Historic Causes for Racism within the Texas Police Division

While anger and protests continue after the murder of Houstonian George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department, it’s worth noting that Texas is also evil in character History of law enforcement violence against the public it serves.

It is difficult to separate perception and fact from the story. A statue of the Texas Ranger Capt. Jay Banks was recently removed from Dallas Love Field, reportedly due to the racist actions of Banks and the racist policing of the venerated law enforcement agency that killed hundreds of Mexicans between 1915 and 1919.

There have always been races in police facilities, said Doshie Piper, a member of the Texas Organizing Project and associate professor of criminal justice at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.

“It always has been,” she said in an email to Reform Austin. “Little has changed. Police departments have a long history of racism. Slave patrols laid the foundation for the current police brutality in the United States. ”

Gary Bledsoe, NAACP president of Texas, said in a 2015 article in the Dallas Morning News and Reporting Texas that after the emancipation of slaves, the police had become an arm of oppression and antagonism to control the African American population .

“It is systemic and is widely used to this day,” Piper wrote. “Two police offers were caught in Dallas and Denison in the summer of 2019 who made and distributed bigoted posts on social media aimed at African Americans, activists, Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT people and women until 2010.”

Law enforcement misconduct in America did not begin in the 20th century, it is as old as the police itself. This is evident from the 2009 report, “An Alternative Remedy for Police Misconduct,” by Samuel Walker and Morgan Macdonald.

“Starting with the first police stations in the 19th century, there have been significant patterns of police malpractice including: use of excessive force, illegal detention and arrest, coercive confession-obtaining tactics, illegal searches and seizures, racial discrimination (including in relation to arrests and use of force as well as corruption. ”

During the 20th century, however, there were significant changes that quickly set the problematic course that society is now taking.

“The process of urban invasion of Texas began to grow around 1920, bringing poor and threatened rural African Americans into cities for jobs and better education,” said Dwight Watson, associate professor of history at Texas State University. “In this way they were put on a collision course with the guards of democracy, the police.”

He said that in the 1930s policing shifted from a community-based model to a peripheral model.

“Where, instead of staying in the community, building relationships with people, staying in time… the police began – because of the automobile – to move on the periphery and cross borders through the city, so they had to use enforcement channels. ” he said.

A study by Watson of the Houston Police Department found that most of the officers surveyed saw themselves as pastors of the elite in society. He said that many officials do not live in the communities they serve, creating a separation between them and the community they are supposed to protect.

The biggest problem is the personalization of the law by law enforcement officers mandated under the Watson Code.

“The truth is, they feel like you are questioning their authority. The law comes second. Authority comes first. And so they become possessive of the mission, and then there is violence and intimidation because they already see people as inferior to them, because they do not know these people. “