Learn the Historical Perspective

THE PROBLEM

As January 6, 2021 and related events lay bare, racism and white supremacy remain core elements of America’s social order and institutions.  Findings of related analyses and investigations reveal two undeniable and unavoidable truths: 1) White supremacy is the greatest threat to the American project today and 2) Policing is plagued by White supremacy. Cellphone recordings of daily interactions, such as the murder of George Floyd and the false police report against birdwatcher Christian Cooper in Central Park in May 2020, have exposed the depth and breadth of systemic racism in America.  Actor Will Smith aptly noted: “Racism is not getting worse; it’s getting filmed.” 

Municipal policing in America originated from slave patrols in the south and private security in the north that protected mercantile assets.  Preserving the social order and protecting private property remain core functions of municipal policing.  Since the 1960s, Hollywood has glorified aggressive enforcement methods and portrayed force as the solution to policing challenges or the key element of law enforcement.  In a tragic example of life imitating art, most American municipal police agencies embrace that image; they promote a ‘warrior’ culture that relies on an “order-maintenance” service delivery model that glorifies and incentivizes enforcement above all else.  Enforcement is the primary measure of member performance and the basis of career advancement.  Police agencies in other countries have evolved; they promote a ‘guardian’ culture that relies on a problem-solving service delivery model that identifies and mitigates root causes of crime, violence and social strife (such as alcohol and drug addiction) in partnership with communities and other service providers. 

Suburban post-WWII Long Island was founded on a system of racial Apartheid that enshrined segregated housing, education, employment and recreation.  Municipal policing on Long Island originated within that system of racial segregation.  Eight decades later, maintaining the social order and protecting private property are still its principal functions. Long Island’s police unions are powerful special interests that enjoy an unhealthy monopoly on public information, control of the public policy narrative and disproportionate influence over the political process. Prevailing policing practices are fundamentally incompatible with our founding principles.   

Too often, Long Island residents are deprived of their dignity through discriminatory policing practices that undermine justice and equality. Many Long Island police departments continue to pursue the outmoded and widely discredited enforcement-based “order-maintenance” service delivery model that is focused on responding aggressively, through arrests and summonses, to the appearance of public disorder under the disproven rationale that such actions prevent serious crimes from taking place. Such strategies disproportionately target low-income communities of color leading to higher rates of illegal, unsafe, and potentially violent encounters with the police. As a result, thousands of Long Islanders have been wrongfully stopped, searched, summonsed, arrested, harassed or even physically assaulted by officers, as investigative reporting has revealed. In recent years, those practices, have resulted in residents paying and being exposed to hundreds of millions of dollars for lawsuits related to police misconduct. Black, Latino, low income, immigrant, LGBT, homeless, people with disabilities, and young alike have faced the brunt of these practices, which violate fundamental rights and freedoms. These practices impose significant public health consequences on targeted communities, particularly among the law-abiding residents; they undermine community-police relations, and place significant burdens on the most vulnerable and marginalized Long Island residents.

As one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, Long Island has a particularly disgraceful history of racial disparity in its criminal justice system, as dramatized by cases like those of Kenny Lazo, Kyle Howell, and SCPD Sergeant Greene, among others. For too many years there have been two criminal justice systems – one for white people and another for people of color. Years of discriminatory policies have bred hostility toward communities of color that manifests itself in Blacks and Latinos bearing an outsized burden of this injustice.