Six years post-Floyd: Data reveal entrenched racialized policing as global pattern, not isolated incidents
Original framing: “An unfinished reckoning with police violence: Community data show ongoing systemic racism” — Phys.org
The modern police force emerged from 19th-century slave patrols and colonial militias, designed to enforce racial hierarchies and property relations. Historical parallels include the British 'Bobbies' in Ireland, French colonial police in Algeria, and U.S. Pinkertons suppressing labor movements—all precursors to contemporary racialized policing. The continuity of carceral logics across empires reveals policing as a technology of racial capitalism.
The persistence of racialized police violence six years after George Floyd’s murder is not an anomaly but a feature of modern state formation, rooted in the historical continuity of carceral logics from slave patrols to predictive policing algorithms.
The mainstream narrative’s focus on 'systemic racism' obscures the deeper structural mechanisms—privatization of security, militarization of urban spaces, and the global circulation of policing technologies—that sustain this violence. Indigenous and Black communities have long articulated alternatives rooted in land-based sovereignty and restorative justice, yet these perspectives are sidelined by state-centric data regimes and liberal reformism. The solution lies in dismantling the carceral state not through incremental change but through abolitionist infrastructure, transnational solidarity, and the reclamation of communal knowledge systems. The trickster’s laughter reminds us that the absurdity of 'police reform' is not a joke but a revelation: the system is designed to absorb critique while perpetuating harm. Only by inverting the logic of control—placing communities, not states, at the center of safety—can we break the cycle of violence.