You are here

Policing and Slavery

Policing is a racist institution, rooted in slavery. The first police forces in America were runaway slave patrols. Later on, police were used to beat down striking workers—to force workers to work, to enslave them. And now the police system is still a runaway slave patrol, that arrests people for victimless crimes and throws them in jail to be slaves in the Prison Industrial Complex, because prison slave labor is a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry! There are no good cops because the institution itself is unjust. "The thing! The thing itself is the abuse!"

To this day, our system is still structured in such a way that it ensures that the majority of people in prisons are people of color. Black people routinely receive harsher punishments for similar crimes. Drugs used in black communities are treated as worse than the drugs popular among whites, even when the drugs are actually the same drug (crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine). And racial bias, even when it is subconscious, guarantees that blacks are more likely to get stopped, to get shot by a cop, etc.