Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Mariame Kaba. Kaba is a Chicago-based organizer and educator who directs Project NIA, a grassroots juvenile justice organization.
In 1900, a 15 year old black New Yorker named Harry Reed recounted his ‘clubbing’ at the hands of police:
“We five boys were sitting on the seat of an open Eighth Avenue car. When we got at the corner of 37th Street and Eighth Avenue we saw a mob, and the mob called out, ‘There’s some niggers; lynch them!’ and they made a rush for the car, and I jumped out. Then I ran up to the corner of 38th Street, where there were four policemen. Of these four policemen three were standing on the corner, and one ran into the street to stop me. When he saw me coming I was running hard, as fast as I could. When I reached this policeman in the street, he hit me over the head with his club. He hit me twice over the head, and I saw the other three policemen coming, and I fell down. I thought if I fell down the others would not attack me, but they did; they hit me over the legs and on my arm, when I raised it up to protect my head, and they hit me in the back…”
Harry’s story was not exceptional. Historian Marilynn S. Johnson suggests that urban residents began complaining and organizing against police brutality in the mid-19th century. In fact, the first major investigation into police misconduct was launched in 1894 in New York City through the Lexow Committee. This committee documented police abuses including corruption, brutality and perjury. In the late 19th century, the most common complaint from urban residents against the police was about “clubbing” which was “the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks.”
On August 9, 18-year-old Michael Brown was murdered by a police officer in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in front of several witnesses. A hundred and fourteen years separate Reed’s clubbing and Brown’s killing. Over that time span, the hostile relationship between black people and the police is unchanged. As a result, black people in general and especially young blacks profoundly distrust cops. This week, the Black Youth Project released a report summarizing research on young black people’s perceptions and experiences of policing. The key findings are unsurprising:
- Black youth report the highest rate of harassment by the police (54.4%), nearly twice the rates of other young people.
- Less than half of black youth (44.2 percent) trust the police, compared with 71.5 percent of white youth, 59.6 percent of Latino youth, and 76.1 percent of Asian American youth.
- Substantially fewer black youth believe the police in their neighborhood are there to protect them (66.1 percent) compared to young people from other racial and ethnic groups.
These findings are confirmed by both anecdotal evidence and various studies. In 2000, for example, Dr. Delores D. Jones-Brown surveyed 125 black male high students regarding attitudes toward and contacts with the police. Her study found that a majority of respondents reported experiencing the police as a repressive rather than facilitative agent in their own lives and in the lives of their friends and relatives. The black male youths complained of being stopped because they were unjustly suspected of dealing drugs or because they were out past curfew or because they were in the “wrong” neighborhood.
Of course, young black men are not the only ones to have negative encounters with police. Black girls and young women often complain about being ‘hassled’ and sometimes sexually assaulted by law enforcement. A young black woman shared a particularly harrowing assault by a cop with members of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) as part of their Bad Encounter Line research:
“I was walking to the bus when a police officer called out and said, ‘Hey you come here girl with all of that ass.’ I ignored the comment unaware of where it was coming from until he pulled up on the curb to block my path in his undercover cop car. He jumps out and yells ‘didn’t you hear me calling you girl? I replied