A World Without Police Read online

  Policing is a cancer, and it is powerfully malignant, meta-stasizing and spreading uncontrollably throughout the social body. Or better still, policing is a virus, because rather than simply spreading its own cells—proliferating school police, campus police, prison police, private police—it hacks into the DNA of existing institutions, communities, and even the everyday consciousness of individuals, corrupting their code and infecting them with a single idea: that every problem can be solved by the police. Family conflicts, neighborhood disputes, schoolyard bullying and brawls, gendered violence, poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and, in a cynically perverse turn, even racism itself—all become objects of policing, and the only solution the police offer is violence. This is the world of police, and we are in its terminal stage.

  The pig majority and the world of police it underwrites doesn’t stop at the US border, either. Domestic policing has always been shaped by and inseparable from colonial expansion and the deployment of imperial power abroad, which in turn became a mode of policing unto itself. Robert Peel, the architect of British policing, honed his ideas during the colonial occupation of Ireland. Similarly, the Pennsylvania State Police, notorious for the brutal repression of a largely immigrant workforce of miners, were modeled on US occupying forces in the Philippines, and, as sociologist Alex Vitale notes, “Marine General Smedley Butler, who created the Haitian police and played a major role in the US occupation of Nicaragua, served as police chief of Philadelphia in 1924.”36 August Vollmer, the father of “police science,” often cited his experience in the Philippines, and we can trace the dialectic of imperial policing back further still, to domestic colonization: “Many American troops involved in the ‘Philippine Insurrection’ (1898-1902) had experience in fighting the Indian Wars,” and would come to play a pioneering role in developing later counterinsurgency technologies.37

  Nowhere was the complicity of policing with colonial expansion so evident as along the rapidly shifting Southwest border. There, the Texas Rangers functioned, in the words of Alfredo Mirandé, as a species of hybrid “police vigilantes,” enforcing colonialism, imperialism, and domestic white supremacy all at the same time, “taming the frontier and displacing Indians and Mexicans from the land.”38 Through their brutal work, Texas was effectively stolen twice: first formally from Mexico and then later, more substantively, through a series of genocidal massacres and lynchings that ethnically cleansed the state and made stolen land available to white settlers. In her history of the US Border Patrol, Kelly Lytle Hernández describes the Rangers’ multifaceted role in upholding racial and capitalist domination in the state:

  They battled indigenous groups for dominance in the region, chased down runaway slaves who struck for freedom deep within Mexico, and settled scores with anyone who challenged the Anglo-American project in Texas. The Rangers proved particularly useful in helping Anglo-American landholders win favorable settlements of land and labor disputes with Texas Mexicans. Whatever the task, however, raw physical violence was the Rangers’ principal strategy.39

  In later decades, the Rangers came to function as the racist Texan equivalent of the Pinkerton Agency—doing the bidding of private ranchers and political leaders while resisting racial integration. In one incident stemming from an alleged cattle raid against the King Ranch—to this day, the largest in all Texas—Rangers “began a systematic manhunt and killed … 102 Mexicans,” using even the thinnest pretext to “kill Mexicans almost at will.”40 For this brutal history of violent ethnic cleansing, the Rangers are glorified to this day, and celebrated as models for policing by presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon alike.

  Thus, where Du Bois spoke of two systems of American justice, there were in reality at least three: justice and equality before the law (within certain bounds) for many white Americans, alongside two parallel systems of injustice for Black and Brown people. Mirandé refers to the last of these as “gringo justice,” a system of aggressive dispossession and land theft masked as white self-defense that later stabilized as a regime of “Juan Crow” segregation running parallel to Jim Crow in the South. While “the agencies that have undoubtedly elicited the most fear, resentment, and distrust are the Texas Rangers and the Border Patrol,” many Mexican Americans were historically abused by la placa (the badge) as well, from the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots—an anti-Mexican pogrom by vigilantes, soldiers, and off-duty police—to the 1971 police riot in East Los Angeles. Little surprise that many Latinx people today view the police “not as a symbol of law and justice, but rather of lawlessness, injustice, and abuse.”41

  The line between official border policing and vigilante violence against Mexican and Central American migrants has never been clear, and remains blurry to this day. As one Intercept headline puts it, “The bloody history of border militias runs deep—and law enforcement is part of it.” This entanglement underwrites what Monica Muñoz Martinez, a professor of American studies at Brown University, deems a “culture of impunity” that “allowed state police officers and local law enforcement in many instances to collaborate with vigilantes. But, she adds, “they wouldn’t have called them vigilantes. They would have said they were pulling together a posse.”42 From the Texas Rangers hunting escaped slaves to Louis Beam, who organized patrols of the state’s southern border under the aegis of the Ku Klux Klan, however, anti-Mexican border vigilantism and anti-Black racism were never separate or separable. And like the police themselves, official institutions like the US Border Patrol grew out of informal, white supremacist mobs.

  As with all policing, moreover, border policing doesn’t respond to the threat of violent crime, much less solve or prevent it. Instead, it too grows from the cross-fertilization of economic interest with racial fear, inventing entirely new categories of crime and creating criminals, just as the Black codes did in the South. Meanwhile, with every measure taken to reinforce the border, the potential profits to be gained from ferrying people or products across it only increase—and with them, violence. From colonial expansion to white supremacist fears of “white genocide” and the threat of a “great replacement” today, the violent policing of the boundaries of whiteness is motivated by a powerful and dangerous victim complex. When white settlers flooded into Texas, they painted those who resisted their land grab as the aggressors, and little had changed by 2019, when Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old white man, walked into an El Paso Walmart, killing twenty-three in a targeted attack on those he perceived to be Mexican. In a manifesto posted to the message board 8chan, Crusius decried a “Hispanic invasion” of what had only recently been Mexican territory and, before that, Indigenous land. “They are the instigators, not me,” he wrote.

  The white supremacist magic by which perpetrators become victims and the dispossessed become targets of legitimate violence operates more broadly still. When neighborhoods are gentrified, poor longtime residents suddenly become a problem population. When Black people are murdered by police or vigilantes, they are transformed in the courtroom and the media into aggressors guilty of their own killing—as the City of Cleveland put it, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s death in a hail of police bullets was “directly and proximately caused” by his own failure “to exercise due care to avoid injury.”43 When movements take to the streets to insist that Black lives matter, moreover, police cynically appropriate the status of victims, contending that “blue lives matter,” that police are the most oppressed minority, and that there is a “war on police.”

  What is the “thin blue line” if not a border?

  —

  This vast and expanding policing archipelago, and the pig majority underpinning it, stretches far beyond the police as an institution, beyond the bounds of whiteness, and even beyond national borders. This, too, Du Bois knew. When the Confederate States seceded, he reminds us, they did so with an internationalist vision: the dream of building a “great slave empire in the Caribbean.” If the South lost this battle, once again it won the longer, global war. While formal slavery was defeated, the fall
of Reconstruction cleared the way for white supremacist rule both at home and abroad. “The United States was turned into a reactionary force,” Du Bois wrote. “It became the cornerstone of that new imperialism which is subjecting the labor of yellow, brown and black peoples to the dictation of capitalism organized on a world basis.”44

  Long before the Global War on Terror and even the Vietnam War—described by its perpetrators as a “police action”—American policing went global in a series of Marine landings in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. In Badges without Borders, Stuart Schrader shows how policing in the United States has always been a global affair bound up with imperial power. Long before New York police commissioner Bill Bratton pioneered “broken windows” or proactive policing—targeting small quality-of-life issues to deter more serious offenses—counterinsurgency, or “small wars,” was framed as “a police-led, less-lethal, preemptive, and anticipatory approach.”45 Bratton himself would later play a major role in exporting broken windows across the globe—quite literally “policing the planet,” in Christina Heatherton and Jordan Camp’s apropos phrase.46 “Across the globe,” Schrader writes, “counterinsurgency was policing. At home, policing was counterinsurgency.”47

  Over time, these global counterinsurgency methods came home to roost, most recently in the deployment of overwhelming military force against protesters on the streets of Ferguson in 2014, and against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters two years later. While these events rightly shocked many, however, they were really nothing new. People of color have long been defined as an insurgent class and treated like a dangerous fifth column. For instance, under Commissioner Bull Connor, police in Birmingham, Alabama, bought two armored personnel carriers to confront the early 1960s civil rights movement. Partly in response to such treatment, Black and Brown radicals have long described their communities as internal colonies that are, in James Baldwin’s haunting phrase, “policed like occupied territory.” As hellfire rains down on Black and Brown people abroad, the same occurs at home under the perverse veil of “law and order.” Today, in Baltimore as in the neo-colonies, those doing the policing often look just like the “insurgents” they are tasked with containing, and from Plan Colombia to the Mérida Initiative in Mexico, the language of fighting crime has provided cover for bloody counterinsurgent war and the projection of US power.

  If policing is bigger than the police, imperialism is bigger than the military. The proliferation of privatized police domestically coincides with the emergence of a vast and expanding mercenary apparatus masquerading under the sanitized name of “private contractors.” Of these, Blackwater is of course the most notorious (which is precisely why it has changed its name repeatedly, first to Xe Services, and today, Academi). During the Iraq War, Blackwater was implicated in multiple massacres, and even the US Congress had difficulty investigating. Despite being plagued by the same kinds of accountability problems as private police everywhere, the contracting of mercenaries has exploded since Afghanistan and Iraq. The ratio of private contractors to troops tripled under Obama—between 2007 and 2012 alone, the Pentagon spent $160 billion on private security contractors, and by 2017 there were nearly three contractors for every US troop stationed in war zones.48 Moreover, as governments and private corporations covertly turn to mercenaries worldwide, there is no way to estimate the true scope or cost of this expanding mercenary apparatus.

  What happens abroad doesn’t stay abroad, however. Just as countries like Colombia and Mexico, where decades of civil war and drug violence have created a surplus of unemployed violence workers, so too are US mercenaries returning home and infiltrating an already-violent society. Many join the police or work in private security, while others offer their skills to organized crime, or even join right-wing militias in their spare time. The result has been predictable: attacks on protesters, mass shootings, and domestic violence have proliferated. America is not only a police nation, but a counterinsurgent nation as well. Inversely, moreover, the domestic vigilante can easily become the international mercenary, sanctioned or not, as the botched coup attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in May 2020 makes clear.

  Under the self-important name of Operation Gideon, mercenary startup Silvercorp recruited Venezuelans for a doomed mission to kidnap Maduro. Founded by Canadian-born US Special Forces veteran Jordan Goudreau, Silvercorp, which had provided security for Trump rallies, sought support from the US government and right-wing Venezuelan leaders before launching the harebrained assault. Unsurprisingly, the operation was fully infiltrated by the Venezuelan government from the start, and as failure became inevitable, Goudreau desperately tweeted at Donald Trump directly in a vain attempt to gain official backing. The mercenary equivalent of a wannabe Instagram influencer, Goudreau’s previous hustle had sought to embed armed agents in schools disguised as teachers, purportedly to prevent school shootings.

  —

  Ta-Nehisi Coates’s provocation that “to challenge the police is to challenge the American people” is at once undeniable and insufficient. To speak of the police is to describe both a discrete institution and something far broader, at the expansive overlap of whiteness, capitalist greed, and global imperialism. None of this is to suggest that the police as an institution are any less important, however—far from it. If policing is a broad practice that functions as the linchpin of US capitalism, buying off poor whites with the wages of whiteness and destabilizing class solidarity, then uniformed police represent the glue binding policing together today.

  Through the everyday street discretion police exercise from their brick-and-mortar precincts, they make and remake the color line in all its classed dimensions. They provide self-deputized white vigilantes with a legal backdrop and a model to emulate. They claim to provide security from the ravages of capitalist inequality, while in reality they only reinforce and deepen these inequalities. They incorporate a multiracial cohort of recruits into the broader white supremacist project—providing it with a powerful alibi. And if the policing of imperial power has developed in conjunction with with the domestic policing of colonized and formerly enslaved populations, the police today stand as a concrete interface point with settler colonial projects like Israel and counterinsurgency efforts worldwide, policing the boundaries of wealth and whiteness on a global scale.

  This pig majority can appear so overwhelming and the global policing apparatus so sprawling that even the idea of resistance may seem daunting. To abolish the police means abolishing capitalism and white supremacy as well, to which Schrader adds, “To dismantle the carceral state, the national security state will also have to be dismantled.”49 Taken as a whole, this is a tall order indeed. But understanding the police in their international context also turns the balance of forces upside down. America’s pig majority is, in fact, a global minority, and the constituency for abolition far broader than we might first assume. It encompasses what Du Bois described as a vast, “dark proletariat … that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black,” but it exceeds it as well.50 Resistance to the global police state has always existed, and there have always been more of us than them.

  Black movements have long diagnosed the historic complicity between police and white supremacists, rallying behind the slogan “Cops and Klan, hand in hand.” But so too have Latinx migrant organizers emphasized a similarly tautological equation: “La migra, la policía, la misma porquería” (Border patrol, the police, the same bullshit). Between and at the intersection of Black and Brown movements today, the constituency for abolition is a global majority, and the history and contemporary practice of global struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy offer a vision of a different kind of world entirely.

  2

  Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect?

  Let’s start with some basic arithmetic. Most Americans have been raised to believe that it is the mission of the police to “protect and serve�
�� the public, and that any failure to do so would be to violate that mission. But who do the police serve, and who do they protect?1

  Certainly not communities of color. According to most calculations, Black Americans are about three times more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts. And when we look more closely at the data, the gaps only widen further: by age, Black males aged fifteen to nineteen are up to twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than their white peers, according to ProPublica; by geography, the disparity in police killings of Black people is 6.5 to 1 in Chicago, according to a recent statistical analysis by two Harvard scholars.2 Nor do police truly protect Latinx, Indigenous, or Pacific Islander communities—even if we set aside histories of genocidal dispossession, these groups are often twice as likely to suffer death at the hands of law enforcement as white people. And while many Asian communities do not figure prominently in police brutality data and remain internally divided over the question of policing, long histories of forced labor, exclusion, and internment mean that any meager privileges afforded to so-called model minorities are tenuous at best—as the racialization of the coronavirus pandemic and recent uptick in anti-Asian violence has made clear.3