Weaponology:
Technologies and Tactics of Police Violence
Police are violence workers. This is true whether they carry a gun or not because violence is a condition of police work. But it is also true that cops love carrying guns, and in the United States the firearm has become the essential modern police weapon. They carry Glock, Colt, and Ruger handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, bolt-action shotguns, pump-action shotguns, and flashbang grenade launchers. They carry shoulder-fired weapons that scramble ocular fluid and blind people. They carry Tasers on one hip, handguns on the other. They pile rifles and shotguns into the trunk of their cruisers. Even when cops aren’t shooting their guns, their pistol always remains displayed on the hip, visible to all, sending a message of security and protection to the good guys while threatening the bad guys with lethal, and legal, state violence.
Cops love shooting their guns. Most people who are killed by police in the United States, nearly 2,000 every year, are killed by a cop who fires a gun at them. And cops are very good and very practiced at shooting their guns. Each September since 2010, teams of cops from all over the United States gather in Albuquerque, New Mexico to practice killing people with guns. Over the course of two weeks at the National Police Shooting Championships, what protesters call the “killer cop” competition, they compete against each other in obstacle shooting courses based on “a hypothetical law enforcement encounter” in events with names like “head shots only,” which the National Rifle Association (one of the event sponsors) describes as important because police officers need to “incorporate head shots into their training.” A scenario called “Accurate, Fast and Fun” evaluates cops for their ability to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time while having the most possible fun. “Drunk Buddies” imagines a scenario in which drunk, knife-wielding men attack police while yelling “kill the cops.” Police win if they can kill everyone. Seventy six cops competed in the competition in 2013. At the time more than one-third of them worked at agencies that were or recently had been under federal investigation for human rights violations.1
Cops in the United States are heavily armed and this is largely taken for granted. It is true that some—police abolitionists and liberal reformers alike—voice concerns about the troubling implications of police militarization, but by and large the arming of police receives broad support in the United States. The National Rifle Association and other right-wing gun enthusiast groups like to claim that “an armed society is a polite society,” which endorses the right of individuals to arm themselves as they see fit, which then justifies more and more powerful police weaponry because of the number of people who arm themselves as they see fit. The irony here is that the Second Amendment, which guarantees a heavily armed population in the United States, was never about the right of individuals to own weapons, but rather was about the need for an armed militia to police Indigenous bodies and control Native land. The Second Amendment was about settler colonialism, not individual liberty.2 It served to expand the power of the state to control Native land and later, through the slave patrol, to control Black labor. Today it serves to justify the expanded use of arms by police. An armed society is not a polite society; it is a policed society.
The NRA is also not at all interested in arming everyone equally. The NRA and the police have long feared Black gun ownership. This is partly because historically Black gun ownership has often been fueled by the need of Black people to defend themselves against the police and white people with guns.3 The rate of Black gun ownership often rises in direct response to the racist violence of white supremacy. Thus the state has always sought to disarm Black, Brown, and Native people, not only during chattel slavery and Jim Crow, but also when Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, passed gun control legislation in order to stop the Black Panther Party for Self Defense from arming its members for protection against the police. The police support gun ownership for the white middle and upper class because it is a class understood as de facto police. But this support for gun ownership ends when historically oppressed populations arm themselves.
If you’ve lived your whole life in the United States, you might be surprised to learn that the use of guns by police has always been, and in some places remains, controversial, not commonplace. Historians of police often point to Robert Peel, an eighteenth-century British politician, as the father of modern police. Peel insisted police should not carry guns, partly to ease the tensions of those suspicious that an armed police force would be, in effect, a domestic army. Peel is usually invoked by reformers who seek to “disarm” the police. But to limit a discussion of police violence to the problem of shooting deaths risks elevating spectacular police violence—the SWAT assault and the hail of bullets—over everyday police violence. The shooting deaths might end, but what about the arbitrary harassment, or the racialized targeting, or the chokeholds and rough rides? Those will continue as before because police are violence workers.
Notes:
1 Correia, David, “‘Killer Cop’ Competition Comes to Albuquerque,” La Jicarita, August 26, 2014.
2 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2014.
3 Umoja, Akinyele Omowale, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, NYU Press, 2013.
The throw-down weapon, or drop gun, is police slang for an untraceable weapon, usually a gun or a knife, that police officers sometimes carry in addition to their service weapon. If an officer is involved in a shooting with an unarmed suspect, the officer will plant the throw-down weapon near the victim in order to mislead investigators into declaring the shooting justified. In the late 1990s, an investigation into the Los Angeles Police Department’s CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit in its downtown Rampart division revealed that officers routinely planted evidence and used what they called “drop guns” on suspects.1 Similar investigations have implicated New York Police Department precincts in engaging in the routine use of throw-down weapons, often planting them on suspects in order to make arrests.2
Cell phone video of the 2014 police killing of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina showed officer Michael Slager shooting the unarmed Scott in the back, killing him, and then planting an electronic control weapon, commonly known as a stun gun or Taser, near Scott’s body. Until the video surfaced and contradicted Slager’s claims, the officer said that he had shot and killed Scott because Scott had taken his Taser. In all cases, the use of throw-down weapons demonstrates that police recognize their use of violence as needing justification and therefore will often try to stack the deck in their favor in order to legitimate their bloodletting.
Notes:
1 Boyer, Peter J., “Bad Cops,” New Yorker, May 21, 2001.
2 Clifford, Stephanie, “NYPD Under Investigation for Routinely Planting Guns on Suspects and Fabricating Circumstances of Arrests,” New York Times, January 17, 2015.
A Taser is a handheld, battery-powered conductive energy device, or stun gun, that the police and military use as a “less-than-lethal” weapon. It delivers 50,000 volts of electrical current into a person’s body via electrically charged darts or electrodes attached to wires. Police are trained to fire the darts at a suspect in order to produce total neuromuscular incapacitation. Police departments purchase a version that comes with a “drive stun” mode that allows police to place the weapon directly on a person and drive the electrical current directly into the body. Police call this a pain compliance tactic, though a number of Department of Justice investigations of police use of Tasers describe this tactic as “street punishment.”
A common slang term for a Taser among police and its victims is “cattle prod.” The analogy is not coincidental. The first police conductive energy devices were in fact cattle prods. Police began using cattle prods in the 1940s for crowd control and as an interrogation tactic. Cattle prods were also used for crowd control in Alabama against civil rights demonstrators, and notorious Chicago police detective Jon Burge used electrical current and cattle prods in interrogation in order to torture confessions out of Black men. The “cattle prod” as police weapon evokes the image of the animal as the object of police interest. The Taser is a cattle prod with the Taser corporate logo embossed on its side.
The physicist who invented the Taser, Jack Cover, was inspired by science fiction novels and the Watts riots of 1965. He recalled that he read a newspaper article “about a man who had harmlessly gotten stuck on an electric fence for three hours … the current immobilized his muscles, and I thought, ‘Why not convert that into a hand item?’”
The United Nations declared Tasers a tool of torture in 2007. The American Civil Liberties Union has documented a pattern of Taser use by police against children, pregnant women, people who suffer from mental illness or are in mental health crises, and people who fail to “properly” comply while passively resisting police commands. In December of 2009 two Albuquerque, New Mexico police officers fired Tasers in drive-stun mode into the body of an unarmed man who had refused to comply with police orders and who they knew had previously poured gasoline on himself. He burst into flames. The ACLU recorded thirty-one Taser-related deaths in the United States between 2001 and 2008. In 2015 alone the Washington Post recorded forty-eight deaths associated with the police use of Tasers.
Tasers are made by Axon, formerly called Taser International, a US-based weapons manufacturer that sells electrical armaments to the military and police, including a number of versions of the Taser handheld stun gun. It claims electrical weapons are a safe, less-than-lethal option for police. The broad adoption of Tasers—more than 15,000 police and military agencies worldwide use them—suggests that police recognize force as an unresolvable political problem, to which Tasers provide a technical solution. In other words, Tasers depoliticize police violence and depict it instead as merely a problem of insufficient tools.
A 2012 Amnesty International study found that between 2001 and 2012 more than 500 people had been killed by police in the United States and Canada after being Tasered. In nearly all cases, Tasers were used against unarmed people as a pain compliance tactic. In May of 2011, Waterbury, Connecticut police officer Adrian Sanchez arrested twenty-six-year-old Marcus Brown for acting erratically and failing to comply with officer commands. He handcuffed Brown and placed him in the back of his patrol car. According to Sanchez, Brown continued to act erratically, so Sanchez opened the door of his squad car and fired his Taser into Brown’s chest. Brown died less than an hour later.
Police often claim that the deaths that follow from their use of Tasers are the result of a preexisting condition among victims called Excited Delirium Syndrome. The owners of Axon, the brothers Rick and Tom Smith, have argued that all people killed after being Tasered would have died anyway because of this condition. Police make the same argument and assert that their actions and the use of the Taser during an in-custody death is always the fault of the victim, who, because he or she died, therefore must have suffered from Excited Delirium. Neither the American Medical Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizes any such syndrome.
A 2009 study in the American Journal of Cardiology concluded that “Taser deployment was associated with a substantial increase in in-custody sudden deaths.” A 2011 study by the US Department of Justice concluded, however, that “there is no conclusive medical evidence within the state of current research that indicates a high risk of serious injury or death from the direct or indirect cardiovascular or metabolic effects of short-term [conducted energy device] exposure in healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons.”
Note how the DOJ study defines “less-than-lethal” through a conditional claim: Taser is always less-than-lethal if used against “healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons.” Since a Taser is not lethal for a “normal” or “healthy” person, a Taser cannot be the cause of death. Thus if a person dies after being Tasered by the police, it is only because that person is not “normal” or “healthy.” This kind of logic absolves Axon and police of any wrongdoing, and instead blames the victim for their own death.
What is more dangerous, a Taser in the hands of police, or the medico-legal argument about its use that absolves police of responsibility for the dead they leave? Consider again Marcus Brown, who walked into the emergency room of a Waterbury area hospital just after midnight in May 2011 seeking medical assistance. He was upset and agitated. A receptionist refused to admit him and instead called police. Officer Sanchez handcuffed Brown and placed him in the back of a patrol car. Sanchez, who in his report described Brown as agitated and upset, fired his Taser into Brown’s chest, an unarmed, restrained man who Sanchez knew to be stressed and seeking medical assistance. A subsequent Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice investigation exonerated the officer. The report reads less like an investigation of Sanchez and more like a review of Taser’s immutable safety. Since the DOJ study exonerates Axon, Connecticut exonerated Sanchez. “Officer Sanchez could not reasonably believe that his actions were likely to cause serious or lasting physical injury to Mr. Brown” and therefore “the use of [the Taser] cannot be determined to have caused Mr. Brown’s death.”
This is the warning label found on the boxes in which Taser Internation ships its stun guns to police:
Tear gas is a toxic chemical agent that irritates the eyes, nose, throat and lungs of those that come into contact with it. The name tear gas is a misnomer, or better still a euphemism, in that it suggests that exposure merely causes tears in its victims. At a minimum, exposure will result in the uncontrollable emission of tears and mucus from eyes and noses, and will induce violent coughing that could last for hours. At worst it kills its victims.
A variety of chemical agents—CS gas, pepper spray, and others—fall under the general category of tear gas, and nearly all were originally developed for use in World War I. Following the war, the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol banned the use of all chemical agents, including tear gas, in warfare. The protocol and a follow-up 1993 agreement concluded that tear gas was too dangerous to use in war. Despite the ban, the United States used tear gas in Vietnam. Soldiers fired canisters into tunnels in order to asphyxiate people. In 2007, Wikileaks released a secret military report that revealed the US military deployed nearly 3,000 chemical weapons in Iraq. The 1925 convention, however, expressly permits the use of chemical agents for “law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes.”
Chemical weapons are too dangerous for military use, but not for police use? Military personnel, according to this logic, cannot distinguish between less-than-lethal and lethal gas during warfare, whereas domestic targets of chemical agents can be assured that police will only ever use nonlethal chemical agents. And police use a lot of it. As a theoretically nonlethal weapon, tear gas has come to serve an important reform function. Tear gas produces order without appearing to cause pain and suffering. CS gas has become among the most common less-than-lethal weapons in the police crowd control arsenal.
But CS gas is only nonlethal when used under open, ventilated conditions and when exposure is limited to a short duration. But this is never how police use CS or other tear gases. Police do not just use tear gas; they weaponize it. It is used to intimidate, to punish, to inflict pain and suffering, and to torture. A 2012 report on its use by police in Bahrain noted that tear gas was not used for crowd control but to “punish protesters, inflict suffering, and suppress dissent.”1 Among the earliest police uses of tear gas was a “tear gas club,” a combination tear gas and nightstick weapon. With it a cop could simultaneously strike a person with a billy club while also igniting a small explosive in the shaft that delivered tear gas directly into the face of a victim. One researcher notes, “In the 1920s, Chicago police pioneered the technique of pumping tear gas into small cells. Police would place a box over the prisoner’s head and release a canister inside the box. Advances in pumping technology now allow torturers to apply mace, pepper spray, or tear gas directly into keyholes or the mouth or face of prisoners. This technique appeared in Israeli prisons in the 1970s, and spread to American and Canadian prisons in the 1980s, and then Belgium and Taiwan in the 1990s.”2
Among the first US domestic targets of CS gas were striking West Virginia coal miners. Bayonets and rifles, the usual crowd control tools, left a bloody battlefield behind. CS gas promised to replace the standard punitive police approach with a gentler, more “progressive” one. In a 1921 article advocating the use of gas against workers, police were told that gas “aim[s] at isolating the individual and restoring him to normality.”3 This was a “humane” alternative to dealing with the “mob.” Salesmen for tear gas manufacturers would follow headlines for labor disputes and sell tear gas to local police. A Senate subcommittee investigation into industrial-munitions sales found that “between 1933 and 1937, more than $1.25 million [about $21 million today] worth of ‘tear and sickening gas’ had been purchased in the US ‘chiefly during or in anticipation of strikes.’”4
Less than lethal, more humane, leaves no mark—none of this is true. In most cases, police, using pressurized grenade launchers, fire weapons-grade CS gas in explosive canisters directly into crowds and into enclosed buildings full of people. The practice occasionally kills victims through blunt-force trauma alone. Most CS gas is released in aerosol form, which causes severe burns and blistering at close range. As a result, in addition to the intended temporary incapacitation of CS exposure that reformers approve of, there are also more severe risks such as pulmonary damage, severe burns, permanent blinding, miscarriage and death. Between 1990 and 1995, at least sixty-one fatalities nationwide—twenty-seven of them in California—were reported following police use of pepper spray on suspects.5
The use of tear gas by police is so common that protestors often come prepared by wearing gas masks or face coverings. A common police tactic, used in Seattle at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests and during the 2011 Occupy protests at the University of California, Davis, is to pull off the facemasks of protesters and deliver a form of pepper spray directly to the eyes. When the eyes are exposed at close range, the risks of pepper spray include blindness.
The United States is among the world’s largest producers and exporters of tear gas. “Between January 1987 and December 1988, the United States exported $6.5 million worth of tear gas guns, grenades, launchers, and launching cartridges to Israel. Rights groups recorded up to 40 deaths resulting from tear gas during the First Intifada, as well as thousands of cases of illness.”6 US arms manufacturers export tear gas to Israel while Palestinian activists export their experience dealing with chemical weapons back to the United States. In 2014 Palestinian activists trained Black Lives Matter activists in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere how to protect themselves from the threat, as police in Ferguson, Missouri fired tear gas into buildings, directly at protesters, and into crowds that included children during the unrest that followed the police killing of Michael Brown.
Most of the chemical weapons used by state security police in Egypt and Tunisia against Arab Spring protesters were made by a Pennsylvania company called Combined Systems, Inc., a firm that also provides chemical weapons to municipal police departments as well as the Israeli and US militaries. CSI makes a number of different kinds of chemical munitions, flash-bang grenades, various types of grenade launchers and handcuffs. Why would a chemical weapons manufacturer also make handcuffs? Because CSI is in the business of selling order. And order is what police buy from CSI.
Tear gas must be understood as part of a police arsenal intended to produce order. Tear gas, like handcuffs, incapacitates a person. And tear gas, like handcuffs, is a pain compliance technique that can leave no obvious physical injuries. Through pain and incapacitation, tear gas and handcuffs can appear to magically produce order by pacifying unruly subjects. Thus tear gas is the perfect police weapon because police fear the crowd, the mob, the riot, the collective. Chemical weapons scatter the crowd, and return things to “normal.” No more people in the streets making political demands, no more people threatening private property. Just gas and the order it delivers.
Notes:
1 Sollom, Richard, Holly Atkinson, Marissa Brodney, Hans Hogrefe and Andrea Gittleman, Weaponizing Tear Gas: Bahrain’s Unprecedented Use of Toxic Chemical Agents Against Civilians, Physicians for Human Rights, 2012, 1.
2 Rejali, Darius, Torture and Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2009, 290.
3 Knappen, Theo, “War Gases for Dispersing Mobs,” Gas Age-Record 48:19 (1921), 702.
4 Feigenbaum, Anna, “100 Years of Tear Gas,” Atlantic, August 16, 2014.
5 Pinsky, Mark, “If Pepper Spray Isn’t Lethal, Why All the Deaths?” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1995.
6 Feigenbaum, “100 Years of Tear Gas.”
Handcuffs are artifacts of unfreedom. They are a routine sign of the unfreedom built into the very foundation of liberal democracy. They are a means of managing bodies at the point of arrest, of transporting arrestees to the poor house, the jail, or the gallows. Handcuffs have long played an important but overlooked role in the violence of racial capitalism. The modern police notion of handcuffs enters the English language in the late seventeenth century, the same time police power emerges as a central organizing logic for the administration of the poor and private property. Today’s handcuffs are just a shinier and more standardized restraint system than the ropes, rawhides, chains, leg irons, and shackles that were central to both the feudal era and racial capitalism’s regimes of settler colonialism and chattel slavery.
Although it might be easy to dismiss handcuffs as just a basic tool, officers are trained in all sorts of methods to restrain subjects with handcuffs, and they are one of the most frequently used weapons in the police arsenal. It might be true that the average police officer will never use his or her gun, but this can’t be said for handcuffs.
Handcuffs are used not only for restraint and incapacitation but also for pain compliance. Police scientists have designed handcuffs that shock captives—“stun-cuffs”—or even administer drugs to help incapacitate unruly captives. To be handcuffed is not a pleasant experience, and that’s just how police want it. If you are arrested, police will cuff your wrists together tightly behind your back, often for hours. And in the United States, handcuffs are no stranger to police torture and police rape, such as by NYPD officers in 1997 when they sodomized Abner Louima with a broken broomstick. In Chicago, Angel Perez alleged that he was handcuffed to a metal bar in the infamous holding facility known as Homan Square and then sodomized by a metal object, which he believed was the barrel of a cop’s handgun.1 The serial rapist cop Daniel Holtzclaw handcuffed a Black woman to a hospital bed before he raped her. Abraham Joseph, a Texas police officer, handcuffed and then raped an undocumented woman on the trunk of his police cruiser in Houston in 2011.
Perhaps more than any other weapon, handcuffs evoke the ways that violence is a condition of police work, and that the ability to incapacitate bodies is always central to the police project of fabricating order. More specifically, handcuffs signify the individualizing powers of capture and arrest, and it is the handcuff that demonstrates police as the first incarcerators, the first captors. Handcuffs exist on a carceral continuum that includes the back of the police car, the jail, the courthouse, the prison. But as part of this continuum, the handcuff can easily be taken for granted, rarely recognized for its own role in projects of unfreedom.
Handcuffs are so normal, and common, and their use so routine that their insidious role in domination is often ignored. Handcuffs serve the police desire for domination: once handcuffed there is nothing the police can’t do to the captive. There is no way around the fact that handcuffs are a form of bodily and psychological domination. To be handcuffed is to be controlled, violently subjected to the prospect of violence delivered in more extreme ways—beaten by a nightstick or raped by the barrel of a gun. Incapacitation opens the very real possibility of extreme degradation and torture. Once a cop handcuffs a subject, that subject is now completely at the mercy of the state and its agents. Perhaps this is why cops themselves frequently complain, and comically so, about being “handcuffed” by laws and the courts. It is an admission that police are supposed to always be in a dominant, and dominating, position.
Notes:
1 Goodman, Amy, “As Chicago Pays Victims of Past Torture, Police Face New Allegations of Abuse at Homan Square,” Democracy Now!, May 15, 2015.
The snarling police dog, a German Shepherd or Belgian Malinois, lays bare the predatory animus of police. The police dog offers the starkest example of policing as a pursuit, a chase, a hunt, transforming humans into prey. The police dog trained to attack is among the most normalized features of every major police department, with little attention paid to this animalized form of police terror.
Police dogs are an extension of watch and guard dogs. The thousands of dogs that assist officers on patrol are trained to “sniff out” contraband like drugs or explosives and also to engage in “criminal apprehension” by biting fleeing or noncompliant subjects. Through what cops call “bite work,” police weaponize the dog and literally animalize police violence. Nearly every day in the United States a police dog chases and bites a person. Their prey are often suspects but this count also includes bystanders bitten by “accident.” These are brutal, bloody attacks; the wounds inflicted by a trained attack K-9 are intended to be debilitating and disfiguring. Victims often require prosthetics and surgery and suffer through long, painful recoveries. Victims often describe the panicked moment of attack by a dog’s powerful jaws and piercing teeth as like being eaten alive, literally devoured by the state.
Trevon Robinson, a fifteen-year-old Black teenager, was severely bitten by a police dog in the Los Angeles area in the early 1990s. “I said, ‘Please, please get the dog off me.’ I was crying … Sometimes I have a dream of a dog attacking me … I wake up and my heart is beating so fast I can’t go back to sleep.” A seventeen-year-old girl spoke of a similar psycho-political experience of animalized state violence: “I was scared to death. I thought it was going to rip me apart.”1
Police dogs first appeared in the United States in the early 1900s, with New York City among the first places to experiment in the use of dogs. In this early stage, the police dog patrolled nighttime cities and police administrators and journalists claimed the dog struck terror in the hearts of vagrants and prowlers. Their fundamental task, however, has never been crime fighting, but the protection of private property and the policing of surplus populations. The police dog makes sense as a technique of police terror only when understood within the context of the class war police wage on behalf of the bourgeoisie.
By the late 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Black freedom struggle, city councils and police administrators throughout the United States turned to the dog to pacify Black and Brown insurgency. It was during this period that “Canine Corps,” as they were often called, first proliferated across the country. Those advocating for the introduction of dogs to the police force saw in trained dogs, especially German Shepherds but also Doberman Pinschers and Rottweilers, a powerful new weapon, a potent crowd control method, a terrifying means to deter and apprehend “criminals” and, perhaps most importantly, a new and menacing way to patrol the ghetto and white business districts. The greatest utility of the police dog was its ability to instill fear, what police referred to as the dog’s “psychological effect.”
For many Black folks the police dog is nothing other than a weapon of anti-Black state terror. The images of K-9s set loose on Black civil rights protesters during the 1960s remain some of the most enduring and terrifying of the era. Although this terror is usually thought of as primarily a Southern phenomenon, the police dog was used frequently against Black crowds and people in Northern cities too. Police dogs attacked and bit Black men, women, and children, echoing the historical terror of the notorious Cuban Bloodhounds trained to hunt down runaway slaves. Ultimately, the use of dogs for crowd control proved too controversial, and patrol and “criminal apprehension” became the primary accepted use of dogs.
The police dog enshrines in police a snarling brutality and savage violence that defies any claim to professed “enlightened” standards. But this is not how police see it. The dog is always described by police as a reform measure, and as a more “efficient” and “humane” tactic of policing. This eventually became most clear with the introduction of the drug or bomb “sniffer dogs” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here the dog was, and still is today, framed as a highly scientific tool that greatly enhanced the searching powers of police, despite the fact that sniffer dogs have been shown to produce “false alerts” quite frequently. We also know that these dogs are highly influenced by the perceptions and actions of their human handlers, and there is growing evidence demonstrating racial discrimination in drug sniffs.
But forget its terror and its racist and classist history, we’re told. The sniffer dog fights the war on drugs and the patrol dog fights the war on crime. And the animal comes to us not as the snarling beast but the friendly pet. The police dog, cops say, is “colorblind” and heralds a “post-racial” era in policing. An enormous police dog industry reinforces this view through magazines, conferences, training organizations, and public relations experts. Meanwhile police continue to use the police dog in highly racialized ways. Indeed, the historical anti-Black terror of the police dog was evoked in Ferguson when police used them to hold back crowds protesting the police killing of Michael Brown. Every person a police dog has bit in Ferguson, Missouri has been Black.
There is something about the police dog that plays off of a primordial human fear: the animal terror of being hunted down and devoured. This is what the police dog teaches us. Despite its own claims to civility, the police power is a predatory power. Malcolm X once said that “police dogs and police clubs” provided the proof that the “American white man” was “one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken people into captivity.” He referred to police officers as a “two-legged dog.” It is in the growling police dog that the brutal image of police emerges most clearly, and in the bloody wounds and torn flesh of their victims that the point of the police power comes so clearly into focus. There is no better contemporary example than the famous phrase popularized by a cartoon police dog, McGruff the Crime Dog, in the 1980s: “Take a bite out of crime!” Police, after all, is a beast.
Notes:
1 Wall, Tyler, “Legal Terror and the Police Dog,” Radical Philosophy 188 (2014), 2–7.
Racial profiling refers to the practice among police of choosing whom to search, whom to stop and frisk and whom to arrest based on race. It is discriminatory because it bases police practice on a person’s perceived race, ethnicity, religion or national origin, rather than on evidence or suspicion of criminal activity. Racial profiling is a common practice among police, and though they deny it, it is often the primary factor when police consider who to stop, who to search or who to detain. According to New York ACLU stop and frisk data, nine out of ten of the more than 650,000 people who were stopped and frisked by New York City police in 2011 were innocent of any suspected crimes. And more than 91 percent of all the people police stopped were people of color.
Police disguise their racial profiling in a number of ways. The legal concept of reasonable suspicion provides cover for much of the racial profiling that police practice. Reasonable suspicion requires that police establish specific and articulable facts based on rational inferences that a person is engaged in or involved in criminal activity before they conduct a stop and frisk. So instead of stopping people based on race, police claim they stop people because those people were in a crime-infested neighborhood, or because they made furtive movements.
Predictive policing provides additional cover for the practice of racial profiling. Predictive policing, also known as data-driven or intelligence-led policing, is the practice of collecting demographic and crime data and using that data to predict criminal “hot spots” and “future crimes.” Predictive policing tells us that stop and frisk is based on computer algorithms, not racial bias, and thus as a practice is not discriminatory. It serves to make police appear objective and therefore scientific, rather than biased and therefore discriminatory.
Anti–police violence activists and organizations have used the overwhelming evidence of racial profiling by police to argue that the higher rates of arrest and police violence in communities of color have little to do with crime and disorder and everything to do with racialized policing and the disproportionate targeting of poor communities of color by police. This is an important critique that has helped to shine light on the practice of racial profiling as an example of the racialized nature of policing.
There is, however, an often unseen political pitfall in the critique of racial profiling when it is centered in struggles against police violence and racist police practices. For one, it risks depicting the problem as one related to a particular practice—stop and frisk for example—that can be isolated, critiqued and, hopefully, reformed. If only we could prove that police racially profile people, we might then be able to convince or force police to quit the practice of racially profiling people, the argument goes. When offered this way, racial profiling portrays racialized policing not as systemic or fundamental to police power, but rather as an isolated and specific issue that can be rectified. This is critique in a liberal register, consistent with establishment notions of police reform that refuse to see police as an inherently racist institution.
When offered as a liberal critique of police, racial profiling transforms racism or white supremacy into a kind of idiosyncrasy of police that absolutely limits, rather than expands, the horizon of the anti–police violence struggle. Racialized police violence is the rule, not the exception. Reforms that propose to weed out racist cops or train the racism out of cops will always serve in the end to justify rather than end future racialized police violence. After all, the reformists will remind us, now that reforms have been implemented and cops have been professionalized, that racism has been filtered out of them and their practices. And so racism can’t possibly have anything to do with their violence.
This is not to say that radical movements to end police violence secretly wish to expand police power (although it is very literally the goal of some reformist efforts). Rather it is to say that too much is at stake to risk falling into the “realist” or “pragmatic” trap represented by concepts such as racial profiling. “On so many occasions when the protest movements made public statements they expressed an understanding of police violence as the rule of the day and not as a shocking exception. However, when it came time to formulate practical proposals to change the fundamental nature of policing, all they could come up with concretely were more oversight committees, litigation, and civilian review boards (‘with teeth’), none of which lived up to the collective intuition about what the police were actually doing … the language of alternatives and the terms of relevance are constantly dragged into the political discourse they seek to oppose, namely, that the system works and is capable of reform.”1
A critique of police that relies on racial profiling is much like a critique that complains about police brutality, which views the problem of police violence as one of excessive police violence. We demand an end to police brutality, and if we win we’ll get cops who fire fewer bullets at people, and who kill with a Taser instead of a gun. If we demand an end to racial profiling and win that fight we’ll get cops with endless diversity training who kill fewer Black people with a chokehold, who kill fewer adolescent boys and girls of color, and who maybe rape fewer women than before.
Notes:
1 Martinot, Steve and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities 9:2 (2003), 170.
Stop and frisk is a police practice in which officers stop, question and frisk pedestrians or motorists who police suspect of criminal activity. They stop, question, frisk and, often, search. The practice is a central part of broken windows policing, a theory first elaborated by James Wilson and George Kelling in their 1982 Atlantic Monthly article that proposed a zero tolerance policy on minor “quality of life” offenses. Wilson and Kelling urged police to take “informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order.” Their theory imagined that disorder came from a breakdown in normative, middle-class values. Consider how they described it:
A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.1
Police, according to Wilson and Kelling, should treat panhandlers and loiterers with zero tolerance. They admitted that the “steps” they proposed—arbitrary search and constant harassment—had no legal merit. But they claimed to know what the neighborhood wanted and thus depicted the issue as a pressing moral problem that only police could solve. Neighborhoods, they concluded, wanted police to remove “panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.”2 The courts might throw out the arrest, but the arrest would clear the street. And even when the stop and frisk doesn’t produce an arrest, it puts “them” on notice. Some “drunks and derelicts,” according to Wilson and Kelling, “knew their place,” but others didn’t.3 The people who didn’t know their place were not the “decent folk” who deserved police protection. Instead they were loiterers or “people who broke the informal rules” and they should be “arrested for vagrancy.”4 Broken windows is about nostalgia for an imagined past and it is also about fear—the fear Wilson and Kelling claim that “decent folk” suffer when police don’t keep order in their neighborhoods, and, more importantly, the fear that Wilson and Kelling want police to impose on the “drunks and derelicts” through constant stop and frisk searches.
Stop and frisk is thus not about crime fighting, it is about putting people in their place. Former Boston, New York and Los Angeles police chief William Bratton became Wilson and Kelling’s most prominent acolyte, popularizing stop and frisk at police departments throughout the United States and abroad. Under Bratton, stop and frisk is how police harass, almost exclusively, poor Black or Latino residents. When stop and frisk ends in arrest, it is often for minor offenses such as loitering, trespassing, disorderly conduct, failure to obey, disturbing the peace, jaywalking, vagrancy, or graffiti. But more importantly, stop and frisk rarely results in arrest. The point of stop and frisk, as Wilson and Kelling admitted, is not about fighting crime. It is about suppressing crime through constant surveillance, intelligence gathering, searching, questioning, and frisking. Bratton, like Wilson and Kelling, celebrate the “order” that results from stop and frisk—an order they consider a restoration of quality of life. And if we take Bratton at his word, we can only conclude that to police “quality of life,” since stop and frisk zeroes in on poor Black and Latino communities, is something constantly under threat by the very presence of people of color. Stop and frisk is thus a method to impose racialized inequality through fear and intimidation.
Under Bratton, the NYPD flooded Black and Latino neighborhoods with cops who engaged in aggressive stop and frisk practices. The judge in Floyd et al. v. NYC, a lawsuit filed by community groups that sought to stop NYPD’s stop and frisk practices, agreed that the practice was racially motivated and designed to intimidate. “The NYPD’s practice of making stops that lack individualized reasonable suspicion has been so pervasive and persistent as to become not only a part of the NYPD’s standard operating procedure, but a fact of daily life in some New York City neighborhoods.” And those neighborhoods, the court was quick to point out, are predominately Black and Latino, and the people for whom stop and frisk is part of daily life are nearly universally poor people of color. One NYPD officer, for example, stopped and frisked 120 people during the third quarter of 2009, and every single person was Black.
New York City might get most of the attention when considering stop and frisk policing, but the practice is built into the architecture of policing everywhere. Stop and frisk as it is practiced today is a more recent version of what police have called a Terry stop. According to the 1968 Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio, a police officer can stop, question and frisk a person without first securing a search warrant as long as that stop is based on “specific and articulable facts.” The Terry frisk is mainly used against Black and Latino populations, but stop and frisk is always at play whenever police pull someone over because the unaccountable discretion extended to police means there is always a reason to conduct a search, and “specific and articulable facts” can always be invented after the fact.
The Baltimore Police Department saw stop and frisk as a way of “striking fear into loiterers city-wide.”5 In a city of 620,000 people, BPD officers “make several hundred thousand pedestrian stops per year.” Nearly all of these stops happen in poor, Black neighborhoods. “One African-American man was stopped 34 times … in the Central and Western Districts alone, and several hundred residents were stopped at least 10 times. Countless individuals—including Freddie Gray—were stopped multiple times in the same week without being charged with a crime.” During one three-year period, BPD officers made 1.5 stops per resident in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods, where they arrested more than 750 people on a charge of being “rogue or vagabond” and another 650 for “playing cards.” These are tactics that Wilson and Kelling called “order-maintenance” and that the BPD described as “corner clearing.” Without any evidence or suspicion of wrongdoing, cops would stop and frisk young Black men and order them off the street. We “do not treat criminals like citizens,” one BPD sergeant told the US Department of Justice, demonstrating the extent to which stop and frisk is premised on racial profiling and the criminalization of Blackness.6
Some officers with the Baltimore Police Department refer to the stop and frisk patrol as working the “VCR detail”—the “violation of civil rights” detail. But it is more than a civil rights violation. The point of stop and frisk is to use fear to impose order. As Didier Fassin showed, stop and frisk imposes “a pure power relationship that functions as a recall to order—not to public order, which is not under threat by youngsters quietly conversing on a bench or joyfully playing soccer, but to a social order, which is one of inequality (between the police and the youth) and injustice (with regard to the law and simply to dignity) that has to be impressed in the body.”7 The point is to humiliate a target population, in other words, with constant stops and harassment.
Stop and frisk, and broken windows policing more generally, is part of what police call community policing. As the experience in Baltimore and New York described above makes clear, community policing defines the community in very narrow terms. Community, in other words, is never meant to be inclusive; rather, it is always exclusive in nature. Through stop and frisk, police seek to “take back” the city from the poor and people of color and give it to the wealthy and white. When officers use stop and frisk to “clear the corner,” they also clear the way for increased development and new urban investment. In short, stop and frisk makes gentrification possible. Stop and frisk is always about imposing a moral and racialized order of patriarchal capitalism on the poor in the city. Loitering means you’re not buying, panhandling means you’re not making a wage, drinking means you’re not home with a family, streetwalking means you’re not serving a husband. So fuck you! You know the drill. Hands against the wall and spread your legs. This is not your city.
Notes:
1 Wilson, James Q. and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” in Dunham, Roger G. and Geoffrey P. Alpert, eds., Critical Issues in Policing: Contemporary Readings, Waveland Press, 2015, 458.
2 Ibid., 456.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 457.
5 “Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department,” Report of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, August 10, 2016, 24.
6 Ibid.
7 Fassin, Didier, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Polity, 2013, 92.
The police make an arrest. They handcuff a suspect and place the suspect in the back of a police van. The van is hot. It has metal seats. The seats are slick and the corners are sharp. The walls are metal and have no padding. The police do not secure the suspect with a seatbelt. The cop behind the wheel drives erratically and at high speeds. The van stops often and suddenly. The victim literally bounces off the metal walls and emerges from the van bloodied and unconscious, sometimes with a severed spine and broken bones. This is a rough ride.
It’s April 12, 2015 and witnesses see four Baltimore police officers dragging a screaming Freddie Gray toward a police van. Police handcuff his arms behind his back and bind his legs in irons. They throw him in the back of the van. It is a metal box, a cage on wheels. They are on their way to Central Booking, but they never arrive. Instead they take Gray on a rough ride through West Baltimore streets. Nearly an hour after his arrest, the van arrives at the Western District station. Gray is unresponsive, his spine is severed and his larynx is crushed. Blood covers the metal walls and drips from the seat belts that hang unused. Medics arrive and transport Gray to shock trauma where he dies a week later from his injuries.
Now change the name from Freddie Gray to Dondi Johnson Sr. In November 2005 Baltimore police arrest Johnson for what they say is public urination. They cuff his arms behind his back and throw him in the back of a police van. He arrives, like Gray, with a severed spine. He survives, like Gray, only to die later from his injuries.
In Philadelphia the police and their victims call it a nickel ride. Philadelphia police arrest Gino Thompson in April of 1994. They cuff him and place him in the back of a police van. As with Gray and Johnson, police do not use the seat belt and they drive erratically. The metal walls deliver a ruthless beating, over and over again, until the trauma severs Thompson’s spinal cord, paralyzing him from the waist down.
In the media coverage that followed Gray’s brutal homicide, the common practice of the rough ride came under scrutiny. Newspapers explained the practice as a form of street justice in which officers punish suspects who “give them lip” or “resist” their commands.
We might be tempted to place the rough ride alongside a suite of dehumanizing police practices such as the chokehold, but we would only be partly right. The rough ride does not just dehumanize, it fully objectifies its victims. It demonstrates the total domination of police power over the human body. It renders its victims objects; mere payload. “You feel like a piece of cargo,” said twenty-seven-year-old Christine Abbot, who survived a Baltimore police rough ride in 2012. “You don’t feel human.”1
The New York Times described the rough ride as a police “ritual.” The Mollen Commission, which investigated NYPD, called it a “bonding ritual that strengthened loyalty and the code of silence.” They are content to limit their analysis to the merely descriptive. And indeed the rough ride is so common and so constant as to nearly constitute a police ceremony. But the idea of police violence as a ritual, as something that serves a ceremonial purpose, opens up an unexpected line of thinking. We should ask what it means about police when we say that the severing of a person’s spine serves a ceremonial function. Or that breaking a person’s body forms the foundation of police camaraderie and loyalty. It is to say that violence is not a ritual of police, but rather that violence constitutes police. At the heart of police power we find a lethal obligation, red in tooth and claw.
Notes:
1 Donovan, Doug and Mark Puente, “Freddie Gray Not the First to Come out of Baltimore Police Van with Serious Injuries,” Baltimore Sun, April 23, 2015.
A body cavity search is the manual internal inspection of the body cavities by police officers and jail or prison guards. While a strip search is limited to the visual inspection by police of a person’s unclothed body and body cavities, a body cavity search includes also the forced penetration of body cavities by a police officer, usually during or following an arrest or upon entry to a prison or jail facility. Another word to describe this practice is rape, or more specifically, state rape. Understanding the body cavity search as state rape amends Max Weber’s argument regarding the state’s monopoly on violence. Weber argued that the state reserves for itself the right to use violence as part of its exclusive policing power. The body cavity search demonstrates that the state reserves for itself a monopoly on sexual violence as well.
The body cavity search is legally sanctioned sexual violence by the state. It is a practice similar in every respect to criminal sexual penetration as defined in law by every US state criminal code: the unwanted penetration of a body part or an object into oral, genital or anal openings.
Unlike perpetrators of criminal sexual penetration, however, the police who conduct body cavity searches are not subject to arrest and are not charged with felony rape. Instead the practice is sanctioned by the US Supreme Court and routinely practiced at every level of law enforcement and in every jail and prison facility in the United States.
Police and the courts defend the practice as a necessary tool to enhance public safety and security. Its victims describe it as a tactic of state terror designed to control and humiliate. In the late 1970s, an investigation by a Chicago TV station revealed that the Chicago Police Department routinely conducted strip and body cavity searches of women in station houses throughout the city following misdemeanor arrests and even minor traffic violations.1
In Bell v. Wolfish (1979), the US Supreme Court, in a 6–3 vote, defended the practice and concluded that body cavity searches do not constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. In other words, the court found that the unwanted, invasive penetration of a person’s vaginal or anal cavity by a police officer or jail guard is analogous, in legal terms, to the search by police of a person’s car or private residence. The ruling overturned a lower court’s decision and created a new and lower legal standard for conducting body cavity searches. A police officer can search your car or private residence, or even your pockets, if the officer can first establish probable cause or reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. The decision in Bell v. Wolfish, however, concluded that no such cause or suspicion was required for an officer to conduct an anal or genital search. The decision provided legal sanction for the practice of body cavity search as a routine part of everyday policing. Justice Thurgood Marshall, who called body cavity searches “one of the most grievous offenses against personal dignity and common decency,” did not join the majority. In his dissenting opinion he pointed to evidence “that these searches engendered among detainees fears of sexual assault,” and “were the occasion for actual threats of physical abuse by guards.”
Critical scholars of police include the body cavity search in a continuum of police sexual violence that includes other forms of coerced sexual violence, such as police officers arresting women and offering to drop charges in return for specific sex acts. As feminist scholars point out, sexual violence against women is often committed by those who women turn to for protection from sexual violence. Thus the legal sanctioning of police rape in the form of the body cavity search reflects a profound institutional indifference to sexual violence against women in all its forms.
Notes:
1 Simons, Pamela Ellis, “Strip-Search: The Abuse of Women in Police Stations,” Barrister 6 (1979), 8.
A curfew is a form of incarceration. It is the police regulation and control of the movements of members of a population through the restriction of time and space. The policing of curfew is always underwritten by force and violence. Like roundups, K-9 police dogs, and police helicopters, curfews impose limits on the time and space of, usually, the poor. Often referred to as a “lockdown,” a curfew is at once a police ordinance and a carceral formation. It transforms both public and private spaces into spaces of captivity, with the choice: disobey and be captured by police; obey and become a prisoner in your own home. A curfew seeks to purify a particular public space through threats of detention and arrest, while simultaneously transforming private living quarters into makeshift holding cells.
Curfews emerge out of a profound ruling class fear of working class revolt, not simply disorder. The word originally meant to “cover fire,” which comes from the medieval European practice of ringing church bells to designate the time at which residents were required to extinguish their outdoor fires and return to their homes. With cramped wooden living quarters, fires posed a grave threat to local towns and villages. But curfews were not merely about accidental fires. They were also aimed at the political fires of insurgency and revolution. Curfews have long “served the interests of the ruling class to avoid having groups of peasants and townspeople congregating in taverns, and later, coffee shops” where they might be plotting rebellions and revolutions.1 The etymology points to the animus of ruling-class power. Curfews are counterinsurgency. They are the normalization of emergency powers in liberal democracies, a key weapon for policing workers, the unwaged, rebels, and those yet able to work, like youth. Modern life is life under curfew.
In the United States, the curfew is among the first legal measures authorities turn to when policing crises, unrest, and general disorders of “crime” and “delinquency.” For instance, in 1703 the city of Boston created a curfew for Blacks and Native Americans, largely as a means of preventing revolt and insurgency.2 Alongside slave patrols and vagrancy ordinances, the curfew was an important tool authorities used to police slaves, and sometimes poor whites, in routine, everyday ways. The curfew was also the key way that white planters restricted opportunities for slaves to organize and socialize after dark, for fear of slave uprisings. Curfews were a common feature of the post-slavery Black Codes, and often worked in tandem with vagrancy laws to control the movement of recently freed slaves. Likewise, the “Sundown Towns” of Jim Crow America were white towns premised on the very notion of a curfew, but only for Black people. They excluded Blacks, especially at night, and would post signs that read “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set On Your Back.”3 The curfew was still in use a century later as a way to police riots and protests related to the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s.
US counterinsurgency documents describe the curfew as one of many “populace control” measures conforming to the “rule of law.” Curfews played a role in the recent US wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and were used in the war zones of World War II and Vietnam, as well as domestically, such as in facilitating the internment of Japanese Americans.
Curfew arrests made up the majority of arrests (42 percent) in the LA riots in 1992, and in the Cincinnati riots in 2001—both of which were in direct response to police violence against Black men. The curfew was used extensively in the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999 and against the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, as well in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Most recently, curfews were used to quell the Baltimore and Ferguson protests and riots in the aftermath of the police killings of Michael Brown in August 2014 and of Freddie Gray the following April.
But the curfew has long been used as a routine measure of structuring the everyday lives of the racialized poor, especially young people. Many US cities and communities have youth curfew ordinances for the summer months, or even year-round, which give police wide discretion to stop virtually anyone who looks under age and is in public after a specified time. Curfews that target youth also target the entire family. Parents are held responsible and can be deemed legally unfit if their children are caught out during a curfew. For example, when Baltimore enacted its emergency curfew to police the uprisings of 2015, critics pointed out that Baltimore already had on its books a year-round curfew for youth under fourteen, which penalized parents $50 for the first citation and subsequently fined them up to $300 or led to jail. Curfews are about more than just the policing of public space—they necessarily police morality and family, too.
The curfew is a mainstay of contemporary political power, but its effectiveness as crime control is by and large unsupported. Research since the mid–1990s has demonstrated that juvenile curfews, for instance, do very little to actually suppress crime and delinquency. “What is certain,” according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant, “is that these curfews significantly increase chances of incarceration for the young residents of poor urban areas,” with police commonly arresting for curfew violations than other forms of violations.4
Whether in response to a crisis or targeting “delinquency,” the curfew always seeks to produce a specific kind of space by actively policing what types of people and behaviors are allowed to move in and across that space. This is what Don Mitchell means by the “annihilation of space by law,” which “is unavoidably (if still only potentially) the annihilation of people” because the curfew is not merely a prohibition against unwanted behaviors, but a prohibition against specific types of unwanted people.5
For someone other than cops and legal authorities to be out legally during a curfew they must prove they are not only an adult, but also a worker. This is stated directly in most curfew laws: unless going to and from a place of legitimate employment, you are not granted legal permission to be out past a certain time. The age threshold for youth curfews is usually premised on the legal age requirement for employment. The curfew dances to the rhythms of capitalism.
The curfew is an anti-public policy. It demands that all of us, at all times, justify our public existence by proving our status as workers. It demands we all just stay home, isolated from a nighttime social life outside of the bourgeois family, preparing for the next day of work—and if you are to be out, you better be buying something or working for a wage. It is the ruling class’s hatred of any mode of being that doesn’t make them a buck. The curfew is the ruling class distrust for all the parts of our lives that aren’t yet subsumed by the laws of capitalist labor and the wages of work.
Policing is itself a kind of endless curfew. The logic of curfew animates the traffic stop and stop and frisk, and the police patrol as much as the slave patrol. The spirit of the curfew is present in the policing of suspicious persons who are supposedly out of place, and whenever the cop says “Hey, you there” or asks “Where are you going?” or “What are you doing here?” Wherever there are cops, the force of the curfew is mobilized, even when a curfew hasn’t been formally declared. To the defenders of order, there are always fires that need covering because there is always disorder lurking in the populace, threatening to burn the system down.
Notes:
1 Parenti, Christian, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in an Age of Crisis, Verso, 1999, 135.
2 Williams, Kristian, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, South End Press, 2007.
3 Loewen, James W., Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, The New Press, 2013.
4 Wacquant, Loïc, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Duke University Press, 2009, 68.
5 Mitchell, Don, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, The Guilford Press, 165, 172.
Rape is a key method and mode of police violence, a form of terror that emerges out of the routine operation of police power. Rape by cop or attempted rape by cop, usually called sexual misconduct by police, is the second most common complaint lodged against police by victims of police violence, after complaints about the unjustified use of force. Rape by cop is therefore not an aberration but rather is set into motion by the legal authority that animates police power. This is because police power is a patriarchal power. The security state, including police, is animated by a masculine logic that seeks to call domination, in all its forms, protection. As Andrea J. Ritchie states, “When we begin to understand that police are a significant source of violence against women and LGBTQ people of color—even as they are promoted as our protectors—we must question whether countering police violence is really a question of dealing with a few ‘bad apples’ or problematic policies.”1
Police sexual violence, and especially rape by cop, is configured by longer histories of rape and sexual conquest as weapons of settler colonialism and chattel slavery. Under chattel slavery, Black people were deemed legal property (see no humans involved), and Black women and children were subjected to rape, forced pregnancies, and other forms of sexual violence. The police rape of Black and Brown women today not only belongs to this history, but is directly structured by it, as their bodies are essentially rendered property of the state when in police custody. Similarly, rape has been a central settler colonial weapon of disciplining and dominating Indigenous women and children, and it isn’t a surprise that cops have been implicated in the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women, as the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement in Canada has helped to make visible (see also starlight tour).
At least in the United States, Oklahoma City cop Daniel Holtzclaw is perhaps the most famous of all police rapists, ultimately found guilty in late 2015 of multiple counts of rape, forcible sodomy, and sexual battery. All of his victims were Black women. To hunt his prey (see pursuit), Holtzclaw used the basic tools and methods of all patrol officers: running background checks on police databases as a way to locate people who have criminal histories. Holtzclaw would then exploit this knowledge by coercing women into performing sexual acts on him. This highlights a key feature of rape by cop: the least powerful in society are often targeted the most since they have fewer options for legal recourse, and this is only exacerbated when victims have to turn to the very institution that employs the person causing them injury. If Holtzclaw’s case presents an anomaly it is that he was actually investigated and caught by police, charged and tried by a prosecutor, and convicted by a jury. We know that most cops who rape or engage in other acts of sexual violence don’t get caught, much less prosecuted and convicted.
Police sexual terror in the United States usually isn’t framed by officials, media, and many commentators as political terror; instead, rape by cop is considered a form of individual terror and an isolated example of police criminality. Certainly there are cultural elements at play in police violence, including police sexual violence. But this point should not obscure the structural relations of patriarchal domination codified in the juridico-political dynamics of police power. When a cop commits a rape, in clear violation of law, and hence commits a crime, it is the fact that he is a police officer—a state agent certified by law—that establishes a relation of dominance in the first place. Cops not only have more power than their subjects, but this imbalance of power is institutionalized, legally sanctioned, and codified by a badge and a gun. Thinking of police sexual violence as an abuse of power, and hence something that can be fixed by changing police culture and tweaking policy and adding more laws to the books, obscures the point: cops don’t abuse their power when engaging in police sexual violence; they merely use their discretionary powers granted them by law. Police are agents of the state and thus the pattern and practice of rape by cop must be understood as a form of political terror. This becomes all the more apparent when we recognize that most of the victims of police sexual violence are from historically oppressed populations.
There is little if anything that is in place, or could be put in place, that could significantly prevent police officers from using their legal power to commit rape so long as policing exists as it has always existed. This is why referring to this violence as “sexual misconduct” is misleading, as this phrase too quickly pathologizes and fetishizes technicalities, all the while refusing to stare the real problem in the face. As long as we have cops and capitalism, we’ll have Officer Hotlzclaws.
Notes:
1 Ritchie, Andrea, “Say Her Name: What It Means to Center Black Women’s Experience of Police Violence,” Truthout, September 18, 2015.
To lynch is to put to death, usually by hanging, without a trial. From the beginning of chattel slavery to the present day, the lynching of Black people in the United States has most often been described as an extralegal punishment meted out by whites against Black people charged with a variety of crimes—often the supposed rape of a white woman. But the practice had nothing to do with crime and everything to do with white supremacy. Lynching has served as a central tactic of racial control by white economic and political interests in the United States. Historically, the answer to Black economic independence has always been white terror.
The journalist Ida B. Wells, among the most prolific chroniclers of late-nineteenth-century lynching in the United States, argued that white economic elites, under the guise of Black criminality, used lynching as a way to suppress Black political power and punish Black economic competition. White business owners would often hire off-duty police and sheriff’s deputies (see rent-a-cop) to attack or intimidate Black shopkeepers or owners and then lynch those who defended themselves. And white-owned newspapers would celebrate white violence by inventing “horrendous” crimes of those lynched.
And the “lynching localities,” as Wells called US cities, were organized around “lynch laws” enforced by white police. Her use of the phrase “lynch law” was meant to demonstrate the ways in which the lynching of Black people by whites should not be understood as extralegal but rather as fundamental to the US legal system, a system designed to limit the horizon of Black life. In other words, law and police made, and make, lynching possible. Police lynched Black people, allowed the lynching of Black people, or ignored the lynching of Black people. Wells chronicled the pattern not as one isolated by geography or history, but rather as a fact of Black life. In an 1893 article Wells explained that “over a thousand black men, women and children have been thus sacrificed the past ten years. Masks have long since been thrown aside and the lynchings of the present day take place in broad daylight. The sheriffs, police, and state officials stand by and see the work done well.”1 And it was work that continued even after the death of the Black men and women they lynched. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains, “One favourite pastime of lynchers was to empty their Winchesters into the victim’s dead body, to watch the bullets destroy whatever human form remained after burning, cutting, tying, dragging, flaying, disemboweling, dismembering had, in Ida B. Wells’ words, ‘hurled men [and women] into eternity on supposition.’”2 This nineteenth-century pattern continued into the mid twentieth century as “sheriffs or deputies participated in roughly half of all lynchings between 1930 and 1933.”3
Lynching “was public torture, and both press and posse elites encouraged ‘everybody-white’ to get in on the fun. Mobs thrilled to participate in the victim’s slow death, to hear agonized cries for pity and smell roasting human flesh, to shoot the dead to smithereens, to keep body parts—ears, penises, breasts, testicles, charred bones—as souvenirs, and to read detailed descriptions of torture in the newspapers.”4 Wells explained that police and white-owned newspapers invented the threat of Black criminality in order to give cover to the racist violence of the nineteenth-century lynching of Black people. White-owned newspapers thrilled in giving the gory details of lynching. The history of policing the ghetto is a history of lynching.
This history explains why social justice activists and critics of police violence call the police killings of Black men and women a form of lynching. Their point is to draw attention to the way police violence, like lynching before it, seeks to constrain Black life through terror. To be clear, the point is not that police violence is wrong only because it is a form of lynching; rather, police violence serves the interests of class and race domination that is premised on the idea that Black life is a threat to white life, and thus that white violence is the only solution to a presumed Black “criminality.” “These rhetorical features,” according to Bryan Wagner, “are commonly shared between the discourse on lynching and the discourse on police.”5
And the similarities between lynching and police violence extend beyond discourse. Like under the slave patrol, Black life and Black communities are under constant police surveillance, and this surveillance and its material practices—slave passes checked by the slave patrol or stop and frisk enacted by police—discipline Black people. Police and sheriff’s deputies took an active role in the lynching of Black people or stood passively by during lynch mob actions. There was nothing extralegal about lynching. It was part of the job of the police, and we are reminded of this with each exoneration following the police killing of a Black person.
The terror of lynching defined the Jim Crow south, but also the US Southwest. The Texas Rangers lynched hundreds, possibly thousands, of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the early twentieth century. It wasn’t only racial animus that explains why police participated in the lynching of Black and Mexican-American people. Lynching was lawmaking. The history of lynching in other words is not just a history of racial terror, it is a history of US lawmaking and law enforcement.
Notes:
1 Wells, Ida B., “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Our Day, 1893.
2 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, “Race, Prisons and War: Scenes from the History of US Violence,” Socialist Register 45, 2009, 74.
3 Murakawa, Naomi, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Oxford University Press, 2014, 31.
4 Gilmore, “Race, Prisons and War,” 75.
5 Wagner, Bryan, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, Harvard University Press, 2010, 18.
Welcome to Saskatoon, Canada, home of the Starlight Tour, where Indigenous people make up 15 percent of the population, but more than 70 percent of the prison population. Where two-thirds of Indigenous people live in poverty. Where Native people make up half of all people the Saskatoon Police Service arrest and comprise all of the passengers police take on their terrifying Starlight Tours. The Starlight Tour, a phrase coined by Saskatoon police, finds its cognate in the rough ride common in the United States. These are forms of “street justice” in which police officers single out and target individuals for punishment. Police detain and handcuff an individual on a minor infraction and then take them for a ride. The rough ride ends with the bloodied body of a helpless victim. The Starlight Tour ends in a frozen field, far from town, on a cold winter night, where police abandon their victims.
Starlight Tours produce gruesome deaths. They require an explanation and police are happy to provide one. These Native men and women are drunk, they say. Police arrest, incarcerate, and release them over and over again. This frustrates police. They hate the paperwork. During an official inquiry in 2003, police admitted to the practice. The Tour is intended to teach them a lesson. So men and women are abandoned at night outside the city. It is a regular practice in Saskatoon. Sometimes those they abandon make it back to town. Sometimes they don’t. On a cold November night in 1990, Jason Roy saw the bloodied face of his seventeen-year-old friend, Neil Stonechild, pressed against the inside back window of a Saskatoon police service cruiser. His frozen body was found the next morning. In January 2000, two more men, Rodney Naistus, and Lawrence Wegner, were found frozen to death miles from Saskatoon. Their deaths are known as the Saskatoon Freezing Deaths.
This police explanation is a revealing one. How can they justify a violent practice against a people who have done nothing to police, if not by blaming those people? They are marked as outcasts and so police ask: Is it not our job to cast them out? Police place a murderous violence at the center of police power. They admit that the practice happens, and they are forced to admit that sometimes those they abandon die, but it is justified by affirming an essential pathology (they’re poor, uneducated, criminal, and drunk). The Indigenous life is thus the proper object of police power and Indigenous death is the result of this interest.
There is another explanation. A Starlight Tour begins with a hunt and a capture. And here we find a contemporary version of a much older practice. What was in Africa a hunt for slaves, or in Europe a police hunt for the vagabond poor, in the settler colonies was a hunt for Natives. In settler societies such as Canada, the United States and Australia, police emerge first as a power unleashed on Indigenous people in order to produce and enforce a colonial society based on the spatial exclusion of Native people and the dispossession of Native land. It is a logic of elimination. Policing in settler societies serves to reinforce this arrangement, and this is still true today. This is why police in US cities with large Indigenous populations frequently tell Native people to “go back to the reservation.”
Consider the language of the euphemism. The first reference in Starlight Tour is to the night sky. It is not the lights of the city, but the night sky of the frozen prairie. Indigenous men and women are to be banished from the city to the frozen prairie. This is the tour they must take. So the momentum of colonial police power rushes along a track leading always to the spatial exclusion of Indigenous people. And what does it mean to call it a tour? The use of the word “tour” makes clear that it is routine, the practice is understood as unexceptional, the presence of Indigenous people on the “tour” is volitional, and that ultimately for everyone else it is educational. The lesson is not for Indigenous people alone. Police give them a tour in which their own death is prefigured. It is a tour from the city to frozen fields, from life to death. And they must die because it is meant as a specifically colonial tour, one from savagery (Native life) to civilization (Native death).
The Starlight Tour focuses our attention on the abandonment—Native men and women left to die in a frozen landscape—but before we consider the abandonment we should consider the capture. The police are a hunting power: the all-points-bulletin, the manhunt, the raid, the dragnet, the chase, the pursuit.1 And the prey for this hunt is never arbitrary: the “illegal alien,” the homeless person, the Native. Thus the Starlight Tour should not be understood as a practice based on what Indigenous people have done, but rather on what they are. The crime is being Indigenous, and in settler society the Native is the subject that should not exist, a living reminder—an accusation—of the crime of colonial dispossession. They are hunted, captured and abandoned. It would be easy to understand this as an example of the Indigenous person abandoned by law, of their rights abandoned by the settler state. But this view misses the point of abandonment. A Starlight Tour is an exile, but those left by police to die are not exiled from law; rather colonial law and order is made through their abandonment.
They are hunted, captured, banished, killed. These are the principles of settler colonialism, and of police.
Notes:
1 Chamayou, Grégoire, Manhunts: A Philosophical History, Princeton University Press, 2012.
The police flashlight illuminates everything but its own purpose. It might seem like a minor police technology, but it is significant for its practical and theatrical powers. The police flashlight is among the most commonly used police technologies. It illuminates the inside of a vehicle by a traffic cop during a stop. It provides light when questioning a suspect or witness at night. It searches a dark alley or building. In the most literal of ways the police flashlight demonstrates that a central task of policing is making the invisible visible, the illegible legible. The police flashlight belongs to a larger family of police illumination, such as spotlights or thermal imagers on police helicopters as well as the police cruiser headlights that help illuminate a traffic stop. Moreover, this desire for luminosity or legibility can be observed in all sorts of other police measures, such as surveillance tactics like stakeouts, wiretaps, CCTV, and even interrogations, searches, and stop and frisks.
But if the modern police flashlight is read in symbolic terms, this routine apparatus points us to the gothic mythology animating police power: the police as the radiating light of civilization that overcomes the darkness of barbarism. Indeed, the police project of fabricating order has long imagined itself as a war of light against darkness, good against evil. Which is also to say police see themselves as always under attack by the forces of darkness. What all of this suggests though is that the problem of darkness, which the police flashlight is intended to solve, is at once mythological and material, theatrical and spatial. This is represented in the films and novels of the police gothic, where the agents of order are in pursuit of the enemies of order through shadowy streets and alleys and dark buildings and rough tenements, usually under the midnight sky. The police, then, are always working in the literal and figurative shadows and hence always resorting to illuminating technologies and theatrical tools as a guiding light in the war against forces of darkness.
The mythological trope of darkness was first materialized in police practice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, when police required that people carry candles and lanterns and install streetlights in order to illuminate themselves between sunset and sunrise. This practice was also used in the United States with “lantern laws” intended to illuminate the Black bodies of chattel slaves. Indeed, the proletariat understood street lighting as a police technology. Street lights were among the first objects destroyed by the crowd in rebellions, in which protesters recreated darkness as a key tactic of insurgency and revolution. The police flashlight, however mundane or normalized today, belongs to this political history, a history that casts illumination itself as a weapon of the powerful.1
Police luminosity has always been tethered to political violence. The police flashlight doubles as a multi-use police weapon, not merely an ad hoc, impromptu baton but an organized component of police power. Though it varies from department to department, the police flashlight is often considered a legitimate police weapon. Indeed, the organized nature of the flashlight as weapon is perhaps best observed in the gun-mounted flashlight that helps officers better illuminate targets in their gun sights, or the police flashlight that doubles as a Taser stun gun. Rent-a-cop companies often train officers to use the flashlight as a tactical self-defense weapon, as well as to fire their weapons holding either a regular police flashlight or the gun-mounted version. One of the newest variations on the police flashlight is the “tactical strobe light,” a handheld flashlight with a strobe light function designed to psychologically disorient and visually confuse.
There are plenty of examples of the flashlight-as-weapon, such as the 1992 Detroit beating of Malice Green, who was killed due to “blunt force trauma” from fourteen strikes of an officer’s flashlight. Or the 2011 killing of Kelly Thomas, a homeless schizophrenic man in Fullerton, California who was beaten to death by police with flashlights. Or in the brutal choking death by a cop of thirty-nine-year-old Jonathan Sanders. Or the gruesome choking death of an Alabama teenager in 2013, in which police shoved the butt of a flashlight down the boy’s throat while looking for contraband. The political history of the police flashlight suggests that illumination itself is a weapon of the powerful, and police vision a genus of police violence.
Notes:
1 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, “The Policing of Street Lighting,” Yale French Studies 73, 1987, 61–74; Browne, Simone, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Duke University Press, 2015.
The police nightstick, also known as a truncheon, a billy club, or a baton, is among the most terrifying weapons and enduring symbols of police violence. The nightstick is the ruthless and vicious tool of police power. Its primary purpose has always been to bloody and bludgeon a suspect into compliance. But it is more than a tool of blunt force trauma to the head, torso, arms, or legs. It is also a means of pain compliance, as police use the nightstick to force submission by beating and choking suspects, or pinning them to a wall (see chokehold). And it is also a tool of sexual terror when police forcibly sodomize subjects with the nightstick (see rape).
The nightstick is a weapon of overt political repression, inflicting violence against those participating in organized rebellions and uprisings, from the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, to the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, to the 1965 March on Selma, to the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. More recently, cops used the baton against protestors in the countless uprisings associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline expansion in North Dakota.
Forget juries and judges. The nightstick is the quintessential symbol of “street justice.” From the police perspective, the streets and alleys are the courtroom, and the cop the only jury and judge that matters. This sentiment is most famously characterized by Alexander “Clubber” Williams, the notorious nineteenth-century New York cop known for his fondness for terrorizing subjects with his truncheon: “There is more law in the end of a policeman’s nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court,” he famously said.1 The police, he made clear, operate according to their own law—the police laws of discretion that grant cops the power to act against the unruly, disobedient, and impolite. But still the organized terror of the Billy Club is not necessarily wielded against the law, as if its brutality is somehow exceptional and outside the supposed civility of legal scripture. As Karl Marx reminds us, “club law is also law.”
The very tactical design of the nightstick—a simple hard piece of wood or metal baton designed to beat and bludgeon—makes clear that this weapon is not about reducing “crime”, but is instead a tactical option to force the “unruly” and “disorderly,” or the “assholes” that question police authority, into being obedient, docile, and polite subjects.
“Street justice” is a euphemism for racist state terror. It is by swinging their nightstick that cops police the color lines and property lines of racial capitalism. This is why cops have called the nightstick the “nigger be good stick,” displaying for all to see the racist animus of the police power in the most terrifying of ways. We do not lack for examples of police clubbing people of color. Among the most well known was the beating of Rodney King by seven white LAPD officers. The beating of King is often credited with ushering in significant reforms around the police use of batons or nightsticks. And now the nightstick is cloaked in the mythology of police reform, a narrative of “progress” that claims the nightstick is either “banished” from policing, or its use significantly reduced, or the training improved.
This discourse is premised on a simplistic binary between the barbaric past and a more “civilized” present. As Los Angeles police Deputy Chief Bill Murphy said, “Back then, it was pulling out a baton and whacking people … After that video played that night, no one hardly ever used the baton. It was banished. It became a symbol.”2 The symbol of racist terror now repackaged as “hygienic” or a “less-than-lethal” weapon. It stands now alongside the Taser, maiming and killing more efficiently. The Los Angeles Times reported that in 1990 the LAPD used the baton 741 times, but in 2015 only 54 times. Here we can see how this language of reform has little interest in actually challenging the police monopoly of violence, but is only concerned with creating the distinction between “good” and “bad” police violence via a logic of “proportionality” and “quantity.” But the fact remains that across the United States the police nightstick, often now called the “collapsible baton” or the “sap” or “blackjack,” is still one of the most routine tools of racist state violence. And what does their reform matter anyway, when even where it’s banished the flashlight remains in the arsenal of police power and has always served the same purpose as the nightstick?
In September 2015, a Stockton, California cop clubbed a sixteen-year-old Black male jaywalker in the face multiple times with his nightstick. As the officer approached the teen for allegedly attempting to cross the road illegally, the teen told the arresting officer to “get the fuck off me!” Here we see the racist animus of the baton merging with the police demand for complete compliance, total obedience. And it was this failure to fully comply with the officer, police claimed, that justified the officer using his baton to force the Black teen down on his back. The teen defended himself by grabbing the nightstick in order to stop the blows. The officer yelled “stop resisting,” which police often do whether anyone is resisting or not, and began striking his victim in the face multiple times. Eventually, more officers arrived, only to throw the Black youth on the ground before putting him in handcuffs and a police car. A police spokesperson stated afterwards as a video of the violence circulated online, “If everyone would just learn to comply with the lawful orders from police officers and not try to hold or grab any of our weapons, force would never have to be used.”3
The crack of the nightstick is always preceded by the threat of the nightstick. A Baltimore officer stated that city officers twirl their wooden sticks from the rawhide loop handle as a means of intimidation: “Criminals don’t like to see us twirl the stick. I have heard that twirling the stick is intimidating. It’s supposed to be intimidating. It’s a stick.”4 If you’ve ever been to a protest cleared by “riot police” recall the sound of frontline police knocking their batons on their large shields in a loud rhythm to intimidate protesters. In 1947 the Baltimore Sun reminded its readers of the limits of possible reforms targeting the use of the nightstick: “After all, telling a policeman not to swing his espantoon [nightstick] would be like asking a happy man not to whistle.”5
The nightstick exposes the visceral, callous, and base violence at the heart of police. As Clubber Williams made clear, behind all police power is the bloody end of the nightstick. Even when policing is said to be many things at once, such as increasingly “community oriented” and “friendly” with digitized predictive policing and crime mapping, the presence of the nightstick, twirling in the hands of the beat cop, reminds us that blunt force trauma will always be central to police power, no matter how “friendly” and “reformed” it claims to be.
Notes:
1 Johnson, Marilynn, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City, Beacon Press, 2004, 41.
2 Winton, Richard, “How the Rodney King Beating ‘Banished’ the Baton from the LAPD,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2016.
3 Studley, Joe and Kelly Goff, “Complaint Filed After Rough Jaywalking Arrest Video Goes Viral,” NBC Los Angeles, September 15, 2015
4 Hermann, Peter, “Baltimore Police Retire the Twirling Nightstick, Ending a Century of Use,” Baltimore Sun, March 27, 1995.
5 Ibid.
Strangulation, asphyxiation, choking—these have long been mainstays of cops whether in liberal democratic or totalitarian regimes.1 Robbing the breath of someone held in state custody—detained, arrested, interrogated, imprisoned—is a central mode of police control and coercion. A vast catalog of strangulation and asphyxiation techniques has been designed, used, criticized, abandoned, and reformed over the years.
The chokehold is both the most common police strangulation method and, in the United States, one of the most controversial. The chokehold that slowly squeezed the life out of Eric Garner on a New York street in 2014 is the most recent and well-known example. At least since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Los Angeles and New York police departments used and justified chokehold techniques, while at the same time banning and sanctioning some versions of the technique. In a five-year period in the 1980s, LAPD officers killed sixteen people with a chokehold, and fourteen of these deaths were of Black people. The LAPD chief at the time, Daryl Gates, even went so far as to say that “some Blacks” were more susceptible to death by chokehold due to the biological makeup of their arteries compared to “normal people,” and then banned the practice. But following the beating of Rodney King, Gates commissioned a study on the reintroduction of the chokehold, arguing that reviving the chokehold as pain compliance would limit the use of the nightstick.2 Police offered the chokehold as police reform, as something that makes police violence more “humane,” “less lethal,” and so more hygienic.
Police have various terms to euphemistically describe an acceptable chokehold, such as “carotid control hold” or “vascular restraint.” Police depict the problem of the chokehold as a problem of training. It is deemed excessive by police to force someone unconscious by placing direct pressure or force against a subject’s windpipe, but it is acceptable to cut off blood flow by applying pressure to the carotid artery. But tell this to the person being strangled, for whom the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable chokeholds means very little.
And the chokehold is not the only way that police strangle and asphyxiate people. Strangulation and choking have long been an interrogation tactic used to force a confession. The first federal investigation of police practices, the 1931 Wickersham Commission, investigated various police methods, including waterboarding, in which cops pour water slowly down a person’s nostrils in order to simulate a drowning in order to force a confession. Police did not invent this tactic, but it and other forms of drowning techniques have long been part of the police project.
Cops also choke suspects or detainees with their neckties or scarves. As neckties became less common, police improvised and found other methods to rob someone of their breath. One of the most common ways police choke people echoes the torture of prisoners by the US military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Called “bagging” or the “dry submarine,” a cop puts a plastic bag or cloth sack over a detainee’s head while sealing the bottom. This became a popular practice among Chicago and New Orleans police in the 1970s and ’80s.
Police reformers claim bagging is no longer common police practice. But it hasn’t disappeared, only morphed into a different form. Police now place “spit hoods” over suspects’ heads in order to prevent them from spitting on or biting officers. Police officials insist the hoods, made of mesh or heavy canvas, are not designed to suffocate or asphyxiate suspects, but Jack Marden would disagree if he could. When Midland County, Michigan police arrested the fifty-six-year-old Marden on a felony assault warrant, they alleged he became aggressive with police and demonstrated erratic behavior, such as stripping down naked and yelling incoherently. Police eventually restrained Marden by hitting him in the head, tying him to a chair, and strapping a spit hood over his head. Marden eventually died, and a lawsuit alleges that police killed him by suffocation.
Police describe the spit hood as a humane alternative to force. It is, in other words, a gentler method of restraint than the nightsticks, Tasers or fists that would otherwise be used. But the result is often the same: terror and death. In addition, police routinely use what are called EDP bags, an acronym for “emotionally disturbed person.” Police use them to totally restrain subjects by zipping them up into a full-body container. Some versions cover the whole body including the head. It is no accident that this technology of police reform looks a lot like a body bag for the dead.
Notes:
1 Rejali, Darius, Torture and Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2007.
2 Skolnick, Jerome H. and James J. Fyfe, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, The Free Press, 1993.
Lapel cameras, a type of body-worn camera that police wear on their lapels or attach to their uniform, are designed to capture video and audio of police–community interactions. Since 2014, they have become the sine qua non of police reform, particularly by reformers who celebrate the lapel camera for the way they claim that it disciplines police. On its surface it is a convincing argument. Lapel cameras appear to check police authority. It has been through the release of videos of the police killing of Walter Scott and so many others that anti–police violence activists have organized protests and forced some reforms on police departments. The lapel camera video of the March 2014 Albuquerque police killing of James Boyd, a video that Albuquerque police chief Gordon Eden at the time defended as a depiction of legal homicide, sparked public outrage that led to months of protests and the eventual indictment of two police officers.
But before we celebrate the end of police violence let’s remember that Axon, the manufacturer of the most common stun gun used by police, Taser, also manufactures the most common lapel cameras for police. Since its rollout in 2008, it has been marketed as a way to record citizen misconduct against police and thus to protect police from police brutality complaints, not as a tool to protect people from police violence. And lapel camera videos of police shootings have been cited as important evidence in the exoneration of police officers in fatal encounters. How can lapel cameras both serve the goals of anti–police violence activists and, at the same time, the interests of police? The short answer is that it cannot. The lapel camera mostly serves the interests of police.
Remember that body-worn cameras are tools organized, controlled and deployed by police. How should they be used? When should they be used? Where should they be used? These are all questions answered exclusively by police. Any police reform demand that includes a call for all police to wear body cameras is a call to invest total oversight authority of police with police. This is a version of police oversight consistent with police claims that only police can police the police. But even if there were independent control over police body cameras and the videos they capture, we’d still be captive to the police view of the world. To watch lapel camera footage is to see the world through cops’ eyes. To elevate its importance as a reform measure is to anoint the police perspective as the most legitimate perspective.
The lapel camera does not stop police violence. It witnesses it. It offers only the promise, always unfulfilled, of future restraint. The lapel camera doesn’t stop the violence; it watches it, records it. It cannot in any way prevent police violence because the very premise of recording the violence requires that what is caught on camera not be stopped, cannot be stopped. It can only be viewed.
When we understand the lapel camera this way, and as part of the larger police surveillance apparatus, a different view of its purpose emerges. It is of a piece with CCTV cameras (closed circuit television cameras), ankle monitors, red light cameras, dashboard cameras, drones, and more. It monitors, records, registers. It is among the tools designed not to check police power, but to extend it; to maximize and intensify its reach; to overcome the physical limits of the cop walking the beat, or driving the police cruiser, or flying the police helicopter. Surveillance allows police to be everywhere without being anywhere.
Lapel cameras are part of a logic of order that recognizes the limits of force to produce that order. Where once the violence of the state produced order—the public flogging or hanging, or shaming—we now find a power augmented by constant surveillance. The goal of this power, according to Michel Foucault, is to produce obedient subjects. And so at best we cannot confirm whether or not we are under surveillance. Power is visible, but not verifiable. You are seen, but you do not see. Through the “eye of power” we are made visible—to police, to the boss, to the teacher, to the doctor—and that visibility renders us “knowable.” This is not solely a punitive power. Police surveillance has a disciplinary effect. Police fabricate order by the threat of force but also through the lens of a lapel camera, or the eye of a drone, or the searchlight of a police helicopter. This surveillance seeks a different power relation. No longer does it rely only an external force applied to bodies—a nightstick crack to the skull—but also now it is present always in the body of the subject. We behave ourselves, in other words. We are disciplined. Violence or surveillance is not just a means to enforce forms of authority and control, but the source of progress itself. The obedient subject of panoptic power is the productive worker, the well-behaved student, the law-abiding citizen. And, yes, the productive cop too. The cop who properly enforces broken windows policing. The cop who stops and frisks. The cop who barks commands and justifies their force, and has the video to prove it. “Is it surprising,” asks Foucault “that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”1 The lapel camera makes all the world a cop world.
Notes:
1 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, 1995, 228.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 200 police departments in the US engage in aerial law enforcement through the use of helicopters and, to a lesser degree, fixed-wing aircraft. The Los Angeles Police Department’s air support division is the world’s largest municipal police aviation department, with nearly 100 officers and 19 helicopters, and operates out of the largest heliport in the United States. Combined with the 18 helicopters of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Aero Bureau, the skies above Los Angeles are never without police helicopters.
The pivotal moment for the police helicopter as a routine form of police urban patrol came in 1966 in Lakewood, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. “Project Sky Knight,” funded by the National Crime Commission, and conceived by Los Angeles County Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess, proposed the helicopter as a means of continuous, constant aerial patrol. Pitchess, who used helicopters first during the 1965 Watts riot, sought to extend the helicopter’s potential for permanent police patrol. A promotional video for Project Sky Knight described the helicopter as “bad news for bad guys,” while explaining that the experiment “takes its name of the knight of old, whose vow was to protect the weak, and pursue the wicked. But all too often the bad guys got away.”
Project Sky Knight was celebrated by the media, which called the helicopter the “Heavenly Prowl Car.” Today Airbus markets its helicopters as a “force multiplier” to police departments worldwide. Their sales materials describe its use: “In Europe, when crowds or demonstrations grow unruly, helicopters discreetly ferry crowd-control police into position so as to avoid provoking violence that might put ground personnel at risk.” More than 2,000 police helicopters prowl the skies over US cities. If we consider the tactical helicopters operated by US police departments as a unit, it is larger than every military on earth except for the fleets maintained by the United States, China and Russia.
Police helicopters are loud and visible and serve as a constant reminder of the ubiquity and reach of police power. That reach usually extends specifically to what police call “crime infested” neighborhoods (see CRASH). But air power obliterates any useful distinction between suspect and bystander, target and non-target. As one LA journalist wrote in 1992, “Hearing LAPD helicopters circle overhead is a nightly phenomenon over much of the Los Angeles basin, even in middle-class neighborhoods like my own … Their circular flight patterns have a way of making people feel as if they’re smack in the center of a crime drama.”
Police explain that this “nightly phenomenon” of police “in the air” supports the work of police “on the ground.” They use helicopters to quickly locate and track fleeing suspects, for example. But nearly all police departments claim aerial patrols serve first and foremost as a deterrent. According to the Institute for Police Studies, police helicopters “contribute to a significant deterrent effect.” The Chicago Police Department claims its helicopter operations “enhance the capabilities of first responders through the deterrence and prevention of crime.”
What does it mean for police to invoke deterrence as a way to explain the purpose of aerial policing? Deterrence has long been a guiding logic of police power, and patrol strategies specifically. The introduction of the police helicopter promised to revolutionize the police powers of deterrence through the nearly magical powers of total mobility and swift punishment. Police power is positioned as omnipresent, “all-seeing,” and able to stop crime before it happens (see predictive policing).
Deterrence theory is also at the heart of military strategy and engagement. The theory of deterrence proposes confronting a threat with the permanent presence of intimidating and overwhelming power with the promise of punishment, swift and severe. This requires not just air power but air superiority. “Whoever controls the air,” according to a 1995 Air Force study, “generally controls the surface.” Air power is the permanent presence of coercion and intimidation. It “produces physical and psychological shock.”1 This is deterrence.
The constant sound of police helicopters hovering over South Central Los Angeles underscores nearly every scene of director John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n the Hood. The ominous sound of helicopters and sirens is the film’s soundtrack. And the helicopter’s thermal imagers and 1,000,000-watt searchlights turn night into day (see flashlight). Singleton depicts a South Central Los Angeles where police power occupies everyday life, peering into windows and drowning out conversations. The film’s costar, Ice Cube, called police helicopters “ghetto birds” on his 1993 album “Lethal Injection.” That same year hip-hop artist KRS-One, in his song “Sound of da Police,” sang “Woop-woop, that’s the sound of da police. Woop-woop, that’s the sound of da beast.” He repeats the word overseer over and over again in the song until it sounds like officer, connecting the history of slavery and the slave patrol to police. “The overseer rode around the plantation. The officer is off patrolling all the nation.”
Air power serves the same purpose whether in Kosovo, Iraq, or South Central Los Angeles, whether we’re talking about a military “no-fly” zone in Iraq after the first Gulf War or the “no-fly” zone above Ferguson, Missouri after the police killing of Michael Brown. It is the ever-present threat of punishment. Military bombs falling on Iraqi villages or police searchlights landing on Compton streets. A US military drone killing a dozen people in a wedding party in Yemen in 2014 or Philadelphia police dropping bombs from helicopters on Black MOVE activists in 1985, killing eleven people, including five children. “Woop-woop, that’s the sound of da police. Woop-woop, that’s the sound of da beast.”
Notes:
1 Meilinger, Phillip S., 10 Propositions Regarding Air Power, Air Force Historical Studies Office, Washington, DC, 1995.
The routine policing of automobility appears so boring and mundane that it is easy to miss how fundamental traffic enforcement and the traffic stop is to the police project. Despite the less prestigious status of traffic duty compared to, say, detective work, it is the most common patrol activity. Being pulled over by police on traffic duty is a frequent and fundamental experience for millions of people each year. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the traffic stop is the most common way people come into contact with police. As sociologist Charles Epps notes, “The police make some eighteen million traffic stops per year in the United States. Nationally, 12 percent of drivers are stopped per year by the police. Among racial minorities the rate is considerably higher: 24 percent or more by some estimates.”1
In July 2016, Saint Paul, Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop. Yanez pulled Castile over, asked for his driver’s license and vehicle registration, and then shot Castile in the chest. Yanez claims Castile, who never unbuckled his seatbelt, made furtive movements. In the aftermath, various commentators noted that Castile had been stopped nearly fifty times in fourteen years for minor infractions like broken taillights or failure to signal. Castile’s murder evokes a long history of police pulling over Black drivers in racially disproportionate ways, popularly referred to as “driving while Black,” as well as municipalities using traffic enforcement as a fiscal strategy.
Castile’s experience illustrates the way traffic enforcement serves as one of the most insidious modes of police power, one in which racialized suspicion animates the politics of unfreedom. The automobile and the roadway have long signified one of the most concrete ways freedom of movement is imagined and practiced. Nevertheless, the liberty and autonomy promised by driving an automobile on the open road is always haunted by the specter of police, especially for people of color. If the automobile makes free movement possible, then the traffic cop marks its limit.
The traffic stop belongs to a broader logic of policing: the interruption of motion, mobility, and circulation. Getting pulled over by the traffic cop is a forceful prevention of motion in order to interrogate, and also possibly to restrain in handcuffs, detain, arrest, or, like in Castile’s case, even kill. As a mode of suspension of the freedom of movement, the traffic stop is by definition a routine loss of liberty at the level of the body, woven into the circuits and rhythms of everyday life. Hence the traffic stop is itself a modality of force whether or not overt acts of violence, such as the killings of Terence Crutcher, Samuel DuBose, and Walter Scott, result from it.
The traffic stop reveals the magnitude and ordinariness of the police manhunt as the traffic cop pursues (see pursuit) and captures the prey. Here we can also think of the speed trap—the officer hiding in the shadows waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting driver. Despite liberal claims that reasonable suspicion and probable cause somehow restrain the discretionary powers of the traffic cop, the commonsense wisdom of the street—that they can pull you over for anything—is the real truth. The near–carte blanche powers of police discretion find their fullest expression in the traffic stop. Broken taillights. Swerved. Failed to signal. Headlight out. Over the speed limit. Under the speed limit. Leaving a known crime area. Windows too dark. Didn’t stop at the stop sign. Fit the description. Before he was shot eight times in the back, Walter Scott was first stopped for a broken brake light. Before dying in a Texas jail cell in 2014, Sandra Bland was stopped for failing to signal a lane change.
Police in Albuquerque, New Mexico pulled over Andrew Lopez in 2009 for having dim headlights and no taillights. Officers later claimed that his car was involved in an incident involving a handgun, despite the fact that the car’s make, model and color did not match the vehicle involved in the incident. A frightened Lopez attempted to run from the scene. This is how an April 2014 US Department of Justice investigation report of the Albuquerque police department described the traffic stop: “When Lopez reached a fence and began to turn, the officer shot at Lopez three times. One of the shots struck Lopez, causing a nonlethal bullet wound. Lopez fell to the ground and lay motionless on his back. The officer [Justin Montgomery] walked around the truck and fired a fourth shot into Lopez’s chest, piercing his lung and heart and causing his death. Lopez was unarmed. The officer fired the fourth and final shot when Lopez was not pointing anything at officers and while he lay on his back already wounded.”2
Beware, the state demands your obedience during the traffic stop. The entire sequence of the good traffic stop is structured by the state expectation of complete obedience to police authority. Sirens and lights are behind you, and you are expected to pull over immediately. Then you are told to turn off the engine and put both hands clearly in view on the steering wheel. You must always be courteous, and always let the officer do the talking. Be polite. “Yes, officer.” “No, officer.” “Thank you, officer.” Don’t ask questions or talk back or challenge the cop’s understanding of the encounter. It is a rehearsal of and for domination. If you break out of the polite decorum by asking questions, acting the smart ass, slow in response to what is commanded, or if you make any movement the officer later calls “furtive,” well, the full force of the state can make itself known. And sometimes, even when you do exactly as you are told, as Philando Castile did, you still might end up dead.
Notes:
1 Epps, Charles, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, University of Chicago Press, 2.
2 Report on the Findings of the Department of Justice Civil Investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department, US Department of Justice, April 10, 2014.
Police and military units use checkpoints to disrupt the movement and circulation of automotive traffic in order to conduct random searches of vehicles and motorists. A police checkpoint is similar to a patrol. But while a patrol places police in constant motion, whether in police cruisers, helicopters, on bicycles or on foot, so as to impose order within a jurisdiction, a checkpoint interrupts the constant motion of all non-police vehicles at a particular location.
Though checkpoints are usually associated with sobriety checks, border patrol checkpoints are more common. Border police stop vehicles in order to check the immigration status of motorists. Permanent vehicle border checkpoints along and near the US border with Mexico in the US Southwest are part of a complex of anti-mobility police and military technologies and techniques that include fences, sensors, cameras, drones, watercraft, and heavily armed foot and vehicle patrols—not to mention anti-immigrant vigilantes—that make the US border with Mexico a deadly and “densely militarized space.”1 But border facilities extend beyond permanent checkpoints at or near international borders, including also temporary, random checkpoints often conducted by non-immigration police seemingly unrelated to international borders. Since 2008 as part of various federal programs, US immigration police require that local and state police agencies throughout the United States expand the checkpoint power of the border patrol. Random checkpoints everywhere have been one expression of this expansion, which scholars have shown has focused on Latino neighborhoods in patterns that established a “climate of terror” among immigrant communities.2
Checkpoints are often associated with boundaries of access and exit, but the police checkpoint demonstrates the limits of this thinking. The checkpoint erases boundaries and borders and replaces these instead with the police, which everywhere sees borders that need enforcing and people that need stopping. The checkpoint arrests mobility and circulation. “Stop. Show me your papers.” It demands constant registration and expects total obedience. As such it is a versatile technology. It conjures images of a police state, at the same time that it presents itself as routine, unspectacular and everyday. Courts have routinely sided with police and have expanded the authority of police to conduct random stops without warrants and without reasonable suspicion at both permanent and temporary checkpoints.3
The checkpoint, like the traffic stop more generally, might appear as a routine function of police, but it is an expression of generalized police suspicion focused routinely on communities of color. The roadblock has long been a key tactic in controlling the movement of Black people in the US South. The slave patrol controlled the movement of Black people through the frequent use of roadblocks. The Ku Klux Klan used roadblocks to enforce Jim Crow segregation. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, police in Gretna, Louisiana set up a roadblock on the Crescent City bridge that linked the city with New Orleans. They fired warning shots at Black people who were trying to flee the flooding in New Orleans.4 White vigilantes in nearby Algiers Point did the same. “Patrolling in pick-up trucks and staffing roadblocks, they stopped and turned back Black people trying to cross through the Algiers Point neighborhood, harassed and intimidated Blacks who lived nearby, and sometimes, it seems, just shot people without warning.”5 If checkpoints enforce borders, then historically the checkpoint enforces a racial border. The police checkpoint is among the most routine and everyday police practices, as is the fear and insecurity it instills.
Notes:
1 Coleman, Matthew and Austin Kocher, “Detention, Deportation, Devolution and Immigrant Incapacitation in the Us, Post 9/11,” Geographical Journal 177:3 (2011), 229.
2 Stuesse, Angela and Matthew Coleman, “Automobility, Immobility, Altermobility: Surviving and Resisting the Intensification of Immigrant Policing,” City & Society 26:1 (2014), 59.
3 See Illinois v. Lidster, 540 US 419 (2004) and United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 US 543 (1976).
4 Dyson, Michael Eric and Paul Elliott, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, Basic Civitas Books, 2007, 153.
5 Williams, Kristian, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, AK Press, 2015, 171.
Pain is the adjective that clarifies police power. According to Samera Esmeir, the criminal justice system is “unfathomable without pain.”1 Without pain, police have no authority. The police inflict pain and are the sole authority to relieve it, and this serves the same legitimating purpose at the heart of criminal justice. Law, Esmeir argues, “openly sanctions the infliction of regulated pain.”2 Law endorses the pain police impose.
Pain is instrumental to another purpose: compliance. Police use pain to modify behavior. Pain makes noncompliant subjects compliant. For police, pain is depicted as a discrete tool or technique administered on “noncompliant” subjects. The police threaten and produce suffering and therefore produce the suffering subject, a subject who does not exist outside this relation. Only a sufferer can be the proper subject of police power. And only police can measure suffering; only police can determine compliance or noncompliance. It is equally the job of police to impose pain as it is to measure its effectiveness. And since, to police, pain is always effective at creating compliant subjects, pain is not present if compliance is not achieved.
Consider what this implies. Police claim the power to administer pain in order to create suffering, and also claim the power to unerringly interpret another’s suffering. It implies that police have secret knowledge of another’s consciousness. But we know from the case of Eric Garner and many others that this is not true. Pain compliance is a phrase that describes a host of specific tactics that police use to inflict pain. These include the use of pepper spray and Tasers, the hog-tying of suspects and the hyperflexing of their joints, and in the case of Garner, the chokehold. Eric Garner died in a chokehold while saying, over and over again, “I can’t breathe.” The officer did not loosen the chokehold because it was the police officer, not the subject of pain compliance, who measures pain. It is not an accident that the police defended the use of the chokehold against Garner, in part, by claiming that he died from complications related to asthma, not the police chokehold.
The power relation brought to life by pain compliance is a relation that excludes all others. “Whatever pain achieves,” according to Elaine Scarry, “it achieves in part through its unsharability.”3 There is only a sufferer who suffers and a cop who administers pain, who measures pain, and who determines when pain culminates in compliance. Pain to the police is progressive. It produces a preferred outcome. But to believe this is to be in the thrall of the instrumental logic of police. If police power is about order, and the compliance that pain produces marks what police consider orderly, then pain is that which makes the world orderly.4 An orderly world, legible to police, destroyed for Eric Garner.
Notes:
1 Esmeir, Samera, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History, Stanford University Press, 2012, 140.
2 Ibid., 145.
3 Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985, 4.
4 Neocleous, Mark, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, Pluto, 2000.