Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

very much like their previous statuS.29 When Democrats attained control ofstate legislatures and local governments, they passed a series of "Black Codes"designed to regulate the former slaves and restore a system of White supremacy-basednot on the private institution of slavery, but on publicly establishedsegregation.o Black people were, whether by law, custom, or Klan intimidation,commonly forbidden to own land, run businesses, work on railroads, changeemployers, travel, or voteY This was termed, in the parlance of Southern Whites,"Redemption." For Black people, it was more like damnation.SLAVE PATROLS REVI SITEDDuring the Reconstruction period, the line between legal and extra-legal authoritybecame extremely hazy. The Klan took on criminal violence in the defenseof an archaic view of law and order, and the local authorities-especially thepolice-were either incapable or unwilling to challenge them. In many cases,the police were actually complicit with Klan violence, and it seemed that the twoorganizations pursued the same ends, sometimes using the same means. Thesecommon features were not arrived at by chance. Both the police and the Klanwere adaptations of an earlier and deeply entrenched Southern institution-theslave patrols.32In the new regime of Reconstruction, Southern whites were forced to adoptlaws and policing methods that appeared racially unbiased, but they reliedupon practices derived from slave patrols and their old laws that had traditionallytargeted blacks for violence. To resolve this apparent contradiction,the more random and ruthless aspects of slave patrolling passed into thehands of vigilante groups like the Klan . ... Meanwhile, policemen in Southerntowns continued to carry out those aspects of urban slave patrolling thatseemed race-neutral but that in reality were applied selectively. Police sawthat nightly curfews and vagrancy laws kept blacks off city streets, just aspatrollers had done in the colonial and antebellum eras.33The slave patrols helped form the character of both the police and the Klan.like the slave patrols, the Klan was organized locally, operated mostly at night,drew its members from every class of White society, enforced a pass system andcurfew, broke up Black social gatherings and meetings, searched homes, seizedweapons, and enforced its demands through violence and intimidation.34 A formerslave, J. T. Tims, remarked, 'There wasn't no difference between the patrolsand the Ku Klux that I know of. If th'd ketch you, they all would whip you."')As a part of this same tradition, minorities (especially Black people) becamethe objects of police control,36 the targets of brutality, and the victims of neglect37Perhaps the clearest inheritance from this tradition is the racial characterizationof criminality-the criminalizing of people of color, and Black people especially.Presently understood in terms of "profiling," the practice is much older than thecurrent controversy. Under slavery, "Bondsmen could easily be distinguishedby their race and thus became easy and immediate targets of racial brutality."38The only thing new about racial profiling is the term, which makes prejudicialharassment seem procedural, technical, even scientific.HI