Spectacles of social activism: pandemic and politicking in the age of digital media

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968.1 By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology.2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate.3 The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of officers as “pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of policing, and allied himself with officers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had. In the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the police, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforcement officers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; they wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets.4 Americans on the right, meanwhile, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of what the country should be.5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, in 2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for off-year electoral losses to Republicans.6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and marginalized community against marginalized community.7 Once again, the police are in crisis, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.In other ways, as well, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. This is especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality. Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of force, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century, officers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American policing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. People of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suffer from both police nonfeasance and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-offs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tolerated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two different social divides. The first is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a century ago, has made policing a partisan flashpoint. The second divide is sociological: the gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who disproportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. Each of these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a premium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people of color, especially African Americans.8Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and 1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more effective, less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their very real shortcomings. Fortunately, moreover, the proposals most likely to work are supported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the groups most affected by crime and by abusive policing.How can American policing be transformed into a more effective and egalitarian system of public safety? We need to start with four key facts. First, crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. Second, police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize toll on poor people and people of color, and here, too, Black Americans are particularly likely to be victimized. Third, improved policing has helped make crime far less common today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years. Fourth, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police departments, but the victories have been partial and very often fleeting.Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime inflicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Criminal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide, aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, at greatly elevated rates.There are between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the United States—a rate of about five or six per one hundred thousand people in the country. Among Black Americans, though, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four; it is the leading cause of death among Black males under forty-five and the second-leading cause of death among Latino males under forty-five. Young Black men are fifteen times more likely than their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these attacks, too. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States.9The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of violent victimization.10Moreover, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighborhoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s lives, affecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns heat waves more deadly, for example, by making people afraid to leave their homes. Children living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty. This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just before. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the effects appear to accumulate with each additional killing. Crime, especially homicide and other serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping disparities between the household wealth of Americans of different races and robbing local governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for individuals, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious assault, is a pillar of American inequality.11Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimination perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential offenders more desperate and potential victims more vulnerable.12 But part of the explanation is inadequate policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white, wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by people of color.13If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suffered from inadequate protection against crime, they have also suffered from an excess of violence and abuse at the hands of the police. Police officers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. Somewhere between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustified.14 And the victims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a quarter of the people shot dead by the police.15 From 1980 through 2019, on an age-adjusted basis, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites; Latinos were close to twice as likely.16 Between 2015 and 2019, an unarmed Black man was four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man.17 For Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was five to one.18Deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers are the most extreme way, but far from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested.19The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police has ramifications far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inflicts. Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discriminatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their communities, with lasting effects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on broader ideas about law, government, and society.20 Unsurprisingly, African Americans consistently report less confidence in the police than whites.21 But mistreatment by the police often leads, also, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the mistreatment but in friends, family, and neighbors as well.22The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the explanation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; more aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life offenses; and the spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and increased use of SWAT teams.23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement and the advent of smartphones and social media.24 But some part of the reason that police violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, transformational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable.25As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes saw similar drops.26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homicide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack. Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, particularly by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.”27The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-first century. Homicide rates began to rise, though, around 2014, and then surged in cities across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021.28 Some major American cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year.29 And just as the crime decline in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black neighborhoods, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same neighborhoods.30 In Los Angeles, for example, Black Americans are nine percent of the population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York City, the figures are twenty-four percent and sixty-five percent, respectively.31 Rates of other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nationwide homicide rate in 2020 and 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. Still, a significant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. Just as there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guarantee those rates will not return.The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime drop, though, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely to both factors. The evidence is threefold. First, a growing body of research links increased police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research examines the effects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the effects of temporary surges in police presence because of, for example, terrorist alerts.32 Second, the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere in the country, and the most plausible explanation for the difference is the especially large changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period.33 Third, there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of particular police strategies that became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.”34American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, and too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, for example, police departments in the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many departments, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces were majority minority—this was true, for example, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and the percentage of female officers had grown as well. Smaller departments made less progress, though. Moreover, as court-ordered hiring plans have expired over the past twenty years, diversification has stalled even in larger departments, and some past gains have been undone.35Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female officers are less likely to use unjustified force, especially against people of color.36 White male officers partnered with minority or female officers also change their patterns of policing for the better. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt other reforms.37One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by countering the strident hostility of police unions toward efforts to reduce police violence, increase police and racial in law Police unions are not always of but even today they do more to than to for making law enforcement fairer, more effective, and less reason for that is that the of police unions and than police officers of Black and Latino officers have often championed reforms by police and the presence of officers of color may in some have police unions to moderate their most of those reforms over the past half century have been community policing and policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s, as and just as every police in the country to “community policing,” in part because it became a for At its though, community policing was more than a It was a of law enforcement from a and toward a that on and with the public and with other policing had major some of which will be And because community policing was with of it was hard to It though, because it often greatly increased public with the police and made people fear of crime to real reductions in when people felt they out and and to become with more people most community policing also police departments, and it focus beyond crime allowing them to a of other by the communities they It well with policing, which called on officers to work and on an basis, with other agencies and the public to of particular local but not policing to responsible for a disproportionate amount of but not the were officers. community policing, the focus on to and a body of evidence these with significant crime there are that and other forms of policing have helped some cities the national and reduce homicides in community policing and policing also increased attention to low-level, of such as and the Part of the idea was that when these of were left neighborhoods toward people on the and rates of serious this was the of Police on quality-of-life could be too, and the that these were in effective at reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as policing and only when the community and particular in particular crackdowns on quality-of-life as community policing and policing, did not reduce the other of the from quality-of-life policing, policing the of in which the police with community groups and other agencies to particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate of a first and most of which was in the 1980s and called because their most was often threats of consequences at the and groups violence in a particular But the also of social to the same people, and more recent of this more than policing. is growing that these when right, their moreover, community policing and policing their in poor were and not just because they were of from of officers in neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. policing and policing police to adopt what the had called the of law kind of policing in to from the of law enforcement in had called the which and the which when community policing and policing were to against life they on the In community policing and policing officers to for neighborhoods to a of other than law enforcement: and so that they had not up to be social but it out they often were at other agencies to more attention to marginalized several different community policing and policing have lost much of their over the past two The terrorist attacks of to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and and local in the early 2000s many departments to community policing and policing as forms of these the crackdowns on and in New York City, helped to community against them in many against the of police And it became increasingly that, even at their community policing and policing had some was that these attention to police This was not in the of either of could have with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police But they Police the of police violence, especially police because they did not the of the This was because the victims were of marginalized groups and or because did not still does on police killings or other forms of police violence, and the advent of body and of these were to It those and the Black Lives Matter movement to give the of police killings the attention it had long lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has over the past half century. for the of the victims, the of killed by a police in the United States during the 1980s, and the drop was particularly Black Americans and The decline in police killings over the course of that to have been to new the use of lethal against In the three decades, in the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant while the rate for white Americans as a the age-adjusted for Americans also In some though, rates to From through 2019, police killings in areas and but by thirty percent in the thirty largest American cities, because of new on use of violence in some cities has dropped especially In Los Angeles, for example, significant of by the police appear to have been in half between and 2019, and police shootings appear to have by forty by officers increased in 2021 but remained far than in past In on the other of by the police have dropped by percent over the past fifteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not a similar Police shootings in between and in and again in and and then dropped over the several years, by to roughly the Los and have been of efforts at police reform over the past two decades, so the of by police in these cities over the past are in some reductions in of in both cities and significant reductions in police shootings in Los but in others progress on police shootings in also the in patterns of police violence, as in crime across the United States. The Police by the and the number of of per thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from to the from fifteen to the United States as a had New York rate of police almost Americans have been killed by the police in had New York homicide people have violently that same Police can and have but the victories have been and often

We assessed the factors that legitimized the police in the United States at an important moment of history, just after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. We also evaluated one way of incorporating perceptions of systemic racism into procedural justice theory. We tested two primary hypotheses. The first hypothesis was that perceptions of police procedural justice, distributive justice, and bounded authority were important to the legitimization of the police. The second hypothesis was that perceptions of the under- and overpolicing of Black communities also mattered to the delegitimization of the institution, especially for people who identified with the Black Lives Matter movement. A cross-sectional quota sample survey of 1,500 U.S. residents was conducted in June 2020. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and latent moderated structural equation modeling. People who viewed the police as legitimate also tended to believe that police treated people with respect and dignity, made decisions in unbiased ways, fairly allocated their finite resources across groups in society, and respected the limits of their rightful authority. Moreover, people who believed that Black communities were underpoliced and overpoliced also tended to question the legitimacy of the police, especially if they identified with the Black Lives Matter movement. These results held among Black and White study participants alike. At the time of the study, systemic racism in policing may have delegitimized the institution in a way that transcended the factors that procedural justice theory focuses on, such as procedural justice. This was especially so for individuals who identified with a social movement, Black Lives Matter, that had an extremely high profile in 2020. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The death of George Floyd in May 2020 in the United States of America (USA) generated protests across the world, fronted by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The BLM movement cast the killing of Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin as emblematic of the criminal justice system’s (CJS) long history of racism. Whilst the core message that Black Lives Matter is indisputable, noble and a worthy rallying call, little scholarly attention has been given to the movement’s underlying philosophy and aims, particularly in relation to the CJS in Britain. This article explicates Britain’s BLM movement by considering four core themes – (a) critical race theory and British social science, (b) the policing of black people in Britain, (c) the omission of social class from the analyses of BLM scholars and activists in Britain and, (d) the aims of Britain’s BLM movement. It suggests that the BLM movement potentially offers a flawed understanding of racism within the CJS. The paper also critiques and problematizes BLM’s use of the terms ‘white privilege and ‘whiteness’. It closes with a critical discussion of the movement’s aims, including defunding and abolishing the police, suggesting that critical engagement with both CRT and BLM should form a core part of criminological debate.

The death of George Floyd in May 2020 in the United States of America (USA) generated protests across the world, fronted by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The BLM movement cast the killing of Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin as emblematic of the criminal justice system’s (CJS) long history of racism. Whilst the core message that Black Lives Matter is indisputable, noble and a worthy rallying call, little scholarly attention has been given to the movement’s underlying philosophy and aims, particularly in relation to the CJS in Britain. This article explicates Britain’s BLM movement by considering four core themes – (a) critical race theory and British social science, (b) the policing of black people in Britain, (c) the omission of social class from the analyses of BLM scholars and activists in Britain and, (d) the aims of Britain’s BLM movement. It suggests that the BLM movement potentially offers a flawed understanding of racism within the CJS. The paper also critiques and problematizes BLM’s use of the terms ‘white privilege and ‘whiteness’. It closes with a critical discussion of the movement’s aims, including defunding and abolishing the police, suggesting that critical engagement with both CRT and BLM should form a core part of criminological debate.

Representations of blacks in Japan continue to be problematic even when the media itself, a prime purveyor of racial misrepresentations, attempts to address the issue. This has become evident in its coverage of global Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police in the United States. While protests have occurred in a number of Japanese cities, mainstream coverage has ignored them and remained focused on those demonstrations that have taken place abroad. While these demonstrations have prompted a reexamination of anti-black racism in the United States and Europe, the Japanese media has largely avoided introspective discussion of its domestic manifestations, despite its prevalence on the internet, social media, and television, including corporate mainstream news broadcasts that have feebly attempted to examine the issue.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement re-centered and illuminated the disparities facing the Black population as a result of systemic racism in the United States (U.S.). Notably, BLM also highlighted and uplifted issues facing Black women. Numerous studies have demonstrated that Black women are at-risk for cardiovascular disease, maternal and infant mortality, breast cancer, and mental health symptoms. This paper seeks to argue that the BLM movement is a critical site for radical transformation for raising critical consciousness. In focusing on the well-being of Black people, BLM puts forth a framework of healing justice that employs an anti-racist, intersectional, holistic, and culturally and politically appropriate informed therapeutic approach. This framework addresses the historical and contemporary trauma that Black people have and continue to experience in the U.S. This paper asserts that this framework can cultivate a space of vulnerability for Black women to heal and to continue to develop resilience for liberation and self-determination.

Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States.2 Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.3 And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.4 It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.5The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.In the first part of this essay, we outline five comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts and make the case for the First World Balance.In one sense, prisons and police are complements. It would be impossible to have many people in prison without the police, since, to put people in prison, the police usually have to apprehend and arrest them first. It would also be difficult to have police without prisons, since the threat of imprisonment is one of the typical sanctions wielded by police around the world. Given this, and given the exceptionally high incarceration rate in the United States, many people assume that the United States must also have an exceptionally high number of police officers.But that is not in fact the case. Figure 1 plots the police and incarceration rates of a sample of developed countries.6 The graph illustrates the chief fact that has animated the iterature on mass incarceration: America is a developed-world outlier in its use of incarceration. Yet it also illustrates the much less-well-known fact that America is not at all an outlier in its rate of policing. The United States has around 212 police officers for every 100,000 total residents, which ranks it in the forty-first percentile of today’s developed world.Yet this way of putting things in fact understates the magnitude of what has been misunderstood. Figure 1 denominates the scope of incarceration and policing by population. By that metric, the United States has an exceptionally high incarceration rate but a relatively normal number of police officers given the total size of its population. But we think it is more informative to denominate punishment and policing by the level of serious crime in a country. By doing so, it is possible to make inferences about cross-national differences in how countries manage serious crime.Here one runs into some difficulties. For several reasons, it is challenging to compare levels of serious crime across countries. Some countries criminalize acts that are perfectly legal in others. Countries define many criminal acts, such as “assault,” differently from one another.7 And countries vary widely in their ability to measure the incidence of criminal acts. The result is that many international patterns in reported data are obviously misleading. Data collected by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, for instance, suggest that the rate of violent crime is higher in Belgium, France, and Canada than in El Salvador, Russia, or Rwanda.8 Our solution to this problem is to measure the rate of serious crime by the rate of homicides.For the comparisons that anchor this piece—the United States to the developed world—this immediately raises a problem. Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have argued that “[r]ates of crime are not greatly different in the United States from those in other developed nations. … [O]ur extremely high rates of lethal violence are a … a distinct social problem.”9 If America has more lethal violence than Europe, but not more crime, the relatively high homicide rate in the United States would be a biased estimate of the rate of serious crime.We have two kinds of reasons for thinking that this is wrong and that the homicide rate is the right (or best) measure. First, given the reliability issues that bedevil the police or victim survey data on which Zimring and Hawkins and others rely, this is an area in which one has to take some cues from theory and other data. Consider, then, the following trilemma.Concentrated disadvantage is the root cause of most serious crime in developed societies.America has significantly more concentrated disadvantage than European countries.America has the same amount of serious crime as other developed countries.One of these three statements must be false. Criminological theory and existing social science evidence strongly support (1).10 And we think there is good evidence to support (2).11 The main theoretical reason to believe (3) is that the United States has far more guns per capita than European countries. But while firearm availability no doubt has some impact on the level of violence, we think the effect is likely to be small. A large effect would be difficult to square with other patterns across place, persons, and time. Consider, for example, that while the United States has ten times as many guns as El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly ten times higher than it is here.12 And that white, richer households in the United States are much more likely to report owning a gun than Black, poorer households.13 Given this and given the reasons to believe (1) and (2), we think (3) is most likely to be the false leg of this trilemma.The second reason—which does not depend on the first—is that homicide accounts for a large proportion of the total harm caused by crime. Insofar as standard measures of the crime rate give equal weight to each act criminalized by the state, they are conceptually meaningless. A society with a thousand petty larcenies and one murder has much less serious crime than a society with a thousand murders and one petty larceny, yet the raw crime rate would be the same in both. A meaningful measure thus has to account for the relative seriousness, or harmfulness, of each action.It is difficult to measure how harmful different kinds of crime are with any precision, but the cost-of-crime literature furnishes a first approximation. Economists estimate the social costs of different kinds of crime by asking people how much they would be willing to pay to reduce their odds of being a victim of various offenses. Summarizing this literature, Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCary estimated that the cost of a murder is around $7,000,000, the cost of an assault less than $40,000, the cost of a robbery around $13,000, and the cost of motor vehicle theft around $6,000.14 Thus, even though homicide is much less frequent than other crimes, it is judged so much more severe that it accounts for about seventy percent of the total costs of crime. This means that it is a much better estimate of the rate of serious harm than unweighted measures of the rate of crime. Figure 2 shows the same data, but this time denominated by homicide rather than by population.One immediately sees something different. Now, America’s outlying level of incarceration looks relatively ordinary. Its prisoner/homicide ratio is a little higher than the developed-world median, but not by much. No less stark is the fact that its police/homicide ratio now appears exceedingly low. That is, if denominated by the level of serious crime, America is not normally policed but rather under-policed. America has about one-ninth the number of police officers, per homicide, than does the median developed country.15One of the refrains of police reformers has been that American police are uniquely inefficient. Typically, when people argue that American people—and Black people, especially—have been under-protected and over-policed, they mean by this that the priorities of American police are skewed. Police focus too much on petty offenses and too little on serious crimes. This is the purpose of dwelling, for example, on the fact that only four percent of a typical police department’s time is devoted to handling violent crime.16And indeed, it is true that in comparative context the police in the United States do not solve many serious crimes. America’s clearance rate is the lowest of all comparable countries, as Figure 3 shows.17 The median developed country records around one homicide-related arrest per homicide that occurs. In the United States, the figure is 0.56.Yet this does not seem to be, as reformers imagine, because police in the United States are exceptionally focused on nonserious offenses. Consider one measure of police focus: the number of homicide arrests made per police officer. The clearance rate (homicide arrests/homicide) is the product of police focus (homicide arrests/police) and the police footprint (police/homicide). The conventional view of policing in the United States suggests that the problem with America’s clearance rate is that footprint is high, but focus is low. In fact, as Figure 3 suggests, the converse is true: footprint is low, but focus is high.One way of summarizing much of what we have shown so far is to observe that the United States seems to emphasize the severity of punishment over the certainty of sanction. The exceedingly high prison/police ratio and the low level of police per homicide together suggest that the United States relies on long sentences rather than the sanction of arrest to control crime. One way to estimate certainty and severity more directly is to decompose the prisoner/homicide ratio into the ratio of arrests to homicide (estimating certainty) and the ratio of prisoners to arrests (estimating severity). Figure 4 plots these two ratios across the developed world. The result supports our judgment: the United States has relatively low levels of certainty but relatively high levels of severity.One advantage of using homicides, arrests, and prisoners to measure these two concepts is that we can say something about how certainty and severity are distributed within the United States. As Figure 4 also shows, while all Americans suffer from an exceptional balance of certainty and severity, it is Black people in the United States who are especially subject to it.American police killed around 1,800 people in 2019. In the rest of the developed world, the average number of police killings is around 5 per year; the median is just 2. It seems intuitive that to reduce the level of police violence, we must reduce the footprint of the police. Yet cross-country comparisons suggest the opposite conclusion. As Figure 5 shows, there is a striking and negative cross-national correlation between the rate at which police kill civilians and the number of police officers per homicide.Countries with large numbers of police per homicide are countries in which police are much less likely to kill civilians, as compared to countries with fewer police per homicide. The countries of the developed world cluster on the bottom right of this graph (high police/homicide, low levels of police violence), while the countries of the developing world cluster toward the top left. The exception is the United States.To be clear, a negative correlation is not proof that lower levels of police/homicide cause the police to be more violent. Several possible confounders might explain the coincidence of high levels of police killing and homicide (e.g., inequality). It is even conceivable that the relationship could run in the reverse direction (high levels of police killing cause low public demand for policing). Because police killing is rare and our data are poor, causal inference is challenging.But there are some theoretical reasons to believe that this correlation is in fact causal. When violence overwhelms police resources, police make contact with only a small fraction of those who commit it. Under these circumstances, the civil treatment of a small fraction of offenders will have a negligible deterrent effect. Indeed, the American combination of small police footprint and brutality is reminiscent of the early modern state. As the opening pages of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish describe, when the infrastructural capacity of the state is low, exemplary but rare shows of spectacular force can be the most effective way to induce compliance with the law.18In addition, in societies where police resources struggle to keep pace with rates of interpersonal violence and private citizens are therefore more likely to arm themselves, police officers are more likely to behave brutally out of regard for their own interests. A severe sentencing regime such as ours could well exacerbate this dynamic since, under such a regime, there are stronger incentives for suspects to take extreme measures to evade apprehension and arrest. Thus, relying on severe and lengthy sentencing, rather than policing, to deter crime could make the job of policing more dangerous. And this might in turn make interactions with the police even more dangerous—for civilians.Of course, these inferences are speculative. Further empirical research is needed to test them. But we think the negative cross-national correlation between police killings and the number of police officers per homicide, along with the theoretical reasons to believe those correlations might be causal, should serve as a warning sign. It is not at all clear that reducing the number of police officers on the street would reduce the pervasiveness of police violence and abuse. And it suggests to us, again, that the obstacles to police reform run deep. Reformers often argue that police officers should be trained as “guardians” rather than “warriors.”19 But the training protocols that instill and entrench the warrior mindset may just be symptoms of under-policing.The United States is ridden with much more serious crime than other comparably wealthy societies. It responds to this exceptionally high level of serious crime with an exceptional combination of relatively small police forces and comparatively long sentences. And, tellingly, this regime reaches its apogee in the way it treats most disadvantaged people. What is to be done?The comparative observations we have made above suggest an obvious hypothesis. Perhaps the United States, like the rest of the developed world, ought to emphasize policing and penal certainty rather than incarceration and penal severity.20 Perhaps the United States ought to shift resources from incarceration to policing until the balance between the two looks more like the balance in the rest of the developed world. The implications of such a move—which we call the First World Balance—would be dramatic. The United States today has almost three times as many prisoners as police officers. If it raised no revenue but simply used the money saved by cutting prison populations to hire police officers until the ratio was the same as the ratio in the developed world (about 3.4 times as many police officers as prisoners), the new United States would have about 370,000 prisoners and 1.1 million police officers. That is, the First World Balance, if implemented in the United States, would be a society with about 1.9 million fewer prisoners and almost half a million more police officers.21 As we note later, this new United States would not be a dystopian police state. Moving to the First World Balance would in fact align the rate of policing in the United States with the rest of the developed world.But, of course, to note that moving to the First World Balance would align the United States with other countries is not to have shown that this would be a good thing. One cannot reason to normative policy conclusions from comparative empirical observations alone. To make these arguments, one has to connect fact to value. Would the First World Balance be justified?To understand our answer, it will be helpful to note three points about our approach.First, it was due to our shared interest in answering questions like this one that the two of us began to work together. Sociologists write about normatively laden questions but are taught to refrain from considering the normative implications of their arguments. It is no surprise that many of them do anyway, since it is those implications that give their vocation meaning. But social scientists’ lack of training in moral and political philosophy means that these conclusions are too often founded on ideology or intuition rather than rigorous normative argument. Some philosophers are interested in applying moral and political theory to puzzles that bear on real-world problems. But a lack of social training many of them to answers to these questions (or of those that do not empirical Thus, our is to empirical evidence and social theory with explicit normative where we to be as as In we do not to the theory of interpersonal or political (or the theory of out the implications of just that we the implications of a of In we that do not have implications for which suggests that our hands about these issues may not be the it We think that the combination of empirical and normative one would have to to our are various of that our case for the First World Balance should be as our to a about how the United States ought to a of penal readers will we the in our by the this a of And force a between prisons and police, when various kinds of social or are to We say more about we the in this way in our forthcoming book What’s Wrong with Mass but some is in think that in the long a of social policy would reduce crime by its root and in turn reduce the and demand for policing and In other we argue that any of or efficiency that the United States should social But a of social policy from to of this magnitude would the to some kind of over the Given the of the American movement and the of the American we doubt we will like this Our in this essay is to say something about what should be in the world in which we just in the world in which we would like to To say something about that we to that are only prisons and the the existing of money from prisons and police to social just as many reformers have As we argue in What’s Wrong with Mass this is because social policy is by what we call the To the root of crime would be to the for the most disadvantaged people in To do this by social would resources, since the of are not America’s most disadvantaged people. Because penal is in a way that social is it costs about a to run the developed most penal state but something like to run its most there is good evidence that social that are at the early and be at reducing But the same that these social also it for to them at The more the the more we can be that these will the of the and the social policy is but for crime while social policy can be but is it is not to the root of crime with to public Yet some might argue that we should from policing and incarceration even if this would result in more policing and concentrated imprisonment and on disadvantaged rather than on incarceration in disadvantaged can social in and political and policing, can entrench and And arrest records can be a disadvantage in the and the fact that many of those who are have their are all by the the with the many negative of incarceration and policing to sanction a in crime is serious crime has those same crime can social and exacerbate and concentrated disadvantage at the in a violent incentives to do things that are for social and violence can be and lack of and and are of in where crime is without to and reducing for public and other of often which the and of disadvantage in those And just as a criminal or an arrest can be a on the job of crime can be in extremely disadvantaged where can become a that serious crime the same kinds of as policing and concentrated we argue that state and an and between the of crime, and policing. The have to bear the of these no how state and to make them. The fact that of this are is an It is an of our But we think some of these are more just and more than we think that the us is how to strike the right penal What ought to be about the level of incarceration and the level of policing in today’s United in the 2 2 above in Figure should the United States how a might this that the state should how to strike the balance between incarceration and policing by that in this 2 2 that should we different of striking the balance between policing and incarceration to in the what we take to be the of moving to any in this what it would for the level of homicide and crime, the number of people in prison, and the number of people killed and by the police. What would to each of these if the United States to the First World homicide and other kinds of serious crime would The empirical literature on is that the size of police forces is a much more way to crime than the of prison sentences for those who are and The for this is well in and do not make the way than the of the they are people to the of their much more than in the It is by possible to to the of a prison only on the in the it is to be that the of arrest and would do more to deter crime than in the United States, a on policing is almost times more effective at crime than a on Our is that the First World Balance would be a world of a little more than four thousand fewer (and less crime more the costs to by mass incarceration would be its prison is extremely to the of It is difficult to put a number on this But one that a in prison is even as good as a this a of two million in the prison would be the of one million of thousand a of about The the rate (e.g., if for a in prison only of the of for a prison, rather than the the of the costs of policing. the one a world of more policing be a world of more on work by our is that the First World Balance would be a world of almost million more the other for the reasons we we that a world of more policing would be one of less police violence (about fewer people killed by the have to some way to these against each This is not but one to do the seems against the For the arrests to be reason to against our on the costs of these arrests to must the of the of less crime and less

The practice of racism in the US stems from a long history of slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation and the various laws that the Government had issued in an attempt to regulate the rights of black people did not prevent black discrimination from continuing to this day. This situation triggered the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is one of the biggest movements in the United States. This research discusses the role of Anonymous as a community using cyberspace during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This research applies the qualitative method using various kinds of secondary data ranging from books, related journals, government websites, and other online sources aiming to analyze the concept of cyberactivism and the idea of ​​cyber libertarianism regarding the role of Anonymous within the BLM movement. This research shows that based on the cyber libertarianism concept the role of Anonymous is as one of the important information sources within the BLM movement by hacking and then propagating the information to the public. Based on the concept of cyberactivism, Anonymous has helped the Police in raising racism awareness. This racism has been rooted in the existing systems in the United States of America. Besides, cyberactivism by Anonymous using hacktivism has shifted the concept of hacking not only as a crime but also a resource of social movements.

Cultural Diversity and the Police in the United States: Understanding Problems and Finding Solutions

Sixteen years after the establishment of the first paid police force in London, the first police force in the United States was organized in New York City in 1845. Since then, police forces flourished in American urban and rural areas alike. The roots of the relationship between police and community in the United States can be traced to the Bill of Rights, to the Peel policing model that emphasized moral and democratic principles and to the English police tradition with its emphasis on the importance of service (Das, 1986). Unlike England and Israel, and to some extent Canada, the American police is as diverse and multi-faceted as is the American governmental system.1 In addition to the federal police forces such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the office of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the US Customs Inspection, the US Postal Inspection, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) inspection and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) inspection, there are independent state, county and city police forces, state patrol and sheriff departments. There is also a multitude of other specialized police forces such as university on-campus forces and a growing absolute and relative number of private security forces in hotels, shopping malls, city blocks and high security residential and business buildings.

This paper examines the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in cultural, historical and relational contexts at the intersection of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, U.S. Civil Rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and reforms thereto in the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision of Shelby County v Holder, 570U.S.529 (2013). The intergenerational relations between the BLM movement and these ongoing movements for civil and human rights is underscored. In the wake of protests about the sadistic murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by a Caucasian police officer, the BLM movement has been mischaracterized as an affront to law and order by the Trump-led U.S. administration. The mischaracterization was a re-election campaign effort designed to ignite 'white fear', 'white rage' and to defend police brutality and systemic racism. Analytical psychology and the phenomenology of the trickster archetype, as amplified from the African-centric perspective in the Yoruba deity Esu-Elegba, are employed to interrogate partisan obstructionist behaviours that assault multicultural democracy in both contemporary U.S. electoral politics and the political economy. The paper concludes with a brief note on the social activism of Fair Fight Georgia and the integration of its agenda into the BLM movement.

The history of black social movements in the United States is a history replete with organizations created by blacks, including in some cases white supporters, crafting programs, tactics, and strategies to address the pressing problems confronting a black dispossessed and oppressed population. A description and assessment of the contemporary Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement forces an assessment of it and how and why it may be linked to previous organizations which sought comparable changes in the black community and in the larger dominant white society. The BLM movement would adopt and use direct action confrontational politics on many occasions, the first of which was the nationally organized bus trip to Ferguson, Missouri during the demonstrations in the Michael Brown case. Closely allied to the importance of the local community as the germinator of programs and leadership in the BLM movement is the importance of organizational decentralization.

When a protest to support the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was organized in Seoul in the summer of 2020, not a few commentators in South Korea's online communities expressed their cynicism about the movement. While some referred to the recent hate crimes conducted against Asians after the coronavirus outbreak, many others summoned the memory of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The fact that many Korean American–owned stores had been looted and damaged during the riots was brought to notice by these commentators as an evidential basis for the uselessness of Koreans’ solidarity with the BLM movement. This article attempts to narrativize how the racial tensions between Black and Korean Americans in Los Angeles in 1992 have been collectively remembered in South Korea to examine the role of the collective memory of the event in the South Korean public's current attitude toward race issues. The images of the so-called roof Koreans, Korean American shopkeepers who kept watching with rifles in hand on the rooftops of their buildings during the 1992 riot, were resummoned during the BLM movement and used in internet memes as a symbol of ideal citizens who could protect their neighborhood with their military training experience back in their home country, South Korea. This collective memorization of roof Koreans as military veterans of the ROK Army raised masculine self-esteem of South Korean males compared to their male counterparts in the United States, in their imagined racial hierarchy, when the hierarchy was questioned and challenged.

Police and Policing in the United States of America