The police are inherently racist

The argument

Whether or not all law enforcement is racist, the system they abide by is racist. The police exist because they are supposed to keep the people safe from crime. Yet, if one were to look closely at what law enforcement does, a different story is told. For centuries now, the police have done their job, maintaining law and order, but this is at the cost of allowing change to take place. The institution also has a hand in specifically abusing people of color, whose earliest forms of policing took the form of slave patrols in the 1700s. How policing is done also contains racial bias. Often, the police patrol neighborhoods that are predominantly poor, neighborhoods whose residents are, for the most part, black. As a result of a more prominent police presence, any arrests made impacted black people the most. In this situation, placement is crucial because it predetermines what races are being directly affected by policing. A large part of why this occurs is because of something called implicit bias, which is the act of harboring predisposed prejudices. Since racism in and of itself is a set of predisposed prejudices, the decision to focus policing on these low-income communities aptly reflects law enforcement's own implicit bias.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Another narrative disputes the idea that the police are inherently racist. According to some black conservatives like Larry Elder, there is no evidence suggesting law enforcement is targeting black people. He posits that this discussion is at the forefront because of the media, claiming that they have a vested interest in the issue. Elder then connects this vested interest into further fueling the black community's anger for Democrats to use to their advantage politically. In short, saying that the police are inherently racist is a political tool used to garner favor with black voters.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Origins do not establish present function. Slave patrols were one root of policing in the American South, but Northern departments derive from British municipal models built around property crime and public order, and no institution's current purpose is settled by what it was founded to do — the argument would need to show that the function persists, not that the lineage exists. The body's own framing, that police maintain order "at the cost of allowing change", is besides a claim about institutional conservatism rather than about race. [Rejecting P2] The observation is well documented, but the premise admits only one explanation for it. Deployment also follows reported crime, calls for service and the concentration of homicide, and the communities policed most heavily frequently ask for faster response as well as less enforcement — a tension the premise cannot represent. Disproportionate outcomes are consistent with biased placement, with the geography of concentrated poverty, and with both, and the argument does not separate them. [Rejecting P3] This is where the argument overreaches. "Inherently racist" asserts a fixed property of an institution, which implicit bias — a disposition varying between individuals and departments and shifting with training, incentives and supervision — cannot establish. The move to abolition does not follow either: if the bias operates through deployment, budgets and law, those are alterable, and consent decrees, mandated data collection and revised use-of-force rules have produced measurable movement, which an inherent property would not permit.