The Oath:
Core Values of Police
Private property does not merely describe a relation between an owner and a thing. It is a social relation—the right to exclude—shot through with violence. If I take food from a grocery store, drive a car off a dealer’s lot, or move into your spare bedroom, and I do it without permission, without paying, and, most importantly, without punishment or fear of punishment, then we cannot say food and cars and spare bedrooms are private property. Without the enforcement of an exclusive claim there is no private property. Private property is therefore always based on force, which is to say that there is no private property without violence.
The capitalist state defends private property rights. “The first and chief design of every system of government,” according to Adam Smith, “is to maintain justice: to prevent the members of society from encroaching on one another’s property, or seizing what is not their own. The design here is to give each one the secure and peaceable possession of his own property.”1 Justice, in other words, is found in the realm of property. The state’s use of violence to enforce property relations is how capitalism defends what it considers just. To speak of enforcement is to speak of police. Property is thus a form of police violence. In Smith’s day, the word “police” referred to an expansive authority to regulate commerce and property. The section titled “Police” in his Lectures on Jurisprudence explained the general principles of law and government as the domain of police. “The objects of police,” according to Smith, “are the cheapness of commodities, public security and cleanliness.”2 In particular “whatever regulations are made with respect to the trade, commerce, agriculture, manufactures of the country are considered as belonging to the police.”3 The point of all this property policing is to produce “liberty”—freedom from coercion, freedom from violence, freedom to pursue one’s fullest potential. The irony, of course, is that the freedom from coercion and violence that capitalism promises is a freedom delivered at the end of a cop’s nightstick. The “invisible hand of the market” is attached to the strong arm of the law.
Private property, established through force, has transformed the world we live in. And it was and is the job of police to patrol the landscapes of private property, to enforce these boundaries and barriers, walls and enclosures. Thus property might best be understood as a police category. Police arrest the trespasser, evict the squatter, and foreclose on the jobless homeowner. Encroachment on private property is a threat to capitalist order, and it is police who manage this threat.
Private property requires violence. Consider the law of adverse possession, for example. The owner of real property—a suburban house or a city lot or a rural pasture—is required to announce and sustain an exclusive claim to property through a variety of acts—paying taxes, erecting fences and “no trespassing” signs, mailing eviction notices to renters who are in arrears, making improvements, and more. These are all performances of an ongoing, exclusive claim. If an owner does not perform these acts, another may do so and claim ownership. Violence too is among the required performances of property. The state of Florida’s Justifiable Use of Force Statute, also known as Stand Your Ground, describes violence as among property’s rights. If a person has “a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm,” the law permits the use of lethal force, but only if an aggressor “had unlawfully and forcibly entered a dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle.” The law, however, forbids the use of lethal violence in that same circumstance if the aggressor “has the right to be in or is a lawful resident of the dwelling, residence, or vehicle, such as an owner, lessee, or titleholder.” In other words, as far as the law is concerned, the authority of the state to sanction the use of violence exists only in the context of a property relation. People do not have an unalloyed right to kill, but property owners do.
Property relations are violent relations, and property has always been a racialized category. Historically, the law has elevated the property claims made by white people. Consider the history of the slave patrol in the Virginias and Carolinas, for example. We should understand the work of the slave patrol as a defense of whiteness as an exclusive property claim—a property claim that extended over Black life. And what happens when the oppressed rise up and riot in challenge to the privileges and whiteness of property? The elite fear the destruction of their property, yes, but even more they fear the destruction of the social relations that make private property possible. And so they fear a world without police.
Notes:
1 Smith, Adam, Lectures on Jurisprudence, Oxford University Press, 1978, 5.
2 Ibid., 398.
3 Ibid., 5.
At first glance it may seem that crime and law are the categories that best explain police. After all, police officers enforce the law, and police officers investigate crime and criminals. When we think of police, we often think of police in uniform making an arrest, or we think of a cop conducting an investigation, collecting evidence at a crime scene. But policing is not about crime deterrence, and the police are more than the sum of individual cops. It is through the concept of order we can best make sense of the concept of police. The central mandate of police has always been “good order” and always in the broadest sense possible. And this means that policing is about more than merely crime, but also what the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling refer to as quality of life.1
Spend just a few minutes reading Wilson and Kelling’s seminal 1982 essay “Broken Windows” to be reminded of the police imperative of order. For their admirers, Wilson and Kelling inaugurated a new era of quality of life policing that, their promoters say, drove down crime and brought new promise to the “crime-infested” inner city. But in truth it merely repackaged a much older imperative of policing as first and foremost about controlling the poor. Consider a vignette from their essay in which they depict the poor as an eternal threat to good order and police as a bulwark against that disorder:
The people on the street were primarily black; the officer who walked the street was white. The people were made up of “regulars” and “strangers.” Regulars included both “decent folk” and some drunks and derelicts who were always there but who “knew their place.” Strangers were, well, strangers, and viewed suspiciously, sometimes apprehensively. The officer—call him Kelly—knew who the regulars were, and they knew him. As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules. Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger. If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet.2
Wilson and Kelling ignore the question of race except, as in the first line of the passage above, to imply that it doesn’t matter. But the order that police impose on the poor—how to behave, how to punish, who belongs and who must be banished—is always also a racial order. The imperative for bourgeois order contains a “white supremacist desire for surveilling, policing, caging and (preemptively) socially liquidating” the poor and people of color.3 This intensified targeting of the poor seeks to build and forever protect an order based on private property. This is policing as and for gentrification.
No violence appears in the story of Kelly the cop that Wilson and Kelling recount. Presumably the white cop just walks a beat in a Black neighborhood, good-naturedly swinging his nightstick, politely ordering people around. They depict him imposing order without the presence or threat of police violence. Just tell those noisy teenagers to keep quiet and they will. But order requires obedience. What happens when they disobey? Perhaps Wilson and Kelling ignore this question because it is immaterial to the question of police and order. It is not behavior that defines disobedience and disorder; it is being poor or being Black that defines disobedience and disorder. This is what happens in the ghetto, where the order police impose comes from what James Baldwin called the “thunder and fire of the billy club.”4 Wilson and Kelling make this argument explicitly. No inference is necessary to understand what they mean. The white cop always assumes the businessman is right and acts accordingly. As Baldwin reminds us, police “are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.”5
If police have “no other function” than to “keep the Negro in his place” and “to protect white business interests,” what an enormous function it is. Order as racial and class order seeps into every nook and cranny of the state, preoccupies every top cop and county sheriff in the land, and defines every age and era of the police. It was in the service of good order that police lynched Black men or stood by while white mobs did. It was for good order that white slave-owning society created the slave patrol as a means to police the movements of Black people on and off the plantation. The mass incarceration of people of color emerged from white fear of the threat of Black criminality to good order, which is just a euphemism for white supremacy. Histories of settler colonialism are always police histories. They are stories of police controlling Indigenous people in the city in order to create and maintain a white order. “Keeping order in public space still largely means mostly non-Indigenous police controlling the movements of Indigenous peoples in city space.”6
The cops in uniform realize that the good order they impose sometimes requires terror and “thunder and fire.” It is through community policing that they convince themselves, and seek to convince us, that all this violence is necessary. They hedge their bets that when we see the world through their eyes we’ll see enemies of good order, not victims of state violence. But as Walter Benjamin warned, the status quo “is the catastrophe.”7 So refuse to see the world through police eyes. Refuse to see police as heroes patrolling the thin blue line between civilization and savagery. Refuse to see your security as a gift police give you. Instead see police as they are: an armed wing of the state out to defend the status quo, out to keep you in your place, out to protect business interests. Nothing more.
Notes:
1 Neocleous, Mark, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, Pluto Press, 2000, x.
2 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, 456.
3 Rodríguez, Dylan, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, South End Press, 2007, 25.
4 Baldwin, James, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” Nation, July 11, 1966.
5 Ibid.
6 Razack, Sherene, Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody, University of Toronto Press, 2015, 14.
7 Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, 1999, 473.
Security is the essential police concept. All that police do is justified in the name of security. Police patrol the ghetto in the name of security. Police patrol the middle-class suburb in the name of security. Your captivity by arrest and handcuffs comes from the need for security, and its close cousin safety. Security is the reason police shoot armed, and even unarmed, poor people of color. Security is why the cop has the gun holstered on the hip in the first place. The body cavity search that routinely humiliates poor women is always justified with appeals to security. The K-9 is set loose on a fleeing subject because the runaway poses a security threat to officers or the general public. It is for security that police respond to riots, strikes, or public protests with Tasers, nightsticks and tear gas.
The fetish of security animates not only the violence work of police, but the mythology and existence of the modern state. According to conventional thinking, liberal democracies such as the United States are not in fact security states because they are built first and foremost on the social contract of individual liberty and the rule of law. That is, what makes a democracy liberal is the precedence that liberty and law take over the absolutist desire for security. Liberty, it is said, is the real foundation of a democratic society and allows for a superior form of government because it actually holds political power accountable while protecting individual freedom via the rule of law. This is not to say that liberal mythology eschews security entirely, just that it has to be balanced with liberty so that ultimately liberty prevails and is kept intact. The liberal state still must provide security to its citizens, but its obligation is to do this without sacrificing liberty.
This is the classic liberty versus security debate, which usually assumes that liberty is the first principle of liberal democracies and is the reason they are called liberal democracies, not security democracies. But the ideology of security, which is to say the ideology of war and police, has always been absolutely fundamental to the rule of law. This is not to say that liberalism’s commitment to liberty is a sham. Rather, it is to suggest that maybe “liberalism’s central category is not liberty, but security.”1 Security, not liberty, is at the heart of liberal democracy. Karl Marx called security the supreme concept of bourgeois society, and we can point to any issue—from parenting, terrorism, travel, migration, education, homelessness, homemaking, climate change, crime, or consumerism—and find the imperative of security lurking in official discourse of the problem that confronts the liberal state. These are made by the state and capital into a “security issue,” which is also to say a police issue, since security is the central police concept.
Security always trumps liberty. This is not an accident or a distortion of liberal principles, but a principle built into the very architecture of liberal thought. The key here lies in the prerogative power that John Locke described as internal to liberal doctrine. The prerogative, according to Locke, refers to those times when even in a society constituted “of the people, by the people, and for the people” (that is, law), the branch of the executive must retain the prerogative for wide discretionary power (see discretion). That is, even in a democratic society ruled by the laws of the people, the state must retain for itself an emergency power to decide when, how, and to what extent to protect life, liberty, and private property. Law, he surmised, is often too slow or cumbersome to address emergencies, accidents, and immediate threats to order, and therefore the right of the state to take swift security measures must always take precedence. The only thing that must be maintained is that the state act in the best interests of the safety of the public and the public good. Importantly, Locke’s understanding of security was intimately linked with the securing of private property and accumulation within the context of settler colonialism in the Americas.
This precedence of security over all else in liberal democracies is normalized and operationalized in the unlimited discretion that the modern state codifies in law and grants to police. Police is security; police is the normalization of emergency power throughout the entirety of political territory since there is no domestic jurisdiction where police don’t claim prerogative to intervene in the name of security. To see police as a category of security, and not of law, is to insist that police power exists because law, or the liberal state, recognizes its own failures in compelling desired behavior and in responding to unforeseen disorders. This failure of law is why law turns to the prerogative of security, the power of police to restore order. As Walter Benjamin argued, “The ‘law’ of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain.” And so, “the police intervene ‘for security reasons’ in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists.”2
Just as almost any foreign policy action has been justified in the name of national security, so it is that security is the justification for all sorts of domestic policies, regardless of how violent and brutal they might be. The imprisoning of over 2 million mostly poor people, with Black, Brown, and Native people caged at higher rates: this is security. The police killing of over a thousand people a year, almost all of them poor: this is security. And this begs the question about what and who is exactly being secured? The security that animates police might seem like safety from crime. But the law has actually made it clear that police are not obligated to protect individuals. Police, the law says, are really only obligated or mandated to protect order, which is also a way of saying the securing of capitalist property relations. If you aren’t a large property owner or part of the upper classes, police don’t really care about you or your security and safety. In fact, you are the embodiment of insecurity, of threat, of disorder. You don’t need the protection of law and order, you need protection from law and order. So when cops talk in the language of security, remember: it is not your security they mean.
Notes:
1 Neocleous, Mark, Critique of Security, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, 24.
2 Benjamin, Walter, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 1978, 287.
Pacification is not about peace; it is the policy of war-making. Pacification is as much the terror of shock and awe as it is the hearts and minds campaign. To pacify a population—to impose order through coercion and consent—is not limited to military destruction and occupation. Pacification is a police concept, which is to say that pacification is ultimately animated by the logic of security. “Capital and police dream of pacification: a dream of workers available for work, present and correct, their papers in order, their minds and bodies docile, and a dream of accumulation thereby secure from resistance, rebellion or revolt.”1 Pacification dreams of an unruly world populated by disobedient subjects who refuse to go along with the state’s vision for order. Pacification does not announce the end of hostilities, but the beginning of compliance-or-else.
Pacification is as fundamental to police as it is to military conquest. And this is to say that the police power and the war power are not separate and distinct spheres of state power. The police and military pursue pacification with an iron fist and a velvet glove, with coercion and consent. The military drops bombs and builds schools, and both tactics are strategies of pacification. Police use physical tactics—chokeholds, handcuffs, nightsticks—and, for the same reasons, police use psychological tactics—community policing, Officer Friendly, coffee with a cop. The entire edifice of broken windows policing is about pacification, built as it is on a simple idea: if you are not polite to police and the interests they protect, you are a threat.
The goal of pacification projects is to produce obedient, docile, and servile subjects. This last one—servility—is important for the way it implies a humiliation at the heart of cop–community relations. Police don’t expect obedience; they impose it. The purpose of the interrogation, the body cavity search and the stop and frisk is, first and foremost, humiliation. It reminds you that you are helpless before the police powers. Yet police also try to impose obedience through public relations campaigns designed to win the support of the population. Efforts designed to convince you that that police are “here to help.” To think of police as agents of pacification is to find in all of these police activities a logic of domination and forced obedience.
Pacification is about the fabrication of order, and order-building requires dispossession first and foremost.2 Pacification serves ongoing settler colonialism by eradicating “existing Indigenous societies while establishing a new society on expropriated land that also erases its colonial past.”3 Pacification is the amnesia that a liberal capitalist order requires. Albuquerque, New Mexico police officers, for example, produce compliance, and thus pacification, with a “knee strike to the head of a defenseless suspect.”4 But this is not recorded in required use-of-force reports as force. Instead police disguise their violence with words such as “distraction strike” or “distraction technique.” In other words, Albuquerque police kick and punch and strike people with nightsticks and fists and knees until those people are obedient, until those people are pacified. And then those cops walk in parades and hand out stickers to children at the State Fair. And they visit local schools to provide safety lessons where they talk about community–police partnerships as the key to nonviolence. This is pacification.
Police demand that the public trust the police, but the police don’t trust you. If you are someone who thinks critically about Officer Friendly and his act, or even if you’re just not a cop, then you too are a threat who might need to be pacified. The police want to pacify you, but they especially want to pacify the poor, people of color, and Indigenous people. This desire for pacification animates everything that the police do.
Notes:
1 Neocleous, Mark, “The Dream of Pacification: Accumulation, Class War, and the Hunt,” Socialist Studies/Études socialistes 9:2 (2013), 18.
2 Razack, Sherene, Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody, University of Toronto Press, 2015, 32.
3 Dafnos, Tia, “Pacification and Indigenous Struggles in Canada,” Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 9:2 (2013), 59.
4 Ginger, James D., et al., “Use of Force Policy, Supervision and Management at the Albuquerque Police Department,” Special Report of the Independent Monitor, September 16, 2016, 14.
This is the story law tells of itself: law describes a body of rules, either formal or customary, imposed on a populace or constituency by an authority, often a religious order or a secular state. These rules are commonly understood to govern the behavior of all, and any violation of prescribed behavior is punished by a penalty. Most importantly law is understood to produce a just order, one based on norms in which punishment follows violation, and all of this serves the goal of equality—we are all equal before the law, in other words. When we submit to law, we submit to an objective authority, rather than to the strongman or the dictator. This is what is meant by the phrase “rule of law”: to be ruled by law, not men.
In this story the rule of law acquits itself quite nicely in comparison to the law of the strongman. After all who would choose to suffer at the whim of the strongman, when all can be equal before the law? But the story law tells of itself, one of justice and righteousness, obscures a dark side. The legal equality law promises is unevenly distributed based on a person or group’s location within relations of production. “How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from begging in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!” Here Anatole France’s great satire of law points out the cruel absurdity of law’s “equality.” Law merely reflects the principles and institutions of a given society in its historical context. Thus in a capitalist society organized around private property and the accumulation of capital, law valorizes private property by criminalizing behaviors that violate private ownership. In other words, theft can only be a “crime” when law establishes “ownership” as a protected legal standard. “In its very neutrality, law maintains capitalist relations. Law is class law, and it cannot but be so.”1 Law is not discovered, it is made, and made to serve class interests. Thus the rule of law emerges from and constitutes a particular social order.
The standard police view of law posits law as that which resolves the problem of the perpetual disorder that follows from a breakdown in social mores and community order. Police enforce the law by fighting crime in order to “protect and serve.” Law, in this view, is depicted as representing an objective good created by shared values and norms. Crime and criminals violate those norms and values. The criminal represents disorder; police defend civilization. But if we understand “crime” as any purposeful act that transgresses lawful behavior, or any behavior that violates an official legal edict, then crime is not an independent condition that preexists disorder and requires police; rather crime and the criminal exist only in relation to law. There is no crime where there is no law, or more accurately, there is no crime where there are no police. Law therefore is a mode of disciplinary power and among its most important effects is that it makes us all subjects before the law, before the police.
It is no accident that the phrase “law and order” is the mantra of police in capitalist society, where criminal law stands in as the central mode of law. Evgeny Pashukanis called criminal law a form of class domination. “The criminal jurisdiction of the Bourgeois state,” he wrote, “is organized class terror.”2 Law, particularly criminal law, in capitalist society, according to Pashukanis, is not about justice. As he argued:
So-called theories of criminal law which derive the principle of punitive policy from the interest of society as a whole are occupied with the conscious or unconscious distortion of reality. ‘Society as a whole’ exists only in the imagination of these jurists. In fact, we are faced with classes with contradictory, conflicting interests. Every historical system of punitive policy bears the imprint of the class interest of that class which realized it. The feudal lord executed disobedient peasants and city dwellers who rose against his power. The unified cities hanged the robber-knights and destroyed their castles. In the Middle Ages, a man was considered a lawbreaker if he wanted to engage in a trade without joining a guild; the capitalist bourgeoisie, which had barely succeeded in emerging, declared that the desire of workers to join unions was criminal.3
And so the criminal deserves violence, and it is through this violence, according to Walter Benjamin, that “the origins of law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence.” Through the state’s “exercise of violence over life and death more than in any other legal act, law reaffirms itself.”4 Law is thus a central element in a repressive order, and, according to Nicos Poulantzas, “by issuing rules and passing laws, the State establishes an initial field of injunctions, prohibitions and censorship, and thus institutes the practical terrain and object of violence. Furthermore, law organizes the conditions for physical repression, designating its modalities and structuring the devices by means of which it is exercised. In this sense, law as the code of organized public violence is the most routine and insidious institution of legal violence.”5
Notes:
1 Miéville, China, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, Brill, 2005, 101.
2 Pashukanis, Evgeny, Law and Marxism: A General Theory, Pluto, 1987, 58.
3 Ibid., 59.
4 Benjamin, Walter, “Critique of Violence,” in Demetz, Peter, ed., Edmund Jephcott, trans., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Schoken Books, 2007, 286.
5 Poulantzas, Nicos, State, Power, Socialism, Verso, 1980, 77.
A normative or positivist view of crime considers it an objective depiction of individual, deviant behavior. According to this view the crime rate measures misconduct in a particular place among a particular population. A constructivist view sees crime as a social construction. “Crime” is a measure of social control rather than a description of deviance, and the crime rate measures the intensity of that control in a given place on a given population. A constructivist view considers the possibility that a dramatic increase in crime rates is as much a function of improvements in data collection methods as it is in something called lawlessness.
Despite the different understandings of crime by positivist and constructivist interpretations, both generally depict crime as a legal category. One commits a crime when one breaks the law. But this view ignores the role of police in the construction of crime as a category. Law establishes what is unlawful; police decide what is a crime. The police powers of investigation, interrogation and arrest constitute the usual way something gets counted as crime. A Baltimore police department sergeant ordered an officer to clear a corner where young Black men were congregating. When the officer asked what crime they were committing, the sergeant replied, “Make something up.” When a Baltimore detective was told he made a bad arrest, he explained to another detective, “We don’t care about what happens in court. We just care about getting the arrest.”1 The power to define what is or isn’t a crime, and who is or isn’t a criminal, rests with police alone.
Police unions and conservative law and order politicians are among the most vocal members of the get-tough-on-crime lobby. They depict crime rates as an objective measure of deviance—always with a focus on street crime and never corporate or white collar crime—and they use this as a rationale for their tough-on-crime positions. The preoccupation among law and order politicians on the problem of crime is often described as a fear of disorder and the crisis that attends that disorder. The solution is to demand “‘more than usual law,’ to ensure, in a moment of crisis, ‘more than usual order,’”2 to expand the punitive criminal justice system with more mandatory prison sentences, more heavily armed police, more solitary confinement, and more life without parole.
Even if one believes that crime describes deviance, it does not follow that these tough-on-crime proposals solve the problem, unless the problem is not enough people of color in jail. Police of course claim otherwise. Predictive policing programs such as CompStat, “quality of life” practices such as broken windows policing, and even tactical units such as police helicopter divisions, are all among the specific ways police claim to engage in crime deterrence, but this is a theoretical, not an empirical, argument. It imagines that crime rates measure an active criminal world lurking just beyond the reach of police. It assumes that only police, via the threat of punishment—arrest and incarceration—prevent crime. The police concept of deterrence needs crime rates in order to assume that criminals preexist a crime, and that these criminals-to-be will choose not to commit a crime based on the threat of arrest and incarceration.
Constructivist theories of crime view it as a measure of poverty and inequality. According to this view poverty, not deviance, is the root of crime, and rising crime rates are a measure of the intensity of that inequality. The constructivist view generally rejects zero-tolerance criminal justice reforms and instead proposes social services and alternatives to jail and prison, such as probation and parole, as a fairer and more effective approach to the problem of crime. But this has had the effect of greatly expanding the scope and reach of the criminal justice system. The result has been an explosion in new prison construction in order to cage the increasing numbers of Black and Latino prisoners and thus an expansion of what scholars call the carceral state. What is important to keep in mind, though, is that this was the result of a bipartisan consensus between conservatives and liberals, and even though liberals and conservatives differ regarding the status of crime as something either real or political, both link race to criminality.
Despite these differences, Naomi Murakawa sees a lot in common between the normative and constructivist views of crime when it comes to how both understand the relationship between crime and race. Whereas conservatives historically see Black crime as “a manifestation of civil rights gone too far,” liberals see rising Black crime rates “as indicators that civil rights had not gone far enough.” She argues that “rising crime of the 1960s was not uniquely racialized as a conservative strategy to conflate civil rights with black criminality; rather, the race ‘problem’ of the civil rights movement from the 1940s onward was answered with pledges of carceral state development—from racial liberal and conservative lawmakers alike.” In other words, while liberal and conservative views differ regarding the status of “crime” as either real or political, both link race to criminality. She encourages us to think about “crime politics,” rather than crime, as a way to understand the intense criminalization of Black life in the United States. How else to explain the explosion in the incarceration of Black people over the past forty years? “Between 1926 and 1976, black admission rates to state and federal prisons varied between 81 and 137 admitted per 100,000, and white admission rates varied between 22 and 50 admitted per 100,000 … a three-to-one ration … After 1976, however, the black admission rate hit a six-to-one ratio.”3
Crime is also a gendered category. It is only since 1993 that marital rape has been a crime in all fifty US states. But again, we would be better to focus on police rather than law when considering the crime of rape. “Only a fraction of rapes is reported, the most frequently mentioned reason for nonreporting being fear of the criminal justice system. Women of color fear its racism particularly. Only a fraction of reported rapes is prosecuted. Many rapes are ‘unfounded,’ an active verb describing the police decision not to believe that a rape happened as reported.”4
The category of crime serves then as the primary tool for social control and order. Nearly one in ten Black men who are in their twenties are currently in jail, and one in three Black men will be incarcerated at some point in their life. But before they can be locked in cages, they must be arrested by the police. Crime, in other words, is at the discretion of police, not the rule of law. Crime is a cop category.
Notes:
1 Crystal, Joseph, “How Police Reinforce Misconduct,” New York Times, August 15, 2016, A19.
2 Hall, Stuart, et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 316.
3 Murakawa, Naomi, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Oxford University Press, 2014, 13–14, 3, 6.
4 MacKinnon, Catharine A., “Reflections on Sex Equality Under Law,” Yale Law Journal (1991): 1303.
The power to kill is the power from which all other police powers follow. The police can arrest you and put you in handcuffs and take you to jail because they can kill you. Cops can make you move along because they can beat you with a nightstick or sic a K-9 on you. They can beat you and kill you with legal and political impunity because police claim the ultimate authority—the discretion to take a life in order to make order. Max Weber famously identified the state as that institution that “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” and it is to the police that this violent monopoly is delegated. When we talk about police power we are also talking about state power, and when we talk about police violence we are always already talking about the legal violence of the administrative state. We are talking about the organized violence that is required for the system of racial capitalism to exist.
Cop power is always an executive power that exercises the discretion to use violence or decide against using violence, to kill or to let live. Think of Hobbes’s notion of Leviathan and Locke’s notion of the sovereign’s prerogative to decide who is a threat and what is an emergency, and see that cops are “petty sovereigns,” invested with an unlimited discretion to identify and respond in whatever ways they deem necessary in any given moment.1 Cops exercise violence routinely and with near legal impunity.
Police are curators in the art of violence. They have a plethora of weapons to help them perform this legal violence. And though police can array this violence however they see fit, it is never exercised equally across a social order. State violence is always more concentrated in spaces of poverty and exclusion such as the ghetto, and against the poor and people of color confined there. It isn’t a coincidence that police violence is often framed as disinfecting and sanitizing. Consider the slang cops use when talking about police violence. When they strike someone on the head with a nightstick: “wood shampoo.” When they explain why they brought in SWAT: “crime-infested neighborhood.” Cops “sweep the streets” and “take out the trash” when they discipline the “savages,” “filth,” “scum,” and “dirtbags” roaming urban space. Police logic is the logic of sanitation, the logic of “polishing” and making “polite” those “dirty” populations that threaten order.
The legal capacity to use violence separates police from all other institutions, since police are legally sanctioned to exercise violence against virtually anyone who is not ostensibly a police officer. But we need to be clear here: violence is not just a right of police work; violence is a condition of police work. The work of police therefore is the work of legal violence. Cops are violence workers first and foremost. One of the most influential sociologists of police to make this point, Egon Bittner, argued that “the role of the police is best understood as a mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force employed in accordance with the dictates of an intuitive grasp of situational exigencies.”1 Bittner argued that the authority of police to use force is nearly without restriction, particularly because the use of force comes with no real consequences. The idea of lawful violence is thus meaningless, as police violence stands forever outside legal sanction.
Coercive force structures all police practice. We call police because of their capacity to deploy violence if necessary. Even when an arrest appears to take place with no visible resistance, this encounter is in no way absent of violence but completely structured by it. As legal theorist Robert Cover famously noted, “We don’t talk our prisoners to jail.”2 It only appears that the defendant goes along willingly. Violence is always there, and ready to make itself known.
An important implication is that police violence shouldn’t be reduced to only those instances where death or outright bodily violence is the result, instances popularly referred to as police brutality. The point is that police violence is never exceptional, however spectacular and appalling it might be, and that the majority of police violence is routine and ordinary, built into the very mandate of police that makes police such a unique and powerful force in all of our lives, but especially the lives of the poor. Legal violence is the principal dynamic that renders an equal exchange between cop and non-cop an impossibility.4
But policing is rarely recognized as violence work. This might be due to your experiences with friendly, respectful and understanding cops. Or maybe you’ve been a victim of crime or personal violence and police came to your aid. Or maybe you have cops in your family and hence see them as much more than violence workers. But to say that cops are violence workers isn’t to narrow the issue to a discussion about individual personalities or particular incidents. To do so would be to reduce a discussion of police violence to bad apples and legal critiques of intent and reasonableness, which is also the same as speaking in law’s language of judges, lawyers and cops. To say that cops are violence workers is to speak about the structural dynamics of policing as both an institution and a sociopolitical process. In addition, the police power endlessly works to disown its violent function, whether through phrases such as “protect and serve,” “public safety” and “security,” or the image work of public relations that represents police as friendly and helpful. Even Officer Friendly is no stranger to violence, because he or she is still a cop from whom violence always remains a condition of employment.
From the police perspective though, they rarely use violence and instead use the word “force” to refer to their violence. The term “violence” is reserved for the non-state, unsanctioned behaviors or actions of anyone who isn’t a cop, anyone who defies police authority to dictate any given situation. Yet frequently police and those who protest police violence agree on the definition of police violence as an injurious act against a body defined in relation to professional standards, usually understood as excessive acts that defy legal or institutional guidelines. We should look beyond this definition because it ignores the ways nonlethal police violence, so commonplace and everyday, goes unseen. Researchers, journalists and reformers can spend a lot of time with police and never see cops use violence and therefore miss the ways that even routine policing is experienced by the poor as nothing but constant humiliation and indignity. This too is violence and should be seen as such.
Thinking of cops as violence workers isn’t to suggest police share any solidarity or real interests with workers in other sectors. Some on the left have argued that cops should be included within the 99 percent and therefore leftist activists should engage in more friendly, reformist relations with cops so as to ultimately convince them to switch their loyalty away from the 1 percent. However appealing this might seem, it resonates only to the extent that it hinges on an ahistorical, hopeful naiveté untethered to actually existing historical patterns and contemporary conditions. Police violence is most often used against low-wage workers, the surplus populations excluded from a consistent, livable wage, and the activists and movements challenging the status quo.
Police unions collectively bargain to be free of independent police oversight regarding their use of violence, and this means they bargain collectively for the right, as a condition of their employment, to be as violent as they see fit. Police unions collectively bargain to maintain and expand the police capacity to deploy violence in order to protect the racialized status quo of capitalist private property relations. Cops bargain with the capitalist state, which means the state engages in negotiations over the very question of police violence, and since no police department in the United States submits to independent oversight, this is another way to see that the state always defers to police on the use of violence.
If the police relation is always nonnegotiable and unequal because it is always structured by law’s violence, then the problem of police violence is the problem of policing and law more generally. Yet this is too limited a view, since it gives too much blame to police and not enough blame to capitalism, specifically a neoliberal capitalism that has systematically produced the largest inequality gap between the rich and the poor in history, and frequently through programs like broken windows policing that unabashedly target the poor, people of color, and the homeless. As Karl Marx famously diagnosed, “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”3
Capitalism doesn’t exist without cops because cops are the violence workers that fabricate and maintain relations of private property that are fundamental to capitalism. This means that even the overt forms of police violence such as the killing of Kelly Thomas cannot be reduced to repression alone but are actually generative of social order. This is among the most frightening facts of police violence: it is productive. It produces a very specific outcome. The liberal capitalist state requires these deaths because they help to produce the current social order. This also means that those movements of insurgency or resistance, such as those associated with Black Lives Matter or Indigenous struggles like Idle No More understand that they are not merely confronting some isolated issue of the police and police violence but are confronting and contesting the very legitimacy and lifeblood of racial capitalism.
Notes:
1 Butler, Judith, Precarious Life, Verso Books, 2006.
2 Bittner, Egon, The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, National Institute of Mental Health, 1970, 46.
3 Cover, Robert M., “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal (1986), 1601–29.
4 Calder Williams, Evan, “Objects of Desire,” The New Inquiry, August 13, 2012.
5 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), Ben Fowkes, trans., Harmondsworth, 1976, 926.
Make no mistake: the police are at war, and have always been at war. They wage a war on crime and a war on drugs and a war on terror, all of which emerged from a war on poverty. Policing is a form of domestic warfare, both in how police talk about policing and in how the state carries it out.1 The rhetoric of war is thus not a metaphor. It comes from the material realities of manufacturing and reproducing an order of racial capitalism.
The police project is a war project and this view helps cut through the ideologies of reform that assume police are ultimately a force for good and a beacon of civilization. The war power of police is therefore viewed by police as the force that constitutes police. There has never been a “golden age” when police were not at war. We should say that again: there is no golden age of policing where police were actually democratic, nonviolent, and didn’t target the poor, people of color, and activists. This is why Black urban communities have long described police as an “occupying army” and the ghetto as an “internal colony.” They use the language of war because policing is war. Life in the ghetto is experienced as violent occupation.
All different factions in this class war recognize it as a war. It is not just poor people of color who draw on the language of war when describing police as an occupying army. When politicians speak of crime and cops, they also speak in the language of war. Lyndon Johnson called for cops to launch “an immediate attack” on crime in 1966. “The front-line soldier in the war on crime is the local law enforcement officer.”2 Bill Clinton reminded Democratic national convention goers in 1992 that “[President Bush] hasn’t fought a real war on crime and drugs. I will.” And the war they delivered put more cops in poor communities and more people of color in cages. If we include jail, prison, probation and parole, the incarceration rate grew from 780,000 when Johnson launched his attack to 7 million in 2010.3 And this war was experienced most intensely in minority communities. As Richard Nixon’s chief of staff explained, “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”4 So they offered programs and policies designed to make the war appear civil, humane, and peaceful in order to capture our hearts and minds, programs such as community policing and Officer Friendly.
There is nothing new about any of this. As Robin Kelley explains, “The position of the police as an occupying army in America’s inner cities is not a new phenomenon. It is not a recent manifestation of a post-industrial condition in which the disappearance of jobs in urban areas generated lawlessness and disorder, nor is it the result of the federal government having declared war on drugs, though these things have certainly heightened police–community tensions in urban neighborhoods of color.”5 Police are a crucial part of the perpetual and permanent war that began with Indigenous dispossession and genocide and chattel slavery, historical processes that still very much structure the political and cultural economies of capitalist accumulation at home and abroad.
So there is no need to distinguish between the War on Terror abroad and the War on Crime at home. The police war against crime and drugs is the same war as the War on Terror, and of course the War on Terror is waged domestically by both police and the military. “Drugs help supply the deadly work of terrorists,” explained George W. Bush in 2002. “That’s so important for people in our country to understand. You know, I’m asked all the time, ‘How can I help fight against terror? And what can I do, what can I as a citizen do to defend America?’ Well, one thing you can do is not purchase illegal drugs. Make no mistake about it: If you’re buying illegal drugs in America, it is likely that money is going to end up in the hands of terrorist organizations.”6 There is no war on crime, drugs, and terror. There is only war against the poor.
And police and war are inseparable, always already together.7 The agents and officials of the warfare state talk endlessly about police as soldiers, and police power more generally as always engaged in wars, battles, campaigns, raids, and operations. Police departments have long utilized the same technologies and weaponry used in colonization and warfare, speaking to the shared material mandate of militaries and police forces. The cop is a soldier, looks like a soldier, trains like a soldier, and cops have long understood themselves as soldiers and policing as a war against the disobedient assholes and “filth” of the city. Police is a modality of war, just as war is a modality of police power.
Notes:
1 Rodríguez, Dylan, “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,” Critical Sociology 36:1 (2010), 165.
2 Johnson, Lyndon, Special Message to the Congress on Crime and Law Enforcement, March 9, 1966.
3 Murakawa, Naomi, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, Oxford University Press, 2014, 5.
4 Quoted in Baum, Dan, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, Boston: Little, Brown, 1996, 13.
5 Kelley, Robin, “Slangin Rocks, Palestinian Style,” in Nelson, Jill, ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, 24–5.
6 Bush, George W., Remarks on the 2002 National Drug Control Strategy, Washington, DC, February 12, 2002.
7 Neocleous, Mark, War Power, Police Power, Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Force generally refers to the physical coercion and compulsion police use to impose order. This is called the police use of force. Cops put their hands on you, strike you with a nightstick, put you in a chokehold, Taser you, handcuff and arrest you, shoot and kill you. But force is also a synonym for police itself—the police force describes the police collective. The state delegates its monopoly on legitimate violence to police, which uses force to impose order. This is police force. What constitutes police, force, is also what names it: the force.
So force is simultaneously what police do and what they are. But it would be incomplete to limit any definition of force to merely the physical coercion used to impose order, because cops use more than physical coercion. Force, in other words, also refers to a capacity to convince and control, and the power to influence or intimidate. Police speak of the deterrence effect of police helicopters, and what goes unsaid is the dread the sound delivers as it hovers over “crime-infested” neighborhoods. Police celebrate community policing as a cop–community collaboration, but its logic rests in an argument about pacification, and thus order, as coming about through both the physical and the psychological. That really nice Officer Friendly who came to your school to read to your kid made sure she strapped her nightstick, her Taser, and her Glock 22 pistol to her waist. This too is force, the “speak softly but carry a big stick” version.
So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that police use violence through physical coercion, and force through psychological coercion as a means to achieve order. But this would be incomplete as well. After all, both “force” and “violence” as police and many critics of police violence define it, refer to the use of physical coercion, and both, in their generally accepted usage, ignore forms of coercion and compulsion that leave no physical marks.
We are now at the impasse in which police intend us to be. What is the difference between force and violence? We do not have the language to explain it. Indeed if it’s true that police have near total discretion to use force, what objective criteria could possibly define unjustified force, excessive force, or police brutality? And yet these are the only terms we have available to us—terms that serve ultimately to reinforce the legitimacy of police use of physical and psychological coercion. After all if the problem is excessive force, then force cannot be a problem, and violence is not part of the conversation.
So let’s start over and define the difference as police would: force is the use of physical coercion to impose order, whereas violence is the domain of criminals and criminality and is the very thing that police force is arrayed against. Police have total discretion to use force as long as it is not disproportionate—shooting a handcuffed subject or beating a small child with a nightstick would be the application of disproportionate force and distinguishes excessive force from justified force. To avoid excessive force, police adhere to the use-of-force continuum, which appears to limit where, when, and how police use force. This is the police version of force, and it is taken for granted by police and criminology.
Perhaps the solution then is to reject the police definition of force and of violence, and to refuse to see the world like police. Let’s turn our attention away from police and toward the subjects of the police use of force. And yes, let’s pay attention to Chicago Detective Jon Burge’s torture victims for example (see interrogation), but let’s not limit our attention to only the sensational cases of police violence. What would happen if we focused our attention on the searing pain of tear gas or the dull, lingering ache that comes from being handcuffed behind your back to a wall for hours? What definition of force could we write if we considered the emotional pain an arrest causes a mother whose parental rights are suddenly in jeopardy, or the financial pain that follows a resisting arrest or a felony battery charge that a cop slaps on top of a simple misdemeanor just to “teach you a lesson”? How would our view of police use of force change if we paid attention to the fear a police presence generates in immigrant communities, or the terror caused by the sirens and sounds of deterrence? This is not about what is justified. That is a police word. This is about what is inevitable. When we no longer see the world like police, we understand why police describe what they do—police use of force—the same way they describe what they are—the police force. Because police force is another word for fear and intimidation. Police don’t use force; police is force.
The word “jurisdiction” refers to a particular mode or expression of legal authority and its reach. When we speak of jurisdiction, we speak of the exercise of judicial authority over subjects or areas of the law, and the extent and limit of that authority. When applied to the police powers, it nearly always refers to the spatial scope of police authority.
But “the object of police,” writes Michel Foucault, “is almost infinite.” The liberal state is obsessed with order and “there is no limit to the objectives of government when it is a question of managing a public power that has to regulate the behavior of subjects.”1 And so here we find the paradox of jurisdiction that does not appear in the criminology books or the legal dictionaries: what the liberal state claims to limit is in fact limitless; what law says is not permitted (unlimited police powers) is in practice realized. It is jurisdiction that animates the rule of law, and it is the rule of law that promises to restrict the state’s reach, to constrain the police powers, but instead it does something quite different. When legal questions arise, jurisdiction prompts us to ask: Who or what can claim authority? Where and what are the limits of this authority? Who must submit? And the answers to these questions chart a liberal route to what the law considers just. As Robert Cover famously pointed out, “all legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.”2
A defendant is judged and convicted through legal interpretation, then police shackle her and prison guards incarcerate her. The military claims jurisdiction, and a defendant becomes a combatant and disappears.
Now consider the concept of jurisdiction when applied to police. It is limited only by territory. Who can claim authority? Only police. What are the limits of that authority? They are only spatial, only geographical. Who must submit? Everyone within the jurisdictional boundaries. If jurisdiction defines the liberal relationship between justice and truth, the definition of police jurisdiction renders truth a spatial effect of the police powers. Police know no limit to the mode of expression of police powers within jurisdictional space. And we should remember that most of the jurisdictional decisions of the criminal justice system take place in the street, on the beat, not before the court.
Jurisdiction appears to limit the police powers by erecting strict spatial boundaries and, in so doing, obscures the limitless nature of authority within those boundaries. But remember, there is no escaping jurisdiction. You are always a subject of police power. One police jurisdiction always gives way to another police jurisdiction. It is through the concept of jurisdiction that police promise a limit to the police powers while at the same time seizing a total power and grasp over all territory.
How have we allowed this to happen? How have we allowed truth to become an adjunct to justice, justice to be the exclusive domain of legal interpretation, and legal interpretation to be described as a thing called jurisdiction, to be patrolled by police?
Notes:
1 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Michel Senellart, ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 7.
2 Cover, Robert M., “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95:8 (1986), 1601.
Fasces, emblematic of authority in ancient Rome and fascist Italy, embellish the border of the LAPD badge.
The police badge is among the most recognizable symbols of police authority. The metallic, glossy badge is an important theatrical prop in melodramatic fantasies of the thin blue line. In the opening credits of The Blue Knight, a 1975 film based on former Los Angeles police officer Joseph Wambaugh’s novel of the same name, a white, uniformed cop twirls his nightstick as he stares into the camera. A series of transpositions take place: red and blue siren lights spin and flash as the words The Blue Knight emerge on the screen. Slowly the title dissolves into a large, shiny LAPD police badge. And then the badge morphs into the white male officer as the camera does a wide aerial pan of the big city landscape as it swallows up the cop walking his beat.
The badge is theater, but it is not innocent. Through its theatrics, the badge does important political work by giving symbolic form to police authority. The gun might be the most basic and lethal of police weapons, but the badge is the emblematic license for legitimate violence. The badge renders the violent work of policing legitimate and justified, but also noble and sacred. The anthropologist Michael Taussig calls the police badge a “magical talisman,” the holy artifact that endows the police community with a mystical authority not just earthly and pragmatic, but nearly divine and transcendent.1 The symbolic theatrics of the badge conjure something similar to a religious conversion. Putting on or taking off the badge, therefore, always constitutes a transformation. It’s a symbol of the righteousness of police. Just by wearing a badge, a person is transformed into a police officer. They undergo a transubstantiation. And just as we are supposed to have faith in Christ and his cross, we are commanded to have faith in cops and their badges.
The overwhelming symbolic importance of the badge should tip us off to the inherently fraught nature of police violence: unlike soldierly violence that might take place “over there,” police require some window dressing as a means of making their violence at home appear civilized, chivalrous, and noble. This also conjures up a particular historical formation: the colonial history of the sheriff’s badge in civilizing the frontier of the Wild West. The frontier was civilized and pacified, we are taught, not just through any old violence, but through the purifying violence behind the constable’s badge. Although the lawman, outlaw, and savage all possess guns and other weapons, they don’t all wear the badge, and this makes all the difference.
The magical talisman of the cop’s badge shrouds the ordinary violence of police in noble, stately robes and chivalrous customs, and by extension confirms the institution of policing as a sacred tradition of civilization. As The Blue Knight shows, police mythology frequently narrates the police officer as the modern equivalent of the crusading medieval knight, and the police badge as the contemporary coat of arms. A police website, The Modern Knight, explains:
A police officer wears a shield on the left side of their uniform for a reason. The strong side, predominantly your right hand, is for your weapon. The left side carries the symbol of the knights of old, the protectors of ancient society. The shield represents the modern commitment that law enforcement officers have made as warriors, servants and leaders to “serve and protect.” Police officers are modern knights, going to work each day with weapons and armor with a noble cause to protect our society and ensure our welfare.
We don’t suffer from a shortage of representations of cops as noble knight warriors and crusaders. Pay attention on the street and you might see people wearing knight-themed police T-shirts, one of which depicts a knight’s helmet with a thin blue line–themed American flag, accompanied by text: “Fate whispers to the warrior you cannot withstand the storm. And the warrior whispers back I am the storm.” Another shirt depicts a cross-bearing Crusader knight wielding a sword, with the well-known Psalms verse: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil.” You might find these shirts worn by members of the Blue Knights, a “law enforcement motorcycle club” with over 650 chapters and 90,000 members across twenty-nine countries. No doubt many have read S.W.A.T.: Blue Knights in Black Armor, a novel written by a former police officer.
Police as knights figure prominently in “Honor of the Badge,” a speech by Springfield, Missouri police chief Paul Williams, published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. In it Williams writes that “today’s police officers are modern day knights, and the badge is their shield … it is appropriate that during the police academy, analogies to knights are used to highlight training experiences.” Like police officers, knights “promised to defend the weak, be courteous to women, be loyal to their king, and serve God at all times.”2
Williams equates the knightly Code of Chivalry with the Law Enforcement Oath of Honor, and the badge as the majestic artifact of police honor. Indeed, the mystical, sacred powers of the police badge are best seen in the ritual ceremonies of badge-giving and -taking. Recruits take the police oath to “never betray my badge,” and then officially become a cop only when granted the badge. In the United States this comes with a gun, the cop’s modern day sword. It goes without saying: you can’t officially become a cop if you aren’t legally, and ceremoniously, granted a badge. The ceremony bestows knighthood on the cop by granting the title of Officer. But the inverse is also true: without a badge, you are not a cop. When you give up or are stripped of your badge and gun, you lose the knightly power to police. This allure of the badge and the gun can also partly explain why impersonating a police officer is taken quite seriously—proper, legitimate cops must be legally authentic, despite the fact that many officers today carry unofficial badges because they can be fined for losing their official ones.
For Taussig the badge becomes the totem of a violent masculinity enshrined within the culture of policing, with the badge as a symbolic stand-in for the phallus. The stripping of the badge is the ritual act of castration or beheading.3 This might seem comedic—a theater of the absurd—but points to the symbolic, totalizing grip the police badge holds over the bureaucratic, workaday rituals of police. The stripping of the badge ceremony can also be thought of as an inoculation. The police perform a self-critique and sacrifice the bad apple officers who have violated the apparent noble and honorable police institution. This is a ritual castration and it works to actually legitimate not only the police institution, but the majestic, sacred powers of the sovereign state. In his comments on “ignominy,” or dishonor and shame, in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes distinguishes between two types of honor. There is the “Honorable by Nature” such as “Courage, Magnanimity, Strength, Wisdome” and the “Honorable by the Common-Wealth; as Badges, Titles, Offices, or any other singular marke of the Soveraigns favour.” Hobbes claims that Honor by Nature “cannot be taken away by a Law” and hence “the losse of them is not Punishment.” But Honor granted by the “Common-Wealth” “may be taken away by publique authority that made them Honorable” and so taking away their “Badges, Titles, and Offices” is punishment by the “Soveraign.”4 The badge, and the mystical authority it possesses, then, is contingent on state permission and approval. The state giveth, and it will taketh away as it pleases, not unlike the exterminating violence police wield against the enemies of the state.
The phrase “behind the badge” is usually invoked as a mode of humanizing the individual police officer—to show that he or she is just a regular person doing a difficult job. Instead of dismissing this phrase as sentimental ideology, we might instead treat it as a cold hard truth: If we peek behind the badge we find no transcendent, mystical, sacred authority; rather, we find political power propped up by material histories of state power and symbolic rituals of pomp and ceremony. Hip-hop group NWA cuts through the theatrical absurdity in their track “Fuck tha Police”: “Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got? A sucker in a uniform waiting to get shot.” What separates the legitimate from the illegitimate, and the sacred from the profane, is a cheap metal artifact authorized by sovereign command.
Notes:
1 Taussig, Michael, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, University of Chicago Press, 2006, 177.
2 Williams, Paul F., “Notable Speech: Honor of the Badge,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, August, 2012.
3 Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 178.
4 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan [1651], Penguin Books, 1984, 358.
It is often said that police represent a thin blue line between good and evil, anarchy and order, civilization and savagery. As one officer writes on a police webforum, “I generally don’t think in terms of ‘us vs. them,’ but the reality is this: there is a thin blue line that seperates [sic] good from evil, order from chaos and safety from fear. Those are the brothers and sisters on the job.” Or consider a line from the 2012 Hollywood police film End of Watch: “The thin blue line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.” The performative power of the thin blue line, as these quotations suggest, depends on both a promise of order and its near-constant collapse or breakdown, with the “boys in blue” playing the role of a barricade holding back savage hordes.
Make no mistake, the thin blue line is a battle line, which is to say that the thin blue line is a mythology of war. The phrase itself is widely thought to be inspired by a poem about war and soldiers, specifically Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy,” which describes British soldiers in the Crimean War (1854) as a “thin red line of heroes when the drums begin to roll.” This police war is waged against anyone or anything that police determine exists on the wrong side of the battle line dividing good from evil.
The thin blue line brings into sharp focus not only the logic of war, but also the theatrical power of police, or the ways that policing always entails a dramaturgical politics of storytelling, symbolic exhibition, and melodramatic fantasies of evil enemies and cruel underworlds. Policing can usefully be thought of as a staging of melodramatic battles between conflicting forces, a form of police theatrics that tries to make the authority of the state appear to be a legitimate form of authority.1 The modern state, as Poulantzas taught, is always engaged in a sort of political theater via “mechanisms of fear,” and to this we can add that the thin blue line is one of the liberal state’s most insidious mechanisms of fear.
The word “thin” is interesting here for the way it implies an always unstable and uncertain border between good and evil. The story of the thin blue line is a story of society under attack, which is really just another way of saying that the police are also always under attack, whether it be from super-predator criminals, lower class debauchery, irrational mobs, heartless gangs, crazed drug addicts, merciless terrorists, sadistic murderers, child molesters, prostitutes, con artists, graffiti punks, liberals or leftists, or disobedient youth. The police story of the thin blue line is a war story of the line between civilization and savagery always getting thinner, whether by criminality, a general lack of decency in society, or a failure to properly support the police. This mythology also helps to absolve cops who decide to cross the line, as we often see in television dramas when the cop crosses over to the criminal side in the apparent pursuit of justice. For cops, the thin blue line is understood as permeable and fluid.
Hence police are constantly complaining that they are underfunded, underpaid, understaffed, under-armed, and underappreciated, while simultaneously claiming criminals are only becoming more vicious, more brazen, and better armed with more advanced weapons.
There is a cottage industry of thin blue line products, including T-shirts, hats, stickers, coffee mugs, and a plethora of other commodities depicting a bright blue line. It has also become a common meme on social media sites like Facebook, as officers and their supporters make a blue line flag the primary image for their profile, largely in response to what they perceive as a war against cops associated with the growing Black Lives Matter protests. One recent campaign encouraged police officers and others to change their front porch light bulbs to blue lights in order to proclaim that “Blue Lives Matter.” One T-shirt depicts an American flag in black and white tones, except for one of the stripes being a bright police blue, as if to claim that the very existence of the nation is simply impossible or unimaginable without police.
The thin blue line orients so much thinking about police power regardless of politics. The thin blue line claims that order and civilization can’t exist without police, because police power is the very line—the border or boundary—dividing wickedness from the good life, morality from depravity, and the sacred from the profane. If there are no police, we are told, there will be no civilization, and life itself will devolve back to a Hobbesian state of nature where life is nasty, brutish, and short. If we don’t give our undying support to the cops, which is to say if we refuse the police definition of reality (that is, think for ourselves), mass violence and chaos will inevitably be the only result.
It was partly for this reason that the Black revolutionary George Jackson wrote in Soledad Brother that the thin blue line was “patronizing shit.”2 It is patronizing shit for the way it limits the political imagination by claiming that sociality can only exist with a world full of cops. The thin blue line is patronizing shit for the ways it claims police keep the peace while ignoring the role of police in class warfare. It is patronizing shit for the ways it claims to be about protection from violence when it is really about maintaining the violence of property. To recognize the thin blue line as patronizing shit is to refuse the police definition of reality and to instead begin writing our own scripts of abolition.
Notes:
1 Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff, “Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder,” Critical Inquiry 30:4 (2004).
2 Jackson, George, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Chicago Review Press, 1970.
A popular refrain in police circles is that policing isn’t a job, it is a profession. Cops are, or at least should be, consummate police professionals. But what does it mean for a cop to be a professional? It means that cops shouldn’t be amateur, uneducated, corrupt, untrained, and unaccountable bullies with a badge and a gun. To be professional is to be educated, impartial, efficient, and trained in techno-scientific crime fighting methods while rigidly adhering to specialized codes of conduct so as to be incorruptible, fair, efficient, objective, and accountable.
When police talk of professionalization they merge concerns over the conduct of individual officers with institutional police structure and culture. The more that policing institutions are professionalized, the more that individual cops will be professionals, the more that democracy will flourish. The story of police professionalization, then, is a story about the reform of the police into a force of progress. It is a redemptive narrative in which police advocates admit past faults and corruption in order to rescue the police institution as a noble, always improving, inherently democratic and scientific force for good.
Police professionalization is as old as modern police, with the ruling classes justifying the creation of the earliest modern police departments in the name of a skilled, trained, and politically neutral police power constituted by, and in service to, the public. Robert Peel, credited with creating London’s first modern police force in 1829, justified this new apparatus of law and order by claiming that a professionalized police institution that adhered to ethical principles would be a significant improvement over past and more disorganized and unethical forms of policing. He also claimed this professional police would be a more legitimate form of domestic governance than the military despite the fact that he modeled the police on the military. Despite these promises, the police were mired in controversies over political corruption, over its inability to fight crime, and for wanton violence. In the United States, a similar process took place, with newly formed professional departments in the mid to late 1800s quickly caught in controversies over violence against immigrants and the poor and for being at the service of political elites.
This history of controversy, corruption, and racialized violence gave rise to more and more calls for professionalization during the Progressive Era (1890–1920). A central focus was the incorporation of new technology, such as the automobile, two-way radios, fingerprinting, and record-keeping systems, among others. This era gave rise to popular figures of police reform such as Berkeley police chief and author of the 1931 Wickersham Commission on police brutality August Vollmer, future president Teddy Roosevelt, and director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.
Police professionalization became a key way in which the FBI legitimated its war on crime beginning in the late 1920s and a way to distance itself from its own controversial past. J. Edgar Hoover, famed top cop, racist, and anti-labor “red hunter,” constructed a kind of scientific masculinity at the FBI through all manner of reforms such as “rigorous training, dress regulations, internal inspections, a strict code of conduct, heavy reliance on the acquisition and sorting of information, and a system of uniform investigative procedures.”1 Police were presented now as experts in science and technology rather than the corrupt bullies of a previous era. The lie detector, for example, largely emerged during this time as a more civil and humane means of replacing the brutality of “third degree” interrogation, working to shore up a view of police as closer to technical experts than brutes.
But police professionalization was not confined to the domestic United States, as this movement plays an important role in US imperial projects abroad. In the name of progress, reform, and professionalization, the United States trained and deployed police in countries around the world, a process that only continues today, as with the US training of Iraqi security forces. This also helps to highlight the ways that police training and nation-building abroad is by no means innocent, as it serves the interests of US political power and capitalism while at once being directly and indirectly implicated in all sorts of atrocities.2
The reformist fairy tale of police professionalization is seductive partly because it masquerades as a self-critique while at the same time rescuing the police as a flawed but fundamentally well-intentioned and necessary institution for the public good. Professionalization is a strategy of legitimization, and this has always been its animating compulsion, and it is why this fairy tale has to be recognized as fundamentally political and ideological. Police professionalization is an inoculation in the way that Roland Barthes thought of the term: the admission of a little bit of evil hides a whole lot of evil. This is the ideological structure of liberal and conservative cop history. The police are always getting better, always improving, always reforming for the better. Police, we are told, are always the bastion and fabricator of progress.
Despite the fairy tale of the police march of progress, the terror of police has never disappeared. There’s no evidence it’s been reduced in any significant way. Police still routinely wreak havoc against the racialized poor. The “third degree” interrogation is still present, even if mainstream commentators want to write this off as merely a case of bad apples or isolated cases. The professionalization movement has only entrenched the power of police by separating police from the public through increased bureaucracy and administrative power while further extending the reach of the state into the lives of the public, but especially the poor.
The critical task should not be to make the police more professional, more educated, more skilled, more proficient, but rather to make police, and the order of private property they build and maintain with organized terror, obsolete.
Notes: