Make Washington Safe for Negro Womanhood The Politics of Police Brutality

2018 ◽  
pp. 75-109
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Street Harassment ◽  
Violent Behaviors ◽  
The Press ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
The City

This chapter chronicles patterns of racialized and gendered interracial police brutality in Washington, D.C. and the efforts of black women and men to end this violence. Between 1928 and 1938 white police officers in the city shot and killed forty black men in the city. While white officers did not shoot and kill black women and girls, but subjected at least twenty nine to a range of violent behaviors, including street harassment, racial epithets, physical assaults, and intrusions into their homes. In addition to these abusive encounters, white officers employed a double standard by refusing to conduct investigates when black women were abused, raped, or murdered; this was a form of negligence. Black women who were the victims of police violence resisted interracial policy brutality by fighting back, alerting the press, and pleading innocence in police court. Black women activists joined with men to stem the crisis of interracial police violence through protest parades, mock trials, mass meetings, and congressional lobbying.

Geographies of Pain, Geographies of Pleasure

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
LaKisha Michelle Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Female Performance ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
The City

In this chapter, LaKisha Simmons argues that the Jim Crow streets in New Orleans were sites of racial violence for black women and girls. By exploring cases of assault and police brutality on the city streets during segregation, the chapter contends that bodily vulnerability defined black womanhood. Yet despite the violence and trauma of Jim Crow life, black women went out on the streets in search of pleasure. Simmons contends that the Million Dollar Baby Dolls declared their humanity and reclaimed their bodies by seeking out pleasure. Simmons analyzes Ralston Crawford photographs of black women dancing and partying to better understand pleasure geographies and black female performance culture in New Orleans during segregation.

scholarly journals When Torture Mocks the Law: Understanding Police Brutality in South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 231-243
Author(s):  
Philisiwe Hadebe ◽  
◽  
Nirmala Gopal
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Water Deprivation ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Police Culture ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Degrading Treatment

South Africa promulgated the Prevention and Combating of Torture of Persons Act No. 13 of 2013, which criminalises the use of torture by law enforcers. The Act also criminalises cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment of citizens by law enforcers. However, the implementation of this law is derisory as the torture and physical abuse of civilians by the police reportedly continue unabated. This phenomenon seems part of police culture that is entrenched in South African policing practices. Prior to the study, the literature review underscored the unabated prevalence of police violence. Against this background, this article seeks to highlight specific incidences of police officers’ use of unconstitutional and abusive acts of torture involving civilians. Using a qualitative research approach, ten officers of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) were interviewed to generate the required data. Thematic analysis was used and the findings revealed that civilians suspected of criminal behaviour were often exposed to inhumane forms of torture, which ranged from food and water deprivation to being strangled, suffocated, and electrocuted. These forms of torture involving suspects were reportedly prompted by the urgency for eliciting information, ‘proving’ the presumption of guilt, proactively preventing crime in communities, and coercing suspect compliance. The findings thus urge the need for a blanket ban on the torture of suspects, the effective investigation by the IPID of cases of torture, and the successful trial and conviction of police perpetrators of this crime.

scholarly journals Black and Blue: Black Women, ‘Law and Order,’ and the Church’s Silence on Police Violence

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 886
Author(s):  
AnneMarie Mingo
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The Face ◽  
Women And Girls

During the mid-twentieth century, many southern White religious leaders proudly championed police brutality and other forms of state-sanctioned violence against Black citizens. In Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, he defends direct-action non-violent protests as he responds to criticisms and offers his own critique of the clergymen who gave commendations to “the police force for keeping ‘order’ and ‘preventing violence,’” while ignoring the “ugly and inhumane treatment” that the police exerted on non-violent Black protestors who sought to stand up for their rights. King intentionally includes examples of violence against older Black women and girls in his critique. In this article, the historical grounding in King’s critique is expanded to reflect longstanding support of police violence in White communities and a form of sanction through silence in Black communities centered around communal survival in the face of violent White power structures. This article highlights religious communities which ignored at best and sanctioned at worst police violence against Black women and girls and identifies the need for change in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, it calls for leaders to be in proximate location to police violence so when they see it, they can be moved ethically to address it.

The Eyes of the World Are upon Us

2018 ◽  
pp. 46-72
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Women In Politics ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The World ◽  
Prayer Meetings ◽  
Political Priority ◽  
The U.S

This chapter analyses how black women living in Washington, D.C. in the 1920s and early 1930s worked hard to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Over a period of fifteen years, women employed a range of protest tactics, including petitions, pickets, prayer meetings, congressional testimony, and a Silent Parade. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in 1922, but it died in the Senate. Four years later, two women testified in the Senate about the urgency of passing anti-lynching legislation, which reflected the growing visibility of black women in politics. But when activists protested the erasure of lynching at the National Crime Conference in 1934, they recognized that police brutality in the nation’s capital needed to be a political priority. Many of the veterans of anti-lynching activism turned toward eradicating interracial police violence in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s.

The Eight-Hour Strikes, the Haymarket Bombing, and the Consolidation of the Chicago Police Department

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Police Department ◽  
City Government ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Positive Image ◽  
The Press ◽  
Chicago Police ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how the Eight-hour strikes of 1886 and the Haymarket bombing transformed the Chicago Police Department into a much stronger institution. It begins with a discussion of the Haymarket affair and how it led to massive strikes for the eight-hour workday that began on May 1, 1886. It then considers how the Haymarket bombing changed what it meant to be a member of the Chicago Police Department as well as the relationship between the police, the press, and the city government. It shows that the Haymarket and its aftermath consolidated a positive image of the Chicago Police Department in the eyes of the respectable citizens of the city. This shift facilitated some institutional changes that favored police officers, such as the allocation of funds for a pension, improvements in police buildings, and expansion of the force. But most of all, only citizens willing to risk being identified with the anarchists would criticize the institution itself.

scholarly journals Making It Home: An Intersectional Analysis of the Police Talk

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon Malone Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Mothers ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Child Socialization ◽  
Intersectional Analysis ◽  
Police Encounters ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Depth Interviews

Black mothers often are responsible for teaching their children how to respond to police violence. Through 30 in-depth interviews with black mothers from diverse social class backgrounds, I investigate how they address the gendered racial vulnerability of their children in the “police talk,” a socialization practice designed to prepare children for police encounters. I identify mothers’ primary discourse as “the making it home” framework, which encapsulates in parent–child socialization their use of double consciousness around the police. This framework marginalizes girls’ experiences in three ways: it conceptualizes boys as the primary targets of police, while constructing girls as collateral targets of police violence; it emphasizes masculine forms of violence; and it is directed almost exclusively at boys. An intersectional analysis is applied to redress the limitations of the police talk and to highlight the need for structural reforms to recognize and combat police violence against black women and girls.

Race, Ambivalent Sexism, and Perceptions of Situations When Police Shoot Black Women

2021 ◽  
pp. 194855062098765
Author(s):  
Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi ◽  
Erin Cooley ◽  
William Cipolli ◽  
Sarita Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Ambivalent Sexism ◽  
Benevolent Sexism ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Ambiguous Situation ◽  
People’S Attitudes

The current research investigates people’s attitudes toward an ambiguous situation of police violence against a woman suspect. We hypothesize that the suspect’s race and participants’ ambivalent sexism, particularly benevolent sexism, will jointly inform perceptions of the suspect’s femininity, and in turn, perceptions of the suspect’s pain, judgments of who is to blame, and perceptions the officer was justified in using force against the suspect. Across two studies, we found support for our hypotheses: participants who reported more benevolent sexism thought the suspect were more feminine, but this association was only present when the suspect was White, as opposed to Black. Perceived femininity, in turn, predicted perceptions the suspect felt more pain, was less blameworthy for the situation, and perceptions that the officer’s use of force was less justified (Study 2).

scholarly journals Do police killings of unarmed persons really have spillover effects? Reanalyzing Bor et al. (2018)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Nix ◽  
M. James Lozada
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
General Population ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Black American ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Crowdsourced Data

We reevaluate the claim from Bor et al. (2018: 302) that “police killings of unarmed black Americans have effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population.” The Mapping Police Violence data used by the authors includes 91 incidents involving black decedents who were either (1) not killed by police officers in the line of duty or (2) armed when killed. These incidents should have been removed or recoded prior to analysis. Correctly recoding these incidents decreased in magnitude all of the reported coefficients, and, more importantly, eliminated the reported statistically significant effect of exposure to police killings of unarmed black individuals on the mental health of black Americans in the general population. We caution researchers to vet carefully crowdsourced data that tracks police behaviors and warn against reducing these complex incidents to overly simplistic armed/unarmed dichotomies.

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