With a new week comes a new set of citizens killed in the land of the free and the home of the brave. On July 5, Alton Sterling was shot in the chest in Louisiana at point-blank range while subdued by two police officers.
On July 6, Philando Castile was shot multiple times by another officer after being pulled over.
In response to the two shootings, Micah Johnson shot 12 police officers and two civilians in Dallas, killing five.
Carl Weinberg, adjunct associate professor in the Department of History, whose research interests include labor history, and modern social and political history, said, “Despite it going on for hundreds of years, what’s changed with police brutality in the last couple of years is that it’s become more visible.”
Since George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal of the murder of Trayvon Martin, Weinberg said the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement has finally propelled the subject of police brutality into the forefront of the national discussion.
“The professional police force arose out of the intense battles with the labor movement in the late 19th century,” he said. “They are not policing corporate boardrooms,” where especially in the financial industry, reside the white-collar criminals who commit some of the biggest racketeering in the United States, whose actions sometimes go unpunished, as in the case of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008.
Though police officers around the country undoubtedly put their lives on the line every day to deter crime and maintain order, Weinberg made it clear that historically, they have only targeted certain types of criminals.
“They have acted as an institution to keep working-class people in line, regardless of what their skin color is,” he said.
Amrita Myers, associate professor of the Department of History, whose research interests include the study of black women, African-American history and 19th century U.S. history, views the situation differently than Weinberg.
“This is not about good apples and bad apples,” she said. “I think this is about a bad apple barrel. In the colonies, police forces were created as slave-patrols, and to protect white people’s ownership of slaves.”
Myers said because of this fact, our judicial and police systems are inherently built on white supremacy.
After watching the video of Castile’s murder, she called last week “one of the most difficult weeks I have experienced as an adult.”
Myers said she could not bring herself to go to work or sleep and devoted two days to mourning, crying and praying because of the news.
“Cops don’t give suspects the chance to defend themselves because they’re dead,” she said.
Myers condemns all forms of violence and said police officers go through training in order to de-escalate situations, arrest suspects and allow the judicial system to charge them with the appropriate sentence.
“This is not a system that is adhering to even the basic premises of the protections of the Constitution,” she said, as police officers simultaneously act as “judge, jury, and executioner,” often without repercussions.
“I truly hope, from the bottom of my heart, that nobody you love becomes a victim of police brutality,” Myers said. “What I don’t want is for them to have to go through something like that in order to be woken up.”
