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Read Slates complete coverage of theTrayvon Martin case.

The story of Trayvon Martins death is heartbreaking. If you have missed the facts: The 17-year-old, who is black, was walking to a friends home in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., when a neighborhood-watch volunteer*, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, spotted him. Zimmerman, whose father says identifies as Hispanic,called the cops to report a suspicious person. They told him not to follow. They always get away, Zimmerman told dispatch in a 911 call released Friday, and he kept tracking Martin. Zimmerman had a gun. Martin was carrying only an ice tea and the Skittles hed just bought at the store. The two had a struggle that no one saw. Hearing shots, neighbors called 911. In one call thats hard to listen to, a woman anxiously says she can hear someone calling for help while in the background, a terrified, wailing voice pleads, No! No!

Zimmerman shot and killed Martin, but he said he did so in self-defense. The shocker of this case so far is that the Sanford police say they dont have enough evidence to dispute Zimmermans claim and arrest him. Martins mother told the Today show Monday morning that her son was killed because of the color of his skin, and his parents want the FBI to investigate. With these facts, you can see why. UPDATE, March 20, 2012: On Monday evening, the Justice Department announced it will investigate Martins killing.

How did we get to a place where Zimmermans claim of self-defense, which seems barely plausible, could prevent his arrest? The answer starts with the Stand Your Ground law that Florida passed in 2005. The idea was to give people who think they are being threatened the right to use force: They can protect themselves without first trying to retreat. The history behind that controversial idea is actually about gender, not race. It involves the intersection between the fight against domestic violence and the agenda of the National Rifle Association.

Lets back up, with the help of Jeannie Suk, a Harvard law professor who wrote an article in 2008 that Ill rely on for the next few paragraphs. In the 17th century, English common law held that people whose lives were threatened in a public place could use deadly force to defend themselves only after retreating as far as possible. It was up to the king and his men to keep the peace, and everyone else was supposed to stand aside. There was only one exception: If someone broke into your house, you could kill him without retreating.

This is called the Castle Doctrine, after the old saying that a mans house is his castle. It makes intuitive sensea limited exception to the duty to retreat that leaves the rule in place. But when the Castle Doctrine made its way to America, Suk says, some courts expanded it. Now someone under attack could repel force by force if he was attacked in a place where he has a right to be. Thats how the Supreme Court put it in 1895. This is amazingly called the true man doctrine, from a line in an 1876 case: A true man, who is without fault, is not obliged to fly from an assailant, who by violence or surprise, maliciously seeks to take his life or do him enormous bodily harm.

Not all the states adopted the true man doctrine. And 100 years later, courts and legislatures faced a new problem: What to do with women who said they were victims of domestic violence and had killed their husbands to save themselves? Did you have a right not to retreat if the person coming after you lived under the same roof? At first, the answer was no, to the fury of feminists. Then in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court said a woman who shot and killed her husband during a violent fight at home could successfully call on the Castle Doctrine to argue self-defense. It is now widely recognized that domestic violence attacks are often repeated over time, and escape from the home is rarely possible without the threat of great personal violence or death, the court wrote.

Suk calls this revision of the true-man rule to encompass domestic violence transformative, and you can see why. The new rules made for more shooting and less retreating. And they set the stage for Florida to ditch the duty to retreat entirely, which the legislature did in passing the nations first Stand Your Ground law in 2005.

Floridas new law did three things: It further loosened the restrictions on using deadly force at home. It scrapped the duty to retreat in public places. And it gave people who use self-defense civil and criminal immunity. Pushing for these changes, NRA President Marion Hammer focused on women and their need to protect themselves. You cant expect a victim to wait and ask, Excuse me, Mr. Criminal, are you going to rape me and kill me, or are you just going to beat me up and steal my television? she said.

Prosecutors opposed the Stand Your Ground law, and they still complain about it. It is an abomination, former Broward County Prosecutor David Frankel told the Sun Sentinel in January. The ultimate intent might be good, but in practice, people take the opportunity to shoot first and say later they had a justification. It almost gives them a free pass to shoot. The quote comes from a story about a former sheriffs deputy, Maury Hernandez, who killed an unarmed homeless man in a Haagen-Dazs shop on a Saturday afternoon. Hernandez, who was with his children, said the man aggressively asked for money and then tried to assault him. Witnesses said Hernandez warned the man several times before taking out his gun and firing multiple times. The police said they wouldnt charge Hernandez for the shooting because he claimed he was under attack.

Its that decision not to press charges that makes Stand Your Ground laws, which a bunch of other states have adopted, a crazy departure from the past. Its one thing to raise self-defense at trial. Its another to have what the Florida Supreme Court calls true immunity. True immunity, the court said, means a trial judge can dismiss a prosecution, based on a Stand Your Ground assertion, before trial begins.

At least theres supposed to be a hearing before that happens, at which the defendant has the burden of proof. And yet as the Hernandez and Martins case shows, Stand Your Ground laws often lead prosecutors to decide against so much as bringing charges. According to the Sun Sentinel, In case after case during the past six years, Floridians who shot and killed unarmed opponents have not been prosecuted.

Now the death of Trayvon Martin is the latest in that line. Maybe this is the kind of case that is so sad and so tinged with racism that Florida will think hard about the very scary place where their self-defense laws have taken them. Maybe.

Read Slates complete coverage of the Trayvon Martin case.

*Correction, March 20, 2012: This article originally stated that George Zimmerman is white, but his father says he identifies as Hispanic.

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Why George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martins killer, hasnt been ...

There are some events and dates in life that you will never forget.

Dates that leave a long-lasting mark on ones psyche, remembering where you were, how the space felt, the emotions you had and the thoughts that immediately entered your mind.

When the news broke that George Floyd was killed by officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I was in the living room having just finished a Zoom meeting. It was a quiet, warm day, the sun was out, I was a little hungry, but I felt at ease. Then my phone started ringing.

It was May 25, 2020.

I would join millions of people across the country the next day who would watch the now infamous video taken by a fearless, teenage onlooker we would later find out was Darnella Frazier and be shaken once again by the myriad of emotions that have come over the years due to police violence taking the lives of unarmed, Black and brown people.

Summer started early last year.

The City of Philadelphias Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disability Services (DBHIDS) Engaging Males of Color (EMOC) initiative, an effort that I lead for the Department, was and is uniquely designed to address some of the challenges that would follow over the course of this past year.

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Since conversations and data collection began in 2013 by then DBHIDS Commissioner, Dr. Arthur C. Evans Jr., and our official launch in 2014 when I was brought onboard, we have worked to promote mental health and wellness for men and boys of color in Philadelphia. We seek to increase access and awareness to behavioral health services, build health literacy and reduce the stigma associated with mental health. We understand the vast disparities when it comes to the social determinants of health for this population and build strategic partnerships to assist in connecting folks to resources.

In perhaps a twist of fate here, EMOC, though initially modeled somewhat after then-President Barack Obamas My Brothers Keeper initiative, is about as old as the Black Lives Matter movement, which started as a hashtag after George Zimmerman, in 2013, was acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin.

We Breathe, We Live: Brotherly Love Protest Stories is part of EMOCs contribution to this ongoing dialogue about race and policing in this country.

Our team has served on panels and shared thoughts in meetings and conferences since May 2020, however it is the value of storytelling, brought on by our special partners in the nonprofit, First Person Arts (FPA), that became the catalyst for this film project. FPA amplifies stories of everyday Philadelphians in dynamic productions and we began a series several years ago, Beyond Expectations, to showcase the innermost feelings and ideas that males of color have and navigate through each day, covering a range of subject areas and issues.

We Breathe, We Live is a continuation of that work.

We identified seven men of various backgrounds, ages and experiences to share their story, as we prepare for the one-year anniversary of this infamous murder and subsequent summer of protests. Where were they? How did they feel? What was it like to be on the ground in the marches? How has this trauma affected them and/or their loved ones? The director of the film, Glenn Holsten, brought a brave and innovative vision to catalyze and link the ideas presented in the film.

These rich stories, plus the inclusion of spoken word poetry and conversations with our DBHIDS EMOC colleagues, give life to a moment that was a peak example of dehumanization.

This film has further resonance since we find ourselves in Mental Health Awareness Month; additionally seen in the relief of millions now that Chauvin has been convicted of his charges.

We hope on Monday, May 24, at 9 p.m. on WHYY-TV (and live on http://www.whyy.org) that communities will gather to watch this film and see these men, in a state of vulnerability, not as the stereotype, but as the humans that they are.

Which is maybe all that George Floyd wanted.

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For more information about EMOC, please contact Gabriel Bryant at Gabriel.bryant@phila.gov, follow EMOC on twitter @emocphilly, and for additional resources and supports, go to http://www.dbhids.org/boost.

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'We Breathe, We Live: Brotherly Love Protest Stories' part of ongoing dialogue about race and policing in US - Generocity

In Elizabeth City, N.C., the morning after a jury in Minneapolis found the former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of the murder of George Floyd, a unit from the countys Sheriffs Department dressed in tactical gear arrived at the home of Andrew Brown Jr. They were there to serve drug-related arrest and search warrants.

Within minutes, 42-year-old Mr. Brown was dead, shot at the wheel of his car. He was hit by five bullets, including one shot to the back of his head. The North Carolina prosecutor in the case has called the shooting justified.

If George Floyd forced America to face the question of whether an officer who abuses power can be held accountable, Andrew Brown Jr.s blood cries out from the ground of eastern North Carolina for deeper change. Justice demands systemic and enduring transformation something that younger generations will see and trust as authentic. We call it the Third Reconstruction.

Consider our recent history, starting with Mr. Chauvins trial. For us, it brought back memories of the summer of 2013, when a jury in Florida found George Zimmerman not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Mr. Zimmerman had shot and killed the 17-year-old boy who was guilty of nothing more than walking while Black in a gated community. Our legal systems failure to hold Mr. Zimmerman accountable for killing Mr. Martin sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. It rallied a generation of young people who refused to accept white police officers regularly killing unarmed Black people, not unlike how white Americans regularly lynched Black Americans in the early 20th century.

And that moment the rise of Black Lives Matter in turn recalled the movement galvanized by the death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, who was murdered with impunity in Jim Crow Mississippi. The horror of his lynching inspired a generation of children who looked like Till to confront a system that denigrated their Black lives and undermined democracy. Over the next decade and a half, they grew up to be the college students and young adults who led sit-ins at lunch counters, organized Freedom Summer in Mississippi, petitioned their fellow Americans to see voting rights as a moral issue at Selma and built a Rainbow Coalition in Chicago to advocate the dignity of all poor people.

The reckoning that Emmett Tills generation demanded took time and it was subverted and sabotaged at every turn. But the young people who saw themselves in Till eventually contributed to a Second Reconstruction of America in the mid-20th century, expanding democracy and pushing the nation toward the promise of a government that would represent all of its citizens.

Now the Trayvon Martin generation has come of age and is pushing the nation toward a Third Reconstruction. The death of Mr. Floyd, along with those of Breonna Taylor and so many more whove joined the litany of lives taken, marked a turning point in the movement: His cries of I cant breathe united this generation in a collective gasp for justice.

But what does that justice look like? Accountability for Mr. Floyds murder is not justice. If we cannot stop the killings of unarmed Black people before they happen, any collective affirmation of Black life rings hollow.

As hard as it may be to achieve, the Third Reconstruction is about more than Black people surviving encounters with law enforcement. Its about America taking steps to protect and value its Black citizens as it has never done before. A Third Reconstruction is about ensuring Black Americans are no longer twice as likely as white Americans to die in a pandemic. Its about remaking a system that saddles them with student debt and then offers them poverty wages.

A Third Reconstruction will ensure that all Americans can access decent housing for their families and quality education for their children, as outlined in a resolution introduced Thursday by Representatives Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal, and supported by our organization, the Poor Peoples Campaign. Their resolution seeks to ensure all Americans access to clean and unleaded water and, in the face of widespread voter suppression efforts, a guarantee that their participation in American democracy is expanded and protected.

The Third Reconstruction is about confronting policies and practices that produce death, whether from police killings, poverty, lack of health care, ecological devastation or unnecessary war. It is, in short, a declaration that unnecessary death is intolerable and that democracy is still possible.

In 2020, following a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, we witnessed the most votes cast in a federal election in U.S. history, with a higher percentage of eligible voters participating than wed seen in decades, and maybe even more than a century. From the Fight for $15 to the Sunrise Movement to the Poor Peoples Campaign, this generation has linked up with movements to connect systemic racism in policing with systemic racism in economic inequality, ecological degradation, health disparities and voter suppression. In our work with the Poor Peoples Campaign, we saw thousands of Black, white and brown Americans reach out to millions of poor and low-income neighbors like them, encouraging them to join a movement that votes for a transformative agenda in our public life.

And then, 11 months after Mr. Floyds murder thanks to the courage of Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed Derek Chauvin with his knee on Mr. Floyds neck the nation witnessed a police chief testify against one of his own and a jury vote to hold Mr. Chauvin accountable for murder. It was a measure of accountability that Trayvon Martin and so many others were never deemed worthy of, and the crowds in Minneapolis celebrated with chants of I am somebody.

But even as Mr. Chauvins trial was approaching and underway, the police continued to kill Black and brown people. We added names including Donovan Lynch, Adam Toledo and MaKhia Bryant to the list of souls we mourn.

As with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the Second Reconstruction, any fundamental change in American policing will require federal legislative action that we do not currently have the political power to achieve. Even the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which does not fundamentally reimagine law enforcement but does introduce protections against the abuse of power, is languishing in a Senate where Republicans are using the threat of filibuster to silence any real debate.

The Third Reconstruction is about more than any single bill or the agenda of a political party. It is about building power to fundamentally reimagine what is possible in our society. Both the First and Second Reconstructions in American history happened because moral movements reclaimed the promises of democracy and a new, expanded electorate insisted on new priorities. If the Trayvon Martin generation has pricked the nations conscience and sparked a moral movement, we believe a coalition of poor and low-income people who have historically been low-propensity voters has the potential to shift the political landscape. We must organize around an agenda that lifts from the bottom so that everyone can rise.

No single verdict or election can bring about the racial reckoning America needs after 400 years of building systems that have rested upon white supremacy. But the generation of young people who saw themselves in Trayvon Martin knows that whatever the color of their skin, their lives will not matter in this society until Black lives matter in our public policy.

William Barber II is the president of Repairers of the Breach and a co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is the author of Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | George Floyd Died a Year Ago. The Third Reconstruction Is Underway - The New York Times

On October 26, 2020, police killed Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philadelphia, as his mother stood on the sidewalk, pleading for his life. Over the next few days, the neighborhood erupted in protest, and my phone lit up with alerts from Citizen, a public safety app. Writers for the app monitor and transcribe police scanner chatter, which is then converted into push notifications. There was a break-in at Rite Aid, a burglary at a nearby liquor store, a dumpster fire one block over, a trash fire 900 feet away.

As local news has been decimated by budget cuts and layoffs, apps such as Citizen and Nextdoor have ascended to fill the void. Citizen in particular has increasingly positioned itself as a news organization. We act fast, break news, and give people the immediate information they need to stay safe, reads an overview on the companys LinkedIn profile. Citizen often ranks higher than The New York Times among news apps in the Apple App Store.

In theory, the platform democratizes reporting; it allows anyone with a smartphone to post comments and videos to a neighborhood network. But in practice, these alerts and the neighborhood commentary attached to them often read like police stenography and amplify existing biases. Users are bombarded by discordant notifications of violence, devoid of meaningful context.

Last November, I deleted Citizen from my phone, grossed out by the tenor of the push alerts. But in March, curious about a nearby apartment fire, I downloaded the app again. This time, when I created an account, I was prompted to sign up for a new feature, Citizen Protect. For just $19.99 a month, a virtual safety agent would track me whenever I left my house. If I said my chosen safe word, the safety agent would start a video chat and, if necessary, send my exact location to a 911 call center. The service promised me that help from Citizens community of users would always be close at hand. Live monitoring, the ad said, means you never have to walk alone. (At this point, it seems Citizen Protect is only being promoted to some Citizen users. A Citizen spokesperson told me they were aiming to fully launch in mid-June but that they could not comment further at this time.)

As an illustration of what the app would look like in action, I was shown a faux, promotional push alert for a lost dog. More than a thousand people had been alerted about the dog, the screenshot suggested, and 475 people were looking for it.

It is not difficult to imagine the many ways such a system could go wrong, particularly in a neighborhood such as West Philadelphia, where in 1985 the citys police bombed its own citizens, members of the Black separatist organization MOVE. The bombing killed nearly a dozen people and destroyed more than 60 homes along two city blocks. In May of last year, during protests over George Floyds murder, Philadelphia police drove an armored vehicle into the mostly Black neighborhood and tear-gassed residents, while the next day, a violent mob of white men roamed Fishtown largely unimpeded. An app such as Citizen Protect is aimed at my demographic: I am a white woman, living in a gentrifying neighborhood, who sometimes goes running after dark. If I felt ambiguously threatened by a fellow joggera Black man, for the sake of argumentand alerted my Citizen safety agent and the broader Citizen community, what would happen to him?

I signed up for a free trial of Citizen Protect in order to test out some of the features. What I learned did little to inspire faith that the app would protect everyone equally.

In many ways, Citizens new Protect feature marks a return to the companys roots. Citizen began as a crime-fighting app called Vigilante that launched in 2016. An ad for Vigilante shows a woman being followed and then assaulted under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She calls 911, and her call is transcribed by a Vigilante operator listening in on the police scanner. An alertSuspicious Man Following Womanis received by a guy playing chess, a ride-share driver, and a man working in a bodega. These three men arrive just in time, conveniently in concert with the police, and two of them shove a camera in the attackers face just as the perpetrator is knocking the woman to the ground.

The New York Police Department condemned the app, which was subsequently removed from Apples App Store. It relaunched the following year as Citizen, a more innocuous app for the professional bystander. (According to The New York Times, the NYPD spokesperson who condemned Vigilante now works for Citizen.)

Citizens new Protect service features safety agents who, according to one recent job listing, triage the level of severity of each call and make appropriate assessments of necessary next steps. The agents are required to offer support and guidance in real-time to any user who feels unsafe. The job qualifications are minimalcustomer service experience is a priority and experience working as a first responder is a plus.

Citizen connects you to a safety agent call center when you click a button that reads Get Help. The first agent I spoke with told me that she was able to monitor my exact location, pace, phone battery, andpresumably, had I connected my phone to, say, an Apple Watch or Fitbitmy heart rate. Another safety agent, Erin, told me that if I added emergency contacts, they would be able to alert those people if I were ever in trouble. Lets say you got into a car accident, said the safety agent, if you asked us to contact 911 and your emergency contact contactseven if we had to hang up the phone because 911 had arrived and you were being stabilizedwe could then reach out to your contact, to let them know whats going on.

As cities face a rise in murder rates and budget shortfalls, this Uber-for-private-security feature feels like an ominous sign of whats to come during the post-pandemic recovery. COVID-19 killed nearly 600,000 people in the United States over the past year, while the government put down uprisings for racial justice across the nation with a heavily militarized police force. The post-pandemic landscape feels both hopeful and post-apocalyptic. What has become clear over the last year is that safety in this country is just an illusion. How much would you be willing to pay for that illusion, though? To some, $19.99 a month might seem reasonable.

A feature such as Citizen Protect strikes me as mass surveillance disguised as a public good, poised to funnel generalized fear into something more nefarious. It will almost certainly lead to unnecessary police stops and, inevitably, to police violence. It will likely encourage vigilantes such as George Zimmerman, who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012.

In the wake of the 1918 pandemic and World War I, the U.S. moved into the Roaring 20s, a period characterized as much by debauchery and cultural development as it was by income inequality and punitive policing. The Pinkertons, a private detective agency known for strikebreaking, and for serving as a goon squad for the wealthy, were omnipresent. If we are now entering our own Roaring 20s, it seems a new kind of Pinkerton is coming with them.

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. Shes on Twitter @reemccarthy.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Citizen 'Protect' sells safety everywhere you go for $20/month - Fast Company

Last month, in response to this years macabre spate of police killings, the Washington state Legislature did what governing bodies often do in such situations: They pushed through a series of accountability reforms. Among them was House Bill 1054, which outlaws or limits no-knock warrants, chokeholds and neck restraints an attempt at preventing the kind of reckless and negligent policing that led to the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Floyd in Minnesota. House Bill 1310, meanwhile, hopes to rein in the use of excessive force by police through a number of measures, including requiring approval from the highest elected official in their jurisdiction before deploying tear gas against citizens.

But such tinkering is woefully inadequate to the problem at hand.

Over the course of Chauvins recent trial, police killed more than three Americans a day. In each of the past five years, police have killed on average about 1,000 people across the nation, the victims disproportionately Black, Latino or Native American. Among the more recent victims are 20-year-old Daunte Wright, 16-year-old MaKhia Bryant, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

These recent efforts by the Washington Legislature and others bring to mind epicycles a term the first century Greek astronomer Ptolemy used to describe the aberrant motions of the planets. Ptolemy held steadfast to an ancient belief that the sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, a view strongly supported by the Catholic Church. Epicycles made only modest changes to the prevailing dogma without overthrowing it.

Police reform legislation is evidence not of progress but of an unwillingness to confront the foundations of American policing. Reform merely tinkers with the current system of policing and hopes everything will still fit. But tinkering didnt work for Ptolemy, and it wont work for American policing.

Eventually, in the 16th century, Copernicus put forth a radical new theory that the Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun. But it took more than a century before Copernicus ideas overcame fierce social and religious resistance and finally found widespread acceptance. Whats needed today is a Copernican revolution in public safety one that would redefine the foundations of modern policing as Copernicus redefined the foundations of modern astronomy. It took overturning deeply entrenched social and religious beliefs to mainstream Copernicus heliocentric solar system. So, too, it will take overturning deeply entrenched social beliefs to bring about widespread acceptance of a new foundation for policing.

Activists calling to defund the police and reenvision policing are on the right track. But theyve not gone far enough far enough back, that is. These activists make the argument that American policing needs to be rebuilt from the ground up because of its origins in the 18th and 19th century slave patrols, and this is true. But theres an even larger, more encompassing argument for doing away with policing as we currently know it and reconstructing a modern system of public safety an argument akin to why Ptolemy was finally dropped in favor of Copernicus.

In fact, American policing is based on ideas about law enforcement originating in 13th century England, when most thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. These ideas have changed little since then; have easily adapted to racism and white supremacy since; and have no place in 21st century America.

In 1285, King Edward I enacted the Statute of Winchester, a decree commanding inhabitants of small English towns to establish police forces and to arrest anyone who wandered into their jurisdiction after sunset. If that person fled to avoid arrest, inhabitants were required, under penalty of arrest themselves, to raise a hue and cry and pursue the suspected transgressors from town to town.

Very soon, the contours of a public safety system came into view: a police force for each village or town, organized into watches and wards; the presumption of guilt of anyone not from a given locale. These were key features of the Statute of Winchester, which divided the populace into us vs. them, and demanded that each local police force protect the former from the latter. In the 13th century, the us were those of an English town or village; the them were persons out after dark, whether or not they had committed a crime.

For the United States, writes Jonathon A. Cooper, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the Statute [of Winchester] set up a system of justice administration that would cross the Atlantic and form the basic framework of American colonial and post-colonial policing.

In colonial America, the us were the slaveholders, the them slaves. Early colonial laws, like a 1672 Virginia statute, called An act for the apprehension and suppression of runawayes, negroes and slaves, granted immunity to any white person who killed or wounded a runaway slave while in pursuit of them. It read: Be it enacted by the governour, councell and burgesses of this grand assembly, and by the authority thereof, that if any negroe, molatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, runaway and shalbe persued by warrant or hue and crye, it shall and may be lawfull for any person who shall endeavour to take them, upon the resistance of such negroe, mollatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, to kill or wound him or them soe resisting.

Colonial notions about policing slaves later found their way into the U.S. Constitution. They took the form of the fugitive slave clause (never repealed) and the Second Amendment, granting slave owners the right to have their slaves returned, and the right to form slave patrols militias to pursue those slaves.

In post-colonial America, serving in slave patrols was compulsory among citizens, but many wealthier white Americans resented that and paid less affluent whites to serve in their place, creating a paid slave patrol force and laying the foundations for a paid police force. These slave patrollers became some of the nations first sworn officers and were given a badge resembling the ones law enforcement officers receive today.

After slavery, the us became white Americans and the them became Black Americans, but police still protected the us. Much of the brutality of the post-Civil War and Jim Crow era saw police openly and covertly killing Blacks. During the 1866 New Orleans Massacre, police killed scores of Black men during a constitutional convention aimed at universal suffrage. Many police officers during this period were also members of the Ku Klux Klan, which, together with paramilitary forces and demagogic politicians, unleashed campaigns of terror and extrajudicial killings directed at Black Americans. The NAACP estimates that nearly 5,000 Blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968, often with tacit or explicit support from law enforcement.

As American cities grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the them expanded to include not only Blacks, but groups like the Irish and the Poles. As the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad said recently, The Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles. And so this dynamic that's playing out is that police officers are a critical feature of establishing a racial hierarchy, even among white people. But over time the once marginalized Irish, Polish and Italians assimilated into the dominant us. What remained were groups that would never become part of the us, including Blacks, Asian and Latino immigrants, and American Indians.

Us vs, them policing is the underlying problem we face. Police should not exist to protect the us; they should protect the all all citizens of this nation. In a democracy, the police should be especially committed to protecting the rights of minorities against the tyranny of the majority. And citizens should not be empowered to enforce this us vs. them boundary either. Echoes of the 13th century origins of policing resound today: neighborhood watch patroller George Zimmerman claimed he was protecting his community when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, as did George and Travis McMichael, when they shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery.

When the Statute of Winchester came into effect, the Copernican Revolution had not taken place and most people believed the Earth was flat and the sun revolved around the Earth. Surely we can do better than to continue supporting a system of policing based on such medieval ideas about law enforcement. Britain, where the Statute of Winchester was born, dropped it as the basis of policing by the early 1800s, adopting in its place the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. Few other institutions of modern American society are based on practices and principles that are 750 years old.

Demilitarization, better training, greater accountability and transparency, civilian control of police top experts are not hopeful that such reforms will actually bring about the needed change in policing.

Yanilda Gonzlez, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said: I'm always such a pessimist with police reform. [We] have to distinguish what works with what can last, what can actually endure without coming under the typical strain of police resistance and politicians' incentives to undermine police reform.

Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim professor of criminal justice at the Kennedy School, goes a step further: What I think we're up against is not just a fairly conservative block of folks who are embracing law and order, and want to quell any kind of dissent. We actually also have kind of silent support among those folks who would present themselves as being fully in favor of progressive change.

A broad swath of Americans are in this conservative block, even those who would not ordinarily consider themselves law and order advocates. Shortly after George Floyds murder, a former mayor of Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, argued that the problem with policing is not the police, but rather the society from which the police emerge. She held out particular scorn for members of her own demographic.

"Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience, Hodges wrote in the New York Times, and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live, where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death. Underlying these requests are the flawed beliefs that aggressive patrolling of Black communities provides a wall of protection around white people and their property."

This makes for stiff headwinds. The police, politicians, most of the public and even those who would otherwise consider themselves progressives are explicitly or implicitly arrayed against fundamental changes in policing. But that does not mean we should stop agitating for a change. Copernicus was up against powerful social and religious forces that disregarded the science behind his observations. It took a century, the efforts of Galileo, Isaac Newton and many others, and the acquiescence of the church to finally cement the notion that the Earth revolved around the sun.

If we mark the start of the modern-day effort to change policing to the Black freedom struggle of the 1960s, that still leaves about 40 years before we might expect to see any meaningful change in policing. But it is possible for the arguments to be made, and the steps taken, to bring an end to us vs. them policing and to disengage modern-day policing from its roots in medieval English society and America slavery. Not only will communities of color, under the ongoing threat of police killings, violence and brutality, be safer, but all Americans will be safer as well.

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Reforms aren't enough to end 'us vs. them' policing in America - Crosscut