3

Neighborhood Watching

Regulating the Citizens’ Patrol

A little before 7:00 p.m. on February 26, 2012, a seventeen-year-old high school student was returning to his father’s Sanford, Florida, home after a trek to a nearby convenience store. The young man, Trayvon Martin, was visiting his father in a gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. After buying some candy and calling his girlfriend, Martin was spotted by Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who called the authorities to report a young male that was “up to no good.”1 Zimmerman followed Martin while driving his truck around the neighborhood, informing the police operator of Martin’s whereabouts and his “suspicious” behavior. When the operator told Zimmerman that she was dispatching an officer to the scene, she advised him to stop following the suspicious boy in a black hoodie. Zimmerman, however, continued to follow Martin throughout the community, telling the dispatcher that “these assholes always get away.”2 In fact, Martin did eventually evade Zimmerman, who complained to the police operator that he no longer knew Martin’s whereabouts. A few seconds later, at 7:13, Zimmerman ended his call with the police. Yet when the responding police officer finally pulled into the community at 7:17, he found Zimmerman bloodied and bruised, while Martin was lying face down on the ground, motionless, with a single gunshot wound to the chest. Martin was pronounced dead on the scene at 7:30.

When the Trayvon Martin tragedy burst into the national imagination, it gave rise to a number of provocative cultural conversations about race, crime, policing, and vigilantism. One central element of this public discourse was the insight it provided into the relationship between surveillance/communication, violence, and civic responsibility. As Michael Thompson, a journalist and former Neighborhood Watch volunteer, observed: “Whether he is found innocent or guilty in his upcoming trial, George Zimmerman gave Neighborhood Watch a bad name simply by carrying a weapon. To tote a gun violates the basic tenets of Neighborhood Watch.”3 Reflecting on his own experience as a young Watchman in the 1970s, Thompson writes that, contra the actions of Zimmerman, the local police “taught us how to watch one another’s homes and what to do, and what to look for as a potential witness in court, when observing a crime or suspicious behavior.”4 Thompson’s observations reflect the moral and political tone of much public discourse that followed in the wake of the Trayvon tragedy. According to this conventional wisdom, Watch volunteers should basically act as sensing/signaling devices for the police: as the National Crime Prevention Council puts it, “This strategy attempts to provide local law enforcement with additional eyes and ears to watch out for all types of criminal activity and promote neighborhood security.”5 Watch volunteers are educated in the visual and aural semiotics of crime, so they can use their “eyes and ears” to decipher what behaviors are suspicious. Once they detect this suspiciousness in their peers’ conduct, they are to contact authorities and prepare themselves to record and pass along whatever information would be most useful in a criminal case. Zimmerman, therefore, should have remained a speaking subject: after he called 911 and offered a description of the hoodie-wearing teenager, he should have let the authorities handle the situation. The national office of Neighborhood Watch, too, expressed this ideal of the seeing/saying subject in its official condemnation of Zimmerman’s actions: “The Neighborhood Watch Program fosters collaboration and cooperation with the community and local law enforcement by encouraging citizens to be aware of what is going on in their communities and contact law enforcement if they suspect something—not take the law in their own hands. . . . The alleged participant ignored everything the Neighborhood Watch Program stands for.”6 What Neighborhood Watch stands for, in other words, is the cultivation of a very specific, nonviolent modality of the citizen-subject—a subject that patrols her or his neighborhood for potential criminality and then reports any suspicions to authorities.

This chapter examines how Neighborhood Watch and other citizens’ patrols have been culturally and legally regulated, especially since their rapid rise during America’s “war on crime.” The essential crux of this regulation has involved channeling citizen vigilance into acceptable forms of seeing/saying citizenship. Since the emergence of Neighborhood Watch and similar state-sponsored programs in the 1960s and 1970s, citizen patrols have been assigned very limited tasks that revolve around communication and lateral surveillance—a stark contrast, no doubt, from the days of watch-and-ward citizen patrols and vigilante justice that characterized most American policing from colonial times to the end of the nineteenth century. This shift is perhaps best characterized as the process by which “Wanted: Dead or Alive” was gradually transformed into “Armed and Dangerous: Do Not Approach—Contact Authorities Immediately.” As sovereign governance spread unevenly throughout the U.S. territories, the state gradually asserted its monopoly over legitimate violence. While the state still needed citizens to remain active in the police apparatus—to function as concerned community members, witnesses, and snitches—a range of public and private institutions emerged to properly cultivate these citizens in standards of seeing/saying conduct that would not violate the state’s privilege of violence. In a word, these institutions set out to turn vigilant citizens into communicative citizens. The tools of this transformation have been primarily cultural, taking the form of neighborhood meetings, speeches, fliers, pamphlets, editorials, television specials, and supervision and mentoring from police officers. Yet when its exclusive right to violence has been challenged, the state has resorted to more extreme measures: radical citizens’ patrols that threaten the state’s defining monopoly have often faced threats, arrest, and violent reprisals. Thus Neighborhood Watch, as an institution that mediates citizens’ relationships with the state and their peers, is an important means by which responsible citizenship is cultivated and the state’s monopoly on violence is reinforced.

While several police historians and activists have provided their own histories of American citizen patrols,7 the main task of this chapter is to map out the key cultural and legal processes by which authorities have attempted to transform citizen patrols from a threat to the state to a tool for the state. As such, the chapter will elaborate on a theme found throughout the book: while instructing citizens to see and say serves an intelligence-gathering function, it also serves as a practical reinscription of the sovereign’s privilege of violence. Therefore, while in Chapter One I examined how police agencies have used crowdsourcing technologies to disseminate responsibilities to the broader public, this chapter will focus specifically on how the state and allied institutions have tried to domesticate citizen patrols like Neighborhood Watch into nonviolent, seeing/saying servants of the public good. The duties of these citizen patrols, however, have provided a site of contestation at which the police, protestors, cultural authorities, and the volunteers themselves struggle over the appropriate boundaries of responsible citizenship. The questions driving these struggles include: should citizens ever physically engage suspects, or should they merely see something and say something? When, if ever, is a citizen’s arrest permissible? How should police accountability patrols, such as Cop Block and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, engage and observe the police? As we will see, this contested ground becomes even shakier when resistance groups are added to the mix, as they use the patrol model to fight—rather than enhance—police power.

Citizen Patrols and Autonomous Citizenship

The citizens’ patrol has been an essential part of U.S. policing and surveillance history. Indeed, as I discussed in chapter one, we can see this process as far back as the colonial town watch system prominent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America. Participation in town watches was compulsory for adult males: in colonial America, “every colonist was a police man.”8 From New England to Georgia, these community-based customs of policing were typically effective at crime control because of the small size, homogeneity, and restricted population flow of most colonial communities.9 Larger cities eventually divided themselves into wards, each under the jurisdiction of a constable. For example, in 1790 Philadelphia was divided into ten constabulary districts in order to accommodate its relatively large population of twenty-eight thousand.10 In colonial America, the state’s specialized law enforcement institutions slowly supplanted the local justice systems that required extensive participation from community members. Salaried constables and judges steadily spread throughout the American territories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and police officers became prominent in eastern urban areas in the middle of the nineteenth century: Philadelphia founded its police force in 1833, followed by Boston in 1838 and New York in 1844.

The emergence of the police officer proved to be a crucial moment in American political history. Not only did it signal the rise of a formal sovereign justice system, it also gave birth to a dissociative rupture between different classes of the American population. On the one hand were regular citizens, who were bound by unique restrictions and terms of conduct; and on the other hand were police officers, who were subject to a different set of responsibilities and who enjoyed special privileges vis-à-vis their fellow citizens—a set of privileges that constitute what Kristian Williams calls “blue power.”11 The defining privilege that this blue power entailed, of course, was a monopoly over legitimate violence. The size and independence of the American frontier, however, led to a layered and uneven enforcement of this monopoly. As Michael J. Pfeifer observes, “the United States’ transition to a capitalist economy was not accompanied by the emergence of a strong, centralized national state that claimed and enforced an exclusive monopoly over violence and the administration of criminal justice to secure the rule of law.”12 Lacking a well-developed system of courts, jails, and sheriffs, British colonial authorities struggled to navigate the tensions between delivering justice and preventing citizens from taking the law into their own hands. The Crown’s solution was to promise justice to those citizens who could capture, detain, and transport subjects to the nearest court for a hearing. Yet in colonies like South Carolina, where there was only one court of law—in coastal Charleston—citizens’ patrols like the South Carolina Back Country Regulators often chose to pursue justice without recourse to the formal rituals and processes of sovereign law.13

The slow and demanding nature of this peculiarly American justice system fueled amateur policing cultures across the U.S. territories. Typically, we associate these citizen patrols with “vigilantism”—that is, those subjects, operating under autonomous norms of citizenship, who reject the state’s exclusive right to judge and punish suspects. In the century preceding the Civil War, several hundred vigilance movements would take root, most of them in the South or on the western frontier.14 From the Back Country Regulators in the revolutionary period, to the mining town vigilantes that flourished in the “Wild West” a century later, and to the popular sovereignty movements of the antebellum South, these groups revolted against the sovereign’s signature monopoly. Empowered by the “dead or alive” justice culture of the frontier, vigilance movements like the Fierce Missouri Bald Knobbers, the Tin Hat Brigade of Texas, the Montana Stranglers, the Dodge City Vigilantes, and the San Francisco Vigilance Committees dispensed justice without regard for the state’s legal processes,15 using hasty violence as a critique of the sovereign’s monopoly over the capture, judgment, incarceration, and punishment of suspects.16

In the early years of the twentieth century, as this ad hoc, Wild West justice threatened to spread to more and more urban areas back east, public opinion turned sharply against the vigilantes.17 Federal and state governments eventually made a concerted effort to crack down on vigilance movements, attempting to transform these autonomous citizens into responsible citizens—that is, attempting to ensure that citizens’ policing activities respected the procedures and privileges of sovereign power. Between 1900 and 1920, states like Ohio, South Carolina, Indiana, and Alabama attempted to suppress autonomous justice by prosecuting sheriffs who allowed vigilantes to break into their prisons and carry away inmates for summary justice. This political shift even drew the attention of Supreme Court justices, one of whom, David J. Brewer, suggested abolishing the right of appeal in order to eliminate one of the primary rationales for vigilante justice: the slowness of the justice system.18 The state’s answer to vigilantism, therefore, was (1) to enforce the established processes of sovereign law, such as suspect confinement, hearings, and jury trials, and (2) to reassert the sovereign’s exclusive privilege of violence by developing and supporting alternative forms and programs of citizen-police cooperation. Thus in order to ensure the maintenance of sovereign political and juridical norms, autonomous citizenship had to be delegitimized and suppressed; it had to be tamed into appropriate expressions of responsible citizenship, particularly as citizens’ social and political engagements were bounded by the sovereign’s monopoly over legitimate violence. The so-called “vigilant era” of American citizen policing, therefore, came to a gradual end as the vigilant South and the Wild West—characterized by their wanton “dead or alive” justice—were tamed, and their participating subjects were instructed in the seeing/saying rituals of responsible citizenship.

The Turn to Responsible Citizenship

As state and local governments strove to thwart vigilante justice, they did not eliminate citizen participation in law enforcement. As this book has taken pains to show, throughout the twentieth century official police institutions remained highly reliant on citizens to watch their peers, report crimes, track suspects, provide tips, give testimony, file reports, and carry out other seeing/saying responsibilities. The police and their allies, therefore, were faced with a dilemma of governance: on the one hand, the liberal police force demands the active assistance of everyday citizens. On the other hand, the police must prevent these responsibilized citizens from violating the state’s monopoly on violence. Therefore, as we see with organizations like Neighborhood Watch, regulating the conduct of citizen patrols becomes a matter of cultivating the seeing/saying habits of the public while preventing their behavior from escalating into vigilantism and other acts of direct physical engagement. In fact, as police historian Martin Greenberg has argued, police authorities have designed and nurtured contemporary citizen patrols in such a way that they have become “antithetical” to the vigilance movements of years past: “The advent of extralegal vigilante groups in many ways represents the antithesis of the role of modern-day volunteer police.”19 The violence and autonomy of vigilance movements provide an illustrative contrast to the kind of responsible, seeing/saying citizenship the state strove to cultivate with official organizations like Neighborhood Watch.

After World War Two, and especially as the 1950s gave way to the turbulence of the 1960s, urban police departments across the country carried out new experiments in citizen responsibilization.20 While this included the heavy recruitment of auxiliary volunteer police officers (according to a federal report, “auxiliaries put more sets of eyes and ears onto the street to detect crimes and summon the police”),21 it also included the rise of federally funded citizen patrols like Neighborhood Watch. The same federal commission that spawned the national 911 Emergency system—President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice—energized the state’s efforts to recruit, support, and regulate citizen patrols. As the Johnson and Nixon administrations began waging America’s never-ending war on crime, citizen patrols became an essential element of community policing and related liberal social schemes. At a time when urban areas like New York City and Detroit were laying off hundreds of police officers, the state threw considerable support behind citizen patrols and related lateral surveillance programs.22

Largely owing to what Richard Maxwell Brown calls the “destabilizing context of postindustrial society”23—which was fueled by the confluence of ghettoized urbanization, the collapse of America’s industrial economy, and the rise of neoliberal economic austerity24—violent crime rose dramatically in the mid-1960s, especially among young people.25 While the American homicide rate had remained at about five or fewer per hundred thousand during the 1950s and early 1960s, in 1966 that rate rapidly increased: by 1974, homicides per capita had nearly doubled, and they peaked at more than ten per hundred thousand in 1980. Property and drug crimes, too, rose drastically throughout this period.26 Responding to this rise in crime, local and federal police agencies began experimenting with new citizen responsibilization schemes. In 1968, President Nixon’s Executive Order 11412, “Establishing a National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence,” empowered a federal task force to study the “causes and prevention of violence.” In a defining moment of early neoliberal policing strategy, the report found that citizen responsibilization should take center stage in federal crime control efforts: “commitment and involvement are a solution—far better, more extensive and beneficial to society than arming oneself and hiding behind locked doors waiting for them (the government, the police, the courts, the elected representatives) to do it all.”27 In addition to encouraging increased citizen participation in crime control, the report also identified two dangers of this responsibilization: “From our national experience, two major dangers apply to citizen participation in law enforcement: first, vigilantism—volunteers exercising full police powers with no police discipline and few legal constraints—and second, the anti-police patrol—a community organization created independently of and in opposition to the police and serving as a roving check on its behavior. . . . Because of these dangers, therefore, individuals and groups should participate in the fight against crime in conjunction with officially sanctioned programs.”28 These two dangers—vigilantism and anti-police citizen patrols—provided the state with two distinct obstacles of governance. When promoting active citizen involvement with the police apparatus, how can violence, vigilantism, and related expressions of autonomous citizenship be kept in check? And when encouraging citizens to take organized action against local threats, how can those citizens be prevented from mobilizing against the threat of the state (in particular, against police brutality)?

Against the backdrop of these constant “dangers,” during the 1960s and 1970s an interesting assortment of citizen-policing groups emerged throughout urban America. In working-class communities, and particularly in urban communities of color, many citizens had a rancorous relationship with the police. The citizen patrols that emerged in these areas, therefore, often lacked the support and oversight of local police departments. As I will discuss in a moment, this mutual distrust helped give rise to autonomous citizens’ patrols that posed the two “threats” identified by the Nixon administration: by carrying guns or adopting militant facades, they threatened the state’s monopoly on violence; and by turning their sights on police abuses, they frequently operated in a state of mutual hostility with the police. However, in most middle-class areas—where citizens’ relationships with the police were typically less tense—the police and local citizens had better success working together to ensure a clear division of policing labor. While the sovereign police would retain their monopoly on violence and physical engagement, citizen patrols would be empowered to function as the “eyes and ears” of the authorities. This rhetorical theme, in fact, was consistent among many early citizen patrols in the United States: take, for instance, the California Neighborhood Safety Team in Los Angeles (whose stated purpose was to “observe and report”),29 Newark’s Triquonic Citizens Patrol (which insisted it functioned as the “eyes and ears of the Police Department”),30 and the Azalea Hills Patrol in Norfolk, Virginia (which claimed to offer “an extra set of eyes for the Norfolk police”).31

The case of the Chicago Organization of Radio Operators (COP) illustrates how this division of labor permeated the identity, behavior, and rhetoric of responsible citizen patrols. In the late 1960s, a group of citizen band radio operators collaborated with the Chicago Police Department to develop a network of local security organizations. In a familiar rhetoric of responsible citizenship, COP’s membership director, Melvin Dixon, said that he decided to join COP because he knew the police “can’t be everywhere all the time. . . . I get an inner satisfaction from doing my part in the community, and making the neighborhood safe for my wife. . . . This combination of social and service activities makes the patrol more fulfilling than I had ever expected.”32 To help carry out this responsible citizenship, Dixon and other COPs carried a variety of media technologies—a pencil, paper, a flashlight, and a CB radio—yet were prohibited from packing guns.33 Not only did the COPs have direct police oversight from the Chicago PD, they were also careful to restrict membership only to those participants who used their eyes and ears rather than their fists and trigger fingers. Insisting that COP’s role was to act as “the eyes and ears of the police,” Dixon proudly declared that two members had been expelled because they exited their cars to “harass” people in the street.”34 In fact, Dixon remarked that “the cardinal rule” of COP was to never physically intervene in an incident: “I would never take the law into my own hands.”35 Agreeing with Dixon, COP’s liaison officer at the Chicago Police Department boasted that COP volunteers had never “degenerated into vigilante activity,” and that “no one wants a COP member to play policeman.”36 These themes reappeared in the discourse of civilian patrols across the country: the Azalea Hills Patrol in Norfolk, for example, was governed by a mission of nonconfrontational seeing and saying that is highly reminiscent of COP. Charley Tweed, an early member of the Hills Patrol in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasized that his group took great pains to eliminate violence and vigilantism from their ranks. According to Tweed, “You can’t minimize the fact that people like to play cops and robbers. . . . We had to prove that we were only doing what an ordinary citizen would do. We were not vigilantes. We were only the eyes and ears of the police.”37 Tweed went on to boast that the Hills Patrol never carried clubs or guns—perhaps the two classic symbols of police violence.

During this process of widespread public responsibilization, “the neighborhood” became an idealized site of citizen discipline as public and private institutions collaborated to produce territorial arrangements that would promote responsible practices of seeing/saying citizenship. One of these schemes, now known as the Hartford Experiment, was launched under a grant funded by the DOJ’s National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (NILECJ). In 1973, a group of NILECJ researchers affiliated with local nonprofits, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined how the geographic layout of urban neighborhoods could be adjusted to facilitate lateral surveillance and informal social control. According to the researchers, the way in which many neighborhoods were geographically organized prevented the police and citizens from carrying out surveillance, primarily because (1) citizens were not encouraged to use their neighborhoods’ outdoor resources, so they stayed indoors and out of sight, and (2) the organization of traffic patterns encouraged transient flow in and out of neighborhoods. According to the report’s hypothesis, “Neighborhoods in which residents are out of doors, where surveillance is easy and where non-residents without identifiable purpose are likely to attract attention, are less attractive to offenders.”38 Thus by getting residents to actively roam about their neighborhoods, the Hartford Experiment tried to rearrange urban space in such a way that would “permit more surveillance” on residents and strangers.39 To encourage widespread lateral surveillance among the community, the Experiment introduced perimeter street cul-de-sacs and narrowed intersections, thus preventing access to the neighborhood from its east, west, and south boundaries. These measures were intended to better define the neighborhood’s interior from its exterior, as well as reduce transient pedestrian and automobile traffic.40 The report’s analysis of criminal geography observed that offenders operate in a complex urban atmosphere that includes police officers, citizen bystanders, and a physical environment. By rearranging the relationships between these three primary variables, urban planners could encourage lateral surveillance and community responsibility in a most liberal and noncoercive fashion. According to the report, “Offenders are deterred by citizens who use the spaces in their neighborhoods, thereby exercising surveillance, and who exercise control over who uses the neighborhood, thereby making extended waiting for an opportunity less comfortable. . . . To the extent that physical surveillance is easy, the citizens’ ability to exercise surveillance is improved. To the extent that the environment encourages residents to use their neighborhood, their opportunities for surveillance are increased. . . . Increased use by residents was seen as a key step to increased resident surveillance and control.”41 By rearranging the public space of urban life, the police and their institutional allies sought to produce the geographical conditions in which local residents and citizens’ patrols were most likely to carry out practices of seeing/saying citizenship.

Neighborhood Watching (and Speaking)

The “job” of a citizen in a Neighborhood Watch area is to be suspicious, alert, and to report any suspicious activity to the police department. It is the responsibility of the police to apprehend the criminals. Yours is to report crime.

—Neighborhood Watch Captain’s Guide42

This focus on “the neighborhood,” of course, was most influential in the creation of Neighborhood Watch, which the National Sheriff’s Association founded in 1972 as the National Neighborhood Watch Program. Kick-started with support from the Department of Justice, the U.S. Jaycees, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Sons of the American Revolution, Neighborhood Watch began with the broad support of the federal government in its call for “cooperation between police, sheriffs, and the citizens of America to reduce crime.”43 Founded on the basic belief that “efforts to encourage citizen surveillance and reporting could have potentially significant impact on crime,”44 Neighborhood Watch was highly successful at attracting federal funding and local participation, and by June 1976 it had spread to more than sixteen hundred local communities throughout the United States.45

The organization’s founding documents give us valuable insight into the rationalities and strategies that informed its development. The National Sheriffs’ Association, for example, asserted that the “principal objective” of Neighborhood Watch “is to develop within local law enforcement agencies an ongoing program of burglary prevention based on creating and sustaining a citizen education, property security, and cooperative action effort.”46 From the beginning, therefore, law enforcement agencies designed Neighborhood Watch as a program that would enjoy the constant monitoring and guidance of the police. These local police officials were instructed to “train” citizens in Neighborhood Watch’s four “secondary objectives”: (1) “Increase citizen awareness of burglary through a continuing information program”; (2) “Train citizens in the means to improve the security of their property and assist them in making their residence more secure”; (3) “Develop a neighborhood action program where neighbors help watch each others [sic] property and report suspicious persons and activities to law enforcement agencies”; and (4) “Encourage all citizens to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in reporting crime.”47 While the first two secondary objectives deal with informing and training citizens, the second two directly identify surveillance and communication as essential duties of responsible citizenship.

These outreach methods were highly effective in cultivating seeing/saying citizenship: during Neighborhood Watch’s first five years of existence, over eighty percent of participating police agencies reported increased calls from citizens.48 Cops also showed some enthusiasm for the program. In a 1977 survey of participating police departments, most officers reported having a positive view of it. Many of the responses lauded the program’s success in promoting citizen surveillance: one cop, for example, related: “They [citizens] have police monitors and they go to the window and start watching—we got three stolen cars this way.”49 Another remarked: “It’s good—the people are nosy and active.”50 The chiefs of police, however, were a bit more reticent about the program: summarizing their opinions, the survey reported: “Only the police can (and must) dominate and control a Neighborhood Watch Program. . . . Police must emphasize to citizens that their role is to watch and report, not take action” (emphasis in original).51 This sharp division of labor, in fact, was emphasized at the very outset of Neighborhood Watch: cops must “dominate” local citizens’ participation, which includes ensuring that citizens know their place (to “watch and report, not take action”). Early Neighborhood Watch even used classic eyes/ears rhetoric to preempt the emergence of citizen violence and vigilantism: as an implementation guide for New York State Neighborhood Watch emphasized, “Check tendencies toward vigilante action. Stress constantly that group members should always call police in suspicious circumstances, and must not take action themselves.”52 The official implementation guides used to train Watch liaisons, therefore, taught cops to curb vigilantism by promoting lateral surveillance and communicative action.

Neighborhood Watch’s success at enforcing this clear division of labor has made it highly popular among police officials, helping make it the best-funded and most influential citizen-surveillance patrol in the United States. Their success, of course, continues to the present day. According to the U.S. State Department, Neighborhood Watch is practiced in every state of the U.S. And while more than twenty thousand Neighborhood Watch programs are listed in the nation’s official registry, it is estimated that there are more than fifty thousand others that operate on an unofficial basis.53 Every volunteer who works with these local organizations undergoes a training regimen in which s/he is instructed in the appropriate practices of responsible seeing/saying citizenship. Official Watch representatives, who are typically police employees, visit local gatherings in order to train volunteers in the arts of responsible Watch citizenship. One of these representatives, Wendy Dorival—who served as George Zimmerman’s liaison to the Sanford Police Department—describes the familiar tone of her presentation: “I go through what the rules and responsibilities are,”54 instructing volunteers that they are to act as “the eyes and ears” of the police force, “not the vigilante.”55 Watch volunteers, Dorival emphasizes, “are not supposed to confront anyone. . . . [The police] get paid to get into harm’s way. You don’t do that. You just call them from the safety of your home or your vehicle.”56 A Watch manual that Dorival distributes to volunteers also hammers home the point: Watch members should “not attempt to apprehend a person committing a crime or to investigate a suspicious activity.”57 Their responsibilities stop, therefore, at simple acts of seeing and saying—they stop where the state’s exclusive privilege of violent engagement begins. Watch volunteers are repeatedly reminded that “they do not possess police power,” and that the consequences of not following strict legal guidelines are severe: “Each member is liable as an individual for civil and criminal charges should he exceed his authority.”58 Watch volunteers, therefore, are instructed in the legal constraints that responsible citizenship places upon their civic duty, and the state’s special privilege of violence is the animating logic behind these constraints.

Seeing Suspicious Activities

This training also teaches volunteers how to interpret and respond to “suspicious” phenomena, attempting to galvanize a renovated sense of community by forging a very specific set of responsibilities between neighbors. In its early days, police agencies promoted Neighborhood Watch by evoking nostalgia for an idyllic, crime-free past complete with unlocked doors and stay-at-home moms. In a federally funded study conducted by the RAND Corporation in 1976, researchers claimed that Neighborhood Watch had emerged in response to the “reduced sense of public safety during the 1960s and early 1970s.”59 Illustrating how police officials tapped into this reduced sense of public safety, a 1981 Watch brochure released by the Virginia Division of Justice and Crime Prevention waxed dreamily on a crime-free era long gone: “In any discussion about crime, a frequently expressed desire is to have neighborhoods return to the way they were in the good old days when one could leave the home unoccupied and not have to worry about locking doors.”60 In the old days, the brochure claims, “neighborhood watching” occurred naturally because homes were always occupied (typically by women working in the home). In the chaotic and volatile word of today, however, citizens have to learn to be “nosy”: “The best way to describe Neighborhood Watch is neighbors being ‘nosy’ about their neighbors. The prying eyes of neighbors may at times seem a nuisance but those prying eyes are enhancing neighborhood safety and security.”61 In addition to distributing local Neighborhood Watch stickers that said, “Use your eyes and your ears. Be nosy,”62 Virginia’s Watch organization reminded citizens of the fundamental duties of the citizen officer: “Trust your eyes, your ears, and your common sense.”63

A 1984 Department of Justice report emphasized the importance of reorienting citizens’ sociality toward these rituals of suspicion: “If citizens are to recognize crimes while the crimes are being committed, citizens need to know what a crime looks like and where it is likely to occur: to provide such knowledge is the goal of programs like Neighborhood Watch. When Neighborhood Watch works, it is because citizens share information about each other’s habits and activities. A man who sees a woman rummaging in a neighbor’s house may think little of it; but, if he knows that his neighbor is on vacation he may recognize that a burglary is in progress and call the police.”64 Recycling a theme that has long played a central role in Watch propaganda, a recent Neighborhood Watch pamphlet laments the atomized urban sociality that gave rise to the organization: “Neighbors stopped being concerned about their neighbor’s property and began keeping more to themselves. The unity and cohesion of the traditional neighborhood gradually deteriorated. Neighbors were not looking out for each other. . . . It was also noted that communities able to obtain the assistance of their citizens in observing, recognizing, and reporting suspicious or criminal activities were much better able to keep the burglary rate down.”65 “Community,” according to this pamphlet and to the Neighborhood Watch sensibility more generally, is fulfilled through assorted rituals of “observing, recognizing, and reporting.”

Through in-person training sessions and official outreach materials, Watch volunteers and recruits are taught: “One of the most important aspects of Neighborhood Watch is getting to know your neighbors.”66 Indeed, neighborhood sociality is reconstructed as a primarily investigative project, as neighbors, their habits, and their belongings are reduced to data that must be mastered in order to protect the community. In other words, Neighborhood Watch makes the conditions of “community” those very rituals of suspicion that do much to undermine any promising possibility for being-with-others. Neighbors are instead reimagined as information that can be remembered, recorded, compared, and profiled—information that becomes valuable only to the extent that it informs surveillance strategy or facilitates the determination of suspicious and unsuspicious activities. We find this sentiment promoted in a 2010 Watch activist instruction manual:

[I]t is important that you share information about the composition of your households and activities. By doing so you make it easier for your block members to recognize and respond to any suspicious activities in your area. To “profile” your block, share with each other the following information: Names of household members, address, phone numbers (include work numbers), makes, models, colors, license numbers of family cars, pets, medical problems. . . . Remember, the more information you share with each other, the better protected you will be. The more you know about the activities on your block, the better your chances of preventing a crime in your neighborhood.67

The sort of sociality prescribed in this manual is purely investigatory: neighbors should get to “know” their neighbors to the extent that that knowledge helps them construct a binary epistemology of suspicious/unsuspicious phenomena. Yet recruits, however, are warned that the semiotics of suspicion is a tricky business: “Burglars may case an area posing as: joggers, someone looking for an address or a friend, etc.”68 Barking dogs, too, may signify an unacceptable state of insecurity. While some of the listed activities might reasonably connote criminal activity—such as “Someone peering into cars or windows”—most others do not. For example, the pamphlet lists as suspicious the tautological “multiple persons who appear to be working in unison and exhibiting suspicious behavior,” as well as warning of “persons arriving or leaving from homes or businesses at unusual hours.”69

Yet this lateral surveillance and investigative labor constitute only one half of the watch volunteer’s duty: the other half requires communicating one’s observations to authorities. The pamphlet asserts, for example: “one of the keys to a successful Neighborhood Watch program is recognizing the importance of using good observation skills to keep your neighborhood safe. Practice looking at pictures of people to know how to describe them.”70 Surveillance and disciplined communicative practice, in fact, go hand in hand for the Watch participant—not only should volunteers hone their “observation skills,” they should also practice rendering these observations into precise, easily decipherable language. And above all, of course, recruits are explicitly warned against transgressing the sovereign’s violent privilege: “Community members only serve as the extra ‘eyes and ears’ of law enforcement. They should report their observations of suspicious activities to law enforcement; however, citizens should never try to take action on those observations. Trained law enforcement should be the only ones ever to take action based on observations of suspicious activities.”71 Denied the implied violence of “action,” recruits learn that their utility has been reduced to the purely biotechnical: they are merely “the eyes and ears” of law enforcement, allowed simply to “report” their observations: “Dial 9–1–1 and call the police department of sheriff’s office, *Tell the call taker what happened and the exact location, *Provide a detailed description of individuals or vehicles, *Remain on the phone and stay calm, *Be prepared to answer follow-up questions.”72 Theirs is a communicative citizenship, to be sure, but it is a citizenship stripped down to its barest mechanical engagement, a fact perhaps best attested by the infantile slogan of one of the nation’s largest Neighborhood Watch two-way radio companies: “We talk, we act!”73

Neighborhood Watching after Trayvon

Despite this training in seeing/saying citizenship, Neighborhood Watch captain George Zimmerman failed to take the message to heart. After Zimmerman shot Trayvon, Neighborhood Watch’s local and national officials frantically adopted more intensive procedures and programs to guide and mediate their volunteers’ actions. These efforts were perhaps most contested and controversial in the Sanford area in which Trayvon was shot. After he was killed—and after Sanford police chief Bill Lee was fired from his job—local police officials moved quickly to place local Neighborhood Watch crews under the direct supervision of police officers rather than civilian liaisons.74 And to emphasize the strictly communicative-surveillant responsibilities of Watch volunteers, in November 2013, several months after Zimmerman was acquitted for Trayvon’s murder, new Sanford police chief Cecil Smith moved to ban volunteers from carrying concealed weapons.75 Speaking on Smith’s behalf, a Sanford PD spokeswoman argued that the conceal-carry ban would restore the original seeing/saying mission to Sanford’s “dysfunctional” Neighborhood Watch program: “Neighborhood watch was always intended to be a program where you observe what is going on and report it to police. In light of everything that has gone on, that’s what we’re really going to go back and push. That’s what this program is and that’s all it is.”76 In light of Trayvon’s death at the hands of an armed Watch volunteer, the Sanford PD attempted to enforce this seeing/saying responsibility by removing the temptation for volunteers to physically engage suspects. Without guns, Chief Smith reckoned, volunteers wouldn’t be emboldened to cross the threshold from “observing” and “reporting” into physical altercations. For Chief Smith, then, establishing the volunteers’ responsibilities firmly within the communicative/surveillant required taking firearms out of their hands. Pleading with volunteers of Neighborhood Watch and similar groups to reject violence, Smith reminded them of their fundamental responsibilities: “If you see something, hear something, say something, call us and allow us to do the job we are being paid for. . . . Our goal is to teach [volunteers] to be great observers and fantastic witnesses. . . . It’s about communications. It’s not about firearms.”77 Smith went so far as to compare Watch volunteers’ responsibilities to that of Bewitched character Gladys Kravitz, whose name has become synonymous with snooping/snitching neighborly conduct. “Your responsibility is to be Gladys Kravitz,” Chief Smith informed the public. “She worked it, and she worked it without a firearm.”78 For Smith, the key to reinstantiating volunteers’ communicative citizenship was to remove guns from the Neighborhood Watch equation, thus narrowing citizens’ range of possible action.

Figure 3.1. Neighborhood Watch material distributed by George Zimmerman. Trayvon Martin Killing: Neighborhood Watch 2 (n.d.): 4; available at http://documents.latimes.com/trayvon-martin-and-george-zimmerman.

Yet this attempt to regulate Watch volunteers ignited a controversy about the rights and privileges of responsible citizenship. As soon as Chief Smith announced his intent to implement the conceal-carry ban, local citizens responded with outrage. Sean Caranna, executive director of a gun rights organization called Florida Carry, argued that Watch volunteers needed to carry guns because their anti-crime activism made them popular targets of violence and revenge attacks. According to Caranna, “What you are doing is asking people to be out in their community, be visible and take note of what’s going on. . . . They can be more of a target for criminal aggression. We certainly don’t want the only person to be armed in a confrontation to be a criminal.”79 Taking a more legalistic approach, Carrie Lightfoot, founder of an organization called The Well Armed Woman, remarked: “If they’re licensed to carry, they’re licensed to carry, and that should not be restricted.”80 As this chorus of dissent rose in volume and pitch, the old wounds from Trayvon’s death reopened, and Chief Smith’s press conference threw Sanford back into the national spotlight. The press conference at which Smith planned to ban guns received international attention, drawing representatives from Al Jazeera, an array of network television affiliates, National Public Radio, the Huffington Post, and other outlets. Yet many onlookers were disappointed to find that, under considerable pressure, Chief Smith decided at the last minute to scrap his plan to disarm Watch volunteers. In a resigned tone, he addressed the press, painting a romanticized portrait of Neighborhood Watch: “Neighborhood Watch is a very simple organization. It’s about neighbors helping neighbors, talking to neighbors about ways to make their neighborhood safe. That’s it.”81 After begrudgingly admitting that Watch volunteers have the constitutional right to carry a gun, he pleaded with them: “Do not intercede or pursue.” After all, he averred, volunteers were simply supposed to serve as “communicative vessels.”82

The Threat of the Citizens’ Patrol

As a state-sanctioned institution, Neighborhood Watch and its police liaisons have taken care to train citizens in the rituals of nonviolent citizenship. While these tactics do not always succeed—as George Zimmerman’s case so starkly illustrates—Watch officials take care to use training seminars, fliers, and other modes of oversight and outreach to govern volunteers’ activities toward responsible outlets of surveillance and communication. Yet, as many scholars have pointed out, Neighborhood Watch has tended to take hold in suburban and middle-class communities where serious violent crime is rarely a threat.83 In urban working-class and poor communities, however, the decline in police resources during the 1970s struck a disproportionate blow—not to mention the fact, of course, that these underserved neighborhoods struggled to draw and sustain citizens’ participation. So while the bourgeois strictures of “observe and report” governed the conduct of citizens who volunteered with Neighborhood Watch and other federally sanctioned programs, many urban citizen patrols developed their own rules of engagement (and, in doing so, often attracted the hostility of the state). Some of these groups included Boston’s Urban Citizens Patrol, the Fifty-Fourth Ward Patrol and the Maccabees in Brooklyn, Kansas City’s Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, the Boonton Crime Patrol in St. Louis, and the Mayberry Glen Security Patrol of Washington, D.C. While these groups had occasional interactions with the police, they lacked the disciplinary oversight and training enjoyed by Neighborhood Watch and other officially sanctioned patrols. This independence often gave rise to patrol strategies and aggressive public postures that openly called into question the state’s monopoly on violent engagement.

Some African American organizations, in particular, took a more militant stance toward community policing. For example, the Deacons for Defense and Justice deployed armed patrol cars around Louisiana to protect civil rights activists from Klansmen and the police. Other radical African American groups, such as the Community Alert Patrol in Los Angeles, emerged in the wake of the Watts riots in order to protect protestors and carry out surveillance on the police.84 In fact, the 1960s saw many lateral surveillance patrols turn against one another: groups such as Newark’s Triquonic Citizens Patrol and North Ward First Aid Squad, and Detroit’s Citizens Organized Radio Patrol Service were organized to “fight rioting”—which, in the context of the civil rights movement, often meant carrying out surveillance and/or violence against African Americans and their allies. In an attempt to protect African American communities from these opposing citizen patrols—and others, including the Ku Klux Klan—a Louisiana group known as the Alliance for Safety (AFS) carried guns and other weapons as a means of community protection. Organized by activist Isaiah Tripp, the AFS had a weapons policy that mirrored its militant stance against state power. In 1965, Tripp took over the Voting Rights Committee, which had been organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and changed its name to the Alliance for Safety. Declaring that Louisiana officials were failing to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Tripp promised that the AFS would form armed patrols to protect African Americans as they sought to vote and protest amid the coordinated interference of state officials, the Klan, and other racist Louisianans.85 According to Tripp, “The local police and the U.S. Department of Justice knew what we were doing and knew that we were armed . . . but it had to be done. I always said though, that when citizens of this town began to work with their black residents, then we would hang up our guns.”86 The police and the local Louisiana political machine, however, had little interest in working with Tripp and other African Americans. In fact, powerful factions of the local government and the business community went to work against the AFS, crushing Tripp’s cab business when he refused to back down. His creditors demanded immediate payment, and he lost much of his fleet. After he refused bribes to fold up the AFS and return to responsible seeing/saying citizenship, the insurance policy for Tripp’s cabs was cancelled, and vandals poured acid on his personal Cadillac and slashed its tires. And because one of AFS’s main missions was to “protect black citizens from police harassment,”87 Tripp and his patrols encountered their own fair share of police harassment and violence. Yet for Tripp, armed resistance patrols helped keep the state in check until it was able to deliver on its promises of peace, justice, and civil rights. The police and responsible citizens, however, were threatened by the radicality of the AFS, and they exerted many forms of cultural, legal, and physical pressure in order to force the group’s members onto the path of responsible seeing/saying citizenship.

Another interesting example is provided by the Guardian Angels, an organization founded in 1979 by a charismatic young New Yorker named Curtis Sliwa. As with the Alliance for Safety, the Angels clung to expressions of autonomous citizenship, making them popular targets of the state. Rather than taking a purely surveillance-based approach, in the 1970s Sliwa and his comrades began attacking and detaining criminals on New York subways. With their uniforms and berets—not to mention their required training in martial arts—the Angels struck a militant posture that smacked of autonomous citizenship. The Angels’ volunteers, who largely comprised young African Americans and Chicanos, flipped society’s prevailing surveillance roles: rather than being policed and scrutinized by the state, these young citizens were adopting the role of police officers. Yet most of all, what set the Guardian Angels apart was their resistance to seeing/saying dogma: they are perhaps best known for carrying out dramatic citizens’ arrests. As constitutional rights advocates Michael Cicchini and Amy Kushner have pointed out, “A citizen’s arrest is likely law enforcement’s last choice for apprehending a criminal suspect.”88 Yet in its first six years of existence, the Angels claimed to have made five hundred citizen’s arrests,89 quickly putting them on a collision course with the state.90

Before the official launch of the Angels, when Sliwa was gaining local notoriety by threatening to organize a militant citizens’ patrol, he began to encounter the hostility of the press and the police. Emphasizing his determination, Sliwa remarked: “it’s being reported that if I am going to try this new idea, the police are going to do everything within their power to stop us.”91 It turns out that his fears were warranted. Just before the official launch of the Angels, Sliwa attacked two assailants who had used a broken bottle to threaten and rob an elderly man. Sliwa rushed the two assailants, knocking their bottle away and detaining them in the back of a train car. He then refused to let the conductor pull the train out of the station: because Sliwa did not have access to a phone, he simply pulled the emergency brake and waited for the cops to show up. “They hate that,” he later recalled.92 As the cops arrived on the scene, they were flabbergasted. When Sliwa informed them he had made a citizen’s arrest, they replied: “Citizen’s arrest? . . . This ain’t the movies. You can’t do that. There ain’t no such thing.”93 He was then detained by the NYPD and escorted to a local precinct station, where he was interrogated and threatened with arrest. Although the police were eventually compelled to release him, the case proved so controversial that, despite his testimony, the city was unable to convict the two thieves of any crime. According to Sliwa, the justice system was trying to teach him a lesson about threatening the state’s monopoly on violent engagement: “They were trying to prove a point: hey, wise guy, you’re going to be a wise guy, you’re going to say it’s a citizen’s arrest, well now you see what’s going to happen.”94

This animosity toward the Angels was widespread among public officials. New York City mayor Ed Koch, for example, condemned the Angels as vigilantes and “paramilitaries.” According to Koch, the Angels should adopt seeing/saying citizenship or leave the policing labor to the state: “I suggest they join the police force if they want to continue their efforts to increase public safety.”95 A member of Koch’s staff remarked that the city would increase its efforts to domesticate the Angels, promising citizens: “At the moment . . . we are trying to balance the Angels’ potential for good with the risk of disaster.”96 In return, Sliwa promised to amplify his antagonism vis-à-vis the state: “I know that Koch is totally uncomfortable with the idea of a black or a Hispanic. . . . I was going to confront him with four hundred and fifty of them, but not with everybody screaming in some auditorium where he could walk out. I was going to make Koch go to sleep at night with four hundred and fifty blacks and Hispanics right under his bedroom window.”97 To be sure, the NYPD had never had to worry about Neighborhood Watch volunteers staging mass protests outside Gracie Mansion. But with Curtis Sliwa’s rebellious band of young men of color, the state encountered an autonomous citizens’ movement that proved difficult to control.

Unsurprisingly, local cops complained that the Angels, unlike Neighborhood Watch and other responsible citizen organizations, would not subject themselves to the oversight and command of the police. While the Angels proved to be popular among New York citizens, the majority of police officers—and the vast majority of public officials—disapproved of the Angels’ activities.98 Frustrated by the Angels’ success with citizens’ arrests—and perhaps intimidated and incensed by their activists’ regimen of martial arts training and their dedication to aggressive citizen responsibility—a local transit cop remarked: “I wish they would report directly to us. . . . But they have this idea that they shouldn’t work too closely with the cops.”99 According to a federally funded study of the group, a national survey of law enforcement officers found that seventy percent of officers who had encountered the Angels accused them of carrying out “inappropriate” interventions.100 Increasingly frustrated with the Angels’ autonomous interventions, a contingent of New York City cops set out to teach Sliwa a lesson in the bounds of responsible citizenship. After making more than twenty citizens’ arrests on the New York subways between 1977 and 1978, Sliwa had a direct run-in with a cop who happily demonstrated the state’s monopoly over violence. In Sliwa’s words, after the police officer arrived on the scene to answer his call, “Cop lets the guy go. He takes his gun, right, he points it at me, he says, ‘This is the third time I’ve run into you doing this shit. You trying to play cop?’ He’s pointing the gun at me, and playing macho man, and, ‘If I catch you out here again . . .’”101 Pointing his gun in Sliwa’s face, the officer demonstrated the essential political boundary that separates citizens from the state.

While Sliwa claims to have softened the Angels’ strategy following this incident, he and the Angels continued to emphasize their uneasy relationship with the police. According to Sliwa, the Angels could never completely make peace with the cops: “The police just don’t understand. . . . We’re not trying to be cops. This is a movement. . . . We are independent. Many of our members are from neighborhoods where the police are stigmatized. We can’t be part of the police.”102 This ambivalence has occasionally boiled over into violence. For example, on February 13, 1981, a crew of Angels got into a fight with local cops, landing eleven of them in jail.103 The following year, a twenty-six-year-old Guardian Angel, Frank Melvin, was shot by a Newark, New Jersey, cop as the two were responding to the same burglary. While the policeman was never indicted for the man’s death, Sliwa and his allies hinted that the officer’s behavior was rooted in the local police’s frustration with the Angels for crossing from seeing/saying citizenship into violent practices of suspect engagement and apprehension.

Discussing the growing hostility between the police and the Angels, a New York Times editorial that appeared after the shooting observed that the Angels were offering public services that the police could not or would not provide. According to the editorial, “The [Frank Melvin] shooting is tragic enough. The controversy it is generating exemplifies a deeper problem: the difficulty that groups like the Angels have in getting along with the police. In Newark as elsewhere, awareness has grown that the police are unable to prevent much of the crime that engulfs a community. That creates fertile ground for voluntary crime fighters, but it also poisons the atmosphere for their relations with authorities. . . . The police inevitably feel antagonistic toward groups that appear to symbolize official failure to stop crime.”104 Other local citizens expressed this sentiment, including Bronx district attorney Mario Merola, who lauded the Angels for their determination to fill the social service gaps left by the police: “To call them vigilantes is nonsense. . . . The municipal and state governments have not met their obligation to provide the kind of security that’s needed on the subway. How do we say to any citizens who want to do some good that they should not be involved?”105 The Angels, in fact, had grown quite popular with many prominent New York residents who were frustrated with the NYPD’s failure to reduce crime. Taking the Angels’ side, legendary New York journalist Jimmy Breslin argued that the police were “terrified” of the Angels’ success: “Of course, government fought him [Sliwa]. . . . We suffer the worst crime in the history of the city, and those who cannot protect us were busy trying to prevent anybody else from trying.”106 For Breslin, the Angels were simply a populistic expression of citizens’ outrage at a corrupt and ineffective police force: “The only way the city can get anything done is for the people to do it themselves. You can’t work through the political process. That failed us. We just have to do the work ourselves.”107 Abandoned by the state during the height of New York City’s crime crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, many citizens agreed that they would simply “have to do the work themselves”—they were happy, therefore, to have citizens like Sliwa shoulder the workload.

Over the years, however, the NYPD has not been the Angels’ only foe: Sliwa has repeatedly been attacked by gang members and other criminals, and in 1992 he was shot and kidnapped after he tried to enter a stolen taxi. In 2000, a fellow Angel was shot by a gang member while he patrolled his neighborhood.108 Facing this sustained hostility from the police and volatile elements of the population, the Angels have often promised to abandon citizens’ arrests and adopt a more responsible form of seeing/saying citizenship. Following a physical altercation with a New York cop, Sliwa remarked: “I realized that I had to create a mechanism where we didn’t have to grab people necessarily, where we would deter by just being there.”109 Despite these reassurances that he would dedicate the Angels to seeing, saying, and being seen, the Angels continue to carry out citizens’ arrests—and, as a result, they continue to encounter the violence of the state and of their fellow citizens. According to Sliwa, six Angels have been killed “in the line of duty” since the organization’s founding.110 And while the Angels now have more than five thousand members in more than eighty cities worldwide, their frequent outbursts of autonomous citizenship have prevented them from developing the public inroads enjoyed by tamer programs such as Neighborhood Watch.

Citizens’ Patrols against Police Brutality

Given the resistance that the Angels and other relatively autonomous patrols have faced, it is hardly surprising that the state typically frowns upon citizens organizing to guard their communities from police violence. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, police shootings reached a twenty-year high in 2013, as American cops allegedly killed 1,688 people between the years of 2010 and 2013.111 These astonishing figures, however, are almost certainly understated: because the FBI’s statistics rely on police departments to self-report fatal shootings, critics argue that the real numbers are significantly higher. To construct a more objective account of annual American police shootings, in 2015 the Washington Post carried out an independent national investigation into fatal police shootings. According to the Post’s findings, American cops fatally shot 990 people in that year alone.112

Following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager shot six times by a Ferguson, Missouri, cop in August 2014, many communities began to take more seriously community programs designed to protect citizens against police brutality. While some of these programs have entailed police education and community review boards, other citizens have taken an open stand against the state’s monopoly on violence. One such group, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, follows its predecessor, the Black Panther Party, by organizing armed citizen patrols in poor and working-class African American neighborhoods. Outfitted with an assault rifle hung over his shoulder, one of the group’s leaders, Erik Khafre, told a Dallas news reporter in the days following Brown’s death: “We felt it was up to us to patrol our communities—especially since a number of police acts of terrorism have occurred in Dallas. . . . Police are running rampant in the community, and they say police are to protect and serve, but basically they are gunning down our people.”113 According to a Gun Club press release, the group began to organize citizens’ patrols in response to the shockingly high levels of police violence among the Dallas Police Department. The press release noted, for example, that in the preceding twelve years Dallas police officers had killed over seventy unarmed citizens. Not a single one of these deaths resulted in the indictment of a police officer; according to the release, only one Dallas cop had been indicted in the death of an unarmed citizen during the past four decades. In the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting death, therefore, “The people, who are gunned down and murdered by violent and militarized police forces, have formed the Huey P. Newton Gun Club for the specific purpose of self defense and community policing. In response, Black and Brown residents of the City of Dallas will conduct the first of an ongoing and necessary armed self defense patrols through our communities in the coming week.”114 As one Gun Club organizer put it, “We know our puny weapons won’t be able to match Dallas police one for one . . . but what they fear is seeing us with weapons.”115 While armed cops are accustomed to patrolling neighborhoods in search of crime, they are less accustomed to openly armed citizens watching them as they sit in their patrol cars or walk their beats. The Gun Club’s emphasis on self-defense, therefore, serves as an open indictment of the traditional rationale behind a strong centralized police force. The police are typically justified on the grounds that they protect decent citizens from dangerous citizens. But when the police in a single American city kill over seventy unarmed citizens in just twelve years, who is supposed to safeguard citizens from the brutality of their supposed protectors? The members of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club have an answer: in conjunction with their regular Saturday self-defense and training classes, Gun Club members march down the streets of South Dallas, chanting in unison, “No more pigs in our community!”116

While the Gun Club is unlikely to dislodge cops from South Dallas, they are not the only citizens’ patrol trying to stamp out police brutality. One of the most interesting of these groups, Cop Block, sends its members to monitor police beats, highway checkpoints, and protest sites. While the group also has an innovative social media presence that publicizes police abuses, Cop Block’s patrols have proven most controversial among police agencies and public officials. Like the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, Cop Block members routinely carry weapons on their patrols. Using radio scanners to track police activity, local Cop Block activists dispatch immediately to areas where citizens will have contact with the police: the sites of 911 calls and traffic stops are some of Cop Blockers’ favorite targets. And while the Huey P. Newton Gun Club coordinates disciplined marches in paramilitary gear, some Cop Block activists prefer to show up with pig ears attached to their heads and to scream obscenities at cops. Openly provoking the police, Cop Blockers like Jacob Cordova have taken it upon themselves to anger cops—even to the point of trying to perform citizens’ arrests on police officers who violate the law.

The actions of Cop Block activists, who make as many as twenty stops per night, have drawn the ire of the police. Cop Blockers are frequently arrested for interfering with cops; Cordova and his comrades are quick to take a misdemeanor charge in order to film the police arresting, harassing, and sometimes assaulting them. Yet as Cop Block and allied groups have become a growing presence in cities across the U.S., police agencies are attempting to develop more diplomatic methods for defusing the threat of armed citizen watch groups. While cops in open-carry jurisdictions cannot legally prevent Cop Blockers from packing heat, they often plead with activists to leave their guns at home. When the Arlington, Texas, police department sent certified letters to local Cop Block headquarters inviting them to a meeting with police officials, Cop Block ignored them. While the Arlington Police Department and its allies are hoping that activists will agree to leave their guns at home, Cop Blockers, like their counterparts in the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, assert that their revolt centers upon depriving the state of its monopoly on potential violence. In the words of Tov Henderson, a Cop Block ally and organizer for the Open Carry Texas organization, “Firearms make us equal to those who aggress us.”117

For the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, Cop Block, and similar organizations around the U.S., disrupting the asymmetry of the state’s capacity for violence and surveillance puts citizens on an equal footing with the police. Just as patrolling their neighborhoods protects their communities from police brutality, it also broadly illustrates that citizens—some with military fatigues, others with pig ears—can at anytime challenge the state’s monopolies on violence and armed surveillance. In the end, these provocative activist tactics may prove to extract important concessions from the police. As I discussed in Chapter One, cop watching is frequently suppressed by legal and technological means—yet in some jurisdictions, gutsy, armed cop watchers have shifted police attention away from preventing anti-cop surveillance and onto preventing cop watchers from carrying guns. Arlington Police Lieutenant Christopher Cook, who has encountered the cop watching styles of both the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and Cop Block, leaves an open door to these groups’ police antagonism: “We don’t mind them cop-watching. Just leave your guns in the car. Leave your guns at home.”118 By shifting the discourse in this way—so that at least some cops publicly assert that they don’t “mind” cop watching—gun-toting cop watchers have the potential to give rise to a new logic of acceptable citizen-to-police surveillance. Pushing the limits of acceptable citizen action vis-à-vis the police, therefore, has encouraged some cops to cede important ground in the political struggle against police brutality.

Conclusion

America has a long tradition of citizens’ patrols—one that goes back, indeed, to the colonial period that preceded the nation’s founding. Due to their ambivalent relationship to the state, these patrols have come in all political shapes and sizes: some have fought capitalist exploitation, while others have protected capital; some have been anti-racist, while others have fought under the banner of white supremacy; some have guarded against the violence of the state, while others have provided simply another articulation of state violence. In his discussion of the South Carolina Back Country Regulators, a vigilance movement that gained prominence in the 1760s, Howard Zinn argues that we have inherited a distorted view of these groups. According to Zinn, early vigilance movements and other citizens’ patrols were mainly comprised of the “rebellious poor” and acquired their stained reputation by revolting against capital and a corrupt state.119 So while we don’t want to develop a romantic view of America’s tradition of citizens’ patrols, we should recognize their diversity, and, with that, the broad range of their motivations, political goals, and tactics.

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and especially since the 1970s, the police and their allies have proven quite adept at capturing these patrols and putting them to work for the state. For many communities, the political stakes of this transformation have been particularly high. Despite high-sounding neoliberal rhetoric about citizen participation and community policing, fostering “community” through rituals of surveillance and suspicion can simply lead to more alienation, vulnerability, and even violence. Although the democratization of some policing roles has been a positive development for some middle-class and privileged communities, the ongoing recession of the police from whole sectors of urban life—and their increasing reliance on community-based surveillance and enforcement initiatives—has proven generally disastrous.120 Moreover, despite the state’s best efforts to train nonviolent, seeing/saying patrols, this widespread responsibilization results in the occasional eruption of violence.

In the earlier days of Neighborhood Watch, criminologist Harold Pepinsky noticed these antisocial tensions simmering under the lid of Neighborhood Watch’s carefully crafted façade of care and community: “While neighborhood residents may build some measurement of cooperation in the process of turning people in to the police, the inherent violence of the collective effort builds more violent tension—more of a sense of isolation and vulnerability.”121 As a result, Pepinsky argues, Watch volunteers “can be expected to find themselves more isolated from other community members in the process.”122 By asking these citizens to carry out the traditional tasks of the police, Neighborhood Watch and other responsibilization efforts encourage citizens to flirt with the rupture of violent privilege that separates citizens from cops. Amateur citizen-officers like George Zimmerman have become far too comfortable exercising the exceptional violence typically reserved for the state. As these men and women play out the drama of state-sanctioned patrol, amateur investigation, and law enforcement, they identify with the activities and mentality of sworn police officers.

As Mark Andrejevic has warned, this identification between citizens and the police can have important social consequences: “Thanks to the promise of interactive participation in the policing process, the authorities can exploit the free labor of selected members of the community. The wager, of course, is that entrusting members of the populace with access to surveillance technology will encourage them to internalize the norms of state surveillance and policing: they will identify the problem the same way the police do, thanks, at least in part, to having been accorded the role of an agent of the state. . . . [This is] a strategy that enlists the appeal of participation as a shared responsibility.”123 As we have seen throughout this book, this process of identification with the raw activity of policing disproportionately leads to individuals reporting their neighbors, coworkers, and even family members for petty infractions. In this regime of responsibilization, citizen action is centered on and filtered through civic obligations, such that one’s duty to one’s community is overshadowed by—and often redefined as—duty to the state. It is hardly shocking, therefore, that Watch volunteers will sometimes slip from seeing and saying into the exception of violence that is legally reserved for the police officials who serve as their role models.124 There is considerable wisdom in what Natalie Jackson, the attorney representing Trayvon Martin’s family, said about the relationship between the police and wannabe cops like Zimmerman: according to Jackson, “What made [Zimmerman] shoot was that he was one of them; he felt he was a cop.”125 Indeed, as Zimmerman was the captain of the Retreat’s Neighborhood Watch patrol, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when he acted out the defining privilege of the police officers with whom he so intimately identified.