Black Power Policing: The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League
A woman gives a Chicago police officer the middle finger during a protest in Hyde Park on the third day of protests in Chicago over the death of George Floyd, who died in police custody on Memorial Day in Minneapolis.
In recent weeks, the world has watched American cities boil over in protest sparked by the murder of George Floyd and carried by a revelatory string of other police murders including that of Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. The burgeoning movement has largely been hailed as a catalytic moment for effecting purposeful social change and has popularised a new clarion call - “Defund the Police.”
While mainstream discourse concerning defunding the police, may strike many as a gleaming new arena of political and social discourse, it is not. Its proponents are calling for police departments to be stripped of their tumescent budgets with those excised funds reallocated for the purposes of social investment in areas like public education, community health services, and affordable housing. For many organisers within the Movement for Black Lives network, critical thinking that questions the scale and purpose of police operations require detailed reappraisal in conjunction with eliminating ubiquitous threats of violence codified in racialised policing practices. Within this broader social framework, questions should also be asked of the role black police officers can play in the actualisation of effecting more harmonious police-community relations.
The Long Movement
The antecedents of current protests are rooted in a branch of historical discourse known as the Long Civil Rights Movement, which presents the popularised accounts of the Black Liberation Movement as a continuum from the 1930s to present day. The examination of policing in the black community has led historians and scholar activists to reckon with grassroots responses to police brutality, often to make sense of the modern carceral state.
As Elizabeth Hinton has written, the fraught relationship between urban black communities and the police was compounded by the militarisation of local police forces, triggered by the Safe Streets Act of 1968, which satiated calls for Law and Order. Rising to meet the physical challenges imposed by such federal policies were a collective of community organisations who were energised by the self-determinist rhetoric of racial uplift engendered by the Black Power Movement. However, the challenge was not only addressed from the bottom up, but also from the inside out as black police officers organised and mobilised for the protection of their communities – most viscerally pursued in America’s Second City.
Black Men First, Policemen Second
A little over a month after Chicago Mayor, Richard J. Daley issued the infamous “shoot to kill” order in an attempt to staunch the civil unrest that engulfed the city’s West side following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a group of black policemen founded the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). They interpreted the mounting disregard for black life as a calling for black officers to “assert the interests of the black community to professional, non-racist law enforcement,” articulating that black police would “no longer be pawns in a chess game” adversely affecting their communities. By adopting Black Power iconography and embracing the ideological trapping of “closing ranks,” the AAPL worked to cultivate a new image of proud black policemen that could truthfully fulfil the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) maxim, “We Serve and Protect.”
The dynamics that faced the black police officer in 1968 were polarizing; did they commit to their white brothers in blue thus affirming a complicity in the continued asphyxiation of their community, or did they reject the status quo, and channel their organic connection to that community, thus trying to effect greater accountability and equality in policing practices? In this identity struggle, choosing either path alienated the black cop.
AAPL Poster that advertises the Complaint and Referral Service.
In defiantly pronouncing that they were “Black men first, and policemen second” the AAPL disparaged those black officers who consciously remained intransigent to the pangs of their communities as “Toms,” or “Oreo cops.” They began to cultivate a new strategy of community-centric policing through direct-action activism, and the introduction of a series of innovative services and demands for better policing infrastructure – a type of advocacy previously closed off to black Chicagoans.
In Service of the Black Community
Police brutality was unequivocally the most pervasive issue affecting black life as evidenced by a study which found that between 1968 and 1971, Chicago police killed civilians at three times the rate of their New York, LA, and Detroit compatriots, and that 75% of those murdered were African American.
In response to the virulence of police brutality, the AAPL embarked on their first outreach efforts that manifested in “sensitivity sessions” between members of the black community and CPD in an attempt to broker peaceable community relations and an understanding of black life. White officers were regularly criticised for their cultural dissonance, and in the words of Chicago Urban League Director, Laplois Ashford, lacked “empathy, understanding, and simple human considerations for the black man in the street.”
The Police Brutality Complaint and Referral Service (C&R) was launched in 1972, following a series of trial runs in previous years. That the League took the time to purpose build a sophisticated complaints service is significant as the final iteration was imbricated on the community’s feedback, as well as an analysis of systematic fault lines inherent to the Internal Investigations Division (IAD). A study by the Chicago Bar Association amplified the IAD’s languid attitude revealing that between 1967 and 1971, the service sustained just 173 cases from a total of 5,251 logged complaints. To compound matters, information that complainants wilfully acceded as part of the investigative protocol was regularly used to formulate an officer’s defence, leading to countersuits that were designed to act as deterrents. The AAPL would subsequently take the lead in pushing back against the IAD’s manoeuvrings through public dissemination, which positioned them as a powerful force that acquired community trust through action.
Labelling the IAD, a “whitewash operation,” Robinson lambasted the torpidity of the department, and sought to use the C&R service, which espoused the League’s insider expertise as a corrective. The pioneering service was comprehensive and welcomed citizen complaints for police brutality, inadequate police services, officer misconduct, and also furnished requests for general information. Furthermore, it evolved to offer free legal advice and lawyer referral, colour photographs of victims for use as evidence, and the filing of civil suits against officers. A cross-section of their intake shows that between January and May 1972, they processed 196 cases of categorical brutality, 173 cases that covered harassment, verbal abuse, improper service, and false arrest, and 135 instances in which legal advice was administered.
The C&R service influenced other organisations to adopt similar facilities, with the American Civil Liberties Union and Chicago Urban League fashioning complaint hotlines. The impact of the C&R service is difficult to quantify, yet its presence, vision, and ability to empower communities to speak out through trusted channels is significant. That black police officers sacrificed their careers suffering ignominy and abuse in the pursuit of anti-racist policing policies and challenging the stasis of law-enforcement culture is equally important.
Looking Forward
Fast forward fifty years to the latest instalment in “Long Movement” grassroots activism concerning the over-policed and under-protected condition imposed on black America. Such environments are strikingly homologous to those in which the AAPL emerged to reconfigure the role of the black cop. The industry of local responses to defund the police, have been verbally endorsed by a number of leading black police officials across the US, prompting many activists and fellow police officials to question the ingenuousness of such support, fearing what Cornel West has animated as the phenomenon of the failure of black faces in high places.
Many black officers have broken rank to march in solidarity with protestors, some have taken a knee in solemnity and reflection, while others have silently mouthed along to protest chants from behind their protective face-shields, staring down protestors with the indomitable will to make thismoment count. These powerful images of cops in solidarity with protestors are often transient, and many have been pressured to desist and apologise in order to protect their careers and livelihoods, amplifying a continued identity struggle.
For many, the police department in its current format is moribund, a menace to be extirpated. Though, just as the AAPL found their strength in prioritising their communities needs over their own in the 1970s, there is an opportunity for black officers to realise and rekindle that calling.
Matthew O’Brien is an Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of History at University College Dublin.