Based on interviews, Northeastern professor Korey Tillman examines the many mundane ways policing manifests for Black people using his concept of punitive inertia. He hopes it will redefine how we think about policing.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, policing has been at the center of the cultural and political conversation in the U.S.
Since then, the explicit ways policing impacts communities of color have increasingly come under the microscope, from police brutality to discrimination in traffic stops. However, new research argues that in order to address the root issues in the criminal legal system, we need to redefine the very idea of policing and its purpose.
Korey Tillman, an assistant professor of criminology, criminal justice and Africana studies at Northeastern University, explains the mundane ways that Black people specifically are policed are just as important as the headline-catching incidents. These everyday occurrences all come back to what he calls punitive inertia, a concept inspired both by his interviews with Black Americans and the world of physics.
“Inertia is a resistance to a change of motion, so I use that as a play on words to talk about how Black folks who are forced to move by some sort of policing also resist that policing and what … we witness when that moment happens,” Tillman says.
Through interviews with Black people across the country, Tillman found that motion, or lack of motion, was central to how policing intersected with their lives. The stories Tillman heard were consistent: people being stopped, detained or told to move somewhere else. What they revealed was how policing impacted Black people’s movement through the world and, as a result, how they related to other people and the U.S. as a whole, Tillman says.
More importantly, the data he collected through these interviews showed the many ways that Black people in the U.S. are policed on a daily basis. Pushing for a new definition of policing, one that goes beyond the criminal legal system to include every person who, as Tillman says, “works for the state,” is integral to understanding these daily moments of policing. He points to the model of civil police established in London in 1829 to explain why it’s necessary to expand the lens around policing.
“We get to a place where policing in its inception has never been just about enforcing the law, but it’s about maintaining this boundary between us and them,” Tillman explains. “I’m arguing that policing does the work –– law enforcement and other[s] do the work –– to say who is human and who is not and maintain that boundary, and [it] has done so for eons, especially during the Middle Passage when the category of human gets shaped by Blackness.”
“The mundane forms of policing take shape in our everyday lives that we often overlook because we just think about and focus on law enforcement and policing in those ways,” Tillman adds.
What does this kind of mundane policing look like?
It could be a “random” stop from a TSA agent, a campus security officer asking to see a Black student’s ID at the library or a young man getting shot for ringing the doorbell at the wrong house, Tillman says. In every case, Black motion is being controlled.
In an interview with Tillman, a man who grew up going to school in North Carolina described what happened when he threw a paper ball in his fifth-grade class.
“The teacher put him in the back of the classroom in a desk that had a huge cardboard box surrounding the desk,” Tillman says. “He literally was enclosed and placed into a box. … She would shake the box and the desk to make sure that he was still working.”
It’s not a traffic stop or detention in prison, the moments most people would consider examples of policing, but Tillman says it was still a “stop” that impacted this young man’s view of who he was and where he was welcome.
“What it does to folks is that it has folks internalize what the dominant group wants them to internalize: That they’re not human and they don’t belong in this space,” Tillman says. “There’s really no place that you can go as a Black person and not face either policing or the threat of policing and having your body altered in its spacial trajectory.”
Addressing seismic societal issues is going to require an interdisciplinary approach to policing that goes beyond just criminology, Tillman says. More broadly, and more challenging politically, it might also require a radical reimagining of what police, prisons and other parts of the criminal legal system look like to reinject them with a humane approach that doesn’t damage people and their communities, he adds.
“It’s not about hate but how do we move forward in a different way because [policing in this way] is a relatively recent invention,” Tillman says. “It’s only a couple hundred years old, and we see that it’s not working. So, how do we look back and see what we did right and what we did wrong and then move forward in ways that hold everyone’s humanity together?”