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See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Police No Evil (Race and Disparities in law enforcement)
Lawfare
Jennifer Earl, David Cunningham
Sunday, January 31, 2021, 10:01 AM
Editor’s Note: One of the many upsetting aspects of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was the passive police performance, which stands in stark contrast to the aggressive security response to Black Lives Matter protests, among others. The University of Arizona’s Jennifer Earl and David Cunningham of Washington University in St. Louis explain this common pattern of underestimating the threat from right-wing extremists, and they offer valuable suggestions on how to improve policing.
Excerpt:
To anyone tuned in to publicly accessible right-wing organizing spaces, the run-up to Jan. 6 brought countless warnings that violence was exceptionally likely. But even so, the U.S. Capitol Police failed to take seriously threats associated with constituencies that had also supported Blue Lives Matter and trumpeted a respect for law and order. Steven Sund, the head of the Capitol Police at the time and a veteran of many major protests and national special security events, reportedly downplayed online coordination of violence, saying, “You might see rhetoric on social media. We had seen that many times before …. People say a lot of things online.” As a private security analyst, R.P. Eddy, told the New York Times, “There was a failure among law enforcement to imagine that people who ‘look like me’ would do this.”
Disparities between police preparation and action at the Capitol versus at recent Black Lives Matter protests are not just unfair and dangerous; they also reflect the same shortcomings. Throughout the past summer, departments across the nation attempted to justify their excessively aggressive policing as responding to intelligence about anarchists and antifa—intelligence that was low quality and demonstrably wrong. Correcting this bias is not only a question of how to protect the First Amendment rights of nonviolent protesters who don’t look like or share common cause with police, although that aim is certainly important. Such imbalances also hinder the ability of police to effectively do their jobs when they focus on fake targets and discount real ones, leaving communities and capitols unsafe, particularly given the grave threat posed by white supremacist and other far-right violence in today’s America.
Grappling with the racialized and politicized roots of these intelligence biases requires a deeper reckoning with how policing functions as an institution, but as a starting point we can suggest a few productive priorities:
Remove white supremacists from law enforcement. From a personnel standpoint, correcting the intelligence carnival mirror is impossible so long as officers and departments are blinded by white supremacy. In 2006, the FBI warned of the dangers of supremacist-affiliated police, but most departments still lack policies against affiliating with white supremacist organizations, don’t vet candidates or sworn officers for racist views and affiliations, don’t deny promotions to officers who promote and recruit for racist organizations within departments, and don’t listen to police of color who report on bad cops. In addition to poor intelligence assessments, this can lead to both on-duty and off-duty officers supporting or aiding white rioters and officer
Disparities between police preparation and action at the Capitol versus at recent Black Lives Matter protests are not just unfair and dangerous; they also reflect the same shortcomings. Throughout the past summer, departments across the nation attempted to justify their excessively aggressive policing as responding to intelligence about anarchists and antifa—intelligence that was low quality and demonstrably wrong. Correcting this bias is not only a question of how to protect the First Amendment rights of nonviolent protesters who don’t look like or share common cause with police, although that aim is certainly important. Such imbalances also hinder the ability of police to effectively do their jobs when they focus on fake targets and discount real ones, leaving communities and capitols unsafe, particularly given the grave threat posed by white supremacist and other far-right violence in today’s America.
Grappling with the racialized and politicized roots of these intelligence biases requires a deeper reckoning with how policing functions as an institution, but as a starting point we can suggest a few productive priorities:
Remove white supremacists from law enforcement. From a personnel standpoint, correcting the intelligence carnival mirror is impossible so long as officers and departments are blinded by white supremacy. In 2006, the FBI warned of the dangers of supremacist-affiliated police, but most departments still lack policies against affiliating with white supremacist organizations, don’t vet candidates or sworn officers for racist views and affiliations, don’t deny promotions to officers who promote and recruit for racist organizations within departments, and don’t listen to police of color who report on bad cops. In addition to poor intelligence assessments, this can lead to both on-duty and off-duty officers supporting or aiding white rioters and officer
Read more at link: https://www.lawfareblog.com/see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-police-no-evil
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