Police violence is not a new phenomenon. Nearly fifty years before Ferguson, Missouri erupted in anger at the police killing of Mike Brown in 2014, James Baldwin wrote that Black communities in the United States are “policed like occupied territory.”
Fifty years before police demanded Black obedience to mostly white cops during anti-police violence protests in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Baton Rouge and dozens of other cities, Baldwin wrote in 1966 that “the law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.”
Nearly fifty years before Charlotte, North Carolina police refused to release the video of Keith Scott’s killing because, as the cops claimed, they needed to finish their investigation of their own killing, Baldwin wrote, “I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once—but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself.”
Fifty years before waves of police in riot gear used tear gas and truncheons to protect white-owned businesses in Minneapolis and New York from Black Lives Matter activists, Baldwin wrote that police are “present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.”
2014 ushered in an era of police violence and anti–police violence activism and protest, but Baldwin reminds us that it is only the most recent. In his time, Baldwin was pessimistic about the prospects for police reform. There have been decades of police reform since Baldwin wrote about everyday racialized police violence in Harlem, but as the passages above demonstrate, little has changed. We share Baldwin’s pessimism regarding the possibilities and promises of police reform. Like Baldwin, we understand racialized police violence to be a permanent feature of police as we know it. The excuses and explanations for police violence—too many bad apples, too little faith in police—serve only to draw our attention away from where it should be: on the persistent historical fact of racialized police violence against the poor. In the fifty years since Baldwin wrote about police as a lethal occupying army in the Black ghetto, there has been no end to police reform and equally no end to police killing and the routine harassments, humiliations, and fear that constitute policing. Indeed, if anything, police reform has only intensified the policing and caging of the poor and of people of color.
This is a book about the language of police and police reform, both of which come to us in a register we might call copspeak: a language that limits our ability to understand police as anything other than essential, anything other than the guarantor of civilization and the last line of defense against what police call savagery. When we see the world that copspeak describes to us—one forever threatened by disorder and chaos—we have no choice but to trust that police, even in Ferguson, can get better; no option other than to hope that police reform, even in Baltimore, will work; and no alternative than to believe that the police even in its current form—particularly in its current form—is indispensable. And so copspeak promises us police reform. But police reform never ends police violence, because police reform has always and only sought to improve the image of police and to shore up police legitimacy more generally. It has never sought to confront police as the lethal force it is, one charged by the state with managing poverty, patrolling the color line, and ruthlessly protecting establishment and economic interests.1 When asked by political elites how they could quell the anger in the ghetto, Baldwin reminded them that people in the ghetto knew all too well that police only “protect and serve” the bottom line of developers and real estate speculators. “Are their profits more important than the health of our children?” he asked. But of course this was merely a rhetorical question. The only thing most Black folks hate more than the ghetto, he explained, is police.
Copspeak works because it is convincing to so many. The fear and suspicion that Black and Hispanic and Indigenous and poor and immigrant communities hold for police is matched in the United States by the nearly universal faith and respect held for police by economically secure, mostly white communities. It is to that largely white constituency that police reformers speak in the wake of outrageous police violence. To the furious protesters marching in the streets, police respond with SWAT units and tear gas; to the white communities who nervously watch events unfold on television, they promise better training, an end to overt racial profiling, and more oversight of police. Copspeak is about pacification, not transformation.
When we listen closely, we can hear police admitting all of this. Speaking shortly after her confirmation as US Attorney General in 2015, Loretta Lynch addressed the unrest in Baltimore following the police killing of Freddie Gray. “We have seen brave officers upholding the right to peaceful protest, while also sustaining serious injury during the city’s unfortunate foray into violence. And we have watched it all through the prism of one of the most challenging issues of our time: police–community relations.” Lynch would return to this theme of police–community relations often in the speeches that followed, a theme her predecessor Eric Holder emphasized as well. The goal of police reform, she said in remarks following her swearing-in ceremony, was to “restore trust and faith, both in our laws and in those of us who enforce them.” In other words, the problem is not police violence but the lack of faith some hold for our police officers. It’s a familiar depiction of the problem of police violence as always anomalous rather than by design, as always a problem of bad apples rather than institutionalized violence against the poor. As always about you and rarely about police.
According to this view, something might be broken in US policing, but it can be fixed by new reforms. Something has gone wrong in an otherwise fair and democratic system, but new policies and procedures will restore our faith in the police. This view is troubling for the way it normalizes the violence fundamental to police power. The ideology of reform never calls into question the heart of the problem: that in the quest for “good order” the police institution is first and foremost an institution of state-sanctioned violence and police officers are first and foremost violence workers. Most of this violence is not extralegal, but routine and insidious. It was not the jack-booted thug or rogue cop who killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, after all, but the friendly neighborhood police officer. Police reform does not challenge police violence; rather, it is the key way through which the state manages and justifies its claim to a monopoly on violence. Policing is not broken. It works exactly as designed.
Understanding Police: Capitalism and Colonialism
Baldwin wrote of the police serving “white business interests,” echoing Karl Marx who, writing a century earlier, had identified the centrality of police powers to the birth of capitalism. “Agricultural folk [were] first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured.”2 The peasant became a proletarian at the end of a police nightstick. The role of the police powers in limiting the prospects for the poor was as true in England in the late fifteenth century as it was in Baldwin’s Harlem in 1966, and as it is in Ferguson, Missouri today. If capitalism is anything, it is a well-ordered police state. It has always been the job of police to patrol the poor and to be the occupying army in the ghetto.
When we talk about police, in other words, we’re talking about capitalism. Capitalism is always on the hunt for resources and markets, yes, and also for control of the laboring poor in Europe, for people to enslave in Africa, and for Indigenous land in the new world. Colonial domination via police power inaugurated an explicitly racial capitalism in which Black, Brown and Indigenous suffering and death served ruling class interests. This book focuses on the historical and contemporary role of police in the United States and, to a lesser degree, places such as Canada and Australia. This focus recognizes that although police emerge from different histories in different places and serve different power relations, there are certain shared realities about police no matter where you are. In settler colonial societies such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example, police have played a vital role in imposing and defending a mode of production characterized by the theft of Indigenous land and the ongoing repression of Indigenous people.
When we talk about police in the United States and Canada, in other words, we’re talking about settler colonialism. As the late Mohawk lawyer and professor Patricia Monture-Angus pointed out, it is law and the police powers that made and makes settler colonialism possible. “Think about everything that First Nations people [in Canada] have survived in this country; the taking of our land, the taking of our children, residential schools, the current criminal justice system, the outlawing of potlaches, sundances, and other ceremonies, and the stripping of Indian women (and other Indian people) of their status. Everything we survived as individual or as Indian peoples. How was all this delivered? The answer is simple: through law.”3
The routine, everyday details of policing in the United States are written directly into its founding documents. Consider the language of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The Second Amendment, which is defended today with patriotic zeal by a predominately white constituency, did not extend the right to bear arms as an abstract idea; rather, it advanced this right as part of a colonial obligation of police and settlers to kill Indigenous people in order to establish and defend an emerging settler state.
Capitalism and colonialism cannot exist without a state willing and able to defend colonial domination, private property, the wage relation, and the ongoing patterns of dispossession that characterize all of these. Ain’t no colonialism and ain’t no capitalism without cops.
Police: A Field Guide
Despite this, the institution of police appears self-evident and doesn’t seem to need specific and rigorous thinking. Discussion of police is often limited to officers in uniform and nothing more. It is not unusual to read books and articles about “law and order” or “crime and punishment” that have very little to say about police. In many valuable texts on prisons and punishment, the police are present, lurking on the page, arresting, harassing, and confining poor people of color. But all too often, the connection between police power and state violence is not directly articulated, and police—as idea, institution and process—remains elusive. One common result is a confused or confusing language surrounding police, where “policing” is conflated with “crime-fighting,” or merely “social control” or “law enforcement.” According to this logic the police provide security, and who doesn’t want that? But policing is too powerful an idea and process to go unexamined. The police are a political idea, a public institution, and a product of sociohistorical forces. This book tackles policing head on by defining its institutional logics and limits, its histories, and its mandates, mythologies, and material realities. It is our attempt to think directly about police and its relationship to racial capitalism. In our view, capitalism not only needs cops; cops are the everyday executives that make the liberal capitalist state possible.
This book therefore refuses to see the world that copspeak describes. What we think we know about police, and how we talk about police, too often comes to us through a register patrolled by police and police reformers. What we should call state rape becomes body cavity search. What we should call a ruthless beating becomes pain compliance. What is racial terror becomes stop and frisk. What looks like an occupation gets called deterrence. When we speak the language of copspeak—of police reform—we see the world as police do. Police reform is the science of police legitimation accomplished through the art of euphemism. Police reform speaks in a language carefully calibrated to limit our ability to understand police as anything other than an equitable force and indispensable institution. He was “armed” and thus his death was justified. She was noncompliant and our use of force continuum permitted great violence against her. In all these cases, the language of police sanitizes the fact of everyday humiliation and violence enacted by police. The vocabulary of police reform is a justification machine. Police: A Field Guide offers a different vocabulary, one we hope could replace the taken-for-granted definitions that depict a police view of the world.
In this book you will find definitions for nearly one hundred of the most common terms and concepts that describe and explain police. We define concepts such as arrest, patrol, gun, and many more. The view of police that emerges in this book will be unrecognizable to the police chiefs, police reformers and conservative law and order types who generally view police as an essential force for justice, security, and democracy. Our definitions refuse their standard view that police arrest criminals, patrol crime-infested neighborhoods, and use their guns to deter crime and enhance public safety. The definitions offered in this book provide a critical view of police as violence workers in the defense of a racial and propertied order, not as crime fighters who serve and protect.4
Police: A Field Guide shares the abolitionist dream of a world beyond walls, cages and armed police. In order to bring that future into the present, we need a different vocabulary of police, one that is free of the copspeak that constrains every conversation about police. Police: A Field Guide redefines the terms and concepts that give police momentum. This is not an exhaustive list of entries, but rather a partial list of keywords that, when read together, explain how a language of police reform serves to guarantee a future of police violence and how a redefined language of police might help chart a future free not only of police violence, but also of the police as we currently know it.
The title of this book is thus not a gimmick. Like any other field guide it is based on the premise that what we find in the world is not always self-evident. In the language of police and police reform, police are both the necessary condition for, and a synonym of, civilization.5 And so any critical view of police risks always drowning in the quicksand of copspeak: He was a threat, so police were justified. It wasn’t violence, it was pain compliance. It was police brutality, but police reform will root out the bad apples and put police back on its path to perfection. The truth of police is obscured by the very vocabulary we use to talk about police. The world of police therefore needs a different vocabulary. Police: A Field Guide is a study of the language of police and policing. It examines the taken-for-granted language of police, a language we’re all forced to speak when we talk about police. Most importantly, Police: A Field Guide provides a different way to understand the police nightstick, a different explanation for the police patrol, and a much different definition of police arrest and interrogation than the one police provide. Police: A Field Guide explains why Officer Friendly might not be so friendly. Why the Taser might not be the non-lethal alternative police make it out to be. Why police might have more in common with the military than we’re led to believe.
Police: A Field Guide, like any other field guide, exposes and demystifies a world that is hidden in plain view. Why won’t police oversight stop police violence? What does noncompliance mean in the police lexicon? What might community policing have in common with military counterinsurgency? What do we learn when we take the police uniform, the police badge, and the police dog seriously? What view of police emerges when we refuse the police definition of terms and concepts such as law, security, and order? What happens when we stop seeing the world as police do, as a world populated by threats and emergencies and disorder?
Police: A Field Guide is not an encyclopedia of police and policing. We make no claim to comprehensiveness. This extends to the sites of our analyses. Most of our examples and illustrations focus on the United States. This is a function of our location in the United States, and of our particular interests and experience. The terms and concepts compiled here reflect our own research and thinking on police, influenced by the work of many scholars and activists, and we suspect they will resonate beyond the United States. Readers throughout the world will see similarities between the police prowling these pages and the ones patrolling their streets.
This is also not a dictionary. The entries stand on their own, but when read together they provide a critical theory to understand police and policing. While the book can be read cover to cover, we suggest a different approach. Start by selecting a term or concept at random or based on your own interest. In it you will find other terms and concepts rendered in red type. This indicates that those terms are defined elsewhere in the book. One reader might start with pacification and then read community policing, then ghetto, then broken windows, and so on. Another reader might select law and then read order, deterrence, police helicopter, and so on. In this way, Police: A Field Guide is not the same book for every reader. Each reader pursues the line of thought they find most interesting and the connections they find most pressing.
“The world in which people find themselves,” James Baldwin wrote, “is not simply a vindictive plot imposed on them from above; it is also the world they have helped to make. They have helped to make, and help to sustain it by sharing the assumptions which hold their world together.” When we speak the language of police—copspeak—we risk seeing the world like police, and thus we help to hold that world together. Police: A Field Guide offers a tour through the shared assumptions that sustain the police view of the world so that we might abolish it.
Notes:
1 See Williams, Kristian, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, AK Press, 2015; Murakawa, Naomi, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Oxford University Press, 2014; Neocleous, Mark, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, Pluto Press, 2000.
2 Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 1 [1867], Ben Fowkes, trans., Penguin, 1976, 899.
3 Monture-Angus, Patricia, “Standing against Canadian Law: Naming Omissions of Race, Culture, Gender,” in Comack, Elizabeth, ed., Locating Law: Race/Class/Gender Connections, Fernwood, 1999, 93.
4 Huggins, Martha K., Mika Haritos-Fatouros and Philip G. Zimbardo, Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities, University of California Press, 2002.
5 Neocleous, Mark, “The Police of Civilization: The War on Terror as Civilizing Offensive,” International Political Sociology 5:2 (2011), 144–59.