2012-07-05 "The Elephant in the Room: The Police and the Occupy Movement" by Collin Harris from "Truthout"
[http://truth-out.org/news/item/10119-the-elephant-in-the-room-the-police-and-the-occupy-movement]
As the global wave of rebellion began in 2011 and eventually spread to
the beating heart of empire and the new subcultures of resistance it
spawned continue to grow and diversify, there is an obvious dilemma that
will have to be worked out if we are serious about changing American
society in any meaningful way. Of the many obstacles facing what, from
our current vantage point, looks to be the only light shining on the
dark and blotted American social-scape, a militarized police force
stands out for its menacing and ubiquitous presence in American social
life. It casts its dark shadow wherever it goes - which is anywhere it
wants.
But where it must always go is where there are even the slightest
rumblings of the world that is to come, a world in which there will no
longer be a place for the armed defenders of oligarchs and politicians.
Attend any protest or political action in America, or simply walk down
the streets of our increasingly fortressed cities, and you will surely
encounter these supposedly public employees caught in the awkward
position of having to justify their continued loyalty to the American
ruling class to protesters and passersby they have more in common with
than the elites they're protecting.
Despite their reputation for systematic corruption, not to mention their
ruthlessly violent techniques of control and repression, the police
somewhat inexplicably enjoy the status of one of America's most trusted
institutions, one in which most (read: white) Americans place a great
deal of confidence. In Gallup's annual Confidence in Institutions poll, a
broad measure of popular confidence in society's dominant institutions,
the police outrank every set of institutions with the exception of the
military and small businesses, with 56 percent of respondents reporting
to have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the police.
After a year of viral videos of police brutality and repression directed
at anybody in their way, from veterans to student debtors to the
elderly, the perceived legitimacy of the police is waning.
On the one hand, cops are ordinary blue-collar men and women who obey
orders from the top, keep quiet and do their jobs like the rest of
society. They have families to feed and debts to pay off. To a certain
extent, they suffer the effects of austerity and economic decline like
the rest of us. They know the system's rigged. They're used and
exploited by the rich and powerful. They're disposable. Maybe they even
hate their bosses, too. To clarify, I'm talking about your average
officer on the street, not the likes of Ray Kelly, who left his position
as senior managing director of Global Corporate Security at Bear
Stearns for his second (non-consecutive) tenure as commissioner of the
New York Police Department (NYPD). It's obvious enough where his
loyalties lie. He's even willing to put it in writing, as he did in his
personal letter to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon expressing "profound
gratitude" for the company's nearly $5 million donation to the NYPD. But
in my experience, lower-level cops have few, if any, coherent
ideological commitments. From what I can tell, their motives are simple:
a paycheck. Economically speaking, they have every reason to oppose our
current social system. Clearly they have no long-term economic
incentive to protect the elites from the people in the streets, but they
do what they can to get by. They are, as the saying now goes, part of
the 99 percent. But are they? Do they deserve the same solidarity and
goodwill that we reflexively (should) offer our family, friends,
co-workers and neighbors? When shit hits the fan, whose side will they
be on? They've got to learn to choose: will you be a friend or an enemy?
The police occupy a unique position in the social hierarchy, and many
undoubtedly enjoy the smug sense of satisfaction any authority figure
gets from exercising their power. They are paid by the state to protect
the wealthy and powerful and to, when need be, repress those potentially
disruptive social forces: minorities, the poor and unemployed, angry
disaffected youth, the rebels, outcasts and outlaws. In return for this
service, the cops enjoy a monopoly on the sanctioned use of violence and
coercion in society and, at least tacitly, a de facto exemption from
the rule of law. Whether it's beating dissidents in the streets or
merely responding to a domestic dispute, whether they acknowledge it or
not, they are paid to keep things as they are. Their very presence in
any given social situation exerts a force, ultimately backed by
violence, that demands passivity and obedience. Everybody, particularly
those of a darker hue and people involved in the Occupy movement, knows
this. So, specifically within the Occupy movement, but more generally
for anyone committed to radical politics or who finds living in a world
in which armed men in uniforms roaming the streets is an unseemly sight,
the issue of the police has to be confronted eventually. We turn to
author and activist Kristian Williams for his insights on the historical
development of the modern police force, its role in enforcing social
inequality, and the evolution of police tactics in response to
successive waves of popular insurgency and rebellion.
---
Collin Harris: What gave birth to the modern police force as we know it
today? What are the origins of the institution? What has been the
historical role of the police in enforcing the racial, economic,
political and cultural hierarchies that pervade American society?
Kristian Williams: My argument in "Our Enemies in Blue" is that the main
function of the police is the preservation of existing inequalities.
Historically, those have primarily been inequalities of race and class,
but gender, sexuality, nationality and ethnicity have also been very
important.
This function really goes straight back to the origin of the
institution. The modern American police force evolved from an earlier
organization called the slave patrols. These patrols were militia groups
responsible for enforcing the pass laws that restricted the slaves'
ability to travel. As importantly - or probably more importantly - the
slave patrols were also responsible for putting down (and later,
preventing) slave revolts. As southern cities like Charleston began to
industrialize, the demands of the new economy started to change the
institution of slavery, and the slave patrols became increasingly
professionalized and acquired an expanding range of responsibility - not
just controlling slaves, but free blacks, and poor whites, and so on -
until they were the body most responsible for what might be termed
public order. By the time of the American Revolution, the slave patrols
had developed into a body clearly recognizable as the modern police.
What I found, looking at the history, was that however much the law, or
the police organization, has changed since then, that core function -
control of the black population and the labor force - has remained
remarkably constant.
CH: In times of crisis, disruption, resistance, transition and social
change, there is a dynamic interaction between movements and the police.
Can you describe the evolution and trajectory of police tactics over
the past century? Were these reactions or innovations?
KW: Both. In periods of unrest, both sides innovate, and they largely do
so in reaction to the strategy of the other side. One of the cops' main
advantages is that they are much better equipped to use violence than
are their adversaries. The civil rights movement, rather ingeniously,
found a way to use that advantage against them. When activists used
nonviolent civil disobedience, the cops responded with violence; as a
result, public support, moral authority and control of the narrative
shifted from the state to the activists.
Eventually the government realized this and started looking for other
means of controlling crowds. The cops, in a sense, adapted themselves to
the strategy of nonviolence. They kept force as a last resort and
instead used negotiations, permit requirements, and that sort of thing
to regulate protest and demonstrations. This let the cops restrict
protests to times, places and tactics that would be minimally disruptive
and - this is important - it was the movement leaders, not the police,
who were responsible for keeping the action in bounds. That arrangement
fell apart with the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in '99, when
the activists simply refused to play by the rules and blockaded the
streets of Seattle.
Since that time, the cops have been experimenting with mixtures of
negotiation and force, and the best theory of their current strategy is
that they are actively dividing compliant, "good" protesters from
disruptive, "bad" protesters, neutralizing the first through co-optation
and regulation, and neutralizing the second through arrests and
violence. John Noakes and Patrick Gillham call this new approach
"strategic incapacitation." Really, it's an adaptation of
counterinsurgency theory.
CH: Can you talk about the carrot-and-stick approach of US
counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy, usually thought of as a matter
of foreign policy, and how it is applied domestically? How does
counterinsurgency allow the state to respond to movement demands in a
way beneficial to its own power and control?
KW: Well, one of the main insights of counterinsurgency is that you
can't beat an insurgency just by killing insurgents. The military
struggle - as important as it is - is actually secondary to the
political struggle. That's because what the two sides are fighting over
is the support of the population.
Now you're right that people usually think about counterinsurgency as
strictly an overseas endeavor, but that's a bit ahistorical. In fact,
the US military practically gave up on the notion after Vietnam,
preferring to establish dominance through air power instead. That
changed with the occupation of Iraq. And, in the 21st century, where did
the military go for ideas on counterinsurgency? One place they went was
to the police.
The cops have been doing counterinsurgency since the 1970s. It's called
"community policing." Coming out of the 60s, the cops knew that they
were lacking public support, and that that had cost them during the
previous decade. So, they started looking for ways to improve their
standing. The negotiated management version of crowd control was one
element of that shift, as was the Neighborhood Watch, the return to foot
patrols and citizen advisory boards, and so on. All of those things
have the effect - in fact, the intent - of building a bond between the
community and the police, which the police can then use to gain access,
information, increased resources and greater power. It also meshed
easily with efforts to co-opt community leaders and channel criticisms
into forums that the state can manage and even accommodate, but which
don't fundamentally challenge existing power relations.
And community policing arose, not accidentally, alongside the other
major shift in policing - militarization. They both developed in
response to the unrest of the sixties, and by and large, they operate
together.
CH: Since the Occupy movement began, many people have pointed out that
the police are part of the 99 percent, and economically speaking,
there's obviously some truth to it. Cops are not oligarchs, but they do
get paid to protect oligarchs, so given their unusual position in the
social order, should we think of the police as part of the 99 percent?
Does their institutional role as the armed enforcers of the status quo
negate whatever common class interests the police may share with
ordinary people? Or is "the 99 percent" just a symbolic slogan with
fairly limited explanatory value?
KW: Yes, well, cops have a crappy job and they don't get rich doing it.
But so what? The same could be said of the manager at Dairy Queen -
which is sad for him, but if you happen to work at Dairy Queen, then
he's your boss, and you should probably be clear that when push comes to
shove, he's going to be one of the people shoving you.
The 99 percent trope has certainly been useful for drawing attention to
gross economic inequality. But I'm afraid it's led some people to think
that the class system is simply a matter of arithmetic: there's the 1
percent, and there's the rest of us, end of story. This oversimplified
account overlooks the fact that it's only the most successful
capitalists who are in the top 1 percent; there's a much larger portion
of the owning class who - while still absurdly rich - just doesn't pull
in that same kind of money or control wealth at the same level. And then
there's a managerial class below them, who basically order around the
rest of us and protect the interests of the ruling class. Those people
aren't in the top 1 percent, either. They aren't even usually
capitalists, but they are their representatives and their guardians - in
other words, cops and bosses. It's not just that they serve the
interests of the oligarchs - we all do that most every time we go to
work. It's that they exercise power on behalf of them, and they use that
power to control and exploit the rest of us.
That's not a personal question as to where their sympathies lie. It's a structural issue. It's their role in the social system.
CH: What's the significance that last year in Madison we saw off-duty
cops joining the protests and supporting the sit-in at the Capitol? What
can we learn from the police response to the Occupy movement that can
inform the planning and execution of future actions as the movement
evolves? Should the movement engage with the police, and if so, to what
end?
KW: I've heard a lot of hopeful talk about police joining the Occupy
movement, but the truth is there is very little of that sort of thing
happening, and where individual cops have offered their support, it has
mostly been in minor and symbolic ways.
That's hardly surprising, since some of the organizational developments
in policing over the course of the 20th century were deliberately
calculated to divide the cops from the working class and to cement their
loyalty to the police institution. That's true of the development of
the State Police, for example, and it's also true of the development of
police unions as distinct organizations apart from the main body of the
labor movement.
Of course, dissent within the ranks should be encouraged, but people are
wrong to think that we encouraged it by being really nice to the cops
and making their jobs easy. If they're comfortable doing what they're
doing, then they're going to keep right on doing it, whatever their
subjective feelings might be. If they can keep behaving like cops and
support the Occupy movement, then we can expect them to "support" us
while also arresting us.
No, the only way to really pull them into the opposition is to force
them to choose, to put them in a position where their job conflicts
fundamentally with their loyalties. One might say, we have to sharpen
the contradictions. If we want them to revolt, we have to make them
uncomfortable where they are. We have to make their jobs harder, not
easier.
CH: Is it a matter of delegitimization? Of creating a social climate in
which cops are unwilling to patrol particular neighborhoods or parts of
the city, or politicians and CEOs are afraid to go out to dinner and go
about their day-to-day business? What are some actions and tactics
people can use to "sharpen the contradictions" beyond shouting at the
police during protests?
KW: I'm generally reluctant to talk too much about tactics, because
tactics are always context-specific, and what makes sense here and now
might make no sense a short distance away, or a few weeks into the
future. Besides which, I think the left overall tends to obsess over
tactics, and even fetishize them to some extent, to such a degree that
the tactics sometimes even stand in for our politics - and this is true
across the tactical spectrum, from the pacifists to the
insurrectionists.
In short, I think there should be less focus on tactics and more on
strategy. Concerning the fairly narrow question of police defections and
how to encourage them, I'd say the main thing to keep in mind is that
that sort of thing is an effect of social change, and not so much a
cause. At the point where cops or soldiers desert or defect or mutiny,
it's usually pretty late in the process of struggle: the opposition
movement is widespread and largely seen as legitimate, its ideas are
gaining dominance, and there's an increasing sense that some sort of
change is inevitable. My point is, we shouldn't focus too much on
recruiting the cops to our side; instead, we should focus more on
developing a powerful social movement, and one result of that will be
the creation of conditions such that cops and soldiers might be willing
to come over.
As for making their jobs harder, I guess what I had in mind is that we
should replace slogans about "The cops are part of the 99 percent," with
the older question from the labor movement, "Which side are you on?"
The question really implies the answer, but it is also a challenge to
them. It makes it clear that they can't have it both ways, beating us in
the streets while supporting us in their hearts.
I think the police should be resisted, sometimes peacefully, sometimes
militantly - that leads us back to those tactical questions - but always
with an eye toward discrediting them. Insurgencies succeed - and
successful social movements function as insurgencies, whether they think
of themselves that way or not - insurgencies succeed when they shift
legitimacy away from the state and toward the opposition.
So, making the cops' job harder has to happen on several levels. It
means not just voluntarily falling into line with the cops' demands: if
they're going to repress us, we have to make them work for it. It also
means putting the officers in positions where their jobs demand things
that they're personally uncomfortable with, and which they may at some
point just refuse to do. And it means undercutting public support for
policing, which will cause the kinds of cooperation the cops depend on
to dry up, and also may mean that individual cops start catching grief
from their friends, families, neighbors, girlfriends and boyfriends,
ministers - whomever they respect and care about.
The other side of that, though, is that we have to support them when
they do break to the left. That means backing whistleblowers, or cops
who refuse riot duty and so on. Officers who make that choice are going
to need help. Their superiors and their colleagues are going to make
their lives hell, and most people just don't have the strength to face
that alone. But offering that sort of support requires a certain kind of
moral perspective from the movement, where we oppose the police, and we
may even fight them, but our antagonism is directed toward the
institution and not toward the cops as individuals. If we demonize them
as people, we may inadvertently close off the possibilities for them to
leave the institution and change sides.
The point to stress, though, is that they can't support the movement while also carrying on with their jobs as usual.
CH: Regarding the police, should the animating principle of a movement
like Occupy be police accountability or abolition? Is fighting for
accountability a necessary step toward abolition, or does it actually
foreclose on such a possibility? Or can struggles for accountability and
abolition complement and strengthen each other?
KW: The animating principle of the Occupy movement, as I understand it,
is an attack on economic inequality. That's a fine aim. Let's stick with
that.
But if the movement really plans to do anything to challenge that
inequality, it is necessarily going to have to confront the issue of the
police. That's true in the immediate practical sense, on the street,
and it's also true in principle - since, as I've argued, the cops' main
job is to preserve that inequality. If the Occupy movement wants a more
equal society, then the cops are an obstacle we're going to have to
overcome.
The very aims of the movement put it in opposition to the cops, but many
people within Occupy either don't realize or won't admit it. If the
movement continues and manages to avoid cooptation - two big if's - I
imagine this conflict will become quite a lot clearer, especially as the
cops escalate their attacks.
The question is what to do about it. Ultimately, I think that a fair,
just and equal society is not one that will have anything like our
present police institution. And I don't have any hope of police
withering away after we've created a new society. I believe, instead,
that we need to abolish the police in the course of creating that
society. That implies, naturally, that we need to come up with some
other means of ensuring public safety and resolving disputes -
preferably one that does not rely on ubiquitous surveillance and routine
violence, one that is substantively as well as procedurally fair, and
one that is directly controlled by the community. In other words, not a
new police force, but something that would be practically the opposite
of a police force.
Obviously there's a lot of distance to cover between here and there. No
one, in the world as it is, has the power to just disband the police
force. And the alternative institutions that would need to take over
responsibility for public safety mostly either don't exist, or they
exist only in a kind of nascent form. Besides which, the vast majority
of people - including the vast majority on the left - assume that we
need the cops and aren't actually on board with an abolitionist program.
Those are three related but distinct political problems that need to be
addressed. And then, in the meantime, there's the fact of ongoing
police racism and violence, and we can't really expect people to just
put up with it and wait for the revolution.
I think, as a matter of practical politics, that abolitionists have to
engage in some variety of reform or accountability work, But we have to
do so selectively, only joining in efforts that weaken the police
institution and don't strengthen it or add to its legitimacy. If we're
smart about it, that work may help limit some of the worst abuses and
will shift power away from the police and toward the community. It will
also put us in coalition with more moderate groups and give us the
chance to advance an abolitionist analysis in dialogue with them. It's
hard work, but with patience and intelligence, I think we can build the
kind of movement and develop the social conditions so that we can get
rid of the police. Our first task, though, may well be just to recognize
the possibility.
CH: You've written that organized police forces historically arose in
response to a breakdown in more informal and traditional methods of
community control. Does this point the way toward a future without
police? What would such methods look like today, for maintaining public
safety and resolving disputes without coercion and organized violence,
when most people simply can't imagine a world without police?
KW: History is helpful in the sense that it demonstrates that it is
possible to organize society without the police institution. We really
should avoid idealizing the past, though. There isn't a Golden Age to
return to.
It's more useful, I think, to look at the myriad experiments with other
forms of justice that do already exist in some form right now. Rose City
Copwatch, an organization in Portland with which I volunteer, put out a
pamphlet a couple years ago called Alternatives to Police, which you
can see at our web site, rosecitycopwatch.org. It consists almost
entirely of short descriptions of real-world alternatives. These include
projects intended to hold perpetrators accountable, to directly
intervene in violence, to burglar-proof low-income homes, to reduce
violence by negotiating truces between gangs, to alert sex workers to
abusive clients and so on.
Of course, most of these are small-scale and experimental in nature, and
none of them are perfect, but I think they point to some hopeful
possibilities.
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