In the book, 'Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color' by author Andrea Ritchie takes a look at the issues of police violence against women of color. As police brutality against black men and women of color has come into the national spotlight, we only sometimes hear how ladies of color are influenced by police viciousness and sexual maltreatment. In the main section of Invisible No More Ritchie investigates history and the controlling dynamic of servitude and colonization. Frontier armed forces and volunteer armies focused on Indigenous ladies and sex nonconforming individuals, regularly utilizing sexual brutality, as a feature of taking Indigenous land and attempting to crash Indigenous individuals to build up the United States. Afterward, control of Native individuals was moved to operators of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and neighborhood police offices. Subjugation was kept up through brutality against oppressed African ladies by slave owners, estate proprietors, and administrators. 'Slave watches,' the country's first police powers, were made to authorize 'slave codes' controlling the developments and exercises of individuals of African plummet. Sexual savagery against African ladies and disavowal of Black ladies' parenthood were fundamental to the activity of bondage. In chapter one Ritchie tells of a nursing slave who served as an instrument of punishment and states “Linda Brent recalls her mother being locked away from her nursing baby for a day as punishment” (Ritchie, 2017). Indeed, even after the finish of formal subjugation, police utilized 'Dark Codes,' robbery, vagrancy, and isolation laws, just as physical and sexual viciousness, to control and rebuff black women. Migrant ladies were prohibited and condemned dependent on generalizations confining them as corrupt, explicitly 'freak,' 'unsettled,' 'infected,' and a channel on open assets. In the reading “Looking Like a Lesbian” by Luibheld tells of a woman who was stopped for questioning by an immigration agent after returning home to Texas. The excerpt states “Documentation that explains why Quiroz was stopped no longer exists. But Albert Armendariz, the attorney who handled her case believes she was stopped because of her appearance” (Luibheld, 2002). This piece of evidence clearly shows how immigrant women were criminalized based off their looks and not by if they actually committed a crime.
There are four major devices of criminalization: the “broken windows” policing, immigration enforcement, “war on drugs,” and the “war on terror”. The war on drugs discusses targeted implementation of drug bylaws through racial profiling, an overload of low-income communities of color with police officers, and armed drug raids. Women, specifically women of color are frequently profiled as drug addicts and carriers, and are subject to violent, degrading and unfortunately public strip and body cavity searches, as well as pressure to have sex under the intimidation of a drug arrest that could lead to many hostile penalties. Not only are women being targeted for carrying drugs, men are targeted as well, and it comes with a high price tag. No one explains the long list of privileges one would lose out on if you are convicted of possession of drugs. Tamara Boor, the author of “How the War on Drugs Kept Black Men Out of College” tells of how everyone but in particular, black men’s privilege to pay for college is being taken away on a daily and states “The War on Drugs also includes a slate of policies that make it nearly impossible for someone with a drug conviction to access financial aid for college. In 1994, the Clinton administration passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which made prisoners ineligible for Pell grants” (Boor, 2019).
Broken windows policing is grounded on the undocumented hypothesis that fierce requirement of minor offenses will stop increasingly genuine ones. As a general rule, policing practices named as indications of 'scatter' like standing or strolling ('sauntering'), resting, drinking, making commotion, and moving toward outsiders, focuses on specific sorts of individuals who are hyper unmistakable in open spaces, for example, black youth, homeless, sex nonconforming individuals, black females who are (or seen to be) occupied with prostitution and drug dealers. Migration authorization brings about profiling of immigrant women and physical and sexual viciousness, by Border Patrol operators and movement officials. Nearby law requirement specialists additionally target immigrants for detainment and expelling through transit regulation authorization and assaults at work environments, homes and schools.
The 'war on terror' was publicized after the assaults of September 11, 2001 and has focused on Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian women and encouraged biased and harsh policing towards women who wear hijab or generally seem, by all accounts, to be Muslim. Dark individuals who are not Muslim are likewise profiled as potential psychological militants by police. Quickly developing paces of detainment for ladies of shading in penitentiaries, prisons and movement confinement focuses are driven by every one of these policing ideal models.
Police officers undertake a pivotal job in approving racialized sexual orientation standards — regardless of whether it's utilizing explicit laws, for example, prostitution laws, or during everyday choices about who to focus on for open request offenses. While 'cross-dressing' laws, which were utilized to condemn and legitimize physical violence against sexual orientation, nonconforming, and LGBTQ individuals for a considerable length of time — are no longer on the used, cops continue to treat individuals they identify to be violating sex standards as suspicious, conceivably perilous, and prone to be associated with condemned action like prostitution or drug use. Officials likewise continue to penalize individuals they see to interrupting sex standards through transphobic and homophobic obnoxious attack, physical and sexual savagery, and obtrusive and unlawful quests to assign a gender based on their physical makeup.
Policing of sexuality, regardless of whether through prostitution-related offenses or police reactions to lesbian, androgynous and eccentric ladies, is an essential site of racial profiling, criminalization, and police viciousness. In a recent article by Dani McClain on the four women who were identified as the “lesbian wolf pack” back in 2015 faced felony charges for defending themselves against an attacker. The author states “It wasn’t just the media that treated the women harshly, the film argues: the criminal justice system did as well. They faced felony charges, including gang assault (simply on account of the size of their group), attempted murder, and criminal possession of a weapon” (McClain 2015). This piece of evidence shows how the justice system paid no attention to factual evidence and paid every bit of attention to the groups sexuality and convicted them based off that insignificant piece of evidence. Moreover, Indigenous women, African American women, Asian and Latinx ladies have all truly been given a role as consistently vicious and explicitly degenerate and as 'whores' through controlling stories which keep on illuminating police communications, prompting huge racial incongruities in requirement of prostitution and dealing laws, just as boundless profiling of trans ladies of shading. Also, policing of prostitution and hostile to dealing assaults are regular locales of police viciousness against individuals in the sex exchanges. Including physical savagery, blackmail of sex, and assault; just as inability to shield from brutality by individuals in the community.
Black young ladies and young ladies of color are profiled and targeted for police brutality in their homes, schools and networks. School-based detentions and tickets for being “disruptive” and inappropriate school dress codes infringement uphold profoundly racialized standards of gentility and heteronormativity. Having police officers directly schools additionally puts black young ladies in extreme danger. In their neighborhoods, young ladies of color are labeled as “ghetto”, “loud”, and their presence in open spaces is vigorously policed. In both frameworks, young ladies experience sexual advances being made to them at an early age, intrusive searches, and physical maltreatment by police. Young ladies of color are likewise excessively pointed out for 'status offenses”, for example, breaking their curfew or running away from home.
From the beginning of time individuals with disabilities have been dependent upon criminalization by law authorization, migration authorities, and therapeutic experts. Logical bigotry surrounded Indigenous and African slipped individuals and foreigners as inalienably rationally or physically handicapped as an instrument to legitimize prohibition, separation and regulation. In urban regions, the nearness of handicapped bodies in open spaces was truly policed close by prostitution and 'cross-dressing,' through laws which later advanced into 'broken windows' policing. Ladies and young ladies of shading who are or are seen as rationally or physically handicapped much of the time experience physical and deadly viciousness by police, incorporating into the setting of calls for help, regularly away from general visibility, in homes, schools, facilities, and organizations.