A World Without Police Read online

  The two different modes of policing that Du Bois had observed in the Jim Crow South and Philadelphia, respectively, remain in place today, revealed most clearly in the rebellions that shook Ferguson and Baltimore less than a year apart. In 2014 Ferguson rose up against a brazenly racist white power structure and Jim Crow police force that had systematically brutalized and looted a majority-Black city, functioning as a collection agency for what even the Washington Post called municipal “plundering.”12 By contrast, radical scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor underlines how in Baltimore,

  African Americans control virtually the entire political apparatus. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and police commissioner Anthony Batts were the most prominent faces of political power in Baltimore during the rebellion, but Black power runs deep in the city … If the murder of Mike Brown and the rebellion in Ferguson were reminiscent of the old Jim Crow, then the murder of Freddie Gray and the Baltimore uprising symbolize the new Black political elite … Even with the involvement of a Black cop, a Black prosecutor, and a Black judge, justice remained elusive for Freddie Gray.

  Even Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney touted by many as heroic for charging the officers involved, was largely grandstanding for political clout: just weeks prior to his murder, she “had personally directed the police department to target the intersection where they first encountered Gray.”13

  Black leaders occasionally even went beyond even their white counterparts, as when Representative Charles Rangel urged Richard Nixon to wage a disastrous war on drugs.14 The Congressional Black Caucus supported Ronald Reagan’s 1986 drug laws—which included the racist sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. Moreover, Taylor notes, they were similarly conscripted into the pig majority under Bill Clinton, when

  Black elected officials lined up to sign off on legislation that was literally intended to kill Black people. In 1993, President Bill Clinton unveiled a new “crime-fighting” bill, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, that included expanded use of the death penalty, life sentences for nonviolent criminal offenses, 100,000 more police on the streets, and a gratuitously punitive elimination of federal funding for inmate education.15

  When the Congressional Black Caucus hesitated, a coalition of Black mayors shoved them across the goal line. According to Taylor, Black leadership came to support unchecked policing and mass incarceration not from a position of weakness, as is sometimes argued, but out of growing strength and comfort in the halls of power. And due to their ability, “as members of the community, to scold ordinary Black people in ways that white politicians could never get away with,” Black officials provided crucial leverage for the Clintonite reform package.16 In the aftermath of the 1994 bill—championed by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden alike—Black incarceration rates tripled as the devastation of police violence reached an unprecedented zenith.

  This is the truly galling reality of the right-wing obsession with so-called Black-on-Black violence. The causes of the racist brutality meted out by police and vigilantes on poor communities of color—the far more prevalent white-on-Black crime that the right doesn’t discuss, because it’s baked right into the structure of American society—are exactly the same as the causes of violence within poor communities of color: systematic neglect and active looting, a lack of social welfare programs, and unequal access to education and opportunities. Far from “ignoring” the problem of intra-community violence, moreover, the Black political class has been, in Forman’s words, “consumed by it,” swallowing hook, line, and sinker the racist pathologization of poor communities of color in support of a bipartisan project of police power.17 What has been ignored across the political spectrum is the fact that even when poorer Black and Brown communities demand more police in their communities, they have never asked for just the police, and have never seen the police as the sole solution to all social ills.

  More often, “these communities also ask for better schools, parks, libraries, and jobs, but these services are rarely provided” because they “lack the political power to obtain real services and support to make their communities safer and healthier.”18 Even many Black leaders, Forman argues, “adopted an all-of-the-above approach to fighting crime” in the 1970s that included social welfare and jobs programs alongside police and prisons. But instead, “black America had gotten only one of the above: punitive crime measures.”19 In fact, as historian Elizabeth Hinton crucially adds, those most radical grassroots voices that “collectively defied the legitimacy of new policing and carceral strategies” have been largely erased from a historical record dominated by more conservative “segments of the black middle class, political leaders, and clergy.”20 This hasn’t stopped many from trying, however, in a series of struggles, to establish community control over not only the police but also public institutions like schools and other community resources.

  If Chicago is a code word for racist fear today, there is no better proof of policing’s colossal failure than that massively over-policed city, which has nearly twice as many officers per resident as Los Angeles. The Chicago Police Department has spared no degree of brutality—even creating a secret torture regime—in the name of law and order, and yet, despite everything, the city has seen dozens shot in a single weekend.21 While many see such crime statistics—and their own fear of becoming victims—as incontrovertible proof that the police are a necessity, the reality is that violence persists in Chicago and elsewhere despite policing. This speaks to a broader point. If someone robs your house or assaults you, the truth is that the vast policing apparatus of the United States—unmatched anywhere on earth—has done nothing to prevent that from happening.22 But by a bizarre sleight of hand, American police continue to cite their own abysmal failures as proof of their indispensability.

  The inverse is true as well: mass incarceration did not correspond to an increase in crime rates and much less did it prevent future crimes. More specifically, the “War on Drugs” that contributed disproportionately to ballooning prison populations beginning in the 1980s was not a response to any noticeable uptick in drug crime, but simply an excuse to invent new and harsher criminal categories that were used to lock people up. Exactly the same is true of the police. The dramatic expansion of policing in every aspect of our lives—their proliferation and militarization, their callousness and arrogant refusal of oversight—is the result not of some desperate social crisis in need of a solution, but of the everyday functioning of a social system based on inequality and white supremacy.

  Today’s pig majority extends far beyond white people, but it is nonetheless fundamentally about white power. The presence of “Black faces in high places”—from the ranks of the police to political power—has done little to transform the deep structures of white supremacy in American society. What’s more, they have actually provided the system with a powerful alibi, a Black mask for the perpetuation of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation—the spokespeople of the system and the storm troopers enforcing it. We live in a world of both Fergusons and Baltimores. But just as both names conjure the specter of police murder, they also bespeak a spirit of revolt among those who haven’t been fooled by the post-racial hype.

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  While the pig majority has always been bigger than the police, policing as a concrete institution has expanded massively in recent decades, suffusing American society, sinking its invasive roots ever deeper and choking out all else. The number of police in the United States has grown exponentially, fueled in no small part by Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting database, the sheer number of uniformed police has grown from 195,000 in 1960 to more than 1.1 million in 2007. In other words, there are five times as many cops walking the streets today as there were sixty years ago, and even in per capita terms, twice as many. Moreover, this growth accelerated markedly after the crime bill, which promised federal funding for 100,000 new cops. But the problem went deeper: that funding accounted for only one-third of new pol
ice during that period. According to the Urban Institute, state and local spending on the police increased astronomically between 1977 and 2017, from $42 billion to $115 billion.23 In cities like Chicago, growth was more extreme still: per capita spending on the police nearly tripled from 1964 to 2020.24 Both of these trends—numbers and budgets—continued to grow even as crime rates began to fall sharply in the 1990s.

  Police at all levels have become increasingly militarized, too. The 1033 program, established in 1997 but ramped up dramatically after the 9/11 attacks, has seen more than $7.4 billion in military hand-me-downs distributed to more than 8,000 police departments nationwide. While the police and the military have never been truly distinct, and while militarization is more a symptom of the excesses of police power than its fundamental cause, police access to massive arsenals of military hardware has had a major impact on the way police view their role in the world and the violence they commit. As Ryan Welch, a political scientist at the University of Tampa, puts it: “Our research suggests that officers with military hardware and mindsets will resort to violence more quickly and often.”25 Bigger, militarized hammers mean even more nails, as civilians are viewed increasingly as counterinsurgents, and police militarization fuels an escalating dialectic of police–military entanglement.

  School police, often benignly euphemized as “school resource officers,” date to the 1950s, but their usage was initially sparse. From the 1970s to the 2000s, however, the proportion of schools with SROs rose from 1 to 40 percent.26 The dramatic increase in SROs also tracked that of police more widely, seeing a sharp upturn in the 1990s, even as crime rates were dropping. This rise was fueled by both push and pull factors: on the one hand, criminalization seeped into schools in the guise of zero-tolerance policies, and on the other, the federal government began to subsidize SROs. A decade later, 70 percent of high school–aged children had an officer or security guard in their school, and the Department of Education reported nearly 100,000 arrests during the 2011–12 school year. Between 2006 and 2011, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, police in Birmingham public schools subjected more than 1,000 students to pepper spray.27

  Although campus police existed at universities like Yale as far back as the 1800s, their expansion in the present came in response to the student movements of the 1960s—in particular, the deaths of students caused by outside police and the military. According to a 2011–12 Department of Justice survey, some 4,000 police departments span 92 percent of public and 38 percent of private institutions university and college campuses, and these numbers have continued to grow. While some argue that campus police are more focused on student well-being than outside forces, high-profile incidents like the brutal pepper-spraying of student protesters at University of California, Davis, in 2011 would suggest otherwise. Further, sometimes protecting students is itself the problem: since campus police, especially in urban areas, understand their task as protecting campus from nonstudents outside of it, shootings of poor and homeless local residents are routine. Again, campus police have continued to expand despite falling campus crime rates, and they have “increasingly gained the ability to arrest and patrol outside jurisdictions” without mechanisms of municipal oversight.28

  Transit police, like the Bay Area Rapid Transit officer that killed Oscar Grant on the Fruitvale BART platform in 2009, have also seen their numbers increase. And as with campus police, Grant’s killing revealed that accountability for nonmunicipal police agencies is even more evasive than for municipal police forces (BART’s board of directors appoints a general manager who then hires the police chief without any input from the public).

  All told, the United States today spends more per capita and dedicates a larger part of its total budget to policing than any other major country—some $389 billion, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—all while dedicating far less to social welfare.29 This hypertrophic growth of the American police state has no relationship whatsoever to crime rates, nor has it made us safer. Quite the opposite: policing has continued to expand despite two decades of falling crime rates, and poor communities of color continue to bear the twin brunts of social abandonment and police violence.

  Even this is far from the whole story, however, since as we have seen, policing is about far more than the police. Today it involves a ballooning private security apparatus as well—across society as a whole, but especially in heavily policed essential industries like health care. Like militarization, privatization is faithful to policing’s origins in the protection of private property and the security of some over others, and in all likelihood, this continuity will lead to consequences that are no less dire. Already in the 1980s there were more private security officers than police, and that number has surpassed 1.1 million today according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  The quantitative expansion of policing has gone hand in hand with—and arguably fueled—an even more sinister qualitative shift, in which society as a whole has been refashioned in the image of the police. This is what critical theorist Mark Neocleous has called the fabrication of social order by the police. For Neocleous, too many criminologists and self-styled “police scientists” pare the question of policing down to a discrete institution, surgically excising the police from their historical genesis and broader collusion with other institutions. “Policing,” he writes, “is undertaken partly by the uniformed public police, but their actions are coordinated with agencies of policing situated throughout the state”—notably, institutions of social welfare.30 On the other hand, those sympathetic to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s equation of prisons, schools, and mental institutions, as comparable structures of surveillance and discipline, can bend the stick too far in the opposite direction. In a sort of bloodless Foucauldianism, policing can become a pure metaphor in which everything is like the police, but the actual police are rarely mentioned.

  Neocleous resists both extremes, locating the police as a specific institution in relation to a broader structure he calls the social police: one that doesn’t simply reflect society or repress the population, but actively fabricates a new vision of social order and rebuilds the world in its image. This crucial insight is not a new one. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin pointed out a century ago that the police use violence not only to uphold and preserve the law, but to make and remake the law as well. This remaking has reached new heights in the century since, extending even into the realm of language, in what David Correia and Tyler Wall call “copspeak.”31 A police murder becomes an “officer-involved shooting” that strangely lacks an acting subject; the growing arsenal of weapons in the hands of police are celebrated as “less lethal” while still killing hundreds; and sexual assault by police, including rape, is routinized as a “body cavity search” or swept under the rug as “sexual misconduct.” The sanitized language of policing forms a protective cocoon around the institution that makes the need for police unquestioned and unquestionable, and copspeak delineates a horizon—the world of police—that clouds our vision and blocks out all other possibilities.

  The history of the United States would attest to this need to expand our understanding of the police even further still, beyond the realm of the state, to understand policing, in the words of historian Peter Linebaugh, as “inseparable from conquest, slavery, debt, industrial discipline, and social hierarchies. Armed settlers, ‘pioneers,’ militia, army units, slave patrollers, Texas rangers, posse comitatus, slave catchers, factory guards, troopers, private security forces, vigilante groups, MPs, lynch mobs, Ford’s ‘service department,’ death squads, night riders, and the KKK have all served police functions.”32 If, as Robin D.G. Kelley adds, “it is important to make a distinction between the police as a formal, modern institution and ‘policing’ as a broader set of practices and procedures that operate beyond (but sanctioned by) formal state structures,” this is in part because we need to retain the specificity of the latter and understand the crucial impor
tance of the police as an anchor for the broader policing apparatus of racial capitalism.33 While policing operates through thousands, if not millions, of self-deputized surrogates, uniformed police are the glue binding the pig majority. And, as we will see, police power—expressed largely through so-called police unions—is the tip of the spear.

  Many abolitionist scholars and activists have drawn our attention to both the broader social policing apparatus and its efforts to remake the world on the blueprint of police and prisons. For Beth Richie and Kayla Martensen, this “carceral expansion” has created a full-fledged “Prison Nation,” where “punitive and social services can become indistinguishable” in terms of “control, surveillance, and punishment.”34 Institutions like child protective services and family court have arguably played racialized disciplinary roles from the very beginning, not only tearing families apart but also concretely feeding police violence and mass incarceration; indeed, Walter Scott was killed by police in North Charleston, South Carolina, in part over a warrant for unpaid child support.35 This carceral expansion has been sharpest in recent decades, however, as even many well-intentioned social workers and feminists have turned to police and prisons as the only solution for domestic and community violence—raising challenges, as we will see, for abolitionist movements today.

  Schools too, which Foucault and others have long compared to prisons, have increasingly become more like prisons. In this sense, the “school-to-prison pipeline” is less a clear line in the sand than a continuous spectrum. Schools were performing a policing function before the advent of school police, and this function is furthermore built right into the history of school segregation and contemporary processes of resegregation. Not only do segregated schools reflect and further contribute to deepening racial and economic inequalities, but school police themselves have come to play sharply opposed roles depending on where they work. In public schools in poor communities of color, SROs police the students—threatening to send them to a real prison if they misbehave or run truant. In white suburban citadels, police are increasingly deployed to protect the student body from mass shooters—even if, as we will see, they often fail spectacularly to do so. Here, too, the question doesn’t stop at the schoolyard fence or the disciplining of students themselves, but bears upon the policy agenda of the nation’s highest office: infamously, Vice President Kamala Harris once laughed when recounting her efforts as San Francisco district attorney to criminalize truancy and jail parents.