Thread by @GeeDee215

1. Violence perpetrated by agents of the state has vastly different repercussions for communities than violence committed by members of the public against other members of the public. There are no real avenues/mechanisms for accountability with regards to the former.

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1b) A cop kills or mains someone and not only is it certain they will never face consequences, but that killing will likely be officially justified and widely defended.

Imagine one citizen fatally shooting another because they thought a phone was a gun.

2. Police violence and community violence are actually *~the same problem.~* A community subjected to bad policing — violent arrests or antagonistic, unnecessary contact — is not, magically, getting *effective policing* when they need to report an actual crime.

2b.) Communities w/ elevated crime are also going to be communities where police don’t really solve a lot of violent crimes. They have low homicide clearance rates, etc.

So these communities get the worst of all worlds: lots of police encounters, but little police protection.

2c.) “[P]oor black neighborhoods see too little of the kinds of policing and criminal punishment that do the most good, and too much of the kinds that do the most harm,” William Stuntz wrote.

2d.) If you can’t call the cops to protect you — how many stories have we seen where Black 911 callers end up getting shot by the same police who they called to help them? — you gotta protect yourself.

So ppl have to find other, extralegal/informal means to protect themselves.

2e.) Researchers have found that local incidents of police violence have a measurable impact on whether Black people call 911:

mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/ups…

2f) any serious conversation about elevated violence in certain Black communities requires understanding that Black people have been the unique recipients of this kind of policing in the US since *before* Emancipation — policing as social control.

2g) When white people talk about police as helpful and respectful, they are not wrong experientially — we have actually had and are having wildly different types of experiences with the criminal justice system than they are.

2h) in Ferguson during the unrest, Shereen was on the white side of town talking to those folks. They didn’t get why people were so upset; they said the police were nice and getting a bad rap.

I was on the other side of town, where every Black person had a cop story.

3) the term “Black on Black crime” has itself had a fascinating trajectory. As @brentinmock writes, its origins lie in the notion that police were indifferent to Black intracommunity violence; they only cared when Black people threatened white folks.

citylab.com/equity/2015/06…

3b) A member of the Black press talked to a Chicago stick-up kid abt why he robbed other Black folks.

3c) #housingsegregationineverything

3d) the term picked up steam in the 1970s — as @brentinmock points out, white flight was in full bloom and crime was up in the economically devastated cities left behind — it subtly morphed into a nod to Black solidarity:

“Why are we doing this to *~ourselves~*?”

3e) then the white press picked up the term.

“The Chicago Tribune ran a multi-part news report that framed urban violence squarely as a problem borne of black youth. Black-on-black crime became an ‘effective vehicle for the rise of Reaganism’”...

3f) in a little over a decade, “Black on Black crime” moved from a term meant to describe the way *the police failed to protect Black victims of crime* to a kind of shorthand for Black criminal pathology.

And that’s the way the term is almost exclusively used today.

4) and finally, this point from Jamelle:

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4b) no one cares about community violence than the people who love in the neighborhoods marked by it. it’s the biggest tell in these conversations: the person saying “but what about...?” doesn’t know what living in those places is actually like. It’s a constant, waking concern.

4c) and it’s the thing about these conversations that makes me the angriest. You have been a victim, maybe the people around you have been victims. But somehow these people think you don’t care about that? That you’re not traumatized or habituated to the anxiety of all that?

4d) it’s so wildly dismissive on its face. It is to further deny Black folks actual human dimension.

The people in those communities care about this shit more than the people concern-trolling about it ever could.

4e) a few years ago, i was reporting on the 30th anniversary of the MOVE disaster. And it struck me as an extreme example of the horrible options available to Black people when it comes to crime and policing.

4f) The people on the block that was ground zero were much older now. Those neighbors NEVER liked MOVE, whose members taunted them and pointed AKs at them their kids from the rooftops. They pleaded with the city and the police to evict MOVE, Bc their harassment was so traumatic.

4g) So the police came and burned the whole fucking neighborhood to the ground.

4h) after shooting thousands of bullets into the MOVE house, the police dropped a bomb on it. The house caught fire. The fire spread to the rowhouses nearby. Three city block went up in flames. Eleven people died, including five children.

No cop or city official was reprimanded.

4i) when we got finished talking to residents who still lived there and were still fighting with the city to make them whole for what happened, we turned the corner onto 63rd:

Big-ass sign for an upcoming summer “Stop The Violence” basketball tournament at the park.

4j) to live in these spaces is to hold and *feel* all this history and context in your head and heart at once, and to know personally the people who are in danger from the police *and* from the streets.