In The Black Community The Police Is Usually A Greater Danger Than Regular Criminals

Those who would give up essen­tial Liberty to pur­chase a lit­tle tem­po­rary Safety deserve nei­ther Liberty nor Safety. (Benjamin Franklin).
Policing in the United States was nev­er intend­ed to secure the Black pop­u­la­tion. It was cre­at­ed from the prac­tice of slave catch­ing. Slave-catch­ing was done by poor whites, most of whom were for­mer white bonds­men who were kicked out of Europe to the colonies by European pow­ers. This prac­tice of bond­ed slav­ery con­tin­ued up to the civ­il war. 
The poor whites who became plan­ta­tion over­seers and slave catch­ers had no love for the rich plan­ta­tion own­ers. Still, they were more than hap­py to accept the roles of slave catch­ers and over­seers, not just for the perks of sex­u­al pow­er it gave them over Black women and the vio­lence they vis­it­ed over Black men whom they hat­ed the most, but because it gave them a sense of pow­er, some­thing they envied about the planter class.
Replete with guns, whips, and vicious dogs, the slave catch­er was a force of ter­ror against Black enslaved peo­ple who har­bored the thought of flee­ing slavery.
Today polic­ing has not evolved much except that it has got­ten a more sophis­ti­cat­ed arse­nal of tools to harass the African-American population.
When we say ‘defund the police,’ those who ben­e­fit from the ser­vices of the role of police know exact­ly what we mean. Still, they fight vehe­ment­ly, using dis­tor­tions and dis­in­for­ma­tion to ensure that instead of scal­ing back the expens­es wast­ed on police depart­ments, more mon­ey is poured into policing.

Even those who claim to be friend­ly to the Black com­mu­ni­ty fold to the dis­in­for­ma­tion out of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy and vote to give more, rather than less mon­ey, to polic­ing. This usu­al­ly means few­er dol­lars for oth­er, more impor­tant func­tions the com­mu­ni­ty needs. But it suits the white pow­er class whose only inter­est is to ensure Blacks are kept in their place.
At the same time, res­i­dents in large cities, usu­al­ly pop­u­lat­ed heav­i­ly by Black cit­i­zens, are expo­nen­tial­ly more ter­ri­fied of police than they are of oth­er crim­i­nals. The sad real­i­ty is that ordi­nary crim­i­nals are usu­al­ly arrest­ed and made to pay for their crimes. Criminal cops are sel­dom held account­able, and even when arrest­ed and pros­e­cut­ed for the most egre­gious crimes, judges go out of their way to give them lighter rather than harsh­er sentences.
Consequently, the African-American com­mu­ni­ty has pre­cious lit­tle faith in the sys­tem and an even greater hatred for the idea of polic­ing, and under­stand­ably so.
The NYC​.Gov web­site claims that the New York City Police Department has (approx­i­mate­ly) 34,000 cops, which means one of two things, either the Agency has no idea how many mem­bers it has, which I do not believe is the case, or it delib­er­ate­ly fudges the num­bers it reveals to the pub­lic so it can con­tin­ue to make the case to jus­ti­fy hir­ing more and more peo­ple to that stand­ing army.
Despite the 34,000-man-strong stand­ing mili­tia that is the New York City Police Department, crime con­tin­ues to be a major prob­lem in the city of over 8 mil­lion res­i­dents. If the police were the solu­tion to end­ing crime, New York City would be crime free.
Many of the assaults and oth­er crimes com­mit­ted in New York City are com­mit­ted by the army of uni­formed thugs who roll upon inno­cent youths in their neigh­bor­hoods, harass, bru­tal­ize, and arrest them for com­mit­ting no crimes. That is not to say there aren’t vio­lent civil­ians. Still, the prob­lem is made expo­nen­tial­ly more volatile by the police, who are seen as a source of ter­ror for young men whose only crimes are their black skin and liv­ing in their neighborhoods.

One com­mu­ni­ty in Brooklyn is exper­i­ment­ing with the idea of not call­ing the police. Men in the com­mu­ni­ty are step­ping up to the plate and pro­tect­ing their com­mu­ni­ty from the civil­ian preda­tors who prey on the weak as well as the uni­formed thugs who ter­ror­ize their com­mu­ni­ty and who the res­i­dents are more ter­ri­fied of than the ordi­nary criminals.
See the sto­ry here:https://​news​.yahoo​.com/​h​a​p​p​e​n​e​d​-​b​r​o​o​k​l​y​n​-​n​e​i​g​h​b​o​r​h​o​o​d​-​p​o​l​i​c​e​d​-​i​t​s​e​l​f​-​1​5​3​0​5​8​7​0​5​.​h​tml

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.