This reality is built on a long history of police targeting people of color. Indeed, policing in the United States was established on the practice of controlling specific populations. In the 19th century, for example, policing in the South was designed to monitor the movement of enslaved Black people. Some of the first police forces in the nation were developed to keep the enslaved from escaping and to recapture them if they did. They were called slave patrols, and by law, some states required white men to serve as slave patrollers.
Similar histories exist with the Irish in the Northeast before they were considered white, as well as with Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest.
Policing and controlling the movements of specific nonwhite groups have often gone hand in hand. This powerful cocktail of racism and policing has enabled brutal forms of violence against people of color...
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