Andi Razo on Richie's "Arrested Justice"

     One of Richie's elaboration is on the issue of public housing, which she characterizes as "brutal". She labels it as such not because of the characters or residents in the community, but because of an outside force: the over-policing of public and low-income housing that creates more issues of safety than it solves.
     Richie says that many units around the apartment of a Ms. B, a victim of police violence in Chicago, were empty and that residents were seemingly randomly dispersed. This should be a good thing; fewer people means cost of living goes down, more privacy, and it would seem more focus of resources to the select people who occupy the units. In a white community this would probably be the case; however, Ms. B lived in public housing occupied by mostly or entirely black residents who were not able to create a community together. This allows the police to surveil the residents more harshly and create what I'll call "crackdown theater" to give the illusion that drug trafficking and violent crimes are being dealt with. Instead, the people who were supposed to protect the community focused their efforts on turning every resident into a suspect of illicit behavior. The police took on the roles of dangerous, powerful individuals that they claim to want to seek and weed out of such communities.
     I find it quite interesting that, at least at this point in her book, Richie does not use the term "colonial" or "post-colonial" since many problems imposed on black people in the US stem from centuries of racism and conscious construction of inequality. While Richie does indeed explain the problems as structural violence  and of course notes that she will elaborate on all points later in her book--as this selection is only an introduction to it--I still do not quite understand why she does not provide this explicit framing. Perhaps the target audience would not be so receptive such plain wording of the problem; after all, "post-colonial" is a term that needs a lot of unpacking. However, I feel it is important to be precise with language and not shy away from difficult topics.
     I did a quick search to see current information on Chicago's police brutality--it's been called out many times, discussed much, and yet it seems little has been done. I have witnessed it with my own eyes, the most vivid being a man protester who was chanting and marching with a group--in a designated area--was singled out and body-checked multiple times unprovoked by a police officer, who did not stop until a white woman yelled at the officer to leave the protester alone. To this day I am incredulous that the officer chose to use his force like that, when he could clearly see the crowd was a mix of ethnicity/races, genders, and some class--there's no way that he thought his actions would go unnoticed. So, in my search, I found a Chicago Tribune article covering an ACLU suit being brought against the CPD for brutatlity and mistreatment of individuals with disabilities. The article does thankfully call out their previous bad behavior and targeting of minority populations. What was most interesting to me is that one officer filed a countersuit against the CPD for failure to adequately train officers in handling and de-escalating such situations.
My question is, in cases such as the above, who do we think deserves more blame? Is the responsibility on the institution, the CPD, to provide officers with that training, or should the individual officer be to blame since they are a product of their own privilege/s?
 Article mentioned above