Why Are People Angrier About Police Brutality than Black on Black Crime Anyways?
By: Bridgette L. Hylton
Tags: Police Brutality, Black On Black Crime, BlackLivesMatter, Crime, Police

Even as the crime rate has declined steadily nationwide, people continue to ask all the time why other people are more upset about police brutality than they are about the strawman that is Black on Black crime. This argument is intended to imply that any focus on police brutality lacks merit because of other seemingly more pressing concerns within Black communities that according to this line of reasoning should be more upsetting to Black people presumably because they are enacted on Black people by other Black people, which inherently assumes that the police are all White, which is illustrative, but another issue altogether. Setting aside the issue of defunding or abolishing the police as alternatives to the current system and setting apart the fact that Black on Black crime isn’t any more prevalent than any other form of race data-ed crime and that crime is more about proximity than it is race, the answer seems fairly obvious to me and probably most people who feel angry about the treatment of Black bodies by the police.

Everyone believes that police officers either formally or informally take an oath to serve and protect the public. In many places the language appears on police badges and cruisers. There is countless merchandise aimed at police officers and police families, fans and enthusiasts that bear these words. Police are paid through public funds collected through taxes. The police technically work for us, we, the people. Out of this oath and this public funding should hypothetically arise a duty that results in higher scrutiny in the court of law and public opinion and more severe consequences for bad actors and systems, but there isn’t one.

That’s the difference between anger around Black on Black crime and anger around police brutality of Black bodies: the perception that the police are required to protect and serve us and that this is what we pay them to do. Criminals and would be criminals are not paid to not commit crime on the public dollar. They have taken no oath and made no promises to protect the public from danger or harm. They have no perceived duty to any of us or to protect any of us even if they have failed the informal public standards of morality and neighborliness.

The legal system calls such an implied or explicit duty a duty of care. This duty should in theory require police officers to take reasonable measures to ensure civilian safety and bodily integrity from both criminals and from themselves in all but the most extreme circumstances or to face heightened punishments and consequences. Yet, despite public perception around the duty to serve and protect, according to our Supreme Court police in the United States owe no such duty to civilians or their property. What’s frightening is that this absence of duty likely means that police officers do not even seem to owe you a duty to protect you from themselves. What’s more, not only do the police not have any duty to protect you, they have a special immunity called qualified immunity against liability for harm that may arise out of their serving in their public function. If you find this illogical and terrifying against the backdrop of everything you have ever been taught about policing and that it inspires cognitive dissonance, you aren’t alone.

Even though no legal duty exists, it is our belief which has been disseminated through every form of media from television to social that the police are there to serve us and protect us, which one would assume means protecting our rights to our lives to the fullest extent possible that creates such frustration and anger with policing especially when it comes to the matter of Black lives. I would argue that even lacking a legally recognizable duty, the public function that police are alleged to serve is intrinsically bound up with this duty and demands it as an ethical imperative.

At some point, the perception of this duty is as powerful in the public consciousness as the actual duty if it existed would be in the court of law. We expect the police to protect and safeguard us. When they do not or when they turn violence upon us, we are angered. We feel they owe us better and they should.

We can be justifiably upset about crime when it is conducted by private citizens as people living in high crime communities have for decades. We can protest and start charities named in honor of the victims of violence caused by criminal influences as communities impacted by violence have for decades. We can do everything in our power locally through political action, protest, and marches to try to reduce the rates of crime near to us and that impacts communities that matter to us. We can create go fund me pages for the families of victims of civilian violence. We can discuss the root causes of neighborhood crime which we know to be poverty, lack of access, and ineffective educational systems in almost every instance.

We can do all of this as we have for decades and still find the pattern of police use of force against Black bodies to be objectionable too or more so because of the public function that police are intended to serve and our expectation that they will serve it dutifully.

It is from this perceived and justifiable distinction, whether it lacks legal merit or not, that anger, outcry, and protest around police brutality arises. It’s not the same thing as a neighborhood kid breaking a window or even enacting more serious violence against their own neighbors. It is the failure to live up to the higher standard that our tax dollars and this oath should engender.

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