The United States cages people at a higher rate than any other country in the history of the world, according to a 2014 report by the National Research Council. A 2017 Prison Policy Initiative report found that the U.S. spends at least $182 billion a year on systems of incarceration, including policing, prosecution, and prisons. If policing and incarceration really make us safer and healthier, we should be the safest society in history. We know that’s not the case.
As a public defender, a tax-paying Chicagoan, as a Black woman who is a survivor of crime and of police violence, who lives in an over-policed neighborhood afflicted by violence, I care deeply about public health and safety and making the right kind of investments to achieve those goals. Here is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: Policing makes communities less safe and less healthy. Policing makes my community less safe and less healthy. Not only does policing fail to prevent violent crime, it creates conditions that allow for even more violence.
Let me explain.
The Chicago neighborhood where I live and have owned a home for the past 11 years has been identified as one of the most violent areas in the city. The city’s answer has always been to increase police presence. But the additional police officers I see driving the wrong way down one-way streets have not reduced violence. The police who close the parking lot to the park in my neighborhood at 2 p.m., when the park is open until 11 p.m., have not reduced violence. The police who look at me suspiciously while I'm on my morning run in my neighborhood have made me feel trapped, unwanted, and afraid — and I still hear those gunshots.
In advance of Memorial Day weekend and the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, the Chicago Police Department canceled all days off and required officers to work 12-hour shifts, supposedly to combat violence. These armies of officers were predominately deployed to Black and Latinx neighborhoods and patrolled neighborhoods on foot as if we were the “enemy.” We didn’t feel safe. We weren’t kept safe. Shootings still happened.
We often hear and, increasingly with smartphone footage, see the physical violence that is inflicted by police. But we don’t talk as much about the psychological violence of policing: the fear, anxiety, depression, and trauma to citizens.
Imagine feeling imprisoned in your own neighborhood, on your own block. Every time you look out your window you see police cars rolling down your street, one after the other, watching you and your neighbors; surveilling your homes, cars, your person; looking for any opportunity to stop and search you, to invade the sanctity of your body and home. People I represent have told me that Chicago police call this “wolf packing.”
I have had countless conversations with my clients in court about being beaten, harassed, or witnessing the police beat or harass a family member or friend. As a public defender, I have had the displeasure of watching countless hours of body-camera videos in which officers stop people walking down the street, tell them to “come here,” search them — moving their hands through their clothes, touching their bodies — and then send them on their way without charge because no crime had occurred. I feel their pain, because I and my family have literally felt that pain. We live in invisible cages.
I have lived in Chicago for 16 years. I am an attorney who holds multiple degrees. I am a homeowner. But when the police see me or my husband, they just see another Black person. An example: My husband asked me to drive with him to the pharmacy blocks away because he was afraid to drive alone after having been stopped so many times by the police. He thought that being in the car with me, a lawyer and public defender who knows the Constitution front and back, would protect him. It didn’t.
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July 01, 2021 at 06:00PM
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Rising Crime in Cities Like Chicago Should Not Lead to More Policing - Teen Vogue
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