Why are there 30 Cops in my Backyard?
Dissecting a rotten police system
The screeching sound of tires racing down the street is not exactly the most remarkable sound. But typically it isn’t followed by the cacophonous wail of thirty sirens.
A couple weeks ago, a car sped down the block in front of my duplex in Phillips, Minneapolis, a majority Black neighborhood. Minutes later, approximately thirty police officers arrived, blocking every surrounding intersection with their cruisers, denying entry and exit to all passersby.
Once the perimeter was secured, the cop-infantry deployed, donning bulletproof vests and automatic rifles. They combed through every inch of the neighborhood, including my backyard, looking for a suspect on foot. As the search continued to no avail, a helicopter with a spotlight beam joined from above, adding to the eerie ambience. For hours, the whole neighborhood was under siege.
My mind wandered to the obvious question: What atrocity could have possibly been committed to elicit this response? Kidnapping children? Murdering a senator? With my eyes peeled to the open living room window, eavesdropping on the chatter of the cops stationed on my block, I eventually received the answer: “A suspect shot a car.” No person had been kidnapped or murdered or harmed in any way. But a car had been damaged.
Thirty officers, automatic rifles, attack dogs, a helicopter, occupying the entire neighborhood for hours–all because of property damage. Perhaps most absurdly, they never found the suspect who abandoned their car and evaded thirty cops!
This one instance of police profligacy demonstrates a larger current of dysfunction. The U.S. police system fails with such flagrancy, that even without challenging the underlying premise of a heavily-militarized police force, it is abundantly obvious that the police do not keep people safe. To make the case for demilitarizing, defunding, or abolishing the police, we need not lead with intricate analytical frameworks (although there is certainly a place for this).
I believe there is a window of opportunity to be found in the utter incompetence of the police. Let’s pretend that police in the United States were really good at their jobs–they solved crimes, prevented overdoses, intervened assaults, and obstructed mass shootings. If this were true (which it’s not) and the police did successfully “protect and serve,” (which they don’t) then the underlying racist function of policing in the U.S. might be obscured by occasional and hypothetical “good deeds.” Because these “good deeds” seldom occur and are far overshadowed by failures ranging from pathetic to monstrous, the true objective of the police is clear–enforcing class and racial hierarchy.
Many people, especially the primary targets of police violence–Black people, poor people, Indigenous people, trans people, unhoused people–know this to be true from personal experience. But an elaborate scheme of propaganda and policy distorts reality and manufactures reactionary mentalities among many Americans.
This piece (and much of my writing on Substack) starts from a curiosity about how nonsensical systems attempt to justify themselves and why everyday people defend them. I write from a standpoint of charitability for those who might be susceptible to the misleading narratives of policing in the U.S., because I believe people are capable of changing their minds. I also believe that for movements to succeed, they need to be engaged in the work of mind-changing.
That being said, I respect that interfacing with people who “feel complicated about the police” need not be your focus, especially if your life (unlike mine) is threatened daily by racist policing.
Police executions reach record-highs in 2024
There is ample evidence that police do not keep us safe (unless you are a piece of private capital) In fact, they do the opposite.
In 2024, the police executed 1,260 people, the most in any year over the past decade. This number does not include probable unreported killings of the 2 million people trapped in the U.S. carceral system.
The majority of these murders were in response to non-violent offences or when no crime was reported at all. 154 people were killed for traffic violations and 119 killed during mental health crises. Around 25% of people executed by the police were Black, despite making up only 12% of the U.S. population, meaning Black people are twice as likely as the average American to be the target of police murder.
A few of the 1,260 lives stolen by the police in 2024 are: Destinii Hope, a 2-month-old baby and her mother Maria Pike, both killed in their home; 15-year-old Jazmir Tucker, shot in the back while fleeing police; Gary Solomon Jr., shot for alleged attempted car theft.
Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman, was murdered by police in her home near Springfield, Illinois, on July 6, 2024. Massey called 911 about somebody stalking her outside her home. After searching her yard, two white police deputies entered her home. Massey and the officers spoke in her living room for a few minutes, before one of the officers pointed out that she had a pot of water boiling in the kitchen. Massey went to turn off her stove, when Officer Grayson yelled at Massey to step away from the boiling water. Massey responded with “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” Grayson then unholstered his gun, pointed it at her, and yelled: “You better fucking not, I swear to God I'll fucking shoot you right in your fucking face.” He proceeded to shoot her three times in the head.
The Sangamon County Police Department initially tried to cover up the story, saying she died from a “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” which soon changed to “she was shot by a neighbor,” before body-camera footage eventually revealed the truth.
Photo of Sonya Massey, murdered by the Sangamon County Police.
Ballooning budgets
State and local police budgets in the U.S. add up to $135 billion annually. In Minneapolis, the police budget is $216 million, although apparently not enough for Chief Brian O’Hara who recently requested the city council approve a bump to $230 million.
A 2022 article by organizer-writer Kinjo Kiema pointed out a cogent contradiction about policing in the U.S. “If larger police forces make us safe, then by that logic, the U.S. would already be the safest society in the world as over $115 billion [now $135 billion] is spent on policing a year, a budget larger than any other country’s military budget except for China.”
If policing supposedly reduces crime, and our police budgets are so astronomically large, then why isn’t the United States a peaceful utopia? It turns out that there is zero correlation between police spending and crime rate. A 60-year long study by the Washington Post found that increasing police budgets has no impact whatsoever on crime rates. The police also overwhelmingly fail to solve crimes that have already occurred. Fifty years of data shows that police solve a paltry 2% of major crimes.
If safety is the goal, then militarized policing with colossal budgets is a nonsensical policy prescription.
Perhaps safety is not the goal.
The true function of policing in the U.S.
All of the empirical evidence points to police failing at their stated purpose–keeping people safe. What do they really “protect and serve?”
Understanding how the police developed through history offers valuable insights. Kinjo Kiema writes: “Prisons and policing in the U.S. are the legacy of chattel slavery in the South and protecting the rights of wealthy property owners in the North. Police and prisons in the U.S. didn’t originate out of a genuine desire for public safety but rather to maintain and uphold white supremacy and defend private property.”
From the origin of chattel slavery in the United States, slave patrols were employed by plantation owners and municipal governments to quash uprising and capture enslaved people attempting escape. Following the (partial) abolition of slavery in 1865, many former slave patrols enrolled in newly formed police forces in the South. Others joined vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, who lynched Black people, burnt schools and enforced a reign of terror that was ignored or supported by local police.
While tactics have changed, the primary objective of slave patrols, Klan members and police officers is the same: defending racial capitalism by protecting private property and terrorizing Black people. Today, Police preserve the unequal distribution of resources in our society, including enforcing evictions on those who cannot afford rent, arresting people “who fit the profile,” beating up protestors who disrupt the status quo.
If the police are understood as the enforcers of white supremacy, rather than the protectors of public safety, then these are instances of them succeeding, not failing.
Copaganda & passive voice
Despite police failing to prevent violence and routinely murdering civilians, the image of police as “public servants” persists. There are a few reasons why.
For one, glorifying the police is ingrained in U.S. entertainment culture. Copaganda (cop propaganda) runs rampant on our television channels, streaming services, even Youtube videos made for children. I was at a restaurant with my extended family this winter, sitting next to my two-year old cousin, who was remarkably quiet. I turned and noticed him glued to his iPad, watching a Youtube video titled: “Jason and the fun cop adventure.” Naturally, I had to watch the video myself.
I confess, it was a little funny. The video was about two “criminals” in striped shirts who steal a cop car as the two cops are on a break eating doughnuts. The “criminals” proceed to evade the police and eat their doughnuts. Eventually the cops catch them and the “criminals” are handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser, before being taken to jail. I’m not going to over-analyze a fever-dream-y video meant for toddlers. The point is that entertainment portraying the police as heroes successfully fighting crime is ubiquitous. The Youtube algorithm suggested this video to my cousin and his toddler-brain shockingly could not discern it as copaganda.
Police are often depicted as courageous heroes subjected to constant danger and fighting for their lives, justifying the use of lethal force. However, research shows that police officers are not one of the 20 most dangerous jobs in the United States–that title is claimed by logging workers and oil drill-operators.
The legacy media also insidiously defends the image of the police. For example, when outlets such as the New York Times report on police killings, they consistently use the passive voice, while using active voice to depict the subsequent ruckus of dissenters.
Other passive-voice headlines include: “Man dies after officer-involved shooting” and “Man dies on subway after being placed in chokehold.” The purpose of both passive-voice usage and copaganda is to maintain the image of the police as a necessary ingredient of American society.
The unyielding defense of police by the media (and politicians) beget reactionary attitudes about policing in the United States. Oftentimes, our critiques are met with: “So what, you want crime to run rampant with nobody responsible for locking up murderers and rapists?” I know that for many of us, this language is upsetting. It falsely assumes that 1) police do prevent violence, 2) a carceral system is the optimal mechanism for safety. Reactionary mentalities reflect the pervasive idea that our police system is both incorrigible and inevitable.
Abolition
The summer of 2020 was a unique flashpoint in U.S. history during which racist policing in the U.S. was challenged on an unprecedented scale. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police Department, sparking a global uprising. Three days later, abolitionist protestors in Minneapolis overwhelmed the 3rd police precinct, forcing cops to flee as they burnt the precinct to the ground.
The media scrambled to portray these actions as senseless riots, but George Floyd’s final words, “I Can’t Breathe,” was a radicalizing moment that laid bare the necessity of transformative change. Abolition was actually on the table, at least on the surface.
While some liberal politicians, including Kamala Harris, paid lip service to the idea of defunding the police, policy never matched rhetoric, and the uniparty consensus for “law and order” soon became more staunch than ever. Police budgets and police murders have both increased since 2020. Despite elected officials refusing to concede ground to the 2020 uprisings, there is still hope to be found in the abolitionist movement.
The cat is out of the bag. Millions of people learned about and truly considered abolition for the first time (including myself). And once one learns about the reality of policing in the United States, the markers of its rot are omnipresent. From there, a world of reimagining public safety possibilities opens up. We stand on the shoulders of visionary abolitionist organizers and thinkers. From the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Abolitionist Geography, to Mariame Kaba’s We do this 'til we free us, and Andrea Ritchie’s Practicing New Worlds, it is apparent that a police system rooted in racial violence is no more inevitable than the movement to abolish it.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about passive voice use by fascists when he talked about the language of apparent clarity and the language of real clarity. The language of apparent clarity uses the passive voice to disguise the perpetrators of violence, as in “the undesirable elements were eliminated” versus “the secret police shot the protesters.”