Over-Policing

Social Welfare Policy Task Force: Over-Policing in Black and Latino Communities. Written by its members.

The research suggests we’ve been over-policing,

Under fire for implyin' we're over policing.

We were under the impression that over-policing

Is an understated problem outside state and fed charter -

Overt racists desisting and ceasing.

We understood the why: over-frisked are making fists speak.

Resisting the law that's under-serving.

Undeserving - like the truth is overreaching.

It was simple enough, 'til we built a causal framework.

Three angles and some lines coalesced to make our brain hurt.

Two dimensions revealed the depth of this. How complex is this?

Shapes can be discouraging.

A liberation model - the photog is human suffering.

Arrows point like guns at death – bidirectional coloring.

Intersectional othering is the basis of the structuring.

So where to begin our syncopated swim?

The surface-deep factors is where we'll dive in.

Psycho-individual - a capitalist's contractor.

Tagged black lives with hash until black lives said they mattered.

"Sorry, sir. Yes, sir." Officer, you’re awful, sir.

Your bias you can hide this in police reports and blotter,

But your bladder's emptied --

Pulling down their pants as you piss on lives of color.

Then shakin' dry the barrell, make it easy to discover--

Your judgments are fatal – all this theory is just fodder

To take a brother from his mother to bunk up with his father,

Who himself is in a cell from an ounce of white to barter,

Tryna sell to get the green - forfeit freedom like a martyr,

Just to find it in a holy book on shelves of bars and wire.

And here’s the key: all them locked away are coming from the same places.

Hymns of justice conducted by a white baton of human races.

Criminogenic concentration, crescendos achromatic populations.

A transaction exchanged in a colorblind Obama-nation.

Do a value calculation and choose reallocation

Of the horses and our forces and all the state's resources.

Does that paint the prisons black? Well, yeah, of course it does.

But we all get assured it’s a sure remediation.

"Crack down on crime" – keep disorder in containment.

Now hit pause and ask a question been fermenting through the ages:

The fuck we end up with this living arrangement?

A big White House - brown sweating in the attic, black drowning in the basement.

And it's in this structure where things get depressing.

The oppression is extension of political design.

Architectural -- detect it still – stands hurricanes of time.

Got a lot of names – an ideology, where fear greets authority.

Marginalize the marrow in a broke society.

Took an image, saw the break, and splinted the bone.

Signed the caste:

Get well soon!

Love,

White Supremacy.

Find the x-ray mounted on a precinct wall.

Framed inside a lie we call “social control”.

This “Serving and protecting's” the language we own.

Broken Windows gave go for Nixon's "law and order" War.

"I'm not a crook," but is the picture crooked?

Now the frame is cracked and the glass is on the floor.

Mortared into sand below a black, decaying door.

Zero-tolerance got us like a ship, all bottled in this.

You been to Baltimore?

Violence don't get taller than this, between the ghetto and the shore.

In our melting pot, dignity is liquidated. Solidarity in solitary.

Now, and it's cooking to remain, stir the pot, “forevermore.”

'Cause Reagonomics took it further – spun the prisons for a profit.

Maybe that’s the reason for policing – just a dollar in the pocket.

Make cents: Free labor's the backbone of U.S. economics.

But spine’s get broke when police get armed with rockets.

Corpses pave the sidewalks.

Brown and Gray, stand-in for black as the colors of darkness.

No drugs in their lungs, in their brain. No gun in their pockets.

I thought death wore a hood? So you'd think they would stop it.

Rough ride a Middle Passage in a vessel steered by officers.

These fat lies lead to flat-lines and a silence on the monitors.

The fate of all our people walks the same cold corridor.

It's the death of a nation - we're the killer and the coroner.

If we ever wanna save ourselves, gotta loosen up the aperture.

See a little wider than the power and narrow fear.

See that they're arrested cause we can't find any gallows near.

Truth sinks in bloody waters, but it floats in hallowed tears.

#BlackLivesMatter