Five

 

Cops Index

Amount of military equipment transferred to local police forces, 1997–2014: more than $4.3 billion

Paid to citizens because of police violence or misbehavior in five years (2010–2014) in New York: $601 million
Chicago: $250 million
Los Angeles: $57 million
Philadelphia: $54 million
Baltimore: $12 million

Percentage of city budget dedicated to police in Baltimore (2011–2012): 20

Percentage of city budget dedicated to police in Oakland: 40

Number of civilian complaints concerning police misconduct in Chicago between March 2011 and September 2015: 28,567

Percentage of complaints that resulted in a police officer receiving discipline: less than 2

Laquan McDonald, a seventeen-year-old Black youth, was shot dead by a cop on the streets of Chicago on October 20, 2014. The official story follows a well-worn script: The police responded to a late-night call that someone was trying to break into cars and found a young man stabbing at the tires of a vehicle; when he refused to drop his knife and lunged at the officers, he was shot in the chest and died. He was one of nineteen Black men killed by Chicago policemen in 2014.

The names and the dates change, but the story does not—particular details and specific facts are stuffed neatly into a familiar and powerful narrative that organizes and circulates them: brave cops patrol a thin blue line between chaos and civilization, protecting the citizenry from explosions of random violence that pierce the calm. The bought media dutifully reports the police accounts of every incident without a nod toward independence or curiosity, typically with a stuttering tagline uttered that it was a clear-cut case of police acting in self-defense. The Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), the agency charged with investigating police shootings, conducts an investigation, of course, as it does in every case of “police-involved shooting,” and as always it concludes that the shooting is justified.

Pat Camden, longtime Chicago Police Department (CPD) press spokesman now with the police union, later described Laquan McDonald as “being a very serious threat to the officers, and he leaves them no choice at that point but to defend themselves.”1

The scripted narrative is typically the end of it, but in this case it was cracked open and shattered by a social movement of young Black activists and by the tireless efforts of a couple of independent journalists. One of them, Jamie Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, a longtime police watchdog group, got an anonymous tip from a police source urging him to pursue the autopsy report. He later wrote: “An autopsy tells a story. The genre is mystery: a narrative set in motion by a corpse. The pathologist-narrator investigates the cause of death in precise, descriptive prose that ultimately allows the dead to testify about what happened to them. . . . It’s very difficult to square the police narrative with the facts established by the silent testimony of Laquan McDonald’s corpse.”2

That silent testimony tells us this: Laquan McDonald was shot sixteen times in rapid succession, he died of “multiple gunshot wounds” from a single weapon, and several rounds entered his back as he lay on the pavement. (The other eighteen murdered by the police that year received ninety-three bullets collectively.) Everything smelled fishy. Tape from a surveillance camera on the roof of a nearby Burger King—seized by the cops—was found to have a gap at the precise time of the shooting. Jason Van Dyke, the cop who fired the shots, was assigned to desk duty and still on the payroll, while the city paid the McDonald family $5 million before a lawsuit was even filed. An anonymous tip led the journalists to pursue a dash-cam video from one of the several police cars on the scene. The city vigorously resisted, but in November 2015 a Cook County judge ordered the release of the video.

Suddenly, four hundred days after the murder of Laquan McDonald, the city sprang into purposeful action. The mayor held a press conference with the police chief where they denounced Van Dyke, fired him, and also recommended the firing of detective Dante Servin who in 2012 had shot and killed Rekia Boyd, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old Black woman. The state’s attorney indicted Van Dyke for murder and explained that the timing was coincidental because investigations take time. Of course the city was in possession of the autopsy report and the video from the start, but the mayor was in a frenzy to reframe the story once the cover-up collapsed. And the video is the worst: A kid reeling down a wide, well-lit street late at night is corralled and cornered by several cops and cars; he looks toward the cops emerging from one car and veers away from them. He is executed.

***

That was not the end of it. This is the Black Lives Matter moment. Young people had been organizing and leading a grassroots movement opposed to police violence in Chicago for several years under various banners: Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100), We Charge Genocide, Ella’s Daughters, Project Nia, Assata’s Daughters, the Chicago Freedom School. They had researched and documented police harassment and aggression, they’d gone to Geneva to present their findings before the UN Commission on Torture, they’d fought mass incarceration, they’d marched against school closings and joined the struggle for reparations for survivors of police torture, and they’d developed a comprehensive program of action that articulated a set of demands through a “Black queer feminist perspective,” African American, womanist-powered, and gender/gay/lesbian/trans inclusive. BYP 100 cochair Charlene Carruthers said, “There’s nothing unusual about the killing of a young Black person . . . by the Chicago Police Department. . . . We live in a city where the Chicago Police Department takes up 40 percent of our budget, while at the same time [they] close over 50 public schools. And so it says a lot to us about what and who our city prioritizes and who we don’t.” Community organizers, free spirits, artists and street activists, they would not let the issue or the memory of Laquan McDonald die. “We’re calling for what we have always called for,” Carruthers said. “We’re calling for massive . . . defunding of the police and investment in Black communities. . . . We want full decriminalization of Black people in the city, be it for minor marijuana offenses or any other behaviors . . . our demands have not changed that focus squarely on defunding the police and investing in things like public schools . . . and we are committed to organizing to make that happen.”3

In the past decade Chicago has paid out a stunning $500,000,000 in settlements for police abuse. The Invisible Institute recently won the release of tens of thousands of pages of civilian complaints filed against the Chicago Police Department—97 percent of which resulted in absolutely no disciplinary action. The Better Government Association reported that three hundred people were shot by Chicago police between 2010 and 2014—seventy people were killed. According to IPRA reports, Chicago police officers shoot, on average, one resident every week. Roughly 75 percent of those shot are Black, and, until Van Dyke, no cop had been criminally charged in almost half a century.4

***

The vindication of murder, execution, and serial assassination is part of a pattern of domination. In his classic short “teaching play,” The Exception and the Rule, Bertolt Brecht tells the story of a rich merchant who journeys across the desert in order to complete an oil deal.5 The merchant is accompanied on his trip by a porter (called the “coolie”) and a guide. The merchant is increasingly brutal with the “coolie,” and also frightened without the police nearby to protect him. The merchant and the “coolie” get lost in the desert and their water supplies run low, and when the “coolie” comes at night to share his remaining water, the merchant misinterprets his action, and shoots and kills the “coolie.” In court evidence the judge concludes that the merchant had every right to fear the “coolie,” and that he was justified in shooting in self-defense regardless of whether there was an actual threat or whether the merchant merely felt threatened. The merchant was acquitted.

The “coolie” is a victim of the rule of capitalism, like so many on the streets of America. The merchant is a proven murderer, but walks away free—like the assassins powered by an oppressive system. The exception and the rule.

Young Black people have dramatically reframed the serial killing of Black youth, naming, documenting, exposing, and challenging the rule of state violence. They have made visible the militarized police occupation of Black communities, and exposed the impunity with which police murder Black young (and not so young) people, and the institutionalized white supremacy embodied in the carceral police state. Black Lives Matter exploded into public consciousness as a radical social movement, but it did not fall fully formed from the sky.

In the wake of the assassination of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and his killer’s 2013 acquittal, three savvy young Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, each experienced in labor, immigrant rights, and social justice organizing, had conceived of #BlackLivesMatter as a mobilizing tool, and this proved to be a critical flash of lightning in a gathering storm. Youth from coast to coast had been organizing for years around a range of racial justice issues, demanding work and living wages, immigrant rights, voting rights, adequate schools and educational opportunities, and an end to street harassment, stop-and-frisk, and mass incarceration. This emerging movement had been energized by grounded, community-based leader-organizers rather than charismatic or hierarchical leaders; it is not leaderless but “leader-full,” in the words of Patrisse Cullors. The movement welcomed street theater, arts interventions, demonstrations, die-ins, and light brigades and, at its heart, required community organizing.

Black Lives Matter youth seek the widest participation and represent an open expression of the full range of community grievances and common dreams. Sparked by the additional police killings of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and then Eric Garner on Staten Island—and the subsequent official findings in late 2014 that no one outside of the victims themselves bore any responsibility for their deaths—the movement blew open a vast public space for organizing, education, activism, and dialogue. This violent assault on Black youth is nothing new—there is no documented national spike in police violence. In fact, despite widespread criminal law data collection, there has been no US tracking of police shooting deaths. Black deaths at the hands of the state have been tacitly accepted as routine for decades by the capitalist media and too many white people, but now that eyes have been opened, we must choose sides, insisting Black lives matter and that Black youth never again be denied their childhoods.

Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old out frolicking in a city park, was set upon and immediately shot dead by Cleveland police who described him as “menacing” and “in an adult body”; Rekia Boyd, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old Black woman, was shot in the head and killed by an off-duty Chicago police detective; Mike Brown, eighteen years old, was murdered by a policeman who described him as unstoppable, like “Hulk Hogan,” and his body left to lie in the summer street for hours; Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman was stopped for “failing to signal when changing lanes” by Texas trooper Brian Encinia, who ordered Bland to put out her cigarette even though she was in her own car indulging her own legal habit, pulled her out of her car, and threatened her with a Taser: “I will light you up”—Bland was found dead in a Waller County jail cell three days later; Eric Garner was confronted for participating in the informal economy by selling “loosies,” put into a choke hold and piled on by New York City police officers, and then recorded desperately pleading, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” until he lost consciousness and died; the police murder of unarmed Samuel DuBose during a traffic stop was caught on camera in Cincinnati, Ohio. These cases and others like them have become the emblems of police occupation and official state terror and plunder. They reveal the links between racial injustice and economic exploitation and the correlation of a violent military system abroad to a colonial militarized police practice at home.

There are no excuses for ignorance about the killing of unarmed Black people, especially youth, at the hands of militarized, aggressive, and racially biased police forces. Say their names: Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Timothy Stansbury, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, John Crawford, Alex Nieto, Aura Rosser, Eleanor Bumpurs, Oscar Grant, Walter Scott, Sean Bell, Fred Hampton, Victor Steen, Timothy Russell, Mark Clark, Orlando Barlow, Aaron Campbell . . . It does not end. We know that African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and four times more likely to have force used while being arrested than whites; we know too that Black people are much more likely to die at the hands of police than are whites. We know that the criminal justice system is driven by federal policy and that court and jail systems from Ferguson to Chicago and from Baltimore to San Francisco are run on money squeezed from poor people through a system of civil as well as criminal harassment and peonage. We know that state violence is deployed selectively and systematically. We know all these things, and it’s past time to wake up to reality and act out; silent recognition is simply complicity.

***

Police violence fits with the pervasive war culture on display everywhere and all the time. We find violent images and cultural artifacts at athletic events, where everyone is expected to sing ritualistic patriotic songs at the start and once again at half time or the seventh inning stretch, and where uniformed and armed people march with flags onto the field of play. The violent war culture is visible at airports and train stations where uniformed military people are given a designated waiting area and priority boarding. It’s in our schools, where military recruiters have free rein. And it is in our language, where war metaphors hang heavy over all aspects of life, from sports and commerce to local politics and social policy, and where the word “service” has morphed quietly into a seemingly acceptable shorthand for time in the uniformed military.

War culture, combined with an ascendant and triumphant individualism, has led to legislation that contains a bizarre, catch-22 contradiction: “Stand your ground” laws allow anyone to shoot a person who seems threatening; “open-carry” laws allow people to carry guns openly—in a posture many would find threatening. What happens when a posse of open-carriers walks into a mall or a restaurant and meets a stand-your-ground crew?

Domestic debates about private gun ownership and gun control are dominated by Second Amendment mythmakers who insist that there’s no common or collective possibility of public safety, and that it’s each isolated person’s individual right and responsibility to defend life and property and personal well-being with lethal force. The National Rifle Association (NRA) urges everyone to arm up, noting that the best defense against “a bad guy with a gun” is “a good guy with a gun.” The NRA might consider introducing legislation (or passing devotional baskets in churches across the land) in order to offer a $1,000 stipend toward the purchase of guns to any American citizen or resident above the age of ten and living below the poverty line—there are many good guys among the young and the poor, and I’ve always gotten a kick out of the words scrawled across the Nightwatchman’s guitar: “Arm the Homeless.” Hell yes!

For those who prefer gun control, here’s another alternative to arming everyone: disarm! To make the process fair and balanced, let’s start with the hyper-violent US military, then move to our brutal domestic police forces, and finally the rest of us. Guns for everyone? Or guns for no one?

FBI director James Comey is usually quick on the draw when it comes to labeling acts of violence “terrorism”—after all, he has an annual $3.3 billion budget to counter terror—but he hesitated in the case of Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine African Americans in the Charleston Emanuel AME church on June 17, 2015. Why? It was “horrific,” he acknowledged, but “terrorism” is “more of a political act and . . . I don’t see it as a political act.”6

Really? The perpetrator himself saw it as a calculated and willful political act. His “manifesto” is a thoroughly articulated political document, one filled with apocalyptic fantasies and white supremacist daydreams as you’re likely to find. And still Comey hesitates.

The farce of Comey’s ambiguity is telling: It reveals the selective and hypocritical deployment of “terrorist/terrorism” as propaganda by the paid agents of the ruling class. Comey’s FBI has labeled acts of vandalism “terrorism,” including breaking windows, hammering on nuclear silos, disabling tractors in ancient forests or airplanes set to bomb civilians, freeing caged animals, and more. As a founding member of the Weather Underground in 1970, I know from close experience just how sweeping—and sticky—that label can become.

I’m reluctant to use the word at all—it flows so automatically into the rushing propaganda stream unleashed by the so-called war on terror, screaming insistently for a permanent state of war, more US aggression, more assassinations and torture, more ethnically based surveillance and repression, more suspicion and fear, more targeting of Arabs and Muslims. But I’ll make an exception here: Dylann Roof is a white supremacist and a terrorist, his actions part of a long legacy of terrorism carried out against captured Africans and later their descendants. The history of organized terror against African Americans begins with the capture and kidnapping of Africans, tortured and transported to the Americas as chattel, none of them willing volunteers on the Middle Passage. This massive crime against humanity was state-sanctioned, legal terror.

Enslaved people ran away and resisted in a thousand ways, and after hundreds of years legal slavery was abolished. A decades-long campaign of terror against free Black people began immediately—pogroms, arson, displacement, false arrests and imprisonment, night riders, and thousands of public-spectacle lynchings. White gangs rampaged on a whim through African American communities in Chicago, St. Louis, Tulsa, Rosewood, and hundreds of other places, and the message was clear: White supremacy would police the racial boundaries and punish any transgression.

Dylann Roof’s murderous outburst can be located in that long history of organized violence against African Americans to accomplish a political goal: the maintenance of white supremacy. The legacy continues, and the resistance is energized and mobilizing. Part of that resistance is to educate and organize around abolishing the whole structure of the war on terror, including the vague language that points toward indistinct enemies. There is no good reason to call for the state to pursue a terrorist enhancement charge against the terrorist Roof. He should and will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And we should continue to oppose endless war, the construction of a prison nation, mass incarceration, the militarization of the police, the serial murder of Black people, and state surveillance and repression.

The general narrative about police violence is that most cops are conscientious working-class men and women who are trying to help people, but a few “bad apples” mess things up sometimes. It’s an attractive argument that lulls us into passivity and silence.

In reality the good guys are the exception, the well-intentioned volunteers whose presence disguises the core functions that have defined policing from the start. The first police forces, after all, were the Indian killers and slave patrollers.

In 2015 James Comey worried, he told audiences and media outlets across the country, that “a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” and it had led to an increase in violent crime. The police are being “sidelined by scrutiny,” as the New York Times put it. “Lives are saved,” Comey continued, “when those potential killers are confronted by a police officer, a strong police presence and actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close ‘What are you doing on this corner at one o’clock in the morning’ policing.”7

You don’t need to listen to the critics—Comey is up front with a clear statement about a particular police perspective on public safety and the place of the cops in a free society: Let the cops loose everywhere; let them do what they do without oversight or constraint or citizen/community scrutiny. Don’t watch us. In fact, the culprit in Comey’s perverse world has been Black Lives Matter. If “they” would just trust us, for chrissake, everything would be fine.

He brushed breezily past the ongoing murders of Black people by militarized cops and the state, claiming there were no reliable statistics. Actually there are: Read the Guardian—they have a counter running.8 Comey condoned the fraternal camaraderie in every police department, a state of affairs that makes everyone there a participant in a vast conspiracy of silence.

This isn’t new: The Black freedom movement was accused of creating civil unrest and disrespect for the law in the 1960s and ’70s by reactionary politicians and racist police leaders. That was a lie too. But it’s key to the agents of power to change the frame, to blame the victims of police murder, their allies, and the activists who rally in the name of justice and humanity. And it’s key to our collective future to resist.

***

In our lifetimes, young people here and across the globe have risen up to challenge and change the world again and again: from Little Rock to Birmingham, Soweto to Tiananmen, Palestine to Chiapas, Wounded Knee to Tunisia. To be sure, youth were not alone in these struggles, but they were the ones who sparked the uprisings against vicious, repressive power. In the past decade, we’ve witnessed the Arab Spring, Occupy, and dazzling social movements for LGBTQ justice, immigrant rights, urgent climate justice, peace, labor rights, and reproductive rights. It’s the youth who reject taken-for-granted injustices, and in this moment it’s young people who are providing the insight and inspiration as catalysts, activists, and organizers.

With their radical impulse to revolt, a spirit of hopefulness and possibility, their laser-like insights into the hypocrisies of the adult world, youth are propelled to break the rules, resist collectively, and reimagine the world. They look at the status quo as unnatural and immoral—a state of emergency for the downtrodden, the marginalized, the exploited, and the oppressed. Inspired by the courage and determination of Ferguson youth, young people across the nation exercised their stubborn agency and walked out of schools, marched on police stations and city halls, sat in, died in, blocked highways and bridges—becoming the fresh, searing force for equality, racial justice, and dignity.

Black youth were not unaware of the risks they were taking by challenging police power and violence. In fact, young people were painfully and brutally aware of the police targeting of Black youth as well as the pervasive institutionalized devaluing of Black lives in the United States.

The moral activism of the Black Lives Matter movement—angry and loving—not only illustrates the brilliance and clarity of young people but also flies in the face of popular understanding that children and young adults are passive and disengaged, less competent, less thoughtful, less wise, and more dangerous than adults. The continuing reality of young people as social actors stands in opposition to official policies of silencing students, suppressing, searching, drug testing, expelling, and punishing our youth, depriving them of an education, and denying their creativity and their right to be heard.