| What | This collaborative series is a peek into the issues facing law enforcement and community relations within our urban communities. |
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| When | We will begin Part I of this collaborative series with a snapshot of the early origins of modern day policing, setting the stage for a deeper dive into the present day issues in Part II of this series. |
| Who | This Source Card overview begins with a look at a man named Robert Peel who may not be a household name to many of us, but as it turns out, in many ways he may well be the founding father of today’s modern day police force as we know it. |
| Why | To facilitate a collaborative process that promotes just a little more understanding from all sides on a complicated set of issues facing our country’s urban centers. And along the way, with your help and input, incorporate some of these themes and issues into our Back of the Yards comic series. |
With this Source Card collaboration, we will be covering various topics related to law enforcement & community relations, together with your input. We’ll start this ongoing collaboration with a peek at the origins of our modern police forces, eventually transitioning to some of the many challenges our police forces face today, and then focus on the impact of those challenges within our black and brown communities in particular.
And as we cover these various topics, we will invite you to the same, either on your own or collaboratively with others. And we hope to not only collaborate with urban youth and their academic administrators, but also other subject matters experts along the way, and perhaps no more important in that regard than those on the very front lines we speak of, our police officers.
That’s the hope anyway. But we’ll see exactly where this collaboration goes together. For now, we’ll simply kick things off with a peak into the origins of the modern day police force.
And as turns out, that tale starts with some guy named Robert Peel. Who, you ask? Well just turn the pages below we’ll dive right into it.
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Ahh, our man Peel. Just what would he be thinking if he were alive today?
Of course, to say a lot has changed since Robert Peel’s day would be like saying a lot has changed for us generally over the last year. Just a bit of an understatement.
In Peel’s day, the newly formed police (nicknamed “Bobbies” in honor of our man Robert Peel) would patrol metropolitan areas carrying only wooden batons and their most common encounters would be drunkenness and street fighting, with the hope all along that their mere presence would significantly reduce such crimes.
So, for some further context, here’s a list of some innovations developed since Peel’s day:
Yes, indeed, lots of innovation since Peel’s day. Which unfortunately brings us to some of the more somber realities of today. In parallel with this modern day innovation, crime has seemed to evolve just as rapidly. In contrast to the Bobbies of Peel’s day, police officers of today must deal with a wide array of violent crime, and this is particularly true within our urban centers.
In the summer of 2020, total Chicago shootings that July were at a 75% increase as compared to previous July. And as I write this blog entry, just over the last weekend alone here in Chicago, at least 49 people were shot, seven fatally.
Violence in our cities is nothing new. And to be fair, the fact of the matter is that violent crime within the United States has actually been on a steady decline over the last 15 years. But that shouldn’t in any way diminish the very real challenges within our urban centers today, as further evidenced by a murder rate that was up 16.1 percent in America’s 25 largest cities in 2020.
And it is this volatility that police officers walk right into the front lines every day. As Chicago’s former superintendent David Brown put it just after a shooting of 3 Chicago officers, “when they leave home, they leave their loved ones and put their stars on and risk everything. They risk everything protecting us all.”
And the danger our police officers face every day is just part of the story. As we will begin to cover more as this collaboration develops, in his book To Protect and Serve, author and former police chief Norm Stamper describes an environment for police that is entrenched in pressures to produce “numbers.”
“Numbers” often in the form of revenue. Moving violations. Speeding. Running a red light. This is particularly true in cities that have stressed budgets. As Stamper describes it, there was no “quota” system per se, but the pressures from above are nonetheless very real.
All of this exacerbated by modern day drug enforcement laws that the police are, of course, further tasked to enforce on the front lines.
All of which tends to put our officers in the position where they must “produce” in order to comply with their job requirements, but in so doing, often an adversarial relationship is collectively formed within the very same communities they are assigned to patrol and protect.
In his book Justice Without Trial, Law Enforcement in Democratic Society (1967, latest edition 2015), sociologist Jerome Skolnick maintains that any job description that calls upon a person to exercise decision-making authority in the face of physical danger may simply be asking too much of the practitioner.
Combine that danger with the systematic pressures police officers feel from above and from within, it would seem to be a wholly undeniable understatement to say that the job of a police officer is a profoundly difficult one.
But as we will try to further explore as this collaboration develops, the same systematic pressures that our police officers feel from above and within, as they also put their lives on the line daily, may also be contributing to the widely disproportionately negative impacts within our black and brown communities that exist today, which are equally undeniable.
And from there, we will pick up this Source Card collaboration to learn more about this pressures and related issues together with you starting with the “Let’s Collaborate” section below, with the hope that we will be able to incorporate what we learn over time into the Back of the Yards comic.
Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book.
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Collaborate with professional artists by contributing some artwork of your own! Some special pieces may be selected to appear in the Back of the Yards comic book.
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