Racism and the origins of Austin policing: A history lesson for the governor

Governor Abbott is upset that a Texas school teacher compared police officers to Klansmen. My guess is that there's more to the story than is being bandied about in social media, but Abbott tweeted:

A teacher in a Texas public school comparing police officers to the KKK is beyond unacceptable.

It’s the opposite of what must be taught.

The teacher should be fired.

Grits is here to push back on "the opposite of what must be taught." If we're going to be honest about the history of policing in Austin and in Texas, it's impossible to avoid its racialized nature.

Last year, as the Austin City Council debated arrests for Class C misdemeanors, Dr. Kevin Foster, a Black Studies professor from UT-Austin, offered up some more-widely-known-than-acknowledged history about the origins of the Austin Police Department while testifying on behalf on Grassroots Leadership.

In the 1860s, when Texas was an exceedingly dangerous place for African Americans, Austin happened to be less so. As a result, African Americans migrated in and joined the black population that was already present. They came seeking safety, autonomy and opportunity. This is why we had Kincheonville, Clarksville, Robertson Hill, Wheatsville, Gregorytown, Red River, Reyna Branch, and a dozen other freedmen communities – each with an autonomous school and church.

And then we messed up. Our response to the Black presence was to build a police force, criminalize Blacks, and control them. In June 1865, the mayor and city council met to deal with “the fact that a large number of Negroes turned loose by their owners are congregating in and about Austin, as also perhaps desperate white men, making it necessary to organize a police force to deal with them.”

And how did we put our new force to use? Council immediately passed an ordinance to deal with “all able-bodied Negroes who have abandoned the service of their employers, for the purpose of idleness, or who are found loitering or rambling about, or idly wandering about the streets or other public thoroughfares.” Today we no longer whip the idle or lease them to the lowest bidder, as we did then, but we do still saddle people with debts that make their escape from homelessness less likely. And we do, by the way, still disproportionately target Black folk.

That history, where the Austin PD was created specifically to enforce new laws aimed at black people after Lincoln freed the slaves, isn't so distant from the roots of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, despite the governor's protestations. As late as 1959, the department only employed seven black officers, none of whom were empowered to arrest white people.

Don't get me wrong, I think comparing 2020 police officers to Klansmen is unfair and misleading. But a knee on your neck is a knee on your neck, whether the person on top of you is wearing a badge or a hood. Let's not mislead about that, either.

MORE: I got an angry email from a cop who should know better (election season makes people crazy!), so please let me clarify. The point of this post isn't to accuse any peace officer today of racist intent based on what happened in 1865. I can't know your heart and don't care about saving your soul. My point was to acknowledge that, like the Klan and the 1873 state constitution, the Austin Police Department is one of numerous institutions created after the Civil War in Texas for the primary purpose of suppressing black people and denying them basic human rights. That's not an opinion, it's the recorded reason APD was created.

This should come as no surprise. It's why Texas seceded. It's the hidden history underlying everything every Texas 7th grader is taught about the state. (For non-Texans, that's when every kid here takes a year-long Texas history class with a textbook fatter than a Catholic Bible.) Does that mean that's the only thing police do? Of course not.  But in Austin, and probably many other Texas towns, it's why they were created and, to a greater extent than one may care to admit, that history remains embedded in current policies and practices.

To the extent the complaint is institutional racism, not individual intent, how can police confront those embedded harms? On that score, let me recommend Yale law prof Monica Bell's excellent "Anti-Segregation Policing," out in June, which argued that cops enforce segregation by policing neighborhood borders and constructing neighborhood reputations as "high crime" or "racist," all of which rings true for Austin. For Bell, "urban policing involves daily reiteration of definitions of geographic spaces as bounded and racially marked, thus perpetuating residential segregation." Grits intended to write something longer about Bell's article later on, and may still, but mention it here in hopes my unhappy correspondent will read it and perhaps think about the job in new ways.

Grits doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but we won't find them by ignoring history.