White supremacy and policing go hand-in-hand. Since the earliest days of policing in the USA, enforcing racism through violence has been part of the job. The first police forces came from slave-catchers, and to this day there’s a huge problem that’s been unaddressed far too long.
Racism in policing isn’t an isolated problem. It’s an issue EVERYWHERE, and even federal authorities admit this. The Intercept reported that an FBI Counterterrorism Policy Guide from April 2015 states white supremacists “often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.”
Police are regularly outed as neo-nazis, members of the KKK, and as other types of white supremacists. This has gone on since the days of our grandparents and beyond.
CBS even surveyed 155 police agencies about their training around racism and the results weren’t great.
Almost 60% of the agencies that said they had training around racial bias admitted they had no way of measuring the success or failure of such a program. That leads to an even bigger question: can racism be “trained” out of a racist, and would that stop racists from becoming cops?
Black people know all too well about the consequences of racists being police officers. We feel it physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally! These big questions about addressing this issue don’t have easy answers, but we can start by having a zero-tolerance policy for racist cops!