The Afro-American Patrolman’s League

Over fifty years ago in Chicago, I founded the Afro-American Patrolman’s League. Black policemen were routinely ridiculed and called Uncle Toms, and they were primarily thought to be the Praetorian Guard for White supremacy.

The Black community’s distrust of police was historically grounded in the roles they had played: slave catchers, participants in lynchings, Klansmen. Now police are seen as an occupying force not a protector, so not much has changed.

Founding the Afro-American Patrolman’s League broke with this corrosive past. The impetus for forming the League came because the most powerful American mayor, Richard J. Daley, issued orders to shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters, the latter directed at Black communities in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination.

In announcing the formation of the League, we Black policemen said we would not obey Mayor Daley’s orders, and we stated that our primary role was to protect the Black community. These statements electrified the Black community, which, for the first time, had a group sworn to protect them.

Now, once again, the Black community feels under siege. The shootings of Black men, mostly unarmed, have become epidemic. Perhaps they have gone on longer than we knew, but the on-site cell phone photo users have brought them to the forefront.

When Sir Robert Peel formed the first modern police force in 1829 in London, he laid out nine principles for police behavior and responsibilities. Principle four is particularly relevant today as it was then. Sir Peel said that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity for physical force. He further stated that the public are the police, and the police are the public.

Peel’s nine principles of policing have merit today, but additional principles are needed with regard to the tension between the police and the Black community.

As a military veteran of US Air Force intelligence, I appreciate that police departments give priority hiring to returning veterans. But many of these veterans served as part of an occupying force in war zones where the enemy was demeaned. Now these same veterans are hired and placed in Black and Brown communities that are troubled and treated like enemy war zones.

I have had the advantage of developing a broad perspective on critical issues as a member of a university think tank, being active in international affairs with the United Nations, the European Parliament, as Chair of Chicago Sister Cities Committee under Mayors Washington and Sawyer, and active in my community. And I am a father and a grandfather.

The new police principles must be 1. that the police come from the people they should serve, which was paramount to the League, and 2. that police selection and training must emphasize and carry out a transition from warriors to peace keepers.

A police department that does not respect and value the people it polices is bound to be viewed with suspicion, and little useful information is likely to come from the community with regard to the crime and violence it suffers.

I fear that those who study the police and put forward reform ideas are pouring new wine into old bottles hoping it will taste better. Until police departments devise new practices to ensure that warriors can be peacekeepers, there will not be peace in the land.

~ Edward “Buzz” Palmer