Translate the following paragraphs into Chinese
If you’re surprised by how the police are
acting, you don’t understand US history
Amid worldwide protests against the police killing of
George Floyd, activists around the US have raised demands for specific policy
measures, such as defunding the police. Justifying these demands are the images
emerging from the protests, with police officers ramming protesters in vehicles,
indiscriminately attacking protesters with pepper spray and exerting excessive
force. Local and state policing budgets have nearly tripled since 1977, despite
declining crime rates. Even people unfamiliar with the police and prison
abolitionist movement are starting, rightly, to envision that public spending
could be used in more socially responsible ways.
But beyond the fiscal argument is an ethical one: policing in America cannot be
reformed because it is designed for violence. The oppression is a feature, not a
bug.
That seems like a radical sentiment only because policing is so normalized in
American culture, with depictions in popular media ranging from hapless,
donut-chugging dopes to tough, crime-fighting heroes. We even have a baseball
team named after a police organization – the Texas Rangers.
But it’s time to look beyond the romanticization of American police and get
real. Just as America glorifies the military and Wall Street, and some Americans
whitewash the confederate flag and plantation homes, the history of policing is
steeped in blood. In fact, the Texas Rangers are named after a group of white
men of the same name who slaughtered Comanche Indians in 1841 to steal
indigenous territory and expand the frontier westward. The Rangers are
considered the first state police organization.
Likewise, as black people fought for their freedom from slavery by escaping
north, slave patrols were established to bring us back to captivity. Many
researchers consider slave patrols a direct “forerunner of modern American law
enforcement”.
In northern “free” states, police precincts developed in emerging industrial
cities to control what economic elites referred to as “rioting”, which was “the
only effective political strategy available to exploited workers”. But, as
described in the text Community Policing, this “rioting” was:
actually a primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers,
[and] [t]he modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body
of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain
order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under
the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.
In other words, police were never created to protect and serve the masses, and
our legislative and judicial systems – from Congress to the courts to
prosecutors – have made this clear. Congress’s 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, for
instance, incentivized law enforcement officials to capture Africans suspected
of running away from slavery, paying officials more money to return them to
slave owners than to free them.
Instead of expanding the American political project to embrace black people as
free citizens, our institutions made caveats to exclude them from the country’s
founding principles. Historically, most black people were not considered human,
let alone citizens worthy of police or constitution protections. We were
property. Even free blacks were, at best, second-class citizens whose status
could be demoted at any white person’s whims and who fundamentally had “no
rights which the white man was bound to respect”, as the supreme court affirmed
in 1856.
Modern court rulings have steadily eroded civil liberties
to give police more power and permit racially discriminatory policing,
convictions and sentencing. This entrenched history of violent white supremacy
is a lot to attempt to reform. So just as 19th-century abolitionists set the
terms of their fight beyond incremental improvements to slavery, abolitionists
today assert that policing and incarceration must move past modest proposals
that fundamentally maintain the system.
The billions of dollars that governments spend on increasingly militarized
police can be better used to address the underlying socioeconomic conditions
that contribute to police encounters. We should divert resources towards
investments in mental health, public education, drug prevention programs,
homelessness prevention, community-centered crime prevention and jobs
development.
The immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing felt like another police
encounter that would lead to yet another viral hashtag with little police
reform. But the work of abolitionists has set the bar even higher. We should
move past calls for criminal justice reform and instead make demands for
freedom.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/05/police-us-history-reform-violence-oppression