could possibly have been true only a few decades ago.
Crime has a partner in forming the common denominator
of a breakdown in moral behavior.
We will continue to press for laws
which would protect our citizens from violence,
and our work has just begun.
Run! Run!
- Run! Yeah!
Time is running out for the merchants of crime and corruption
in American society.
The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future
in the United States of America.
Our ranks have increased from the original 55 men in 1925
to the present complement of almost 4,000 men and women.
Again, I commend you
for manning the thin blue line that holds back a jungle
which threatens to reclaim this clearing we call civilization.
Last February, I asked for a 700 million dollar increase
in the drug budget for the coming year.
We have found an immediate need for another billion and a half dollars.
With this added 2.2 billion,
our 1990 drug budget totals almost eight billion dollars.
I came here to say that in my balanced budget proposal to the Congress,
we will have nearly 1.3 billion dollars
to renew our community policing program.
The Homeland Security Grant Program funds state and local governments
for planning, organization, equipping, training, and exercising
against the possibility of terrorist attacks.
That's why, from the very beginning,
my administration has been dedicated
to giving state and local law enforcement the resources they need
to get the job done.
So far, 3.5 billion dollars
of the Recovery Act has gone to support local law enforcement.
I will fight to protect you.
I am your president of law and order.
Today I have strongly recommended to every governor
to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers
that we dominate the streets.
We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police.
- It's to fund the police.
Fund them.
Status quo.
The existing state of affairs,
especially regarding social or political issues.
Police expansion has been the outcome
of almost every domestic war and moment of social unrest in US history.
When the status quo is resisted,
that resistance is put down with overwhelming force.
Armed backlash,
an expansion of police to return us to the status quo.
I'm looking at, uh...
So I want cameras at McDonald's, and J... is that JJ's Fish House?
In between there. Then I need one back up at Merwin's.
Well, they're dealin' drugs right now, so...
I'm... I'm lookin' right...
I don't know if they're throwin' needles. Are they still on heroin there?
Or are they sellin' weed?
These are younger dudes I'm lookin' at.
I wish I had 'em on every... every corner, you know?
'Cause they've been very helpful with, uh, you know...
I wouldn't say deterring crime,
because most people don't realize they're up there.
We're not tryin' to keep it a secret.
There were some... some people on the council last year
didn't like the whole "Big Brother watching" theory, right?
You know, but with all these cameras around the city,
it's been real helpful for us getting our bad guys
and young ladies off the street.
This is always recorded, right?
The beauty of this thing is we know what vehicle's involved. We got a black SUV.
We got four African-American males who've been there for hours.
I've watched them do hand to hand.
And we can go right up to them and snatch them.
We have probable cause to do it, right?
So nobody innocent gets caught up in this.
So I'm gonna read our mission,
say what I'm hoping we can do today, and then we'll go around and check in.
So, we're the Police and Black Men Project.
Our mission is we're a group of Minneapolis police officers
and Black community members
building relationships of trust to promote community safety.
My thing is the rise of carjackings, right?
- Yeah. - And the thing is, our car...
Most of our carjackers, probably 99% are juveniles.
- Right? - Yeah.
You... It's rare you get an adult doin' that, but we do get 'em.
Our youngest carjacker was nine, right?
And we got one young lady, she's probably 16 now,
but she's probably got over 20 carjackings under her belt, felony type.
So we were... they were talking about the revolving door
of the juvenile justice system, right?
You know, we don't want to criminalize our kids.
But we don't wanna understand when they are criminals.
So we continue to let them go out there and do worse things.
Uh, so here's the problem, is that, uh,
what's happening is a failure of the criminal legal system, Charlie.
So, keep in mind, from my vantage point, everything needs to be transformed--
These girls will end up getting killed.
They're going to end up killing somebody if they haven't already.
But what's insane to me is just that we can't figure out
how to get these kids on a Zoom call in front of a judge
to get them assigned to some sort of intervention.
It tells you what they think about our kids.
You wanna know what's happening with white kids right now?
They don't got... They're getting pre-trial interventions.
- Pre-trial interventions! They're sending them to treatment.
They're sending them to all kinds...
This fool that shot Deshaun,
I'm sure at some point, that dude got a pre-trial intervention.
Like, the reality is, like... that is what's...
That is how our criminal legal system fails us.
It means you can't even do your job.
So what do we do?
It goes back to we got a bunch of kids, African Americans,
locked up in the County Home School.
Maybe that's not right. We shouldn't have them there.
- But we're not checking their behavior. Yeah.
I think they're locked up for their behavior, not because... who they are.
We can talk about what the intervention should be, right?
I'm cool with that conversation.
The problem we're having today is that the process to get an intervention
is not being given to our kids.
And our criminal legal system thinks that we just...
"Just let 'em out with no intervention and see...
and make sure that they... they don't re-offend."
And it's bullshit.
They're setting our kids up to fail. They're setting you up to fail.
They're setting all of us up to fail. The same shit doesn't happen in Edina.
Every arrest, every discretionary stop and frisk,
every moment of police violence illustrates the paradox of police power.
It is a vast institution,
extending across 18,000 police departments.
But it is most tangible through close, individual encounters.
Again, on this theme of domination,
Ray Kelly said Stop and Frisk is designed to, quote,
"instill fear" in Black and brown kids
that they should not go out with weapons.
It's not a response to crime. It's a form of domination and control.
Day to day, the institution of policing doesn't have a single face,
but the individuals that get caught in the machine of policing do.
By 2008, I was what's known as a truant,
um, on my way to being pushed out of school.
Uh, I guess my life was just, you know, skipping school, mostly.
Home life was rough.
School life was rough.
I would take it out by not being there, avoiding all responsibilities.
And because of that, um, I sort of got known around Flushing.
I think I was getting stopped and frisked a couple times... a week.
At least once a day, somebody got stopped.
There was, like, 30 or 40 of us in one friend circle.
"We can't go around Bowne Park today because cops are there."
We just... "Navinder already got stopped."
Or "Asha got stopped," or something.
It can... it can seem like a friendly thing, even, sometimes,
or it can be incredibly aggressive.
I think I'm more upset with the friendlier ones.
What's your name? Art.
Huh? - Art.
His name? Eddie.
Come over here, man.
Where you goin', Eddie?
- If I see him again, he'll have a problem. - I know.
- Okay? I know.
Eddie! You better come on, Eddie!
It was routine at that point.
I knew them by their names. They knew me by my name.
It happened to me once on a park bench while I was reading a book.
That particular day, I remember just thinking, you know, nothin' of it.
There's nothing she could possibly have on me.
I was like, "Hi, Amanda. How you doing? You having a good day?"
Says, "Yeah, Nilesh. I'm havin' a good day."
"Uh... put your hands on the bench."
Wanna go to the station and talk about it?
No. - Then you wanna tell me his name?
Eddie. Hi.
Eddie what?
- Smith. Get over here.
Come on! Come on.
- Come on, man! Come on. - For real, Eddie Sm--
Go sit in the car. I'm not gonna hold you.
- Go sit in the car, man.
And go to the station? - Sit in the car.
When you have that kind of relationship with cops,
every single time, every minute feels like it was ten, you know?
A five-minute stop feels like 30.
You become fuckin' submissive real fast too, you know?
And... I was a dick.
I... 'Cause, do you know what? Fuck you, and fuck the cops.
And again, I wasn't... I wasn't some fuckin'... some...
some violent fuck or somethin'.
I'm just some skinny-ass Indian kid.
It just slowly goes from like this guilty,
"Oh my God, I'm being stopped by the police."
"I must be a terrible person," to...
"Well, this is what I get."
"This... uh... for bein' me," you know?
And you sort of just, like, identify with that sort of feeling.
That... that sort of profile that they put on you.
And if you ask me what that profile was, I don't know.
But I felt like I was some terrible criminal.
I felt like I was some hood rat,
fuckin' crack-slingin' piece of shit, you know?
I did. I did. I...
It genuinely felt like that's the kind of person I was,
the way they treated me.
And it was just like, well, I guess... I...
I've never done any of those things.
Uh... I swear. Um, but...
This constant little push, just down.
Just a little... just a little push.
It's just constant. And then, eventually, you either become too tired,
or you get a little too angry or a little too emotional,
and you end up fucking dead, you know?
One of the examples that I always find super interesting to think about
is in New York City, in the period during Stop and Frisk,
which was almost kind of like
a more mobile and flexible form of managing,
not spatial separation into different parts of the city,
although that still exists,
but managing how people move throughout the city.
Weapons were uncovered 1.5% of the time.
The... the gun recovery rate, 0.1%.
This is how preposterously faulty this program was.
This, in some ways,
was a purely kind of algorithmic, kind of racial project
when you think about what it actually was,
in which the police go around watching where different kinds of bodies
are in motion in the city,
and taking it upon themselves
to literally seize those bodies in a moment.
Stop and Frisk, right?
Making them suspect for being in the place that they are.
You almost could think of that as kind of like a mobile segregation project.
You know, "We're just gonna move around and make sure..."
"We're not gonna say people can't be here or be there."
But some people are going to always be imagined
as potentially out of place, out of where they should be.
Guess what? I don't tolerate the shit out there.
He went in, and two of his pals went in.
All right, so we gotta keep that corner clear.
What they do is they come out. They hang out a few minutes.
If they don't get moved, then they all start comin' out.
You gotta get 'em movin' right from the start
because if you get too big of a crowd there,
they're going to get out of control and think they own the block.
We own the block. They don't own the block.
They might live there, but we own the block.
We own the streets here.
In the end, it won't be a knife or a gun,
but when this woman throws her shoe, it will lead to an arrest.
Back off, all of yous.
Because Flynn thinks it was a rock or a brick.
To demand unqualified compliance, which is what the police demand,
goes against what I think the majority of Americans believe our society to be,
which is a democratic society
where you don't have to be subjected to essentially authoritarian commands.
She's going.
No! No!
This used to be referred to as "ATM." Ask, Tell, Make.
"First, I ask someone to do it. Then I tell them to do it."
"And if they don't do it at that point, I physically make them do it."
No, no, no!
When we watch television shows and there's an authoritarian government,
or we read about an authoritarian government
where citizens are expected to offer unqualified compliance
and obedience to some other power,
we laugh at that and say, "Oh, isn't that horrible? That's tyranny."
"Luckily, we Americans are free."
I got him, Kyle. I got him.
Get off me, man!
A chokehold is a maneuver that some police officers use
to try to get you to do what they want you to do,
but you cannot do it because you cannot breathe.
Obviously, in any violent confrontation on the street,
it's difficult for the officer to remember
where the blood vessels lie in the neck, where the nerves are.
He got you!
Oh!
On the other hand, it is our belief,
particularly from the medical advisors' side,
and from your training instructors,
that the more one practices
and the more one becomes familiar with the underlying anatomy,
the less chance there is for injury and disability.
It's my belief, after reviewing a number of cases,
that these special holds, when applied properly,
carry very little risk...
I can't breathe... - This is why we believe...
I can't breathe... I can't breathe...
People who are exercising the police power
are doing a really specific thing.
They are translating this essential core piece of state power,
the ability to claim the monopoly on legitimate violence, into practice.
What? I'm trying to open it. Open the door. Get out the car.
No, I don't know what's going-- Come on!
Okay, stop the car. Stop! Stop!
- Okay, I'm getting out. I'm getting out!
- Stop! I'm getting out!
- Stop! I'm getting out! Stop!
- Stop! Stop! Get out the car!
I'm trying to get out!
I'm trying! I'm trying! Get the...
Stop, I'm getting out!
Get out! Get out!
- Get out the goddamn car!
Stop here.
Okay. Roll black.
If I stop this violence here, is it less obscene?
I've put it in the blind spot.
But how much can the blind spot hold?
He's not responsive. Does he have a pulse?
No, bro, look at him.
- He's not responsive. Check for a pulse.
- Check for a pulse. Bro, are you serious?
- Gonna stand here with that on his neck? Let me see a pulse!
Is he breathing now? Check his pulse!
I'm not gonna have this conversation.
Check his pulse, Thao. I'm telling you, check.
Check his pulse. What'd you do?
Bro, check his pulse, bro. Don't do drugs, guys.
Don't do drugs, bro? What is that? What do you think that is?
- So you call what he's doing okay? Get back.
You call what he's doing okay? Badge seven...
You call what you doing okay? Are you really a firefighter's...
- Yes, I am, from Minneapolis. - Get on the sidewalk, then.
You call this okay? - Show me his pulse!
Check his pulse! Check right fucking now!
Get back on the sidewalk. - Check... The man ain't moved yet, bro.
- The man ain't moved yet, bro. He's on the street...
It's hard to prosecute police officers for killing people of color
because, usually, it's legal.
Get your hands in the air!
- Do it now. Turn around! Turn around! ...over here...
Get down!
The Supreme Court has given the police what I call superpowers
to racially profile, to arrest, and to kill.
In terms of police use of force, Graham versus Connor is the case.
And the Supreme Court held that the police can use force,
so long as your average police officer would think
it was an appropriate situation in which to use force.
That's the rule.
And it is extraordinary how many police departments
don't want any regulation of the use of force other than that.
Now, what has happened for decades
is police unions have aggressively used the collective bargaining process
to load up their contracts, and in some cases,
to load up state laws with provisions that are not just generous,
but that bend over backwards to help police officers avoid accountability.
I guess it was this house over here.
Yeah.
Are you muted or on?
I'm muted, but I can...
Fancy seeing you all here.
- Mute it?
Questions are swirling tonight over why Sacramento police officers
muted their body cameras.
Are you muted?
I'm off. All the way off.
Okay.
Police unions come to the table and tell government officials,
who are largely beholden to them at this point,
who kowtow and bow down to them, "This is what we need."
"We need, you know, 24 to 48 hours before this officer
even has to make a statement about whatever he or she did,
up to and including gunning that person down."
"We need disciplinary records kept secret."
"We need records to be cleared after a certain period of time,
as quick as six months."
"We need that whole... that whole record gone."
And this is the kind of thing that allows officers
to escape accountability time and time again,
and don't even talk about qualified immunity.
I'll tase you!
Just stay back. I'll tase you!
- Taser, taser! Stop!
Ah! She shot me. Please, stop.
I shot him. You did?
Yes! 'Kay.
I drew the wrong fuckin' gun!
I shot him! Oh my God! Kim, sit down.
The system of policing has largely been constructed
outside of the view of the average American,
and the rules governing American policing have been determined, in many cases,
by the police themselves and their lobbies.
And what that means is the police have been able to codify,
to double and triple down on their power, time and time and time again.
In terms of law, we have very, very, very few national standards.
Almost none.
And we have very, very few, remarkably, state standards either.
And very few municipal standards.
So the standards by which the police operate are largely set
by the police, police department policies, and their professional associations.
We're talking about ensuring that what police do is lawful,
and when they behave in a way that's not lawful,
they're held accountable to that.
But the biggest problem with policing today
is that most of the harm that policing causes is perfectly legal.
Um...
It's scary, right?
That's what I mean when I say it's on us. 'Cause we're the ones who make it legal.
I'm not... I'm not trying to absolve the police from responsibility.
But the fact is that most of the harm they cause is perfectly legal.
So I'm interested in the, um...
I'm interested in the "we"-ness of it all.
You've both made similar points about the laws
that "we" let the police enforce
and the things that "we" let the police do.
And I'm sitting here, and I'm like, "I don't let the police do..."
-"I don't want the police to do that." - Mm-hmm.
"I didn't know that was legal." Am I a part of this "we"?
- Um, so if you could try to contextualize... - Mmm.
...who it is that actually enables
the legislators to walk away from their responsibility, um,
to tell the police in a more robust way what to do and how to do it,
that would be great.
Anybody in any position of authority
who moves to hold police accountable
faces a challenge from the police department
and the other defenders of the status quo in whatever environment you're in.
That's the same suspects wherever you are.
Corporate America, moneyed interests.
Just look at the historic role of police in America.
They put down the labor unions in the North in their formative stage.
They were on slave patrols in the South in their formative stage,
always protecting the interests
of those who would exploit the masses to their profit.
When you think about politicians and police,
you are thinking about individual people, actual people,
as opposed to systems,
and those people are often acting in the interest of a system
that they don't explicitly support, that they might even critique.
But the weight of their work goes toward reinforcing, buttressing that system.
And it is a system that privileges a class elite,
a racial elite, people who are free of social stigma.
And yet, there are many people involved in shoring it up
who find themselves on the wrong sides of all of those divides.
You know, policing is hard now. It's real hard.
You know, every day, it's kind of like...
Man, I'm kind of just tired, you know?
Last year, a 12-year-old was shot.
Right here, where...
You see where he was shot, fightin' with another kid from up the street.
I've never... When I pulled up here...
I've never had somebody tell me who did it so quickly.
You know, 'cause they're still people I grew up with who live down here.
What happened to that 12-year-old? - He died.
We have many really vulnerable communities in this country.
So you go to them and ask people, "Do you want to abolish the police?"
And many people say, "No, we'd like more police."
On the other hand, you go to those communities and talk to people
about how they are policed, and they're angry.
And again, that's our failing.
There are ways to help those communities
other than through aggressive carceral policing.
It's just that we don't do it.
I was always a proponent of "More Black cops, we would have less problems."
"Get us a Black Chief, we'll have less problems."
I believed that for 30-somethin' years, right?
I don't think that's the case.
I've lost a lot for just standin' up for Black cops on this department.
It just makes me wonder sometime.
What if I was just one of those guys who just kept my mouth shut
and did my job every day?
Where would I be, right?
Charlie Adams has been a police officer since 1986
and has no plans to retire.
He wants to finish his mission as an inspector with the 4th precinct.
♪ Oh! ♪
♪ Mine eyes have seen ♪
♪ The glory of the co-- ♪
We began as 13 states along the Atlantic seaboard.
We carried freedom with us.
If the polis and the polity are the self-governing democratic subjects,
the police are the shadow force that says,
"We exist to assert authority when you can no longer govern yourselves."
"We exist to control and regulate violence in the society
by arrogating all of that violence to ourselves."
Consistently, the response of law enforcement
to Black demands for respect for our lives,
and our homes, and our families, and our kids,
it's always, "Yeah, fuck that."
"Try... try this... Try this force and see how you like that."
When you think about the police systemically,
and you think about how the police have grown up in the United States
into this massive force...
When you think about not just the police
but the network of prisons, the numbers of people who get arrested,
the numbers of people who have felony convictions,
all that flows from that,
all the people who are related to people who are punished, policed, and in prison,
you're looking at the majority of people in this country, now.
Not the minority, the majority of people in this country.
We are an over-policed society,
and that over-policing means
that the relationship of the police to the people has become entirely skewed.
Instead of growing the numbers of people
who can be seen as part of this self-governing democratic
world of people trying to figure out how to get along
and resolve their conflicts through politics, through protest,
instead becomes increasingly shrunken,
to a core that can be allowed to go about their business
and to an increasingly large group who are under some kind of police supervision.
...see out on exit 161?
Okay, I see it.
One of the first things fascist regimes and totalitarian regimes do
is empower police.
One route is we actually enhance the police power,
this fourth branch of government.
We enhance the powers of the police.
And that spells doom for democracy.
I like to say sometimes, "Think of the most powerful person
you can think of in the United States,"
be it Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton,
if you think they're still in charge of everything secretly.
None of them can pull out a gun and shoot you in the chest.
Every single sworn police officer in the United States of America
has the right, has the power, to pull out a gun and shoot you.
Move! Get back!
Push... Hey!
- He is bleeding! He's bleeding out of his ear!
Get somebody over here! He's bleeding out of his ear!
- Get a medic now. Get a medic.
What the fuck are you walking up on me? I'm over there!
This question of losing our democracy
won't have anything to do with some kind of right-wing demagogue like Donald Trump.
It's gonna have to do with this deep, long history
in which we fail to address
the systemic problem of growing police
at the expense of growing and developing our democratic reflexes
and the supports that we need to operate as a self-governing people.
Here we are a decade after Trayvon Martin, almost a decade after Michael Brown...
and the American people have to make a decision.
If we're gonna engage these issues and have a real conversation
about upending these systems,
which is what many people have said they want to do,
then folks are gonna have to really engage on these questions.
Because these systems are tough.
They're hard. They're complicated.
They're powerful.
Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand."
And the power that is American policing hasn't conceded anything.
If anything, it's doubled and tripled down on that power.
Move! Move!
Move, move, move!
Move! Move!
"Power concedes nothing without a demand."
"It never did, and it never will."
Frederick Douglass.