Black Security and the Conundrum of Policing

A nuanced perspective.

What does it mean for a nation to be safe and secure? Who enjoys the presumption of security, and who is a nation being secured from? And how does race shape how we think about national security, borders, and enforcement of laws within the United States and globally? These are the questions law professor (and friend of the newsletter) Matiangai V. S. Sirleaf seeks to answer in the just-published anthology she edited, Race and National Security, which you can buy right now (enter code ALAUTHC4 for 30% off!).

Sirleaf is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law and a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (yes, she does a lot). She has also kindly shared an essay from the anthology by Monica Bell, Professor of Law and Counselor to the Dean at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Bell explores what are often portrayed as paradoxes in Black communities: a desire among voters for more efforts to fight crime, and a demand from activists for greater freedom from policing. A more nuanced understanding of policing and safety (or lack thereof), she argues, would help us to both better understand what community members want, and allow for the development of more creative and effective policy solutions.

It’s a fascinating piece from a truly incredible book. I hope you give it a read, and consider picking up your own copy of Race and National Security.

One note: I removed the footnotes from Bell’s article for online publication, to make this short enough to fit in an email newsletter. The fully annotated version of her piece is available in the anthology.

xx Jill

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Black Security and the Conundrum of Policing

By Monica Bell

Introduction

In the summer of 2020, we entered a new phase of the long police reform debate. There was a halting but broad recognition that the opaqueness of police governance—especially with respect to spending, staffing practices, and expansion of criminal codes and enforcement priorities—had made some places, especially Black and Brown urban communities, neighborhood-level police states. We were, perhaps for the first time, seriously interrogating whether police should be able to function in these ways and, more fundamentally, questioning the role of police in producing public safety. With the failure of Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and with murders, especially gun murders, rising across many American cities during the COVID-19 pandemic, the political winds have since shifted away from police reform and toward expanded police presence and power. In cities like New York and San Francisco, these upticks have stoked political energy to reinvigorate “broken windows policing,” or the deployment of police to surveil and intervene in petty crime—often targeting the unhoused population for offenses like public intoxication and urination—after several years of decreased support for those practices.

Polarized narratives, one that places traditional policing at the heart of the project of building community security—and one that sees policing as perhaps an irreparably brutal force that should be minimized to create alternative governmental and community resources for safety—have put the political debate surrounding policing today on the highly fractured moral and political terrain. Yet what is continually lost in these conversations are the intricacies of the experiences, needs, and dreams of the people in communities most directly targeted by both private violence and state violence.