In 1285, King Edward I enacted the Statute of Winchester, a decree commanding inhabitants of small English towns to establish police forces and to arrest anyone who wandered into their jurisdiction after sunset. These ideas have changed little since then have easily adapted to racism and white supremacy since and have no place in 21st century America. In fact, American policing is based on ideas about law enforcement originating in 13th century England, when most thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. But there’s an even larger, more encompassing argument for doing away with policing as we currently know it and reconstructing a modern system of public safety - an argument akin to why Ptolemy was finally dropped in favor of Copernicus. These activists make the argument that American policing needs to be rebuilt from the ground up because of its origins in the 18th and 19th century slave patrols, and this is true. But they’ve not gone far enough - far enough back, that is. So, too, it will take overturning deeply entrenched social beliefs to bring about widespread acceptance of a new foundation for policing.Īctivists calling to “defund the police” and reenvision policing are on the right track. It took overturning deeply entrenched social and religious beliefs to mainstream Copernicus’ heliocentric solar system. What’s needed today is a Copernican revolution in public safety - one that would redefine the foundations of modern policing as Copernicus redefined the foundations of modern astronomy. But it took more than a century before Copernicus’ ideas overcame fierce social and religious resistance and finally found widespread acceptance. But tinkering didn’t work for Ptolemy, and it won’t work for American policing.Įventually, in the 16th century, Copernicus put forth a radical new theory that the Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun. Reform merely tinkers with the current system of policing and hopes everything will still fit. Police reform legislation is evidence not of progress but of an unwillingness to confront the foundations of American policing. Epicycles made only modest changes to the prevailing dogma without overthrowing it. Ptolemy held steadfast to an ancient belief that the sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, a view strongly supported by the Catholic Church. These recent efforts by the Washington Legislature and others bring to mind “epicycles” - a term the first century Greek astronomer Ptolemy used to describe the aberrant motions of the planets. Among the more recent victims are 20-year-old Daunte Wright, 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo. In each of the past five years, police have killed on average about 1,000 people across the nation, the victims disproportionately Black, Latino or Native American. Over the course of Chauvin’s recent trial, police killed more than three Americans a day. House Bill 1310, meanwhile, hopes to rein in the use of excessive force by police through a number of measures, including requiring approval from the highest elected official in their jurisdiction before deploying tear gas against citizens.īut such tinkering is woefully inadequate to the problem at hand. Among them was House Bill 1054, which outlaws or limits no-knock warrants, chokeholds and neck restraints - an attempt at preventing the kind of reckless and negligent policing that led to the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Floyd in Minnesota. Last month, in response to this year’s macabre spate of police killings, the Washington state Legislature did what governing bodies often do in such situations: They pushed through a series of accountability reforms.
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