WHY THEY RUN FROM POLICE…
One age-old question asked when people try to run from the police, and things go wrong is, ‘why do they run’? The question ‘pretends’ not to understand the most basic instinct of all living species to be free.
If we set aside that pretense, in many cases, when someone runs from the police, even if they are guilty of a crime, they stand a chance of getting away with it.….…at least in their mind at the time.
Years ago, I wrote an article about some of the perils law enforcement face in Jamaica, where I was engaged in law enforcement for a decade, not the least of which was the mountainous terrain. Even in cases of murder, if there are no eyewitnesses to the crime, once the offender jumps into a gully, he stands an almost 100% chance of getting away with that murder.
Why do they run? To understand why people run from law enforcement in the United States, we must first understand what law enforcement has been from its inception to black Americans.
Let’s begin!!!
On the website of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the following paragraph.
The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the “Slave Patrol.” The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included using excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.
https://mikebeckles.com/it-is-about-the-warrior-cop-it-cannot-be-fixed/
PATROLLER’S OATH
“I [patroller’s name], do swear, that I will as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God.”
North Carolina Slave Patrol Oath.
https://mikebeckles.com/5‑fired-memphis-officers-charged-with-murder-in-death-of-tyre-nichols/https://mikebeckles.com/black-memphis-man-dead-after-alleged-police-beating/
The NAACP argues: By the 1900s, local municipalities began establishing police departments to enforce local laws in the East and Midwest, including Jim Crow laws. Local municipalities leaned on police to enforce and exert excessive brutality on African Americans who violated any Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow Laws continued through the end of the 1960s. End quote.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with the NAACP that Jim Crow Laws ended toward the end of the 1960s. Jim Crow laws and the method of enforcement remain to this day.
So for one to get an appreciation for why black people run from the police, one has to understand at least what policing has been to black Americans as opposed to their white counterparts.
Black people running from the police is an act of freedom, just as the enslaved black people ran from the oppressive monstrosity of slavery and the genocidal system that kept them enslaved.
To argue, ‘all they have to do is to comply with the police,’ is the most uniquely white privileged thing to say. It creates the false impression that the system looks at blacks the same way as it does whites.
To assert that compliance with the police guarantees equal and fair treatment is by itself steeped in either ignorance or delusion.
To a young black male being stopped by the police, complying could easily mean being arrested on trumped-up felony charges resulting in years in prison for crimes they never committed. For them flight is their only recourse. As it was for their ancestors fleeing the slave patrols, it is equally the same today; being caught has similar consequences, yes, even death.
For those of you who would come out the side of your faces to question the veracity of the latter statement, tell it to Tyre Nichols.
The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States, purposely retained a clause reinforcing the continuation of slavery.
Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. See, e.g., Clyatt v. United States, 197 U.S. 207, 215 (1905).
One doesn’t need a law degree from Harvard to recognize that slavery has not ended conceptually, based on section (1). To any young black male, whether he committed a crime or not, being stopped by the police is a clear and present danger of going into slavery.
It is not called slavery today; it is the prison industrial complex. Those who coined the language in section (1) of the 13th Amendment were fully aware of what they were doing in the language. ‘Except as a punishment for crime,’ understanding that the mass incarceration of blacks would be the next iteration and continuation of the enslavement of black Americans.
https://mikebeckles.com/court-sanctioned-pre-textual-traffic-stops-a-tool-police-use-to-escalate-violence/
https://mikebeckles.com/police-cannot-rid-themselves-of-the-racism-embedded-in-their-psyches/
Many well-intentioned commentators on police violence, including yours, truly have, from time to time, argued that American policing is broken. Yes, in terms of how police officers are supposed to operate, it can reasonably be argued it is broken.
In terms of the intent behind the way policing was designed to work in the United States, it is working exactly as modeled.
What makes it so offensive to the sensibilities of conscientious people is the gruesome barbarism of it when it is held up to the light of scrutiny.
No one should be delusional about how police violence is viewed among a large subset of the white community, however.
Operating from the anonymity of their keyboards, in group chats, and on message boards, a truer picture of who they are emerges. From this rancid pool comes cops, prosecutors, judges, politicians, and their supporters that stand in the way of reform.
When the laws are written to impact a particular group directly and enforced with the same mindset, the results are what we have with the incarceration rate of blacks in the United States.
Scratching the surface of the definitive intent to lock up black Americans puts to rest the lie that blacks are more likely to commit crimes than whites who are not policed the same way.
Why do they run?
The next time you ask that question, remember what you just read.
https://mikebeckles.com/white-women-continue-to-glorify-in-the-destruction-of-black-bodies/