Disturbing History - DH Ep:41 The Thin Blue Line

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

This episode isn't going to be easy to hear, but it's necessary. I spent sixteen years in law enforcement, ending my career as an Atlanta police officer in 2016, and I can tell you from experience that the conversations we're having about policing in America are missing the most important piece of the puzzle. We're arguing about reform and training and bad apples, but nobody wants to talk about where the tree was planted in the first place.In this comprehensive deep dive, I trace the direct line from the first organized police force in America to the militarized departments patrolling our streets today, and that line is far darker than most people realize. We start in 1704 South Carolina with the creation of slave patrols, the first publicly funded, professionally organized law enforcement in what would become the United States. These weren't just groups catching runaways. They were psychological warfare operations designed to keep enslaved people in constant fear through random night raids, unlimited search authority, and violence with complete legal immunity.Every legal framework they operated under, from reasonable suspicion to qualified immunity, still exists in American law today. After the Civil War destroyed slavery, Southern states immediately created the Black Codes, laws specifically designed to recreate slavery under a legal facade. We explore how these codes required new police forces to enforce them, forces often staffed by former slave patrollers who understood their mission perfectly. The convict leasing system that followed turned arrested Black men into forced labor for private companies, and we trace how that system evolved into modern mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex that still exploits the Thirteenth Amendment's exception for convicted criminals. Meanwhile, Northern cities were developing their own model of policing, and while it looked different on the surface, it served the same essential purpose of controlling dangerous populations. The creation of the New York Police Department in 1845 established the template that spread across America, departments that were tools of political machines and industrial interests from day one, designed to control immigrants, freed Black people, and the working class. Then we meet August Vollmer, the so-called father of modern policing, a genuinely brilliant reformer who professionalized American law enforcement in the early twentieth century.He created crime labs, established training academies, recruited college-educated officers, and introduced technologies like patrol cars and radios. On paper, he was building something better. In reality, he was making a system of racial control more efficient while operating from assumptions rooted in scientific racism and eugenics. His reforms created police departments that were independent from political corruption but also independent from any meaningful democratic accountability.The 1960s brought everything to a head with the civil rights movement and urban uprisings that forced America to confront police brutality. President Johnson's Kerner Commission spent seven months investigating and released a report in 1968 that predicted exactly the crisis we're living through today. The commission warned that America was moving toward two societies, one Black and one white, separate and unequal, and identified police brutality as a symptom of deeper systemic racism. The report's recommendations were ignored, and America chose the path of increased policing and tough-on-crime politics instead.We examine "The Police Tapes," the groundbreaking 1977 documentary that gave America an unfiltered look at policing in the South Bronx. The film captured the reality that official reports couldn't convey, showing both the impossible conditions officers faced and the casual dehumanization that had become routine in poor minority neighborhoods. It demonstrated how the system wasn't working for anyone, not the officers burning out from impossible expectations and not the communities being simultaneously over-policed and under-protected.he militarization of American police accelerated through the drug war and the war on terror, transforming departments into paramilitary forces equipped with armored vehicles and trained in warrior mindset tactics. Legal doctrines like qualified immunity made accountability nearly impossible. Police unions became powerful political forces that could block any meaningful reform. And then smartphones put cameras in everyone's pockets, finally providing undeniable video evidence of what Black Americans had been experiencing for generations. Ferguson in 2014 became the flashpoint that sparked a national reckoning, but as the Justice Department's investigation revealed, Ferguson wasn't unique. It was typical. The same patterns of constitutional violations, revenue extraction through fines and fees, and racial targeting exist in countless jurisdictions across America. The system is working exactly as it was designed to work.I left law enforcement in 2016 with a clear understanding that the problems aren't individual bad officers but a system built on a foundation of racial control that has never fundamentally changed. Every reform, from professionalization to body cameras, has been absorbed without transforming the essential purpose.We've made the machine more sophisticated, but we haven't changed what the machine does.This episode connects every dot from slave patrols to stop-and-frisk, from Black Codes to quality-of-life policing, from convict leasing to mass incarceration, from the legal immunity of slave patrollers to the qualified immunity protecting modern officers. It's the history they don't teach in police academies because understanding this history makes it impossible to pretend that reform within the existing system can work. Real change requires confronting the uncomfortable truth that American policing has always been about control more than safety, and that truth has been consistent for over three hundred years. If you've ever wondered why policing in America looks so different from policing in other developed democracies, why we have more people incarcerated than any nation on earth, why the same videos of police violence keep emerging despite decades of reform efforts, this episode answers those questions.The answers aren't comfortable, but they're necessary if we're ever going to build something better. This is the dark history of American policing, told by someone who wore the badge for sixteen years and saw the system from the inside. It's time we stopped pretending the problem is a few bad apples and acknowledged that the orchard was planted in poisoned soil from the very beginning.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner. of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. I spent 16 years in law enforcement, 16 years wearing the badge, responding to calls, walking beats, and seeing humanity at its absolute worst, and occasionally at its surprising best. My career ended in 2016 when I left my position as an Atlanta police officer, but the questions the job raised have never left me. I've seen policing from both sides now, standing in the gap between the community. and the thin blue line. And I can tell you without hesitation that the reality is far more complicated

than either side wants to admit. There are good cops out there, men and women who genuinely want to serve their communities, who see their badge as a responsibility rather than a weapon. I worked alongside them. I also saw the other kind, the ones who seemed to relish the power,

who saw every interaction as an opportunity to dominate rather than serve. The system itself I learned, has a way of encouraging the latter while burning out the former. But here's what troubled me most during those 16 years. What kept me awake long after my shifts ended. Nobody talks about where this all came from. We debate police brutality.

We argue about qualified immunity. We march and protest and demand reform. But we rarely ask the fundamental question that might actually help us understand what we're dealing with. Where did American policing come from? what were the first police forces designed to do? Who were they designed to protect? And just as importantly, who were they designed to control?

The answers to those questions are buried deep in American history, and they're far darker than most people realize. This isn't a story about a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. This is a story about an orchard that was planted in poisoned soil from the very beginning. And no matter how many times we've tried to graft new branches onto the tree, the roots remain the same. What you're about to hear isn't the sanitized version of police history they teach in the academy. This is the real story, the one that explains why policing in America looks fundamentally different

than it does in other developed nations. It's the story of slave patrols and night watches, of black codes and convict leasing, of well-intentioned reformers who built systems that still haunt us today. It's about how the professionalization of policing, championed by men like August Volmer who genuinely believed they were creating something better, still couldn't escape the foundational purpose these forces were created to serve. We're going to talk about things that make people uncomfortable. We're going to explore the 1968 Kerner Report,

a presidential commission that warned America was splitting into two separate and unequal societies and predicted exactly the crisis we're living through today. We're going to talk about the police tapes, a 1970 documentary that showed America what policing really looked like in the streets of the South Bronx, raw and unfiltered in ways that shocked the nation. We're going to trace a direct line from the slave patrols of the 1700s to the militarized police forces of the 21st century. This is the history they don't teach you in the academy. This is the history that explains everything.

If you want to understand American policing, you have to start in the most uncomfortable place possible. You have to start with slavery, and more specifically, you have to start with the terrifying efficiency of the slave patrol system that emerged in the colonial South during the early 1700s. The first formally organized police force in what would become the United States wasn't created to fight crime in any conventional sense. It was created to catch human beings who were trying to escape bondage. In 1704, the colony of South Carolina established what historians now recognize as the first publicly funded, professionally organized police force in America. They called them slave patrols, and their job was brutally simple.

Maintained the system of racial slavery through surveillance, intimidation, and violence. These weren't informal groups of vigilantes, though those existed too. The slave patrols were official government organizations, funded by taxpayer money, granted legal authority by colonial legislatures. White men, usually poor whites who couldn't afford to own slaves themselves, were drafted or volunteered for patrol duty. In South Carolina, every white man between the ages of 18 and 45 was required to serve. They received official commissions, legal immunity for their actions while on patrol, and in many cases, payment for their services. The patrols had sweeping authority that would make modern civil libertarians' heads spin.

They could enter any plantation at any time. slave quarter or master's house to search for weapons, check that slaves were where they were supposed to be and look for any signs of insurrection planning. They could stop any black person on the road and demand to see their papers. Passes written by their masters granting permission to travel. No pass meant immediate punishment, often delivered on the spot with a whip. They could break up any gathering of black people because any gathering might be a conspiracy. They could administer corporal punishment at their discretion. They operated with virtually no oversight and faced no consequences for brutality.

But here's what made the slave patrols particularly insidious. They weren't just about catching runaways. They were about psychological warfare. The patrols rode through slave quarters in the dead of night, randomly, unpredictably, making noise, checking doors, reminding enslaved people that they were always being watched, that escape was impossible, that the white power structure was everywhere and all seeing. The randomness was the point. You never knew when the patrol would come, so you lived in constant fear. The system spread like a virus through the colonial south. Virginia formalized its slave

patrol system in 1727. North Carolina and Georgia followed. By the time of the American Revolution, every southern colony had some version of this system in place. The patrols became woven into the fabric of Southern society, so normal that white Southerners couldn't imagine life without them. And here's the crucial detail that connects directly to modern policing. The legal frameworks developed to empower slave patrols created precedents that still exist in American law today. The concept of reasonable suspicion, the idea that police can stop and question someone based on their appearance or behavior, rather than concrete evidence of a crime, comes directly from slave patrol practices.

The legal authority for searches without warrants in certain circumstances, the qualified immunity that protects officers from personal liability, the broad discretion given to officers in the field. All of these legal concepts trace their ancestry back to the powers granted to slave patrols. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's stay in the colonial period a moment longer because something different was happening in the North. And that difference matters.

were understanding how American policing evolved along regional lines. Northern colonies where slavery existed but never became the foundation of the entire economic system, developed a different model of law enforcement. They adopted the British system of night watches and constables. These were part-time positions, often unpaid or poorly paid, filled by ordinary citizens who rotated through the duty. The night watch was supposed to look out for fires, report crimes and maintain order on the streets after dark.

It was, by all accounts, a fairly terrible system. The watch was staffed by whoever got stuck with the duty that night, often elderly men or people who'd been drafted into service as a form of punishment. They spent most of their time sleeping, drinking or ignoring problems. When they did act, they had limited authority and even more limited motivation. Boston established a formal night watch in 1636. making it one of the earliest forms of organized law enforcement in the colonies. New York, then New Amsterdam, followed in 1658 under Dutch rule.

Philadelphia created its watch system in 1700. These northern systems were reactive rather than proactive. They responded to crimes after they happened, rather than actively patrolling to prevent crime or control populations. The key difference between northern night watches and southern slave patrols was purpose. The Nightwatch existed, at least in theory, to protect all citizens from crime. The slave patrols existed to protect one group of citizens from another group of human beings who weren't considered citizens at all.

One system, however flawed, was built on the idea of mutual protection. The other was built on racial domination. The Revolutionary War disrupted both systems. In the chaos of independence, formal law enforcement largely collapsed. The new United States emerged without any national police force and with only the most rudimentary local systems. For several decades, American cities relied on volunteer watches, constables, and sheriffs, all operating with minimal organization, training, or resources. It was, by almost any measure, a disaster.

Crime flourished in growing cities. Riots broke out regularly. Mob violence was common, but then came 1829 and everything changed. That was the year London established the Metropolitan Police, the world's first modern professional police force. Organized by Home Secretary Robert Peel, the Met introduced revolutionary concepts. Officers worked full-time, received salaries, wore uniforms, followed standardized procedures, and answered to a central command structure. The goal was to prevent crime through visible patrol presence rather than simply responding after crimes occurred. Peel's principles emphasized that police were civilians in uniform, that their power derived from public consent,

and that effectiveness should be measured by the absence of crime rather than by arrests or force used. American cities watched this experiment with intense interest. They faced growing pains that the old constable and watch systems couldn't handle. Waves of immigration swelled urban populations. Industrial development created new forms of crime and disorder. Class conflict intensified. Wealthy merchants and property owners demanded better protection for their interests. The time had come for something new.

Or rather, the time had come for something old to evolve into something that looked new on the surface while maintaining its original purpose underneath. In 1838, Boston created what's often called the first modern American police force, a day watch to supplement the existing night watch. But it was New York that really showed other American cities the model for urban policing. In 1844, the New York State Legislature

passed a law creating the Municipal Police Department of New York City. In 1845, the city formally organized a police force of 800 men modeled loosely on London's Metropolitan Police, but adapted to American circumstances in ways that reveal everything about what American policing would become. On paper, the NYPD looked like a progressive innovation. Officers wore copper star badges, giving rise to the nickname Coppers, or cops. They patrolled fixed beats on foot. They answered to a central command structure. They were supposed to be politically neutral public servants focused on preventing crime and maintaining order.

In reality, the NYPD was a creature of urban political machines from day one. Officers were appointed based on political connections rather than merit. Police jobs were patronage positions. rewards for loyal party service. Officers owed their allegiance to ward bosses and political machines rather than to any abstract ideal of justice or public service. The department became a tool for political control, a private army for whoever held power at City Hall. And here's what's crucial to understand. The New York model spread rapidly to other northern cities, precisely because it was so useful for political control. Philadelphia organized its police force,

in 1854. Chicago followed in 1855. Cincinnati, New Orleans, Newark, Baltimore, all created police departments based on the New York model between 1850 and 1860. These forces were explicitly designed to control the dangerous classes, which was how the wealthy referred to poor immigrants, freed black people and the working class in general. Meanwhile, in the South, something else was happening. The Civil War had destroyed the the slave patrol system along with slavery itself. But white Southerners had no intention of accepting actual equality for the four million formerly enslaved people, now technically free. They needed a new system of control, one that looked legal enough to pass constitutional muster, but was

really just slavery by another name. Enter the Black Codes. A series of laws passed by southern states immediately after the Civil War, in 1865 and 1866. These laws were masterpieces of malicious creativity, designed to recreate as much of the slave system as legally possible. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. They varied by state, but the common elements were chilling in their systematic oppression. The black codes restricted where black people could live, requiring them to work as plantation laborers or domestic servants. They required black people to sign annual labor contracts, and if they were,

left before the contract expired, they could be arrested and forced to return. They made it illegal for black people to be unemployed, calling it vagrancy, and the punishment for vagrancy was forced labor. They prohibited black people from owning firearms, from gathering in groups, from testifying against white people in court. They established separate court systems for black defendants. They created separate and severe punishments for crimes committed by black people. They allowed white employers to whip black workers, calling it discipline rather than assault. Mississippi's Black Code declared that any black person who couldn't prove they had employment would be arrested for vagrancy, fined $50, and if they couldn't pay the fine, sold to whoever would pay it in exchange for their labor.

South Carolina's Code required black people to get a special license to work in any job, except farmer or servant, and the license cost between $10 and $20 and $100, an impossible sum for people who just emerged from slavery with nothing. Louisiana's code made it a crime for black people to leave their employer's property without permission, or to have visitors without permission. George's code made it illegal for black people to own property in urban areas. The enforcement of these codes required a new form of organized law enforcement in the South. The old slave patrols were gone,

but their successor emerged in the form of southern police departments and sheriff's offices, often staffed by former slave patrollers, former Confederate soldiers, and men who'd grown up in the slave patrol system. These forces understood their mission perfectly. Keep black people subjugated, keep them working, keep them afraid. But the black codes were too obviously oppressive. Northern Republicans, fresh from winning the Civil War and still in control of Congress, recognized these codes for what they were, an attempt to recreate slavery through law. In response, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaring that all people born in the United States were citizens with equal rights, and then the 14th Amendment, which constitutionally

guaranteed equal protection under the law. The black codes in their original form were struck down, but white Southerners simply adapted. They created new laws that were race-neutral, on paper, but designed to be enforced exclusively or disproportionately against black people. Vagrancy laws that criminalized unemployment, loitering laws that criminalized standing around in public, laws against disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct that gave police unlimited discretion to arrest black people for essentially anything. Convict leasing laws that turned arrested black men into forced laborers for private companies, who paid the state for their labor while working them literally to death. This is where the direct line from slave patrols to modern policing

becomes impossible to deny. Southern police forces in the post-Civil War era weren't primarily focused on solving crimes. They were focused on arresting black people to feed the convict leasing system, which had replaced slavery as the foundation of the southern economy. Police had quotas to meet, prisoners to deliver. Companies paid good money for convict labor, and that money-funded local governments. The entire system depended on police constantly arresting black people, usually on fabricated or trivial charges. And here's the nightmare detail that connects directly to our current moment. This system didn't end with reconstruction or the progressive era or the civil rights movement. Convict leasing was finally abolished in most states by the 1920s, but it was replaced by

chain gangs, prison labor, and the modern system of mass incarceration that still did. disproportionately targets Black Americans. The legal framework that allowed slave patrols to stop any black person and demand papers evolved into stop and frisk policies. The qualified immunity that protected slave patrollers from consequences evolved into the qualified immunity doctrine that protects modern police officers. The assumption that black people are dangerous and need to be controlled never went away. It just learned to speak in colorblind language about high crime

areas and reasonable suspicion. By the late 1800s, American policing had established its dual character, and that duality persists today. In the north, police were tools of political machines and industrial interests, breaking strikes, controlling immigrant populations, protecting property. In the south, police were tools of white supremacy, enforcing racial hierarchy through constant surveillance and selective prosecution. Both systems were were profoundly corrupt, brutal, and unaccountable. Both systems understood that their real job was social control, not justice. The early 20th century brought the first serious attempts to reform this disaster. A new generation of reformers influenced by progressive-era ideals

and scientific management principles believed that policing could be transformed from a corrupt patronage system into a professional, scientific, politically neutral institution. They imagined police departments run like businesses, with merit-based hiring, standardized training, modern technology, and objective data-driven practices. Leading this reform movement was a man who would become known as the father of modern American policing, a Berkeley police chief named August Volmer. And to understand how we got from there to hear, we need to understand both what Volmer tried to create and what he actually built. August Volmer was born in New Orleans in 1876.

and by any objective measure, he was a remarkable man. He joined the Berkeley Police Department in 1905 and became chief in 1909 at the age of 33. Over the next 23 years, he revolutionized American policing in ways that still shaped the profession today. He was brilliant, innovative, genuinely idealistic, and completely convinced that science and professionalism could transform policing from a corrupt patronage system into a force for social good. would. Volmer introduced reforms that seem obvious now but were revolutionary then. He created the first scientific crime laboratory in America, applying forensic science to criminal investigations. He established the first police training academy, requiring officers to study

psychology, sociology, and criminal law, rather than just learning on the job. He recruited college-educated officers, believing that education would produce better police. He implemented merit-based hiring and promotion rather than political appointment. He introduced patrol cars, radios, and other technologies to make policing more efficient. He pioneered the use of lie detectors and handwriting analysis. He emphasized crime prevention, rather than just response, putting officers on foot patrol to build relationships with communities. Volmer's reforms spread across the country.

Other departments adopted his methods. His students and protegees became chiefs and men. major cities. He consulted with police departments nationwide, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Kansas City. He taught at the University of California, training a generation of police leaders. He wrote extensively about policing as a profession, emphasizing education, psychology, and social science. He advocated treating police work as a career requiring specialized knowledge rather than just a political job. On paper, Volmer was creating something better. and in some ways, he genuinely was.

Professional police departments with trained officers and scientific methods are objectively superior to corrupt political machines with untrained thugs carrying badges. Volmer believed deeply in reform, in progress, in the possibility of creating police forces that served all people fairly and justly. But here's what Volmer couldn't escape, or perhaps never fully recognized. He was building his reforms on the same foundational purpose, that American policing had always served. He was making the machine more efficient,

but he wasn't changing what the machine was designed to do. Volmer was a product of his time, and his time was the progressive era, an age of scientific racism, eugenics, and absolute confidence in white expertise-solving social problems. He believed in the science of his day, which meant he believed that crime was caused by biological and psychological defects in individuals,

particularly individuals from inferior races. He supported restrictions on immigration from southern and eastern Europe because he believed those populations were genetically predisposed to criminality. He advocated for the forced sterilization of criminals and mental defectives to prevent them from reproducing. He saw black Americans as inherently more prone to crime due to what he considered their lower evolutionary development. In fairness to Volmer, these views were mainstream.

among educated white Americans of his era. But we can't ignore how those views shape the reforms he championed. When Volmer professionalized policing, he created more efficient systems for identifying, tracking, and controlling the populations he believed were inherently criminal. When he introduced scientific methods, he used them to develop criminal typologies based on racist assumptions. When he emphasized crime prevention,

he meant preventing crime by surveilling and controlling communities, communities of color and poor white immigrants. Volmer's psychological approach to policing sounds progressive until you understand what it meant in practice. He believed police should study the psychology of criminals to predict and prevent crime. This led to the development of criminal profiling based on race, ethnicity, and class.

It led to intelligence gathering operations targeting immigrant communities, black neighborhoods, and labor organizers. It led to prevent. detention of people who fit the profile of potential criminals, even though they hadn't committed any crime. The science was just eugenics dressed up in police uniforms. And his technology innovations, while impressive, made surveillance and control far more effective. Radio communication allowed coordinated crackdowns on entire neighborhoods. Patrol cars increased the number of contacts police had with citizens,

particularly in communities deemed high risk. Scientific recordkeeping allowed police to track and target individuals and groups with unprecedented precision. Every innovation that made police more professional also made them more powerful and less accountable. The fingerprint database Volmer championed became a tool for identifying and tracking immigrants and black Americans who'd committed no crime. The criminal files he meticulously maintained became blacklist that destroyed lives, based on suspicion rather than evidence. The patrol strategies he developed concentrated police presence in poor and minority neighborhoods,

creating the model for the over-policing we still see today. But perhaps Volmer's most lasting and problematic legacy was his success in separating policing from political oversight. He argued correctly that police departments needed independence from political machines. He fought for civil service protections that prevented politicians from firing officers arbitrarily. He established police commissions and internal review processes rather than external civilian oversight. He professionalized police unions and fraternal orders that advocated for officer rights and interests. All of this seemed like progress toward a more professional, less

corrupt police force. But what it actually created was police departments that were independent, not just from political corruption, but from any meaningful democratic accountability. police became their own political force, answerable primarily to themselves, protected by civil service rules and qualified immunity, organized into powerful unions that could resist any reform they opposed. By the time Volmer retired in 1932, he'd created the template for modern American policing, professional departments with trained officers, advanced technology, scientific methods, and substantial independence from civilian oversight. Other police reformers of his era, men like Raymond Fos Dick, Bruce Smith, and O.W. Wilson, built on his foundation. By the 1950s, the professional model had become dominant in American policing.

It was, without question, better than the corrupt political machine model it replaced. But better doesn't mean good, and better doesn't mean the fundamental purpose had changed. The professional police forces of mid-20th century America were still primarily focused on controlling population, deemed dangerous, still disproportionately targeting communities of color, still operating with minimal accountability, still seeing themselves as warriors against internal enemies, rather than servants of the entire community. And then came the 1960s, when everything exploded. The 1960s didn't invent police brutality or racial injustice, but they made it impossible to ignore. Television brought images of police beating civil rights protesters into American living room.

urban uprisings put entire cities in flames. The gap between the promise of equal protection under law and the reality of racially targeted policing became a national crisis that could no longer be papered over with talk of a few bad apples. The civil rights movement forced America to confront the fact that southern police had spent a century enforcing apartheid, with extreme violence. Images of police in Birmingham using fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful protesters, including children, shocked to the national conscience. The murder of civil rights workers James Cheney,

Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964, with local police complicity, demonstrated that southern law enforcement was often indistinguishable from the Ku Klux Klan. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, where state troopers beat marchers bloody with Billy Cluck.

was broadcast live making it impossible to deny. But the civil rights movement was primarily focused on the south, and that focus allowed northern cities to maintain the comfortable fiction that police brutality was a regional problem, a remnant of slavery and segregation that didn't exist in enlightened northern cities with their professional police forces. Then the ghettos exploded. The Harlem riot of 1964 started when an off-duty police officer shot

and killed a 15-year-old black boy named James Powell. The community erupted. For six days, Harlem burned. The Watts uprising in Los Angeles in 1965 left 34 dead, over 1,000 injured, and entire blocks destroyed. Newark in 1967 saw 26 deaths and extensive destruction. Detroit in 1967 was even worse, 43 deaths, over 2,000 buildings destroyed. The Army's 82nd Airborne Division deployed to restore order.

Between 1964 and 1968, hundreds of riots erupted in American cities. The pattern was almost always the same. Police confrontation with black citizens, usually over something minor, community response, police overreaction, escalation into full-scale uprising. The immediate triggers varied, but the underlying cause was constant. Black communities had been subjected to aggressive police. constant harassment, routine brutality, and they'd reach the breaking point. President Lyndon Johnson, desperate to understand what was happening and how to stop it,

did something remarkable. In July 1967, after the Newark and Detroit uprisings, he established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. Johnson charged the commission with three questions. What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done? to prevent it from happening again. The Kerner Commission spent seven months investigating. They reviewed police department policies and practices. They conducted surveys and riot areas. They interviewed hundreds of people, residents, police officers, public officials,

civil rights leaders. They commissioned research studies. They held hearings in cities across the country. And in February 1968, they released their report. The Kerner Report is one of the most important documents in American history and one of the most thoroughly ignored. It's worth quoting at length because its findings were so stark and its predictions so accurate. The commission concluded, Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal. That was the

headline finding, the one everyone remembers. But the report went much deeper, identifying white racism as the fundamental cause of the urban crisis. Not just individual prejudice, but institutional and systemic racism embedded in every aspect of American society. On policing specifically, the Kerner report was devastating. The commission found that police brutality and harassment were pervasive in black neighborhoods. They found that black citizens had no effective means of redress when officers abused them. They found that police departments were almost entirely white, with black officers concentrated in the lowest ranks and given the least desirable assignments. They found that police saw themselves as an occupying army in black neighborhoods, rather than as public servants.

They found that police union resistance prevented meaningful reform. The report identified specific problems, aggressive patrol tactics that treated all black citizens as potential criminals, routine use of excessive force with no consequences, stop and frisk practices that that humiliated and intimidated, verbal abuse and racial slurs from officers, differential enforcement where black citizens were arrested for things that white citizens were warned about, lack of community input into police policy, and virtually no accountability when officers crossed the line. But here's what made the Kerner report so powerful. It didn't just describe symptoms. It traced causes. The commission connected police brutality

to housing segregation, unemployment, inadequate education, and political powerlessness. They showed how police were being used to contain black citizens and ghettos while failing to actually protect those communities from crime. They explained how decades of over-policing and under-protection had created deep mistrust. They warned that aggressive policing was creating the conditions for continued unrest, rather than preventing it. The Kerner Commission made specific recommendations for police resources. reform. Recruit more black officers, establish community relations programs, create external

civilian review boards, limit stop and frisk practices, develop guidelines on when officers could use force, implement better training on dealing with minority communities, and ensure swift action against officers who violated citizens' rights. President Johnson, who'd commissioned the report, hated it. He felt it blamed white America too directly, risked alienating white voters, and didn't give him practical solutions he could implement. He essentially buried it, refusing to formally receive the commission or endorse its findings. The report became a bestseller anyway,

over two million copies sold, but its recommendations were largely ignored by policymakers. Police departments and police unions responded to the Kerner report with hostility. They rejected the finding that police brutality was a significant problem, insisting that the real issue was black criminality and outside agitators who turned minor incidents into riots. Police unions attacked the commission as biased against police. Departments resisted external oversight, arguing that civilians couldn't understand the

complexities of police work. The few reforms that were implemented, mostly superficial community relations programs, were underfunded and treated as public relations rather than meaningful change. And then, just two months after the Kerner report was released, everything got worse. On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Over a hundred cities exploded in grief and rage. Federal troops occupied Washington, D.C. The violence of that spring made the previous riots look minor.

Any momentum for police reform died in the flames. The 1968 presidential campaign became a referendum on law and order. Richard Nixon won by promising to crack down on crime and restore order to American cities. He attacked the Kerner Report as soft on crime and soft on criminals. His campaign used coded racial language about urban crime to appeal to white voters, terrified by the riots. His victory signaled that America had chosen the path of more aggressive policing

rather than addressing the underlying causes the Kerner Report had identified. The 1970s brought the tough-on-crime era into full bloom. Politicians competed to see who could be hard. hardest on criminals. Police departments got larger budgets, more equipment, more authority. The drug war started, giving police sweeping new powers and creating perverse incentives for aggressive enforcement in minority communities. Mandatory minimum sentences filled prisons disproportionately with black offenders. The entire apparatus of the criminal justice system shifted toward punishment and control. And in 1970, something unprecedented happened that gave America,

an unfiltered look at what policing actually looked like on the ground in the poorest neighborhoods. A documentary film crew followed police in the South Bronx, capturing reality in ways that news coverage never could. The police tapes wasn't supposed to be revolutionary. It was supposed to be a documentary about police work, filmed in 1976 by Alan and Susan Raymond for public television. The Raymond's convinced the NYPD to let them ride along with officers from the 44th precincts. in the South Bronx, one of the most dangerous precincts in the city. The department agreed, probably expecting a show that would make police look heroic. What the Raymond's captured instead was something much more complicated and much more disturbing.

The film aired in 1977 on PBS and immediately became controversial. It showed police work in raw, unscripted reality, officers responding to domestic violence calls, dealing with drug addicts, processing arrests, navigating bureaucracy, no music, no narration, just the unfiltered experience of policing the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhood in New York. What made the police tapes so powerful was its refusal to pick aside. It showed officers who genuinely cared about the community they served, trying to help people in impossible situations with inadequate resources. It also showed officers who were burned out.

cynical, openly hostile to the people they were supposed to protect. It showed the chaos of understaffed precincts dealing with overwhelming violence. It showed the human cost of that violence on both officers and residents. And it showed, without commentary or judgment, the racial dynamics of policing. Mostly white officers patrolling an almost entirely black in Puerto Rican neighborhood, seeing residents as problems to be managed rather than citizens to be served. The film captured moments that revealed the truth about urban policing in ways that official reports never could. In one scene, officers respond to a domestic violence call in a housing project. The woman who called is terrified. Her face bruised, her children crying.

The officers are sympathetic but also frustrated because they've been to this apartment multiple times and they know they can't actually solve the problem. They can arrest the boyfriend, but he'll be out in hours. and the cycle will repeat. They tell the woman she needs to press charges, but she's afraid, dependent on him, trapped. The officers leave, knowing they've accomplished nothing. In another scene, officers arrest a teenage boy for robbery.

The boy is clearly high, barely coherent. The officers are rough with him, not brutal exactly, but not gentle either. They joke about him, treat him like a piece of garbage they're hauling to the precinct. There's no hatred in their actions, just complete dehumanization. He's not a person who made a bad choice, not someone who might be helped. He's a problem, a statistic, another body to process through the system.

The most disturbing scene shows officers responding to a call about a man with a gun. They arrive at a building, run up the stairs, confront a man in a hallway. The situation is tense, dangerous. The man doesn't have a gun, it turns out. but he's not cooperative. The officers subdue him aggressively, throwing him against the wall, handcuffing him roughly.

Later, back at the precinct, the officers laugh about it, about how scared the guy was, about how they thought they might have to shoot him. There's no malice in their laughter, but there's no empathy either. It's just another day at work. The police tapes showed America

what the Kerner report had described, police operating as an occupying force in minority neighborhoods, making constant contact with residents under adversarial circumstances, seeing every situation as potentially dangerous, treating community members as perpetual suspects. The film showed how routine these interactions were, how unremarkable the casual aggression and dehumanization had become. But the film also showed something the reformers rarely acknowledged, how impossible the job was. The officers in the 44th precinct were responding to truly horrific levels of violence and social collapse.

The South Bronx in the 1970s was a war zone. Buildings burning, crime everywhere, social services nonexistent, poverty absolute. The officers were understaffed, underpaid, inadequately trained, and expected to solve problems that were fundamentally economic and social, not criminal. They were set up to fail, and their failure took the form of either burning out or becoming hard and cynical. Police unions hated the film. They argued it showed police in a negative light, made them look racist and brutal. Some officers who appeared in the footage claimed they'd been edited to look bad. The NYPD initially tried to prevent the film from airing, arguing it would

damage community relations. When it aired anyway and won critical acclaim, including an Emmy, the department changed tactics, using the film to argue that officers needed better equipment, more support, higher pay, and less oversight. Meanwhile, community activists watched the same film and saw confirmation of everything they'd been saying about police brutality and racism. They pointed to the same scenes the unions complained about and said, yes, exactly, this is what we experience every day. The film became a Roar Shack test, with viewers seeing in it whatever confirmed their existing beliefs about policing. But if you watch the police tapes without an agenda, what you see is a system that doesn't work for anyone. Not for the officers who are trying

to do an impossible job under terrible conditions. Not for the residents who are both over-policed and under-protected, constantly harassed by police, but unable to get help when they actually need it. Not for the city that's paying for a police force that's maintaining order through fear, rather than actually reducing crime or serving the community. The film captured something essential about American policing that remains true today. The system asks police to be social workers, mental health counselors, mediators, warriors, and peacekeepers simultaneously, gives them inadequate training and resources for any of those roles, then blames them when they fail. At the same time, the system concentrates police in poor minority

neighborhoods, encourages aggressive enforcement, rewards, arrests, and citations over community relationships, and protects officers from consequences when they crossed the line. It's a perfect recipe for the dysfunction we see today. In the years after the police tapes aired, that dysfunction only intensified. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The 1980s brought the crack epidemic and the militarization of police in response. The 1990s brought the crime bill and mass incarceration. The 2000s brought the war on terror and even more military equipment flowing to local police departments. The 2010s brought ubiquitous video recording and finally,

undeniable proof of what black Americans had been saying for generations. The militarization of American police didn't happen overnight. It was a gradual process, justified by a series of moral panics about crime, drugs, and terrorism that transformed police departments from civilian peace officers into paramilitary forces. It started with SWAT teams. The first special weapons and tactics team was created in Los Angeles in 1967, specifically in response to the Watts riots and increasing concern about urban violence. The idea was to have a specialized unit for extraordinary situations.

Hostage rescues, active shooters, barricaded suspects, situations that required military-style tactics. SWAT was supposed to be the exception, used only when, normal policing wasn't sufficient. By the 1980s, SWAT teams had become routine, and their use expanded far beyond their original purpose. The drug war provided the justification. Politicians declared drugs a threat to national security, equivalent to military invasion. If drugs were war, then police needed to be warriors. Congress passed laws allowing police to seize assets from drug suspects before conviction, creating a profit motive, for drug enforcement. The Pentagon's 1033 program established in 1997 allowed the military to transfer

surplus equipment to local police departments. Armored vehicles, grenade launchers, assault rifles, body armor, night vision devices, all the equipment of modern warfare flowing to small town police departments. The transformation was ideological as well as material. Police training increasingly emphasized officer safety above all else. teaching officers to see every interaction as potentially deadly, every citizen as a potential threat. The warrior mindset became dominant in police culture. Trainers like Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger,

taught thousands of officers that policing was combat, that hesitation would get them killed, that they needed to be prepared to use violence instantly and overwhelmingly. Grossman literally taught courses called killology, arguing that officers needed to overcome natural reluctance to kill and develop a warrior mindset. This training was coupled with legal doctrines that made it nearly impossible to hold officers accountable for violence. The Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Graham v. Connor established that use of force should be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer in the same situation, not from hindsight. This standard gave officers enormous latitude to claim they felt threatened.

Qualified immunity, a judicial doctrine developed over several decades, protected officers from civil liability unless they violated clearly established constitutional rights. A standard so narrow that officers could beat or kill someone and face no consequences as long as the specific circumstances hadn't previously been ruled unconstitutional. The practical result was predictable. Police violence increased, particularly in minority communities that were already over-policed. SWAT teams were deployed not for genuine emergencies, but for routine drug warrants, often in the middle of the night, often at the wrong address. Flashbang grenades were thrown into homes without knowing who was inside.

Dogs were shot routinely. Innocent people were terrorized or killed. And accountability was virtually non-existent because officers were following training and policy, protected by qualified immunity, backed by powerful unions. The War on Terror after September 11, 2001, accelerated militarization further. Police departments received terrorism grants to purchase military equipment. Officers trained in counterterrorism tactics. Surveillance expanded dramatically. The line between military and police operations blurred. Departments acquired mind-resistant ambush-protected vehicles,

MRAPs, designed for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, to patrol American streets. By 2010, American police departments had become occupying armies in poor and minority neighborhoods, conducting raids that looked like military operations, patrolling and armored vehicles, dressed in military gear, trained to see residents as enemy combatants. The language police used reflected this mindset. They talked about war zones and combat and neutralizing threats. They described entire neighborhoods as enemy territory that needed to be controlled through overwhelming. force. And then came the smartphones. Before ubiquitous video recording, police abuse was mostly

invisible to white America. Individual cases might make the news, but they were treated as isolated incidents, aberrations, bad apples that didn't reflect the system. Black Americans knew better because they experienced it, but their testimony was routinely dismissed. Officers' accounts were given automatic credibility. The system protected itself through plausible deniability. The system protected itself through plausible deniability. Video changed that equation. Suddenly, white America could see what black America had been experiencing. The beating of Rodney King in 1991 was caught on video,

though even that video wasn't enough to convict the officers initially. Oscar Grant was shot in the back while restrained by a BART police officer in Oakland in 2009, captured on multiple cell phone videos. Eric Garner was choked to death by NYPD officers in 2014, while gasping, I can't breathe, filmed from start to finish. Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in Cleveland, was shot dead by police within two seconds of their arrival, captured on surveillance camera. Walter Scott was shot in the back while running away from a traffic stop in South Carolina, filmed by a bystander. Philando Castile was shot

during a traffic stop in Minnesota, while his girlfriend live streamed the aftermath. The video kept coming, each one showing clearly what police had always been able to deny. But it was Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, that became the flashpoint. Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. The circumstances were disputed. Wilson claimed Brown attacked him. Witnesses said Brown had his hands up. What wasn't disputed was what happened next. The police response to community protests demonstrated every wrong with American policing. Ferguson police responded to protests with overwhelming military force. Officers in combat gear, carrying assault rifles, deployed tear gas and rubber bullets

against peaceful protesters. Armored vehicles rolled through residential streets. Snipers took positions on rooftops. Journalists were arrested for covering the protests. The police treated the black community's grief and anger as an insurgency to be crushed rather than a legitimate response to a young man's death. The Justice Department investigated Ferguson and released a devastating report in 2015. The report found that Ferguson police routinely violated the constitutional rights of black citizens, using excessive force, conducting stops and arrests without reasonable suspicion, issuing citations and fines that had no legal basis. The report found that the entire criminal justice system in Ferguson existed primarily to generate revenue for the city,

through fines and fees extracted from poor black residents. Officers had quotas to meet for citations. Courts existed to collect money, not dispensed justice. People were jailed because they couldn't pay fines for minor violations. The system was explicitly designed to exploit the black community. But here's the crucial finding. Ferguson wasn't unique. It was typical. The same investigation could have been conducted in hundreds of cities across America

and found the same patterns. Ferguson just got caught because Michael Brown's death and the protests forced national attention. The Justice Department report on Ferguson confirmed what the Kerner report had warned about in 1968. American policing remained a system of racial control, more sophisticated than slave patrols or Jim Crow police forces, but serving the same essential function.

The tactics had evolved. The language had become race-neutral, but the purpose remained common. constant. Ferguson sparked the Black Lives Matter movement which forced a national conversation about police violence and systemic racism that had been avoided for decades. Activists demanded fundamental change, end-qualified immunity, demilitarized police, redirect funding to social services, establish genuine community control over police departments. Some cities made modest reforms, body cameras, implicit bias training, community policing

initiatives. A few cities went further, banning chokeholds, restricting no-knock warrants, establishing civilian review boards. But real reform was blocked by police unions, by politicians afraid of appearing soft on crime, by a legal system that continued protecting officers from accountability. And then came 2016, and the possibility of fundamental change seemed to die. I left my position as an Atlanta police officer in 2016. The same year the country elected a president who ran on a platform of law and order, who promised to restore respect for police, who told officers they should rough up suspects during arrests, who pardoned a sheriff convicted of criminal contempt for refusing to stop racially profiling

Latinos. The message was clear. The brief window where national conversation might have led to meaningful reform had closed. But closing the conversation doesn't change the reality. Everything we've traced in this history, from slave patrols to Ferguson, is still present in American policing today. The legal frameworks haven't changed. The funding models haven't changed. The training hasn't fundamentally changed. The culture hasn't changed. We've made cosmetic adjustments while leaving the foundation intact.

The slave patrol practice of stopping and questioning black people without cause evolved into stop and frisk policies that police departments across the country used to conduct millions of searches, overwhelmingly of black and Latino men, with no probable cause. New York City alone conducted over 5 million stops between 2004 and 2012, and nearly 90% of the people stopped were innocent of any crime. The practice was eventually ruled unconstitutional, but many departments still use it, just under different names. The Black Code's use of vagrancy laws to criminalize black poverty evolved into modern quality of life policing that criminalizes homelessness, loitering, panhandling, and other manifestations of poverty. Cities arrest people for sleeping in public, for sitting on sidewalks, for asking for change, for existing while

poor. The punishment for these citations is often fines people can't pay, leading to warrants, arrests, jail time, and criminal records that make escaping poverty even harder. The convict leasing system that turned arrested black men into forced labor evolved into the prison industrial complex, where incarcerated people worked for pennies per hour, producing goods for private companies. The 13th Amendment didn't abolish slavery. It created an exception for people convicted of crimes. That exception is still being exploited. The practice of using police to generate revenue through fines and fees, so clearly documented in Ferguson,

exists in countless jurisdictions. Municipal budgets depend on citation revenue extracted primarily from poor residents who can't afford to fight tickets in court. The justice system becomes a debt collection agency with guns and jails. The militarization of police continues unabated. The 1033 program still transfers military equipment to local departments. SWAT teams are still deployed for routine warrants. Police still patrol in armored vehicles and poor neighbors. The warrior mindset still dominates training. Officers are still taught to shoot first and ask questions later,

to treat every citizen as a potential threat, to prioritize officer safety over civilian life. Qualified immunity still protects officers from civil liability, making it nearly impossible for victims of police violence to get justice in court. The Supreme Court continues expanding qualified immunity, finding new reasons why officers shouldn't be held accountable. Officers can choke someone to death, shoot someone in the back while they're running away, conduct warrantless searches, use excessive force, violate clearly established rights, and face no consequences because the specific circumstances haven't been previously litigated. Police unions remain the most powerful obstacle to reform,

using collective bargaining agreements to prevent accountability, funding political campaigns to elect prosecutors and judges who won't hold officers accountable, threatening to strike or slow down work when cities try to implement oversight. The unions have ensured that discipline is nearly impossible, that officers fired for misconduct are routinely reinstated through arbitration, that everything from body camera policies to use of force investigations is subject to union approval. The Supreme Court's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment gives police enormous, discretion to carry out searches and seizures. The reasonable suspicion standard is so subjective

that officers can justify stopping anyone based on nothing more than a hunch. The reasonable officer standard for use of force means officers are judged by other officers rather than by community standards of reasonableness. The automobile exception, the Plain View doctrine, consent searches, protective sweeps, inventory searches, all these doctrines give police authority to search with minimal constitutional constraint. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And crucially, the funding model for American policing

remains perversely incentivized. Police departments get federal grants for drug enforcement, for hiring more officers, for purchasing equipment. They keep asset forfeiture proceeds from drug cases. They generate revenue through fines and fees. But they get no funding for reducing incarceration. No grants for solving community problems without arrests. No rewards for building trust or addressing root causes of crime.

Every incentive pushes toward aggressive enforcement and maximum arrests. The result is a system that looks almost nothing like policing and other developed democracies. American police kill more people in days than police in countries like England or Germany kill in years. American police are far more militarized, more violent, more aggressive, more aggressive, more aggressive, more aggressive, violent, more aggressive, more numerous, and less accountable than police incomparable nations. We have more people incarcerated, both in raw numbers and per capita, than any country in the world, including authoritarian regimes. And the burden of this system falls overwhelmingly on black and brown Americans, just as it has since the first slave patrols. August Volmer's dream

of professional, scientific, politically neutral policing was always an illusion because it ignored the fundamental question of purpose. You can make a system of racial control more efficient, more sophisticated, more professional, but you can't transform it into something else without changing its foundational purpose. That's the lesson American policing teaches. Reform without fundamental restructuring just makes oppression more palatable to the people not experiencing it. The Kerner report warned in 1968 that America was moving toward two societies, one black, One white, separate and unequal. We didn't heed that warning.

We chose increased policing instead of addressing underlying inequality. We built a massive carceral state instead of investing in communities. We militarized our police instead of demilitarizing our approach to social problems. And now, more than 50 years later, the prediction has come true. We have two justice systems, one that treats some Americans as citizens deserving protection, and another that treats other Americans as subjects requiring control. The police tapes showed this reality in 1977, but we didn't want to see it. Ferguson showed it again in 2014, and still we resist seeing it.

Countless videos of police violence have shown it, each one undeniable evidence of systemic problems, and yet the system persists. The history is clear, the evidence overwhelming, the pattern undeniable, But change remains elusive because change would require admitting uncomfortable truths about what American policing has always been designed to do. The history of American policing isn't a story of steady progress interrupted by occasional setbacks. It's a story of an institution created for racial control that has resisted fundamental change

for over 300 years. Every reform, from professionalization to community policing to body cameras, has been absorbed into the system without changing its essential character. The system adapts, evolves, learns new languages, but it doesn't transform. So what do we do with this knowledge? Understanding history doesn't automatically show us the path forward, but it does tell us which paths we've tried that don't work. We know that hiring more police doesn't make communities safer. Cities that massively increased police forces still experienced crime increases. We know that better training alone doesn't prevent police violence. Officers receive training on

de-escalation, implicit bias, constitutional rights, and still abuse citizens because the system incentivizes aggression and protects officers from consequences. We know that body cameras don't ensure accountability. We have videos of clear misconduct and officers are still cleared. We know that superficial diversity doesn't change police culture. Departments that hire black officers often see those officers either forced out or absorbed into the dominant culture of aggression in us versus them mentality. The reform strategies that have failed all share a common assumption. The problem is individual bad officers or deficient training or insufficient oversight, and the solution is better officers, better training, better oversight

within the existing structure. This assumption allows us to avoid confronting the harder truth that the structure itself is the problem. Real change would require dismantling the legal frameworks that protect police from accountability, fundamentally restructuring how we fund and deploy law enforcement, transferring many responsibilities currently handled by police to other types of trained professionals,

establishing genuine democratic control over police departments, and most difficult of all, abandoning the idea that public safety comes primarily through aggressive enforcement and incarceration. Some cities and communities are experimenting with approaches that reject traditional policing models. Crisis Response teams staffed by mental health professionals instead of armed officers. Serious investment in violence prevention programs that address root causes. Alternatives to incarceration for low-level offenses. Community-based restorative justice programs.

meaningful civilian oversight with real authority, elimination of police involvement in traffic enforcement, drug possession, quality of life offenses, and other areas where police presence escalates, rather than resolves problems. These experiments face enormous obstacles, police unions that fight any reduction in their scope or power, political opposition from those who benefit from the current system,

fear-mongering about rising crime whenever reform is proposed, insufficient funding because governments are unwilling to shift resources from punishment to prevention and resistance from within police departments themselves. But the experiments also show what's possible. Cities that have reduced police contact in favor of other interventions have seen better outcomes for both public safety and community trust. Mental health calls handled by professionals rather than police result in fewer violent confrontations and better care for people in crisis. Violence prevention programs that address root causes reduce violence more effectively than aggressive policing. Restorative justice programs reduce recidivism better than incarceration.

The question isn't whether alternatives to traditional policing can work. The evidence shows they can. The question is whether Americans are willing to make the political choice to fund and implement them. Whether we're willing to give up the comfortable fiction, that the problem is a few bad apples rather than the orchard itself. in the orchard itself, whether we're willing to confront the uncomfortable truth that American policing has always been about control more than safety. My 16 years in law enforcement taught me that individual officers are mostly just people doing a job, some good at it, and some terrible,

most somewhere in between. The officers I worked with weren't monsters. Most of them genuinely wanted to help people. But good intentions don't fix a broken system. You can't reform something that's working exactly as designed. You can only replace it with something better. American policing is working exactly as it was designed to work. Slave patrols were designed to control enslaved populations through surveillance and violence. Modern police forces in poor and minority neighborhoods operate the exact same way. The legal frameworks that protected slave patrollers from accountability now protect modern officers. The assumption that black Americans are dangerous and require special control hasn't changed. It's just been dressed up in race-neutral language about high-crime

areas and reasonable suspicion. Until we confront that fundamental continuity, until we acknowledge that the history we've traced isn't the past but the present, reform will remain impossible. We'll keep having the same conversations after the next video emerges, the next killing, the next protest. We'll implement the same superficial changes, body cameras, and implicit bias training, and community forms, and nothing will fundamentally change because we refuse to change the foundation. The history of American policing tells us where we've been. It shows us how we got here. It explains why reform has consistently failed, and it suggests that real change will require not reform, but transformation, not improvement, but replacement, not fixing the system, but building something

entirely different on a new foundation. That's the uncomfortable truth that history. teaches. The question is whether we're finally ready to learn it. I think about my years in law enforcement often, especially now, watching videos that look just like situations I responded to, hearing explanations from police that sound just like explanations I gave, seeing a system that hasn't changed, despite everything that's happened since I left. I think about the good calls, the times I genuinely helped someone, talk down a suicidal person, reunited a lost chance, with terrified parents, arrested someone who was actually dangerous. Those moments were real, and they mattered.

But they existed within a system that wasn't designed for those moments. Those were exceptions to the rule, deviations from the core purpose. I think about the bad calls, the times I participated in enforcement that served no legitimate purpose beyond harassment and control. The times I watched other officers cross lines. the times the system protected misconduct. The times I knew what was happening was wrong, but felt powerless to change it,

or was too exhausted to fight. Those moments were real too, and they were far more common than the good ones. I think about why I left. It wasn't one incident, but an accumulation, a slow recognition that I was part of something that couldn't be fixed from inside, that the problems weren't individual bad actors,

but the system itself. I could be a good, cop by some measures. Treat people with respect, avoid unnecessary force, try to help, rather than just arrest. But I was still operating within a structure designed for control and punishment, still enforcing laws that criminalized poverty and blackness, still part of an institution whose history and present purpose were inseparable. Leaving didn't solve anything. The system continues without me, operates the same way, produces the same outcomes. But staying, meant being complicit in something I'd come to understand was fundamentally unjust,

means being a small gear in a machine I'd learned was designed for oppression. The history we've explored in this investigation, from slave patrols to Ferguson, from the Black Codes to qualified immunity, from August Volmer's reforms to modern militarization. This history explains everything about why American policing looks the way it does. It explains why reform has failed repeatedly. It explains why we keep having to having the same crisis. It explains why the videos keep coming, showing the same violence, the same impunity, the same pattern. Understanding that history doesn't make the present easier, but it does make it clearer. We know what we're dealing with now. We know where it came from.

We know why superficial fixes don't work. And that knowledge, uncomfortable as it is, is necessary for any real change. The badge I left behind in 2016 represented 16 years of my life, relationships with fellow officers, moments of genuine service to community. But it also represented participation in a system whose history is the history of racial oppression, whose present is still defined by that history, whose future won't change without confronting uncomfortable truths. This has been the story of American policing, the full story, the dark story, the story that connects directly from the past to our present moment. It's a story that implicates all of us, not just police officers, but every American who participates in a system built on this foundation,

who accepts the comfortable fiction that policing is about safety rather than control, who chooses the easy path of calling for reform rather than the hard path of demanding transformation. History isn't destiny. The fact that American policing was built on slave patrols doesn't mean it must always serve the same essential purpose. But changing that purpose requires first acknowledging where we've been, understanding how we got here, and recognizing that incremental reform of a fundamentally unjust system has failed for over 300 years. The question now is whether Americans are finally ready to build something different, something not rooted in racial control, something designed for genuine public safety rather than maintaining social hierarchy.

The history suggests we're not there yet, but history also took, teaches that systems that seem permanent can collapse suddenly when enough people decide they've had enough. That's where we are now, in the space between a history we can't escape and a future we haven't yet built. The choice of which way we go from here belongs to all of us. The history just shows us what we're choosing between, more of what we've always had, or something we've never actually tried. Real justice, real equality, real transformation of a system that's needed it since the first slave patrol rode out to remind enslaved people they were always being watched, always being controlled, always subject to violence with impunity. That system still exists.

It's more sophisticated now, more professional, better equipped, more carefully disguised in race-neutral language. But the essence remains. Until we face that truth, until we act on it, nothing fundamental will change. That's the lesson from 16 years behind the badge and everything that history teaches. The only question that matters now is what we do with that knowledge.