Pawns in the Game
“A hand set the spark. Two eyes took the aim. Behind a man's brain. But he can't be blamed. He's only a pawn in their game”
-Bob Dylan, Only a Pawn in Their Game (1963)
There has been so much discussion of the terrible events that took George Floyd’s life that I didn't initially think I could add anything useful to our understanding. But I have noticed, in many of these discussions, that something is lacking. It’s not that the details aren’t clear (they are, and painfully so), or that there are questions about responsibility (that too is resoundingly clear). The biggest fault I have with the current narrative has to do with our fixation on the “individual level”. We focus on the actions of the individual police officers involved, on the individual protesters in the streets, and the individual politicians and officials making decisions. This makes sense, and usually isn’t a terrible place to start. In a frenzied and fast moving situation, these are the easiest things to grab on to, analyze and dissect. However, none of these individual actors, or the actions they engage in, occur in isolation. Rather, they are all part of larger structures, institutions and cultures that have both direct and subtle influence on the actions that are captured on camera and put on display for all to see.
While that might sound like academic gibberish (and it might well be), it is vitally important to understand the structural/institutional component of police brutality, racism and just about any other problem facing us today. If we don’t, then we are doomed to continue down our current path. For example, in the murder of George Floyd there were certainly four individual actors who are responsible: the “bad cop” who knelt on Floyd’s neck, and the three “good cops” who stood by and did not intervene. If it were just these individuals who were solely responsible, then the solution would be incredibly simple. Remove the officers, prosecute them for the murder, and replace them with new officers. Couple that with a few new “sensitivity” or “de-escalation” trainings, maybe push for a few of the leaders in the police force to retire, and you would have a fitting solution. Unsurprisingly, given our insistence on individual responsibility in all things, this is the “solution” we have been utilizing for a long time. We fire police officers, in some rare cases we even prosecute them (though here too is a serious miscarriage of justice), and then replace them. We have existing officers take more training, and from time to time, we even propose new policies and change up leadership at the local level. And yet, despite many years of this type of “fix”, we continue to have the same problems with racial profiling, excessive use of force, disproportionate sentencing, and far more.
Just because these efforts haven’t solved the underlying problems of racial injustice doesn’t mean they aren’t worth while. Indeed, we should hold individuals accountable for their behaviors (and many would argue that far more accountability is necessary, and I wouldn’t say no to that), and we should engage in educational efforts through more and better training for those in law enforcement and other positions in the criminal justice system. As is all too evident from just a cursory search online, there are countless examples of police officers across the country putting these trained skills to use. From officers who de-escalate violent suspects and place them under arrest peacefully, to the cop who went viral for playing basketball with kids who a neighbor had reported for rowdy behavior. This type of “good cop” behavior and ability does exist, and is no doubt far more prevalent than over racism and the “bad cop” behavior currently under scrutiny. So what gives? We have lots of “good cops”, we (sometimes) punish/remove “bad cops”, but we still have these problems. The answer to this conundrum lies at the structural/institutional level.
One of the biggest challenges as a social science/CJ professor, is to get students (who up until that point have pretty much only focused on individual level explanations) to look at the world from a “macro” level. In other words, to see the social arrangements of things such that personal behaviors are influenced by larger elements that are outside any given individual (like religion, work, family, government, etc.). Its a tricky thing to do, but once it clicks, you tend to realize that it’s kind of the obvious answer. For our discussion of bad police behavior, let’s look at a more relatable example: kids. I know that many of you reading this have likely been spending much more time with your children in recent weeks during the nationwide lockdown for Covid-19. Many of you also may have seen some behavioral changes in your kids. My daughter for instance has been much more emotional than normal, and we’ve struggled with listening skills and plenty of spats between siblings. If my wife and I approached these changes in behavior with a 100% individual level explanation, we would probably have a pretty bad outcome. This would involve blaming our kids for their behavior, and punishing them in order to fix it. That isn’t to say that timeouts haven’t been used, but we realized pretty quickly that there must be something else going on outside of our kids’ individual selves. That elephant in the room (as I know many of you have found as well), is the situation we are currently living through with everyone at home. Our schedules have all drastically changed, our sleep patterns are different, meal times are different, etc. These “external” factors have no doubt contributed to behavioral changes at the individual level for our kids. In this case, no amount of timeouts would fix this issue. It was a structural change that needed to take place, an adjustment to our schedules, an establishment of a new normal that we can all live with. Suffice it to say, this hasn’t been the easiest transition, but approaching these behavioral issues from the structural level makes the most sense. This type of explanation scales up to much larger issues, such as racial profiling. If punishing individual officers doesn’t fix the problem, there is likely something at a “higher” level contributing to this behavior.
In the case of racial profiling and racial inequalities in the CJ system, there are several notable structural factors at play. The most notable of these factors is the history of law enforcement. From its early days, one of the leading elements of American policing was the control of minority populations. For instance, in the early Boston volunteer night watch system of the mid 1700’s (one of the first organized “policing” organizations in the colonies), one of the main orders was to arrest “all Negroes found out after dark without a lantern” (Russell, 2005). Upon this basis was built the rapidly expanding system of policing in the early United States. During the era of legalized slavery, those who were non-white were considered deviant in their basic existence, and could be arrested for simply not being on the plantation, or in the presence of their owners. After slavery was abolished, many in the post slavery south feared the newly freed Blacks, and police forces were used to monitor and control the segregated Black communities. Laws were passed legalizing segregation, and through the Jim Crow era, it was police forces that upheld this law of the land. After segregation was legally done away with, these old patterns of behavior didn’t just disappear. For instance, if you were on patrol before the passage of the civil rights act, and then the next day (after its passage) you had to go out on patrol, where would you go? Chances are, you would continue policing those areas where historically you have caught criminals, and those areas are populated predominately by racial minorities. This shadow of legalized discrimination has thus stuck around. Couple this with the cultural undertones of fear and suspicion that have similarly not disappeared completely (culture is a major source of behaviors), and you have a situation where white America continues to vilify communities of color for all sorts of things (from stealing jobs to committing crimes). In this context, laws have been passed, and policies put into place, which place our police forces (which are part of this very same social fabric) in the position of “cracking down” more in minority communities across the country.
The failed war on drugs is a not so shining example of this pattern, with decades worth of CJ focus on communities of color, and amplification of deviant and criminal behavior as a result of this oppression and sustained police presence (you catch more criminals when you are looking for them in a specific area). There are many other factors at play, including systematic discrimination in the form of decades of redlining and other economic disparities, which have contributed to higher rates of certain crimes in those communities already under suspicion of being “more criminal”. For an example of this type of discrimination in Minneapolis, look up the story of Arthur and Edith Lee, which is far from ancient history, and demonstrates the discriminatory undertones at play in this jurisdiction.
In such arrangements, it does not matter how much training officers undergo, or how many “good” cops are on duty. If these structural factors put officers in the position of more enforcement in minority communities, they will make more arrests, and use more force in those communities. Because of this, the “easy”(and individual level) solution of replacing “bad cops” will never change the pattern. It doesn’t matter if you are an officer who marches in the streets with the protesters (or even if the cop is non-white), if you are asked to go on patrol in “those” neighborhoods as part of a system that has done this for many years, you will continue to perpetuate the same problems. As Bob Dylan sang in the lyrics at the beginning of this essay, the “blame” doesn’t just lie with the individual who did the harm, for “he’s just a pawn in their game”. If you’ve never heard the song, go look it up! In this case, “the game” is the larger historical and structural pattern, in which individual actors play a role. Unfortunately, because of this institutional level influence, seeking solutions becomes a much larger challenge.
I don’t have the step by step answer for how to fix these problems, but my hope is that understanding the root causes can help create that roadmap. Justice and accountability are a great place to start, but we must move beyond just that. This will require many years of political and cultural changes, but that is where we have to focus. I realize that that sounds daunting, but there are some things we can do at the individual level (in our own lives) that can certainly help move us in that direction. The first thing all of us (especially white folks like me) need to do is listen. When someone claims that wrongs have been done, don’t just brush it away because it doesn’t fit your political views, or because you know many good cops. If we don’t let those who are being negatively impacted voice their concerns, no action will ever be taken. We see that we have failed miserably at this. Such claims and cries have been hitting collectively deaf ears for generations. Within the past several years we have seen attempts to get the point across peacefully (from protests in the street to kneeling for the national anthem), and our response has been “don’t do that”, and “what are you complaining about, that’s not how the police treat me?”. As a result, we have seen little meaningful change in regard to curbing excessive use of force, and we have been left with far less peaceful demonstrations that only in the destruction of property appear to shock white America into recognizing that something might be wrong. And that is the second thing we can do, actually recognize that there is something wrong! If your response to an officer involved killing is to say/post “there are more good cops than bad cops”, or if you sport a thin blue line flag in your support for law enforcement, you must realize that there is indeed a problem, and that certain difficult truths about the basis of these problems must be addressed. For our leaders, the best approach to the current situation (including protests) is literally anything other than doubling down on the use of force. We have seen this tactic being used across the country, especially against peaceful protesters, and the only effect this has is to drive the wedge further between police forces and the communities they are supposed to serve. It might also help to have non-idiot leaders (those capable of actual critical thought and taking different perspectives) in charge at all levels, but we will leave that discussion for a later time.
But most importantly, we must stand in support of those whose lives are affected by these problems. If that means telling your friend he’s a dick for that racist joke at the bar, or simply standing up and saying “Black Lives Matter” in the face of injustice, then those are actions you need to take. If we can’t even do those things, we might as well be those three cops who stood by and watched as George Floyd begged for his life. Such negligence and indifference in the face of oppression and inequality might be the easy, or even more comfortable, route to take, but all it makes us is easily manipulated pawns in the game of institutional discrimination.
References:
Russell, R. (2005). A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
