Turner 1

Jackson Turner
Marissa Campbell
English 121
18 April 2015
Police
Shots fired. A man lies dead in the street of downtown Denver. He is a father of two children, a
husband, a brother, and a young person of color. The man that put a bullet into him? Is none other than
one of our own Denver Police Officers. The dead man's family tries to file a law suit against the Denver
Police Department, and one of two things happen. Either the officer who ended this mans life gets put
on temporary suspension, or the majority of times we're told the dead man was a threat, with all of the
weapons he was not carrying and all of the aggression that he was not displaying and the officer was
just doing his job. So what does society do? We protest. Where protesters are beaten by police, arrested,
maced, and imprisoned for simply being upset about the police, who are sworn to uphold the law,
shooting and killing our friends and families. This is an issue that happens all the time, we see it on the
news, in the papers, but yet no body does a thing about it. The institution of the current police force
was created to serve the interest of private property and is responsible for killing minorities,
incarcerating entire black populations, and murdering poor white people, therefore the current
institution of the police should be abolished and replaced with a system of community self policing.
The first thing that should be done is to analyze the contemporary social issue of police injustice
by utilizing a historical materialist method of analysis, this method of analysis will look at the historical
conditions that produced the institution of the police and the material conditions in which this
institution reproduces in the modern era. It's important to understand when looking at this issue where
the institution of the current police force originated. During the 1700's the police were Slave Patrols.
Slave Patrols had primarily three functions, to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners,

Turner 2
runaway slaves... to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts [and] to maintain a form of
discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated
any plantation rules. (Potter) After abolition the first police force was created to continue the white
supremacist power structures through the enforcement of the newly established Jim Crow Laws. This
means the institution of the police was established to oppress people of color. The effects of this can be
witnessed today.
Interestingly enough, it is not possible to do a quantitative analysis on police brutality because
police are not required to give public information on the number of occurrences of police violence.
However, thanks to media sources some information can be used to speculate. Between 2008 and 2010,
the city of Denver has been charged just shy of $1,500,000 in police misconduct related legal battles.
And has an Excessive Force Rate which is ten times over the national average. (Packman) According to
the Denver Post, Over the past decade, claims targeting the Denver police and sheriff departments
have accounted for 78 percent of city civil settlements above $5,000 [totaling at $8,666,689]
(Murray).
Several examples in Denver exemplify this form of police repression. In the case of Jessie
Hernandez, a 17-year-old Latina was driving to school in an allegedly stolen vehicle driving herself and
a handful of her closest friends, on her drive to school she was pulled over and the police gunned down
this unarmed woman. After being gunned down by our Boys in Blue, her lifeless corpse was unable to
maintain the pressure of depressing the vehicles brake. In which resulted in the vehicle to start to drive
and hitting the assaulting officer. This was later used as the officers defense plea, saying that he was hit
and dragged by the vehicle and then he shot her, among several other conflicting reports by the police
(Phillips and Paul).
A similar example occurred in last July in the case of Ryan Ronquillo. Ronquillo was a
suspected car thief who was gunned down while attending his friends funeral, unsuspecting that he

Turner 3
himself would be joining his friend in the next several minutes. After the police shot and killed
Ronquillo in front of his friends, family, and friends families, they had the audacity to further add insult
to injury by arresting Ronquillo's corpse. (Roberts) It seems that the Denver Police Departments new
policy on dealing with grand theft auto is public execution. So much for the right to a fair trial.
In addition to these two people, Sharod Kindell was also a victim of police brutality in which he
narrowly escaped death after being shot several times by the police. Kindell was a 23-year-old black
man, who was frequently pulled over for running stop signs and lights and cracks in his windshield that
obstructed his vision, all of which were imaginary and non-existant. While he was eating dinner with
his girlfriend and his two kids, Kindell's brother-in-law called him and asked him to bring him baby
food for his newborn child. Kindell left and unfortunately for Kindell's girlfriend, she would not see
him again that day. On his way back home he was pulled over yet again, he then began to enforce his
rights that he had learned he had during his criminal-justice course he was enrolled in at Metro State.
The officer eventually had enough of Kindell's attitude withdrew her weapon and pointed it at
Kindell. Kindell screamed Please, officer, don't shoot, don't shoot! as the officer dragged him out of
his car, once again, removing foot that was depressing the break keeping the car at rest. Once removed,
the car backed up and the now open doors of the vehicle hit the officer and his partner, and that's when
the officers began discharging their weapons, shooting Kindell after hitting the police with his car.
After the first time Kindell was shot, he began to fear for his life and started to run to safety, to find
help. He was then shot in the groin before being arrested. (Warner)
These cases are sadly not isolated incidents; These are a continuation of the police forces
heritage, the enforcement of the systematic oppression of the poor and people of color. Just as how the
police force was created to enforce Jim Crow laws, the police force reproduces the white supremacist
powers it was instituted to protect. Another way to evaluate the relationship between the people and the
police is through incarceration rates.

Turner 4
The police generate revenue for the state through tickets, arrests, and the imprisonment of
criminals. Prisoners are then held captive by either the state or a private firm where they can be sold
as a form of virtually free labor to corporations. This process incentives police officers to arrest as
many possible citizens as they can to generate this reserve army of labor. This problem is referred to as
the prison industrial complex and has escalated since the implementation of the war on drugs but is not
a new phenomenon. The ability for private firms to insource labor to prisoners has played a prominent
role in the American economy since the abolition of slavery. This further demonstrates that the current
institution of the police should be abolished and replaced with a system of community self policing,
because it exists to promote the interests of capital, not of the people. In the early 1900's Emma
Goldman explains, We are spending at the present $3,500,000 per day, $1,000,095,000 per year, to
maintain prison institutions, and that in a democratic country, - a sum almost as large as the combined
output of wheat...and the output of coal (Goldman 32) these numbers are incredibly shocking, and
what's even more shocking, is that these values are much, much higher now, considering that this was
written in the 1900's, before the implementation of the modern day car.
People justify the use of prisons on the basis that that they prevent crime in their mere
existence, though this is not the case but rather to dish out vengeance. Prisons themselves are relatively
unsafe places with the amount of beatings committed by both the jailers and other inmates, stabbings,
hangings, etc. This isn't new to anybody, it's a well known fact but once branded as a criminal, these
people are stripped of their basic human rights. Most people don't care or are fine with looking the
other way when a prisoner is stabbed to death while the wardens and jailers do not provide adequate
protection, because these criminals, had it coming or should have thought about that before they
committed the crime. Not only that, but the fear of punishment is not enough to stop a criminal from
committing a crime. Clarence Darrow explains this understanding, Does punishing [person] A keep
[person] B from the commission of crime?...the direct result of scaring [person] B is not to keep him

Turner 5
from the commission of crime, but to make him use precautions that will keep him safe from
discovery (Darrow 25). Darrow is simply arguing that the fear of ending up in jail isn't enough to stop
someone from committing a crime, but rather to delay the crime until said individual is able to come up
with a fool-proof way as to get away with it which inevitably requires more criminal actions. In this
sense, enforcing stricter punishments to crime, causes people to commit more crimes. In addition, the
vast majority of crime can be classified as property crime, which is committed when an individual does
not have access to the socially acceptable amount of resources. This means the vast majority of crime is
due to economic inequality, or the hoarding of private property through capital accumulation. Arguably,
this means that the police produce the material conditions that cause the people to commit crime and
enforce laws to commit additional crimes in fear of punishment and lastly incarcerate these people in a
place that is going to make them more likely to commit more crimes. Putting criminals with other
criminals helps collaborate further criminal activities and where these people slipped up.
The solution to these inherent problems regarding the Police, boils down to several things. The
first action that would need to take place is the abolition of the current institution of the police to allow
the replacement of a community self policing system. Secondly, prisons would need to be reformed to
rehabilitate criminals from anti-social behavior instead of promoting criminal behavior to secure a
labor force. Lastly, this will require the elimination of structural discrimination along racial and ethnic
lines that currently resides in America. A solution that addresses these three problems will properly
mitigate the issues that currently and historically have plagued the criminal justice system.
Police accountability is a major problem in America's current criminal justice system. All this
means is that in our current state, the police are held accountable to private interests such as their boss,
people with the most power, instead of being held accountable by the people. Police should be voted
into the force by the people who they are sworn to protect. Thus drastically reducing the amount of
unarmed men, women, and children killed by the police. This would ensure that police officers with a

Turner 6
history of violence would not be issued a gun, badge, and impunity, and keep the citizens of which they
serve safe. Even stripping police officers of their gun and instead giving them less lethal weapons such
as a tranquilizer gun would significantly result in less shootings.
Police accountability is incredibly feasible. The privately organized police force is out dated and
unnecessary in today's society. Publicly appointing our police officers would not only ensure the safety
of the public at large, but ensure that the officers were following the law and not abusing their
impunity. Being publicly appointed and consistently at risk of being removed from the task force would
ensure cops abided by the same rules and conduct that the rest of society has to follow. In its current
form, the police are protected by their cop-friends and higher ranking officers.
The cost of police accountability is extremely low, albeit some cops would not get re-elected
into the academy and would need to seek employment elsewhere. This would create a small amount of
unemployment for select officers. Albeit, it would also open up jobs to those who would seek
employment in that field. However, what is more important? Select cops being outsourced by better
cops? Furthermore, this change would only effect the bad cops from the good cops. Those officers
with clean records and a non-violent police record would still be able to maintain their jobs.
The implementation of police accountability would be fairly easy to incorporate. It would only
require the Police Department to be a public office. Ensuring that a middle class white cop wouldn't be
patrolling a poor black community that he isn't even a part of would help keep racial profiling at a
minimum if it would even still exist.
Prison reform would require substituting a substantial amount (not to say all) prison officers
with social workers. This would allow prisons to work on fixing anti-social behavior rather than
promoting more crime. Repeat offenders are repeat offenders because of what they had learned in
prison made them think they could, and often do for a long period of time, get away with more crimes
if they just did things slightly different.

Turner 7
Prison reform would be feasible due to excess and willing social workers. Not only is there an
influx of social workers ready and able to employ, but in doing so, there would be less people in jail.
There would be less incarcerated people as a result of the institution no longer breeding criminal
activities and repeat offenders would drastically be reduced in number.
The cost of a prison reform would actually save the state a lot of money in criminal settlements,
less criminals being incarcerated, and as such would require less money being invested into prisons,
and as a result, would require less of a labor force to maintain the lower number of criminals. The
burden of the cost would fall upon the employees that would lose their jobs, and the capitalist firms that
insource labor from prisoners because they would lose their slave-labor. On the plus side, this should
reduce unemployment in America unless those firms chose to outsource employment and labor to
foreign countries where they could get cheap labor to supplement the cost of prison labor.
The implementation of this prison reform would be fairly straight forward due to its intuitive
nature. Most people expect prisons to already be this way and actually have no idea what they are like
today. These conditions would come as a shock to many people if they saw what these conditions were
like, especially in privatized prisons looked like. Implementing this policy would not only reorganize
the penal system to mirror what the majority of people already think into what goes on. The societal
burden to make these changes would be slim.
Structural discrimination is the biggest problem. White supremacy is embedded into nearly
every corner stone of America. Structural discrimination is a deep seeded problem that can be seen in
any statistic that people want to talk about. Compare the difference between white folk, and those of
color and in every single case, the white man wins.
Fixing structural discrimination would unfortunately be the least feasible option due to the
intrinsic nature of Americans today. That isn't to say that it is not feasible, just the least feasible option
of the three. Structural discrimination is so deep seeded in America's history, that it even dates back to

Turner 8
the founding of the thirteen colonies and the Manifest Destiny when the white man kicked all of the
Native American's out of their homes. America was founded on the genocide of Native Americans and
the enslavement of the African-American race.
The cost of fixing structural discrimination isn't necessarily a monetary thing, unless we began
to pay white, black, brown, men and women the same with no gender or race gap. As well as a cost of
changing elementary school curriculum's to promote racial tolerance and equity.
Again, Structural discrimination is the hardest thing to implement due to the inherent nature of
American's and the American history. Really the only appropriate way to implement a method of fixing
structural discrimination would again, come from a change in early childhood education on racial
inequality, and trying to teach children to grow up to be more tolerant to other races.
In the end, a new criminal-justice system that is self policing, would be the best solution to
getting rid of the current privatized police departments that place an emphasis on protecting private
property. Though in order for such a change to occur, it would need to start with individuals voicing
their concerns by any means necessary. Whether that means attending protests when police do not do
an adequate job on duty, or simply educating people on these solutions. The important thing to
remember in all of this is, while there are good cops, as an individual, as an organization, it is too easy
for these cops to abuse the power of impunity.

Turner 9
Works Cited
Darrow, Clarence. "Purpose of Punishment." Crime. N.p.: Black Oyster, 2012. 25. Print.
Goldman, Emma. "Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure." Anarchism and Other Essays. Lexington, KY:
CreateSpace, 2011. 32. Print.
Murray, John. "Denver Pays Millions to Settle Abuse Claims against Police and Sheriff." The Denver
Post. The Denver Post, 3 Aug. 2014. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
Packman, David. "Is There a Police Brutality Problem in Denver?" PoliceMisconductnet. N.p., 06 Sept.
2010. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
Phillips, Noelle, and Jesse Paul. "Jessica Hernandez Family Calls for Federal Intervention in Shooting
Death." The Denver Post. The Denver Post, 30 Jan. 2015. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
Potter, Gary, Dr. "The History of Policing in the United States, Part 1." The History of Policing in the
United States, Part 1. N.p., 25 June 2013. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
Roberts, Michael. "Ryan Ronquillo Shooting Deemed Justified, But Family Says Police Murdered
Him." Westword. N.p., 12 Aug. 2014. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
Warner, Joel. "Denver Police Kept Pulling Over Sharod Kindell -- and the Last Time, They Shot Him."
Westword. N.p., 03 Feb. 2015. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.