@Tamerlane I see at least three related questions. There is the question of whether police officers are bad people, the question of whether there is some sort of conspiracy to use the police for racist purposes, and in my opinion most important is the question of what the police are, more broadly,
for--what is their function?
As individuals, many police officers are perfectly decent people, although I wouldn't go so far as to say the ratio of nice to nasty is identical to what you'd find in all other professions. Just as slimy opportunists tend to gravitate to politics, and caring people are more likely to go into nursing, certain types are attracted to policing. In the case of policing I'd say there are two distinct types who are overrepresented: The kind who genuinely, at least in the beginning, want to serve and protect while having a kind of exciting life . . . and the bullies, who really like the idea of being able to give people orders and push them down on their face in the concrete. And there has always been, and in recent years it has become organized and there is copious direct evidence of this, a push by the racist right to have their members join the police in an attempt to influence policing, which has had some success. Nonetheless, none of those tendencies overwhelm the general averageness of people IMO; perhaps more important is acculturation, where people adapt to their surroundings and start acting the way the local culture acts and to some extent thinking the way the local culture thinks. This has led to some really rotten police forces and others which are closer to trying to do their best.
Well, going a bit broader . . . on the question of whether policing in the United States has anything to do with some sort of
conspiracy to keep down blacks. Well, structurally it seems to operate to a fair extent as if that was the purpose, but that's not evidence of conspiracy. The vast expansion in policing, jail and so forth in the United States was accelerated by presidents and congress/senate votes with support both Republican and Democrat. Reagan famously pushed the "war on drugs", but Clinton also was very much into the "tough on crime" schtick, and Joe Biden shepherded draconian crime bills through, and there were plenty of other players, some obviously and strongly racist a la Strom Thurmond, others not. Reagan and Biden are/were probably somewhat personally racist, but Clinton seems to have pushed this stuff almost purely out of considerations of political gain.
But none of them
started the push to increase policing and expand the prison population--that was Richard Nixon. And about Richard Nixon we
know why he did it, because of all his tapes. And Richard Milhous Nixon said on tape that the point of pushing for increased incarceration was to get the blacks without looking like they were getting the blacks. So he genuinely was conspiring. Meanwhile, we also know thanks to the Church committee that the FBI was indeed making concerted efforts to undermine black people; the most famous example is their definite spying on, harassment, threats to and probable assassination of Martin Luther King, but we know it was vastly more widespread than that . . . and many, many files remain secret. Now the FBI sounds like three letters, but it is after all the federal police of the United States, and there's no real evidence that it changed its modus operandi afterwards, and plenty of indications that it didn't. So yes, there is some evidence that important elements of law enforcement and executive power in the United States have conspired against the US black community.
In many ways though, to me structural issues are more important. If the overall role of the police in society lends itself towards functional racism, conspiracies are likely to be unnecessary to get it to work that way, while if the overall role of police in society lends itself to enforcing racial equality, conspiracies would likely be insufficient to make it racist. So what are the police primarily
for?
The police are for protecting property and its owners, as against those who don't have much. The more the property is worth, the more it is their job to protect it. And the more poor there are, and the poorer they are, the greater the degree to which their job is suppression rather than "serve and protect". The police are fundamentally there to protect the upper classes and the prosperous middle class (that is, me) against the unwashed hordes. One way you can see that this is the case is the inverse correlation between the size of a country's social safety net, the strength of its welfare state, and the size of its policing function and amount of incarceration.
Countries with strong social safety nets, cheap education etc. put few people in jail. The US of course is an outlier--the land of the free puts, per capita, 6 times as many people in jail as Canada and 10 times as many as Denmark. Cops beating people down is one of the prices the United States pays for having as much inequality as it does; or rather, it's one of the ways the United States maintains that inequality, stops it from leading to mass political action by the poor.
So of course that function by itself would lead to the police beating down black people more than white people, in a completely colour-blind way, just because black people average poorer. And beating down Latinos more than whites but less than blacks, because they're poorer than whites but not as poor as blacks. But I would say that in the US, partly for historical reasons but not entirely, there is more to it than that. If the beneficiaries of inequality (ie the rich) want to stay that way, they need to grapple with the problem that there aren't very many of them. There are a lot more poor people, and still more than that who, while not poor as such, would probably be better off if the very rich were a lot less rich. If all those people decided they were on one side and the rich on the other, things could change pretty damn fast. So it's absolutely important to keep all those people from realizing they are on the same side. Divide and rule, older than the Roman empire. In the United States, one of the key ways to do that has been racism. W.E.B. du Bois said that the poorer end of the whites was given a "psychological wage of whiteness"--they might not have a lot of money, but at least they got to lord it over blacks. One manifestation of that is differential policing; even poor white people get treated better by the police than blacks, get something resembling a presumption that they are genuine citizens who might not be criminals, where blacks are generally assumed to be worthless criminals up to no good. And while the poor whites don't really think about the better treatment they get, any more than middle class and higher whites think about the frame they see of police, as fairly polite people there to protect them, what the poor whites
do internalize is the day-to-day media crime reportage based on that police attitude, so they get to absorb a frame in which "black == criminal, not like me", and so by implication "even if I have nothing else going for me, at least I'm better, and better off, than that media black figure because I'm white". So the psychological wages of whiteness, a sort of replacement for any real benefit and simultaneously a tool for preventing cross-race organizing, is still a piece of the puzzle. Of course the division doesn't
have to be, and isn't
only, black vs. white; for instance, there's currently a push to make it local vs. immigrant, but it's all the same divide and rule.
So yeah. Blacks experience the police as a hostile occupying force which is there to keep them ground down. That is because the police, and perhaps even more the court and prison system,
are a hostile occupying force there to keep them ground down, even if most individual police officers are not aware of that and might even be unhappy about it if they were. Prosperous whites don't notice because it doesn't happen to us and generally not in front of us. This can probably not be really changed unless the United States changes its political/economic course significantly, to the point of creating a strong welfare state and drastically reducing inequality generally, not just for blacks in particular. In my country of Canada we have the same tendencies, if less pronounced, and those tendencies have gotten stronger ever since the 80s when we started cutting welfare, social housing, education and health care (if not as much as the US).
