Activists calling for police reform often claim that defunding, re-training, and weeding out the “bad apples” will help lower the number of cases of police brutality.
There really is no such thing as a “bad apple” when it comes to policing, according Northwestern University Sociology Prof. Andrew Papachristos. In a recent discussion about Chicago’s police violence, Papachristos said police violence it is a systemic issue, not the result of a small number of problematic officers or bad apples.
People often use the term “bad apple”, which assumes that a small number of police officers are responsible for the majority of malpractice. While this may be somewhat true, it doesn’t explain the “epidemic” of police violence, according to Papachristos.
“We forget the rest of (the bad apple) analogy, which is (that) it spoils the bunch,” Papachristos said. “Oh yeah, and there might be a rotten tree.”
Former NFL player-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick agrees. Bad policing is not bad apples, it’s a rotten system, he said.
“It is not a matter of bad apples spoiling the bunch but interlocking systems that are rotten to their core,” Kaepernick wrote in an article for Level, published in October.
It has been four years since Kaepernick first protested by kneeling during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“At the time, my protest was tethered to my understanding that something was not right,” Kaepernick wrote. “I saw the bodies of Black people left dead in the streets. I saw them left dead in their cars. I saw them left dead in their backyards. I saw Black death all around me at the hands of the police. I saw little to no accountability for police officers who had murdered them.”
The only way to make a significant change is to change the system from top to the bottom, according to Kaepernick.
“Systemic problems demand systemic solutions,” Kaepernick wrote. “Predictably, the political mainstream has responded to recent uprisings by shifting the demands to ‘defund the police’ to reformist interventions centered on ‘acceptable’ modes of enacting death and violence upon oppressed peoples…To understand the necessity and urgency of abolition, we must first understand the genesis and histories of the institutions and practices we must abolish.”
Kaepernick’s stance appears to align with Papachristos’. While studying the Chicago police department, the professor found that when “bad” officers are surrounded by others just like them, the violent behavior spreads.
“Bad” officers were more apt to shoot at an unarmed civilian and had the potential to “contaminate” more officers, Papachristos said, according to the Daily Northwestern.
Papachristos worked with the Invisible Institute to track 160 crews of officers in the Chicago Police Department. According to the data, these crews, which include 480 people and make up 4 percent of all CPD officers, account for a quarter of all use-of-force complaints.
“These 4 percent of officers have been essentially creating levels of harm far exceeding what you would expect by any random distribution of bad apples,” Papachristos said.
Bottom line, Papachristos said the bad apple theory is not only simplistic but it is “distracting.”
“If we do not attend to and elevate the systematic attention to the systematic problems, it will continue to create these massive disparities and inequities,” he said.
A top MAGA White House official claimed that the case of George Floyd, who died in May at the hands of police in Minneapolis, was just a few bad apples — not systemic racism in law enforcement.
White House adviser Robert O’Brien said he didn’t believe most cops were bad, nor that there was systemic racism, according to the New York Post.
“No, I don’t think there’s systemic racism. I think 99.9 percent of our law enforcement are great Americans,” O’Brien told CNN in a separate interview. “Many of them are African American, Hispanic, Asian, they’re working in the toughest neighborhoods, they’ve got the hardest jobs to do in this country and I think they’re amazing great Americans and they’re my heroes.”
While this may be MAGA’s view, it’s not the view of the American Medical Association (AMA), which earlier this month recognized police brutality as a product of structural racism. Physicians, residents and medical students at the AMA’s Special Meeting of its House of Delegates recognized the detrimental public health consequences of violent law enforcement interactions.
The AMA adopted a policy addressing the need for policing reform. The new policy recognizes police brutality as a manifestation of structural racism disproportionately impacting Black people, the AMA reported.
“The data make clear that police brutality – one manifestation of systemic racism – has significant public health consequences for impacted communities, particularly among the Black community,” said AMA Board Member Willie Underwood. “The AMA is dedicated to actively working on dismantling racist policies and practices across all of health care, and we call on stakeholders to make systemic changes to protect public health and combat the detrimental effects that racism and communal violence have on the health of the nation.”
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
To that end, the AMA urged Congress over the summer to act on policing reform legislation to protect public health, urging necessary policing reforms to address the excessive use of law enforcement violence.
Around the U.S., 145 cities and counties in 27 states have declared that racism is a public health concern, Phys.org reported.
