Racialized policing is killing Black men in mental health crises; yes, whiteness is the problem

A placard being held up by a People’s Organization for Progress (POP) member at the POP’s 67-mile march for justice in Lawrence Township, NJ, Oct. 16, 2023. (Josie Gonsalves for Public Square Amplified)

Of all my views that have shifted as I've learned and grown, none may be as unrecognizable as my views on policing. I grew up in New Jersey, in a white neighborhood, in a white town, and had an uncle and next-door neighbor who were police officers. I saw the police as providing safety, protecting everyone from evil—the good guys. I wondered aloud why anyone would run from the police and thought cops should be able to use their cars against people who ran. Any cracks in that good guy facade didn't go very deep. 

As I started driving, I knew cops in certain towns would pull you over for minor things. But as a white teenager, all I had to do was drive carefully, and I was fine. And if I did get pulled over, I feared a conversation with my parents, not for my life at the hands of the police. I believed New Jersey State Police when they claimed they were not racially profiling when making stops on the Turnpike; they were profiling the condition of the cars, not the passengers. While waiting in line for food at college, I got into an argument defending the idea that an innocent person would never confess because, again, the police were good, protecting everyone from evil.

I get it if the previous paragraphs made you want to slap me. But if they sum up your current view of police, please keep reading to see what I now know I got wrong back then. 

Flash forward my 20-ish years and thousands of Black people killed by police, and my current views are nearly unrecognizable. People change, situations change, sometimes you have to do some work, other times things jump out at you. 

In the "greatest country in the world", we face a cruel existential crisis in NJ: the overlap of mental health, Blackness, and police violence. In just the past three years, NJ police officers have murdered Hasani Best in Asbury Park, Amir Johnson in Ventnor, Gulia Dale III in Newton, Bernard Placide in Englewood, and now, just weeks ago, Najee Seabrooks in Paterson. 

Murders of Black men, each suffering an acute mental health condition, where a police response involved unnecessarily aggressive behavior to an individual who may or may not have been armed but was certainly contemplating harming themselves. This is supported by a recent report, Dying at Intersections: Police-Involved Killings of Black People with Mental Illness. The report lays out these encounters and offers recommendations to address the repeated killings at the hands of police of Black people in mental health crises. 

Maybe, NJ is particularly inept at helping those suffering from mental health, no doubt we could do better, but what stands out is how few white people are killed by NJ police under similar circumstances. In the 2020 Census, NJ reported 62% white; 12% Black. That means that for the above referenced five Black men killed, we'd expect to see almost 25 police shootings of white men with mental illness unless Race was the determining factor in the police response to these incidents. But the incomplete records indicate only a handful of cases with white victims. So maybe the very structure and system of policing is racist? 

US policing began to support the chasing, capturing, and killing of enslaved Black and indigenous people who had escaped their kidnappers, abusers, and rapists. They held power to search the residences of enslaved people, looking for weapons or other contraband and did so without regard for due process or cause as the enslaved "had no rights a white man ought to obey." 

From these origins, it shouldn't be surprising that many police officers not only declined to intervene in the lynchings and Klan violence from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and into the Civil Rights Era, but were active participants. 

But make no mistake; lynchings are still with us—often done under the auspices of the state and now captured in HD, happening with a far too regular cadence. The revolution will not be televised, but the police lynchings will. And policing in the 2020s looks very much like it did in the 1820s and the 1960s. 

I get that this is hard for my fellow white folks; I really do. I still feel a quick jolt of relief or safety when I see a police presence; honestly, that may never go away. But then reality kicks in. I'm here to tell you we can force ourselves to reckon with the fact that while our feelings of safety and protection, our most basic human inclinations, may revolve around the police, that same system inspires fear, distrust, violence, and pain, not a few neighborhoods away, but in the homes of our Black neighbors. 

The racialized policing we see perpetrated on our most vulnerable neighbors looks nothing like the police and courtroom dramas we may like to binge-watch. When have armed, un-uniformed men jumped out of a car and ran at you, guns pointed just due to the color of your skin? That those men could be police is likely inconvincible to many of you reading this as it was to me a few years ago. But Carl Dorsey is dead, and Justin Rodwell was detained for over a year in Essex County Jail from this style of policing in Newark, to name one city. Racialized consequences of policing don't happen to White people.

What's even more heartbreaking is that Newark police have gotten better. Newark Police have been operating under a federal monitor as part of a consent decree since 2016. That consent decree was put in place because Newark Police have a violent, racist, and oppressive history. But that monitor doesn't consider individual cases, and that process doesn't consider particular circumstances. And even with training, body cams, and diversity goals, a Newark police officer still murdered Carl Dorsey and was found to have done nothing wrong. But even if the NJ Attorney General Matt Platkin hadn't failed to get an indictment in the Grand Jury process, the system had already failed. 

Rod Simpkins, the officer who turned, pointed his weapon and fired a single fatal shot at the unarmed Dorsey, who was moving away from him, appears in the 2010 filing that created the Newark consent decree. In that 2008 case, he was part of a group of five officers who told a youth football coach and his players: "You have no fucking rights . . . we're the cops, we do whatever we fucking want." Not in 1808, but in 2008. And, no, Simpkins is not a bad apple nor has he been ruined by a group of bad apple cops. In either case, he went 13 years undisciplined, uncorrected, never fired by leadership, unreformed by Internal Affairs and the police policing themselves, and as a result, was allowed to murder Carl Dorsey.

So, what can I do? What can you do, White people?

I believe we have to struggle against the inhumane racialized policing that is to keep you safe and me safe, because our safety as white people is not, and never should be, at the expense of our Black neighbors.

There continue to be more calls for total abolition: a world without police. But no matter where you fall on that spectrum, it's essential to understand your experience with policing, which is always racialized and depends, first and foremost, on the color of your skin. From there, I encourage you to join me in rethinking where you stand on policing. It's a journey, not a destination, but we can't pretend to be on the right side of something that, from its roots to its modern-day representation, is racist. 

A racist system will always produce racist outcomes. We need to break down that racist system.