During the years I lived in Inglewood, I got little glimpses of the community-police dynamic. It was not pretty.
One of the first memories of my time there was when I walked home from school to get lunch at my apartment. While I was sitting at my computer eating a burrito, a major police action occurred across the street. Apparently some robbers had ran from police and were in hiding. The police surrounded the block, a guy with a shotgun standing every 40 feet or so. I was amazed. Police cars rolling around, guns being brandished everywhere, helicopters overhead. I had never seen anything like it.
The shotguns looked like they were just being used as tools of intimidation. Which, of course, they were.
Massive displays of force like that were common. I had students tell me stories of their homes getting raided, police breaking down doors, charging in with guns drawn, scaring their family. Sometimes it was the case of mistaken identity, or the police claimed they had the right home but failed to find anything in it.
Once it happened to me. I went to my school on a Saturday, as I did every week, to water the class garden and take care of the classroom animals. Since I only had my classroom key and not a front gate key, I jumped the gate like I did every week (which my principal was well aware of). Except this week someone called the cops.
I didn't know anything was happening until I saw multiple police cars pull up into the school's back parking lot. I thought, "Whoa, must be something big going on across the street." Then I saw the police get out of their car and start gesturing towards me. Wait, no, they were gesturing behind me. I turned around and saw that multiple police cars had pulled into the front parking lot, and a gang of police officers had their guns drawn.
I walked over to them.
They asked me what I was doing.
I said that I was a teacher watering the plants. I showed them the water can I was holding in my hand.
They put the guns away, apologized, blamed the caller, left.
(I should note that I got off a lot easier than the four Black parole officers who had guns pulled on them in a similar error.)
Our neighborhood was a scary place. I knew multiple kids who got shot - it seemed to happen to someone at our school about once a year. Once I drove down the street with one of my kids in the car, and he pointed out homes where friends of his had died, places where people he had known had been shot. There was a shooting in front of our own house at least 4, possibly 5 times in the 4.5 years I lived there.
But I never saw how the dramatically violent police presence made the neighborhood safer, or reduced the likelihood that someone would die a violent death. In fact, I think it made the neighborhood more dangerous. And it wasn't just the people who were shot by Inglewood PD that I'm referring to here. For everyone in Inglewood, the police were scary. It made things tense. It made people not want to call police in dangerous situations, not knowing what might happen. And subconsciously it confirmed the belief that violence and force were the proper arbitrators of dispute, the go-to means of asserting one's own rights and power.
In America, I generally don't believe that we live in a "police state". But some of our poorest neighborhoods are living in something close to one, and a lot of other neighborhoods have been moving in that direction in recent years. Military gear, even armored vehicles, have been flowing into communities. Images of police officers pointing sniper rifles at unarmed civilians or yelling threats at protesters, (even murderous ones) are the new normal.
Do neighborhoods with militarized police forces breed calmer, safer, more peace-loving citizens? Does intimidation work as a technique for improving the life of a community? I really doubt it. But it appears to be the road that many community police forces have chosen to walk right now. We only need to look at neighborhoods like Inglewood and others like it to see how well it's been working so far.
One of the first memories of my time there was when I walked home from school to get lunch at my apartment. While I was sitting at my computer eating a burrito, a major police action occurred across the street. Apparently some robbers had ran from police and were in hiding. The police surrounded the block, a guy with a shotgun standing every 40 feet or so. I was amazed. Police cars rolling around, guns being brandished everywhere, helicopters overhead. I had never seen anything like it.
The shotguns looked like they were just being used as tools of intimidation. Which, of course, they were.
Massive displays of force like that were common. I had students tell me stories of their homes getting raided, police breaking down doors, charging in with guns drawn, scaring their family. Sometimes it was the case of mistaken identity, or the police claimed they had the right home but failed to find anything in it.
Once it happened to me. I went to my school on a Saturday, as I did every week, to water the class garden and take care of the classroom animals. Since I only had my classroom key and not a front gate key, I jumped the gate like I did every week (which my principal was well aware of). Except this week someone called the cops.
I didn't know anything was happening until I saw multiple police cars pull up into the school's back parking lot. I thought, "Whoa, must be something big going on across the street." Then I saw the police get out of their car and start gesturing towards me. Wait, no, they were gesturing behind me. I turned around and saw that multiple police cars had pulled into the front parking lot, and a gang of police officers had their guns drawn.
I walked over to them.
They asked me what I was doing.
I said that I was a teacher watering the plants. I showed them the water can I was holding in my hand.
They put the guns away, apologized, blamed the caller, left.
(I should note that I got off a lot easier than the four Black parole officers who had guns pulled on them in a similar error.)
Our neighborhood was a scary place. I knew multiple kids who got shot - it seemed to happen to someone at our school about once a year. Once I drove down the street with one of my kids in the car, and he pointed out homes where friends of his had died, places where people he had known had been shot. There was a shooting in front of our own house at least 4, possibly 5 times in the 4.5 years I lived there.
But I never saw how the dramatically violent police presence made the neighborhood safer, or reduced the likelihood that someone would die a violent death. In fact, I think it made the neighborhood more dangerous. And it wasn't just the people who were shot by Inglewood PD that I'm referring to here. For everyone in Inglewood, the police were scary. It made things tense. It made people not want to call police in dangerous situations, not knowing what might happen. And subconsciously it confirmed the belief that violence and force were the proper arbitrators of dispute, the go-to means of asserting one's own rights and power.
In America, I generally don't believe that we live in a "police state". But some of our poorest neighborhoods are living in something close to one, and a lot of other neighborhoods have been moving in that direction in recent years. Military gear, even armored vehicles, have been flowing into communities. Images of police officers pointing sniper rifles at unarmed civilians or yelling threats at protesters, (even murderous ones) are the new normal.
Do neighborhoods with militarized police forces breed calmer, safer, more peace-loving citizens? Does intimidation work as a technique for improving the life of a community? I really doubt it. But it appears to be the road that many community police forces have chosen to walk right now. We only need to look at neighborhoods like Inglewood and others like it to see how well it's been working so far.
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