In recent months, the United States has witnessed a wave of violence whose motives can only be described as banal. In Texas, two cheerleaders were shot after one got into a car that wasn’t hers in a dark parking lot. Something similar happened in New York, where a woman was shot dead after pulling her vehicle into the wrong entrance while looking for a friend. In another episode, a black teenager was shot in the head by a white man in Missouri after mistakenly ringing his doorbell.
A professor at the Yale University School of Law and one of the leading experts on urban policing in the US, Tracey Meares says this scenario is not entirely surprising. She explains that there are several factors that can, on the one hand, encourage violence —such as the feeling of insecurity and the presence of firearms—, and on the other, contain it, such as access to basic services. And, during the pandemic, part of the American population not only experienced an increase in violence triggers, but also had difficulties meeting their basic needs, complete.
The idea connects to one of the main arguments of the researcher, who is participating this Friday (25) in a seminar organized by the IBCC (Brazilian Institute of Criminal Sciences) in São Paulo.
Meares argues that the police are called in to deal with emergency situations when the circumstances that allowed them to explode come from a long time ago. “What people really want are representatives of the state working on those problems in the long term. These aren’t issues that will be resolved right away.”
His conclusion is the result of a decade of studies on the perception that ordinary citizens have of the authorities in the USA —a country whose recent history has been marked by episodes of police brutality, many of them motivated by racism.
The most emblematic of them was probably the murder of George Floyd in 2020. “I can’t breathe”, says the black man repeated over the nine minutes in which he had his throat pressed by the knee of a white police officer, became the phrase of order of a movement that took over the country and provoked a wide debate on the urgency of reforming the police.
For Meares, the recurrence of cases like Floyd’s in the US is related to the fact that the way the police are conceived today in the country “does not correspond to the work that many want and expect them to do”. One of the problems, she says, is that agents see themselves as “warriors against crime” when what the population wants are “guardians” who protect their communities. And not only from robberies or rapes, but also from the abuse of power by the authorities.
Another factor that would harm the corporation’s performance would be the increase in contingents as an automatic response to questions that, according to the researcher, originate from structural problems. “In the US, when you ask what the state should be doing for the well-being of its citizens, the answer, historically, is more police,” she says.
Asked what kind of changes could be made to make the police more effective, Meares says the solution is twofold. One of them is short-term actions, such as submitting agents to training and modifying the scope of action of the corporation as a whole. “There is nothing —nothing— about some work assignments that require the presence of an armed agent”, says the researcher, citing as an example the inspection of traffic and the intermediation of disputes between neighbors.
A long-term plan would involve trying to understand the circumstances that culminate in situations of violence. In these cases, the solution would probably involve social actions, such as offering housing to homeless people and jobs for unemployed young people. “It could be that the answer is for schools to stay open longer and serve three meals a day. This has nothing to do with the police, but I can assure you that if we do this there will be less crime,” she says.
Meares’ argument is reminiscent of the “defund the police” movement, which gained momentum after Floyd’s murder. Its members advocated that governments withdraw funds from the area of public security and transfer them to areas such as health and education.
At the time, the agenda was taken over by the Democratic Party, and some mayors and governors even implemented measures defended by the activists. With Covid, however, crime rates skyrocketed in the US at the same time that agents left the corporation en masse.
It was just what Republicans needed to accuse their opponents of being lenient on violence — even though several of the places that conservatives say have become more dangerous after joining “defund the police” actually increased their budgets for security forces, according to a study released by the American broadcaster ABC last October.
In any case, the Democrats, at the time on the eve of the midterms, the mid-term elections that renew part of Congress, decided to distance themselves from the cause. In February 2022, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the proposal to cut police funding had died. Two weeks later, in his traditional State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said the answer was not to decrease the security forces budget, but to increase it.
Asked how she sees “defund the police” today, Meares says the public safety debate in the US right now “is precarious and short-sighted,” and “is asking the wrong set of questions.”
Meanwhile, cases of police brutality against black men keep repeating themselves. In January, five Memphis, Tennessee, police officers were charged in the death of Tire Nichols, 29, after severely beating him.
Meares, who was the first black woman to obtain the title of professor at the Yale Law School, says that the case drew a lot of attention in the US because the agents suspected of the crime were also black. She claims, however, that the kind of racial dynamics behind episodes like this have nothing to do with what she calls “old-fashioned racism.” “It’s a kind of structural racism,” she says.
The researcher has been focusing more and more on the subject through research in the area of ”racial conditioning”. One of the experiments she performed involved dividing volunteers into two groups. One of them was shown photographs of black men and the other of white men. Next, the researchers presented an image of the outline of a weapon.
According to Meares, those who had come into contact with portraits of black men recognized the object much more quickly than those who had seen pictures of white men. “What this shows is that in the US, race is deeply associated with crime,” she says. “I’ve never been subjected to such an experiment, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if I reproduced these biases, because they’re unconscious.”
