BRITTANY ANDERSON
A CONVERSATION ON POLICE CULTURE
Looking at police brutality from a solutions journalism perspective
This story was written as my senior capstone project at Texas State University. I would like to extend a huge thank you to Holly Wise, my professor, for guiding me through the process and helping me become a better journalist, and my interviewees, Cassie Smith, Scott Bowman, Dwonna Goldstone, Martha Mercado and Mo Amalbert for taking time out of their day to speak with me and share their stories and perspectives.
Featured image by Roman Koester.
By Brittany Anderson
bea48@txstate.edu
Published July 2020
Aiyana Stanley-Jones. Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Elijah McClain. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd.
These are just a few of the names that have triggered the conversation surrounding systemic police reform over the last several years, and recent nationwide protests have called for major police reform to combat police brutality and systemic racism that the Black community has faced for centuries.
As people continue to speak out about issues within the policing system, the question remains of what solutions can be implemented that keep the community's best interests in mind while undoing years of racist practices.
Slavery Roots
Policing in the United States can be dated back to as early as 1636 with the creation of “night watches” in Boston. Other cities followed in the years after. These watches were the precursors of police departments, acting as a community-led means of protection.
In 1704, the colony of present-day South Carolina created the first “slave patrol,” a practice that spread into the other colonies. According to Dr. Gary Potter, professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, slave patrols existed as a way to chase, apprehend and return runaway slaves to their owners, as well as create organized terror in order to deter slave revolts. Slaves were subject to being questioned, searched, flogged and separated from their families if placed on the auction block once returned to their masters.
While the first publicly-funded, organized police force was formed in 1838 in Boston, this vigilante-style of patrolling lasted well after the Civil War. Due to growing urbanization, different regions used different methods of policing, and Southern police departments in particular used these same slave patrol tactics on freed slaves to enforce Jim Crow laws.
Despite historical moments like the Civil Rights Movement that shifted the culture surrounding racism, the years of systemic racism that built institutions like law enforcement continue to have detrimental effects on the Black community.
Dr. Scott Bowman, an associate professor in Texas State University's School of Criminal Justice, says he teaches his criminal justice students using a holistic approach.
“My classes really talk about some of the larger factors that influence criminal justice outcomes, like socioeconomic status, implicit bias and how we construct and deconstruct race,” Bowman said. “We also talk about politics, the media and public opinion, and how all of those things shape the legislation that is often placed upon police departments. None of it is bashing anybody and it’s definitely not pointing fingers. It’s recognizing that the police as a function are a cog in a much bigger wheel. It’s an understanding for them that they’re not going to move into criminal justice jobs in a bubble. There’s history that influences the kind of social and symbolic interactions and microaggressions that take place in policing. So much of it is really saying, 'Don't take a lot of this personally; it's been around for a lot longer than you have.' It’s teaching them how to be human and do the job.”
Policing, as Texas State's School of Social Work lecturer Cassie Smith sees it, has undergone a transformation from its intended design to how it operates now.
“Obviously, policing has transitioned in its synchronism and what it means to be a part of a police system,” Smith said. “The ultimate job is to serve and protect. What we’re seeing now is this shift. Over the last few decades, these old ways of doing things that may have once gotten the job done or were a band-aid for issues are no longer working.”
As such, communities are calling for modern-day solutions to fix centuries-old problems.
Reform for the 21st Century
The idea of police reform is layered and complex. Some push for community policing and collaboration efforts, others want to defund police departments, and abolitionists are set on dismantling and reconfiguring the institution as a whole.
According to data from The Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform, 37 states allow their officers to work before attending basic training. Additionally, the average department requires only 656 hours of basic training and 15 hours of field training.
“There should be a variety of things that are tested before somebody becomes a police officer,” Bowman said. “There are professions that take much longer to start a career in than policing. We give police officers the license to take a life, so there are a whole host of things that should come up on the training side."
Dr. Dwonna Goldstone, director of the African American Studies program at Texas State, believes that changing the culture of police is at the heart of creating fundamental change within the system.
“We need to change the kind of people who go into policing,” Goldstone said. “I think if we had social workers, psychology majors, English majors, history majors—liberal arts majors— in policing and not just criminal justice majors, it would maybe change how the police see people.”
A similar effort takes the shape of community policing, which keeps police and civilian culture in mind. These policing strategies are designed to allocate a small number of officers in one area so they can focus on building relationships and working closely with community members. The intent is to build trust through less aggressive and pervasive practices.
One of the most prominent examples of community policing comes from Patrick Skinner, a former CIA Operations officer who is now a community police officer in Savannah, Ga.
Skinner views his role as a community police officer as a responsibility to first and foremost be a good neighbor. Skinner understands the complexity of policing a community, and works towards cultivating personal connections with his neighbors.
Several police departments in Texas have adopted community policing programs, including cities like Arlington, Dallas, Flower Mound and San Antonio. However, these efforts alone are not always sufficient.
According to APM Reports in 2017, 34 states do not require de-escalation training for officers. This kind of training teaches officers how to slow down and use communication techniques that will defuse hostile situations. Without statewide mandates on things like de-escalation training, law enforcement expectations and citizen experiences will vary between cities.
The Use of Force Project has collected data on 100 of America’s largest police departments to review their use of force policies and determine if they include useful protections against police violence. Austin’s 2015 policy, for example, included many lax use of force policies: the department did not require de-escalation, did not have a ban on chokeholds and strongholds, did not require officers to exhaust all other means before shooting, and did not require comprehensive force reporting.
Smith says her experience as a social worker has shaped her perspective on the need for collaboration between police departments and fields like social work, and that by doing so would create a kind of de-escalation strategy in itself.
“Our lens is person and environment,” Smith said. “For example, when we look at a person who is engaging in drug behavior, we’re looking at what happened. Why is that person involved in using drugs? We look at a person and their environment because that is going to reveal so much. It’s very complex. In essence, there could be true rehabilitation instead of punishment. For decades, what we’ve seen is all punishment. But that’s where social workers can come in.”
In Dallas, collaboration efforts are already being made. In 2018, Dallas’ police and fire departments teamed up with Parkland Hospital to implement a program called RIGHT Care that created a mental health team— consisting of a paramedic, an officer and a social worker— to respond to mental health crises calls.
Dallas receives thousands of mental health service calls each month. Five police officers are dispatched, which rarely result in referrals to proper mental health care services. The goal of this program is to break this cycle by addressing the root causes first and keep vulnerable populations out of jails and hospitals.
In 2018, the program diverted 31% of the calls they responded to towards useful community resources. Since its implementation, there has been a 20% drop in psych patients in Parkland’s ER.
Some police forces have incorporated a mental health unit into their department. San Marcos Police Department’s mental health unit consists of a corporal, two officers and a certified therapy K-9, and they work with the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team (MCOT) and Hill Country MHDD in crisis situations.
Bowman says that from a reform standpoint, collaboration is a necessity.
“The primary decision should not be to arrest or not arrest,” Bowman said. “There should be some middle ground that allows for alternatives so somebody can avoid the criminal justice system, because it doesn’t help people like it was designed to help.”
Bowman says that overall, it’s critical to not look at police reform with clouded vision.
“If you live in a place where you can say, ‘My police department doesn’t act like that,’ you fall into a mold of comfort and privilege,” he said. “That’s a big part of what the masses need to understand. Your police may not do those things, because it’s a smaller community, or because they have different mandates. But there are police throughout the U.S. in cities that need to wake up.”
Smith believes one of the most important parts of reform comes from instilling a sense of integrity within forces through honest dialogue and active action.
“If an officer has been there for 30 years but they have a track record of incidents and are still being allowed to go out on the force and respond, whose fault is that?” Smith said. “That’s a person in a position of power allowing for that to continue. If there are ordinances from federal, state or local governments that they have to comply with, there needs to be a fault if they don’t. It will shift and shape the culture. There has to be integrity.”
Defund: Why Words Matter
The Brookings Institution explains the notion of defunding the police as reallocating or redirecting funds away from police departments to other government agencies or community programs that are being funded by local municipalities.
“There are a lot of people that keep saying, ‘Oh, defunding? You mean take away all their money?’” Bowman said. “No, that’s not what it means. Defunding is not problematic in and of itself other than knowing where those funds are going to go that you’re taking away from the police. If it’s going to community organizations that can step in and ease the policing burden, then nobody should have a problem with that.”
Despite the true purpose behind defunding the police, Goldstone recognizes that using words like ‘defund’ can warp the message’s intent.
“The words matter,” Goldstone said. “I understand the language of defunding, but I think we need to shift towards saying what we really want, which is reallocating how money is used on police.”
Bowman says that policing has stood as a barrier between communities and resources that would address the root of their problems.
“A big part of one of the biggest changes in policing, certainly over the past 40 years, has been defunding homeless, defunding mental health, defunding after school programs and then saying, ‘Okay, what we need to do is put police in that space,’ or, ‘I'm going to train officers but not necessarily with the capacity you would a social worker or a nurse,’” Bowman said. “It goes beyond the control of police departments because they do what city budgets tell them to.”
Proponents of defunding the police view taking city budgets like that of Austin and reworking the police budget so other departments are given more resources, creating a streamlined effort towards removing the need of police and prisons as answers to community problems.
In light of recent demands, the Austin City Council reconvened in June and voted unanimously to direct the city manager to propose reductions to the police department’s budget for the next year, as well as approved a set of measures that will limit police officers’ use of force.
Abolish: Death of the Institution
Abolition has been at the forefront of police reform conversations for a long time, and it is often considered to be one of the more radical solutions.
Bowman says police abolition is not as clear cut as one might think, and that the idea is rooted in the idea of shifting the narrative of policing by philosophically looking at the institution at hand.
“Abolition means we’re going to ask our police officers to do different things,” Bowman said. “We’re going to invite other people to be in our police department that were largely absent in the past. You may call it a police department when you’re done, or you may call it something else. But we’re abolishing what existed before that. It’s the death of the institution. It’s been this way for centuries, both in function and discriminatory practices. It’s saying there has to be something different and better.”
In 2012, the notoriously crime-ridden city of Camden, New Jersey abolished their police force due to corruption and violence and created a new county department. In light of recent reform conversations, this city has been brought back to the spotlight as a potential abolition success story.
Although Camden has experienced 42% less violent crimes in its eight years of disbandment, this cannot be totally attributed to abolition. The initial disbanding of the department actually increased the number of police officers, thus creating a surge in broken windows policing.
It was only after pressure was placed from local activists that led the department to rewrite their use-of-force policies over time: in 2015, they implemented a de-escalation mentoring program, and in 2019, they began requiring officers to intercept if another officer was using inappropriate force.
Bowman echoes similar sentiments as seen in Camden: communities are going to have to be the ones to spearhead reform efforts, which is why abolition is looked at as a solution.
“I don’t think [reform] can come from the police themselves,” Bowman said. “I say that because police departments have had 100 years to change what they do. They at any point had the opportunity to look at each other and say, ‘Either we’re being asked to do too much, or there are certain things that we’re going to refuse to do.’ Even as a union they never said, ‘We’re going to call on certain things to happen to make our jobs easier.’ It’s just been: keep going, keep moving forward, keep doing what we do. I think it has to come from activists, and criminologists, and sociologists. It has to come from a critical mass.”
Although Camden is not the pinnacle of police abolition, the efforts from the community show that with the right leadership and resources, “starting over” from the ground up offers a compelling solution towards addressing police and city violence.
Bowman also believes that “abolition” in the truest sense of the word is likely not feasible.
“It’s very unlikely there’s going to be zero police in a city,” Bowman said. “Certainly not in a large city. There’s going to be somebody that has to have the ability to make arrests, use discretion, write speeding tickets, etc. Those things are not ever going away.”
Community Voices
Texas State senior Mo Amalbert, a B.F.A Acting and B.S. Electronic Media and Mass Communication major, looks at police reform from her perspective as a Black artist.
“Reform looks like more background checks, not just in terms of logistics and paper tests, but testing of character,” Amalbert said. “If you look at acting or performing arts programs, yes, they look at what you can do and your talent, but they also look at your person. They analyze how your human will react in certain situations. If anything, I’d love to see more simulations where they’re in high stakes situations and are observed from that.”
As a Black woman, Amalbert overall feels failed by the system.
“It shouldn’t be like this,” Amalbert said. “We can’t trust them. Even if you’re a 'good' cop, there’s been too many situations for us to take a chance on you being good. They've done the opposite of what we’ve trusted them to do.”
Amalbert says that the easiest thing people who want to learn can do is research— and usually, it’s as simple as watching a film on Netflix.
“Look at art,” Amalbert. “It’s made to talk about the Black experience, and it’s so well done. It’s there and ready for you. The list is endless. Don’t put pressure on your Black friend to articulate the experience of the entire community when we have artists and creatives who have produced work that explain your questions.”
Goldstone says that as a Black woman, the microaggressions she and others experience have become normalized.
“I certainly have stories,” Goldstone said. “I think for a lot of Black people it happens so often that when you ask us it’s like, ‘Eh, I don’t know.’ I get a lot of people who don’t assume I have a PhD. I was at my last school for 18 years, and one of the things I noticed was I was doing all this work and never getting recognized. There was a lot of white privilege; white people getting all of the accolades.”
Martha Mercado, a graduate Social Work student at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, views allyship as an important component of working towards police reform.
“I prefer to view myself as an ‘accomplice’ because that’s more of an active role,” Mercado said. “I think ‘ally’ can sometimes be too passive. Being an accomplice involves conspiring with Black revolutionaries, activists and leaders to help their vision come true. It's being involved through everyday anti-racism actions.”
Mercado, who is Latinx, stresses the importance of self-awareness for white people and non-Black people of color.
“It’s really important to listen with an open heart and mind,” Mercado said. “The world does operate in a different way based on your skin color. If you don’t understand what oppression is and the systemic component of it, it’s hard for someone to be an ally or an accomplice.”