Every day, county, city, state, district, and national governments exercise police powers, usually in ways we barely even notice. The stop sign on your street corner is an exercise of police power just as much as the officers making sure you obey it. Zoning laws that keep a slaughterhouse from becoming your next-door neighbor, regulations that keep your drinking water clean and rein in predatory lenders, statutes that let ICE arrest undocumented immigrants, mask and vaccine mandates to stop pandemics—all of these are the police power at work.
Legally speaking, “police power” means the government’s power to restrict individual freedom and property to promote the People’s welfare. It is a public good, distinct from any private interest. History shows that the story of police powers is also a story about democracy—about who gets a voice in how the police power is exercised. When we debate about ICE raids, vaccine mandates, and bad cops, we are arguing about who counts as part of “We the People” and who does not—about who the police power protects and who it protects us against.
In 2020, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade revived a national debate—long dormant—about how police have misused their powers to commit violence against Black people. But just as Derek Chauvin was one cop in a large department, uniformed cops are just one strand in a vast tangle of “police powers” that reach into virtually every corner of our lives.
George Floyd’s murder sent people into the streets because it crystallized this simple truth: that the democratic processes of voting in leaders to promote the People’s welfare had never protected all the People. It was then that the protests of 2020 joined a long history of struggle over police power.
The problem has always been much bigger than a few—or even many—bad cops. The problem is that, too often, governments have not truly exercised police power as a public good. For one thing, governments have delegated police powers to private citizens. Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery were each pursued by armed men seeking to carry out a citizen’s arrest, arguably backed by the laws of their states.
The state laws that authorize such private policing have ugly roots. During slavery, southern states required every county to have “slave patrols” to catch fugitive slaves and whip any Black person they caught off the plantation without a pass, effectively deputizing poor white men to protect and serve rich white men’s investments. After slavery was abolished, southern states put Black people “under a sort of permanent martial law,” reported journalist and future Senator Carl Schurz in 1865, by “invest[ing] every white man with the power and authority of a police officer as against every black man.” Jim Crow laws modernized this pattern of privatized policing. That is why, before he called the cops on Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus driver first threatened to arrest her himself, and why the famous boycott that followed was originally organized not to desegregate the city buses but to stop drivers—private citizens—from enforcing the segregation laws through beatings and humiliating abuse.
Over-policing makes the headlines, but it typically goes hand-in-hand with something subtler and arguably just as damaging: under-policing—marooning certain groups of people outside the protection of the police power. Crimes against Black people have long gone unpunished, whether committed by whites or other Black people, while even the smallest infractions against white people have unleashed the terrifying full force of the state: manhunts, brutal interrogations, ruthlessly efficient trials, and fearsome penalties. What were called “riots” in 1967, eruptions in Newark, N.J. and Detroit, Mich. were really Black uprisings against this vicious combination of over and under-policing: white policemen who arbitrarily harassed hardworking Black people for no reason, and then did nothing when those same hardworking Black people called to report break-ins, prostitution, drug-dealing, and bar-fights—-the kinds of illegal activity cops did not tolerate in white neighborhoods.
These patterns of behavior made it clear that white policemen were only carrying out the wishes of the voters who elected their bosses—the mayors and city council members who believed that the police were there to serve and protect only those who looked like them. These voters did not want to live near Black people, go to school with Black people, and most certainly, did not see African Americans as fully part of We the People. It is no accident that the same political coalitions that led to hiring abusive policemen also passed single-family zoning laws to keep Black people out, while steering all the vital but foul things that every community needs to put somewhere—highways and trash incinerators, among other things—into Black neighborhoods.
Government decisions about zoning, permitting, and environmental regulation illuminate the vast scope of the police power and the thousand ways it touches the fabric of our lives. When I was a kid in Princeton, N.J., for instance, I wondered about the broken dishware and rusty hasps and old coins we dug up in our backyard garden every spring. The grown-ups said it was because our neighborhood used to be the town dump. We were lucky it was only that. For decades, many county, state, and federal officials have quietly steered oil refineries, heavy industry, and trash incinerators into poor and working-class neighborhoods, then regulated with a business-friendly “light touch.” It is no accident that the people who live in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” or in the shadow of Pensacola’s “Mount Dioxin,” or whose neighborhoods got bulldozed for new highways, tend to be working-class and minorities—people like my great-aunt and uncle, Annie and Thomas Holcomb, who lost their home to the Garden State Parkway. These public goods mostly did good for other people—usually whiter and definitely richer—the kind of people city councilmen thought of as constituents.
Under and over-policing, along with the dreary litany of failed police “reforms,” is what motivates calls for “police abolition” in general. As law professor Tracey Meares puts it, in many places today, policing is a public good that has gone bad, like the water system in Flint, Mich. And just as Flint’s water crisis cannot be solved by pouring some chemicals into the old, lead-lined pipes, many police forces must be dug up, rethought, and rebuilt.
Black people have understood this fundamental truth long before the summer of 2020. Time and again, African Americans have refused to stand silent in the face of abusive police power.
Some turned to the courts. During the brutal years of Jim Crow, as new work by historian Myisha Eatmon is showing, Black people filed tort lawsuits—negligence, wrongful death, civil assault, and battery—to make white officials and white-run companies pay for the violence they enabled, just as Arbery’s mother sued the white men who killed him in 2020 while he was out jogging. In a similar way, the mass protests that took hold after the acquittal of Martin’s killer decried the “Stand Your Ground” and “citizen’s arrest” laws that invited untrained amateurs to act out their own personal ideas of “justice.” Others tried to meet the crisis of under-policing by picking up a gun themselves. In the 1950s, Martin Luther King’s Montgomery, Ala. home was “an arsenal,” and today, some reports suggest that more Black people bought guns even before the Jan. 6 insurrection and Donald Trump’s re-election.
The abuse and misuse of police powers have also galvanized people across the usual dividing lines of race, party, and class. For all that conservative radio riles up listeners against federal government overreach, actual red-state voters are just as worried about local exercises of police power, like the New Orleans parish levee board deciding whose homes will get flooded in the next big storm, and the state legislators making abortion a crime. Comedian Roy Wood Jr. likes to joke that “white people got friends that go to jail! Especially rednecks.”
White people fall behind on their car payments, too and see their cars seized by private repo men clothed with public power. Widespread fury at the abuses of the banking industry spurred the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, which, until March, was quietly protecting millions of Americans of all backgrounds from illegal car repossessions, flawed home foreclosures, junk fees, and more. And in the 1990s, working-class white residents of Arkwright, S.C. realized that toxic dumping had sickened them, and so they listened when young Black activists started an interracial movement to make the EPA and city council clean up and redevelop their neighborhood. That effort was so successful that it became a model across the region for environmental justice, healthcare access, and affordable housing. They–we–have long wanted a voice in how the police power is exercised.
Americans have come together to demand that their governments use police powers for the good of all the people—whether it be someone like George Floyd, the West Virginia coal miners, or my great aunt and uncle. One way or another, police power touches all of us in nearly every part of our lives. But here’s the thing: it belongs to all of us. Whether it means showing up at the next zoning board meeting, or calling your member of Congress, or standing in silent protest, the police power is in our hands—if we are willing to grasp it.
Penningroth is the author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights
This project was created in partnership with the Center for Policing Equity.