Summary

Chapter Three begins by describing the killing of Tamir Rice, a twelve year old boy who was shot by a Cleveland Police officer while playing with a toy gun. The officer was not charged with a crime because prosecutors accepted that he justifiably, if wrongly, believed that he would be shot. This sense of fear has permeated all aspects of policing in urban areas; people often refer to those neighborhoods as “war zones” and officers and Cleveland had informally dubbed one of their stations a “forward operating base” (82). This suggests that police officers are occupying soldiers fighting to control a foreign population, a common trend in colonialism. This fearful occupier mentality has a long history in the United States. The earliest colonists feared attacks from American Indians. Decades later, Southern Americans feared the threat of slave revolt, a rare, yet frightening event. Hayes acknowledges...