Why Cops Aren’t Apples but Apples Are a Cop-Out
When we start talking about police officers as grocery-store produce, the conversation about race dynamics in law enforcement takes a dangerous turn toward becoming oversimplified.
But let's stay in that analogy for a while, since we’re all familiar with it. The conversation usually goes something to this effect: Police officers come in two varieties. There are “good apples” and “bad apples.” The bad apples are the ones who racially-profile, unduly intimidate, brutalize, and even murder Black people on a whim. The good apples are the officers who don’t.
In these appetite-destroying talks about racial injustice you will often hear folks opine that the ranks of police forces are stocked with mostly good apples, and incidents of racially-biased police violence are just isolated examples of a few bad apples that found their way into the bunch.
But now we are seeing so many of these “isolated” incidents lately. Why is that?
Well, the obvious answer is that, in the age of smartphones, these incidents are being recorded more frequently. But make no mistake, these types of encounters have been happening on a consistent basis for as long as policing in America has existed. And at least for the past four decades, Black people have been trying to convince White people of the regularity of our victimization at the hands of police. Blacks have tried to shine a light on this particular injustice in a number of ways. From protest and riots, and even by way of art, with decades of songs that have anthropological lyrics, such as The Beast by The Fugees and Trapped by Tupac Shakur, Blacks have been screaming, singing, and rapping about our abuse at the hands of police. White America has danced to the rhythmic beats of these songs but have largely ignored their message. Again, and again, Blacks have explained to White America that routine traffic stops for us are routinely hostile and degrading, and often dangerous and deadly.
But how does this all fit into the good-apple-bad-apple paradigm? Can there really be that many bad apples in the bunch?
