Models of Policing:
How the Police Are Organized and Defended
The nearly 10,000 sheriff’s deputies of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the largest sheriff’s department in the United States, are organized into four patrol divisions and nearly two dozen station houses. They are also organized into secret clubs with names like the Vikings, Jump Out Boys, Regulators, the Posse, and the Grim Reapers. Nearly all of these clubs are comprised of mostly white deputies who patrol predominately Black and Latino neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County. Deputies, and even former Sheriff Lee Baca, say they are akin to fraternities that boost morale and improve unit cohesiveness.
US District Judge Terry Hatter, in Thomas v. County of Los Angeles, called them “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang[s].”1 They falsified arrest reports, covered up officer misconduct, celebrated officer-involved shootings (see also CRASH), and according to a 1992 investigation, engaged in “off-duty criminal activity.”
Hatter was referring specifically to the Lynwood station Vikings. In December of 1991, the LA County Board of Supervisors appointed special counsel to investigate the Sheriff’s department. The resulting Kolts Report concluded that “groups of deputies have formed associations that harass and brutalize minority residents … some deputies at the Department’s Lynwood Station associate with the ‘Viking’ symbol, and appear at least in past times to have engaged in behavior that is brutal and intolerable and is typically associated with street gangs.”2
The Kolts report referred to the “clubs” as a “malignant” force and described them as “racist deputy gangs.” They meet the United States Department of Justice’s definition of a “street gang”: any group of three or more individuals that adopts a group identity, often through the use of a group name, slogan and shared tattoos, which controls territory through the use of violence and intimidation in order to engage in “criminal activity.”
In one court case involving a police killing, the court ordered a deputy to pull down his socks to reveal whether or not he had a tattoo signifying Viking membership. He did, and next to his Viking insignia he’d also tattooed the number 998, police code for officer-involved shooting.3
The Vikings routinely engaged in “warrantless, harassing arrests and detentions, incidents of excessive force and unwarranted physical abuse against handcuffed and otherwise defenseless detainees (beating, kicking, pushing, striking with flashlights, choking, slamming doors on legs, slapping, shooting to maim); ransacking homes and businesses; incidents of outright torture (interrogation with stun guns, beating victims into unconsciousness, holding a gun in a victim’s mouth and pulling the trigger on an empty chamber, pushing a victim’s head through a squad car window); quick-stop driving to bang a victim’s head against the squad car screen [see rough ride]; and uninhibited expressions of racial animus by deputies, including use of epithets such as ‘niggers’ and ‘wetbacks.’”4
Police gangs engage in activities similar to those of street gangs. Both control territory, wear colors, share an emblem, tattoo those colors and insignia onto their bodies, and engage in criminal activity. But membership patterns blur the line between police and criminal street gangs, questioning the notion that there is a distinction between the two. Scores of police departments throughout the United States acknowledge that active street gang members work as officers for local police departments. “Street gangs, prison gangs, and [outlaw motorcycle gangs] all have members and associates who have either gained or attempted to gain employment with law enforcement agencies, correctional facilities, and judiciary/courts across the country.”5 Members of the Aryan Brotherhood work as correctional officers and serve in the military. Active members of the Diablos MC, Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings work for municipal and county law enforcement agencies, and every major street gang in the United States places its members on domestic and international military installations.
Notes:
1 Thomas v. County of Los Angeles, 978 F.2d 504 (1992), Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, 11.
2 Kolt, James G., The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Los Angeles: A Report by Special Counsel James G. Kolts and Associates, 1992, 323.
3 O’Connor, Anne-Marie and Tina Daunt, “The Secret Society Among Lawmen,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1999.
4 Thomas v. County of Los Angeles, Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, 1.
5 National Gang Intelligence Center, 2013 National Gang Report, Washington, DC, 2013, 31.
The first thing that nearly all proponents of community policing say about community policing is that there’s no definition of community policing. “Community policing remains many things to many people.” Or: “Community policing seems always in vogue, yet its essential qualities remain elusive.” Or: “Community policing encompasses a variety of philosophical and practical approaches and is still evolving rapidly.” 1
Advocates for community policing claim that it offers a suite of best practices and policies that promote collaboration and partnership with communities as a way to enlist the active support of an entire community in the fabrication of social order. It emerged as a discourse in policing in the 1960s and ’70s in response to the civil unrest of the period. Police were among the targets of civil rights protesters and organized labor, which saw police as an institution that defended Jim Crow racism and enforced capitalist wage relations through aggressive strikebreaking. In response, community policing offers a nostalgic image of an imagined past populated by your friendly neighborhood cop on the beat. This is a nostalgia that seeks to establish the legitimacy of the police powers. And the legitimacy problem for police is about the legitimacy to use violence. Community policing is not about making police friendlier, but rather about making police violence more acceptable.
Community policing is to the police what COIN, or counterinsurgency, is to the military. The final report of President Barack Obama’s “Task Force on 21st Century Policing” explains community policing as a way to “help community members see police as allies rather than as an occupying force.”2 The military allusion is not an accident. COIN and community policing seek to legitimize an occupation. They seek to build community trust in order to more effectively impose order. Military officers take tea with tribal elders; police officers play midnight basketball with ghetto youth. Military planners place forward bases in rebel territory; police brass place police substations in “high crime” neighborhoods. It is an occupation (the iron fist) masquerading as collaboration (the velvet glove). Community policing and SWAT are two sides of the same COIN.3 4
Notes:
1 Fielding, Nigel G., Community Policing, Oxford University Press, 1995; and Cordner, Gary, “Community Policing: Elements and Effects,” Police Forum, 5:3 (1995), 1; and Trajanowicz, Robert C., “Understanding Community Policing: A Framework for Action,” U.S. Bureau of Justice Monograph Series, 1994, 1.
2 President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2015.
3 Williams, Kristian, “The Other Side of the COIN: Counter-insurgency and Community Policing,” Interface 3:1 (2011).
4 Platt, Tony, et al., The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975.
The term red squad describes any police intelligence unit, usually secret, that uses covert tactics including violence to target and intimidate political dissidents, most often on the political left. The rise in red squads is frequently traced to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Square “riot,” in which a labor rally following the police killing of several workers turned violent. A bomb exploded at the rally and was followed by gunfire. Seven police officers and four workers were killed. Eight anarchists were arrested and convicted of conspiracy and four were eventually hanged by the state. The four Haymarket martyrs, as they became known to their working class comrades, were considered part of a vast anarchist conspiracy by police. The origins of the first red squad came in the aftermath of Haymarket, when Chicago police “commenced a terror campaign” in which they raided activists’ homes, made illegal arrests by the hundreds, tortured suspects and intimidated witnesses.1
Chicago police quickly institutionalized police terror. Every red squad that has followed has borrowed their tactics: target political dissidents, call them terrorists or agitators, use violence and intimidation, deny that secret units exist. The first targets were anarchists and communists in the late nineteenth century (hence the name, red squads). In 1919 and 1920, the US Department of Justice raided union and political meetings in thirty cities in two dozen states, arresting thousands of political radicals, and deporting hundreds of people in what are known as the Palmer raids. Those raids served as a prelude to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s various secret counterintelligence programs that began in 1950s and lasted until the 1970s. COINTELPRO, as it was called, targeted civil rights activists. Today the targets also include radical environmental activists, anti-war protesters, and Muslims.
Consider the New York Police Department. Its “bomb squad,” which NYPD created in 1914, operated like the red squads in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington DC, and other major cities. It spied on anarchist groups, infiltrated the Communist Party USA, raided union meetings, tortured suspects, and traded intelligence information with federal agencies such as the FBI, which had its own red squads. By the 1960s, NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) focused on Black Power groups, civil rights activists, and radical left organizations. BOSS placed spies in the ghetto and launched thousands of investigations of dissident groups. BOSS kept dossiers on liberal politicians it considered political enemies, and its intelligence found its way to secret military units.
NYPD’s Intelligence Division and Counter-Terrorism Bureau, created after September 11, 2001, was first led by David Cohen, who came to NYPD from the Central Intelligence Agency where he served as Deputy Director of Operations. Cohen created a series of secret units in the intelligence division, such as the Demographics Unit (which NYPD denied ever existed until an Associated Press investigation proved that it did), and hired analysts (with a preference for those who spoke Farsi, Urdu, and/or Pashto) from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, among other spy agencies. According to the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit “is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.”2 At the same time that NYPD was spying on Muslims in New York, it extended its influence abroad. In 2012 the NYPD opened an intelligence division office in Kfar Saba, Israel, where it collects intelligence on Muslim “radicalization.” Its agents train with, and are trained by, Israeli intelligence officers.
The punishing tactics of secret red squad police violence are part of everyday police practice at the Chicago Police Department. In the 1970s a secret unit led by Detective Jon Burge, who learned electroshock torture methods while serving in the military police in Vietnam, targeted residents of Chicago’s Southside ghettos and tortured confessions out of hundreds of Black men. In the basements of police station houses, Burge and his detectives handcuffed men to radiators and then burned and beat their bodies and electro-shocked their genitalia.3 The horrors of Burge’s red squad continue. The Guardian revealed in 2015 that CPD detective Richard Zuley, who as a reserve officer in the military presided over the torture of Mohamedou Ould Slahi at Guantánamo Bay, also commanded the torture of people in Chicago at Homan Square, a secret black site where Chicago police have tortured confessions out of suspects.4 Interrogating Slahi in 2003, Zuley used sensory and sleep deprivation, long-term shackling, physical violence, and simulated executions.5 Zuley used similar tactics in Chicago, where he threatened to kill suspects’ families if they didn’t confess and left them shackled in dark basements for hours on end.
The history of red squads should not be mistaken as a story of bad apples and illegal practices. Red squads are considered by police as “elite” units that recruit the “best and the brightest.” Red squads thus were not, and are not, fringe units. From their beginnings, the covert intelligence gathering and intimidation tactics of red squads have been part of regular police practice at nearly every major municipal, state and federal police agency.
Red squads are a covertly organized and carefully structured form of police repression unleashed on political enemies of the state. This demonstrates that policing is not just about crime, but also about the targeting of people who challenge the status quo. And since workers and working-class organizations are frequently the target of red squads, it is the status quo of capitalism and wage labor that police protect. Exposing the dirty tricks, secret violence, and everyday repression of the red squad is essential to any radical critique of the police. The logic of the red squad shares the logic of police: order, which is understood as based on private property, capital accumulation, and obedience to authority, coming about only through the violent and repressive capacity of the state. Disorder, which to the capitalist state is the racial and economic justice and political dissent that threatens bourgeois order, must be ruthlessly repressed. There can be no history of police without a history of red squads.
Notes:
1 Donner, Frank J., Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America, University of California Press, 1990, 14.
2 Goldman, Adam and Matt Apuzzo, “NYPD: Muslim Spying Led to No Leads, Terror Cases,” Associated Press, August 21, 2012.
3 Conroy, John, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture, University of California Press, 2000.
4 Ackerman, Spencer, “Guantánamo Torturer Led Brutal Chicago Regime of Shackling and Confession,” Guardian, February 18, 2015.
5 Slahi, Mohamedou Ould, Guantánamo Diary, Hachette UK, 2015.
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, known by its acronym CRASH, was a Los Angeles Police Department “anti-gang” program that operated from 1973 until it was reorganized in 2000. During most of those years, a CRASH unit operated in every LAPD division in the city. Although often described by the media as an “elite” unit, most were comprised of young, inexperienced officers working in nearly autonomous units with limited supervision. CRASH units throughout the city became particularly notorious for their aggressive tactics.
CRASH units were assigned to specific gangs in areas that LAPD defined as “gang infested,” where they were given enormous latitude and autonomy. The notorious Rampart division CRASH unit adopted an “anything goes” approach to eradicate what its officers routinely called a gang “infestation.” A 2000 Board of Inquiry investigation of Rampart found that the word “infestation” commonly appeared in CRASH arrest reports. In other words, it was routine practice to stop and frisk and detain individuals in areas considered “infested” based on the reasonable suspicion that mere presence in an “infested” neighborhood demonstrated gang membership and activity.1 Multiple investigations of Rampart concluded that its officers often forged supervisors’ signatures on arrest bookings, routinely invented probable cause, regularly booked suspected drug dealers or gang members on false drug or weapons charges, and often planted throw-down weapons on unarmed suspects in order to claim self-defense after police killings (see officer-involved shooting). And there were many police killings and shootings in Rampart during the mid 1990s, nearly triple the number of shootings in the 1980s. CRASH officers gave themselves tattoos following shootings. They gave each other commemorative plaques. And they celebrated in sports bars far from the “infested” neighborhoods they patrolled.2
It’s important to consider the use of the word “infested” for what it reveals about the logic of CRASH. An “infestation” refers to an invasion of a particular place by a dangerous and unwanted species. Think rats or cockroaches. It is also a common racially coded term that circulates in large, urban US police departments to describe a perceived threat to the (white) body politic posed by, usually, a predominately Black or Hispanic community. It is instrumental for the way it rationalizes the practice of violent police power. But the use of the word “infestation” establishes more than just probable cause for campaigns of stop and frisk racial profiling. It amplifies the police imperative to impose order by drawing an entire population into the orbit of police power; it marks an entire people the “legitimate” target of police violence.
The word “infestation” absolved CRASH of the obligation to first determine if someone was or was not a member of a criminal gang. Instead it defined CRASH’s job as the same as the exterminator. This is the political dream for police that the “gang infested” neighborhood provides. It removes any limit to the police use of force. Disorder in Rampart was defined by the presence of the poor, largely Salvadoran, people living there. And CRASH’s job was to bring order. CRASH officers conducted constant raids, frequent arrests and, ultimately, deportations. In the late 1980s, Rampart CRASH, in cooperation with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, arrested hundreds of young Salvadoran men in Rampart, based solely on the fact that they lived in Rampart and were Salvadoran. They turned them over to INS, which deported nearly 200 of those men based only on the fact that LAPD had arrested them for “gang membership.”3 For a short time CRASH represented what we might call a pure expression of police violence: organized for everyone to see and unleashed on an entire people, who lived under total and violent control, by a police force celebrated by reformers, unencumbered by any limits, and beyond the reach of any authority.
Notes:
1 Board of Inquiry into the Rampart Area Corruption Incident, Los Angeles Police Department, March 1, 2000.
2 Cannon, Lou, “One Bad Cop,” New York Times Magazine, October 1, 2000.
3 Davis, Mike, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Verso, 1990, 286–7.
Between 1956 and 1971 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under director J. Edgar Hoover, engaged in a wide-ranging program of covert surveillance, intimidation, harassment and infiltration of, largely, social movements and civil rights organizations within the United States. These activities were organized as part of a program known as COINTELPRO, a codename that combined the first letters of “counter intelligence program.” According to an investigation in the mid 1970s by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also known as the Church Committee, COINTELPRO “was designed to ‘disrupt’ groups and ‘neutralize’ individuals deemed to be threats to domestic security.”1
While some surveillance activities focused on far-right groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, COINTELPRO was organized specifically to focus on Black and Chicano radical activists and even mainstream civil rights leaders. A who’s who of left political and civil rights organizations in the United States became the focus of COINTELPRO. Organizations such as the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panther Party came under intense scrutiny, as did leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Reies López Tijerina.
The FBI sent letters to the spouses of civil rights leaders hoping to create domestic conflict that would end marriages and relationships. In order to sow distrust and internal divisions in the social movement groups they targeted, the FBI spread false rumors that activists or members of various gangs were actually police informants. These tactics occasionally worked exactly as planned. In September of 1969, for example, the FBI took credit for conflicts among radical Black activists in San Diego. Following the violent deaths of San Diego Black Panther Party members John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and Sylvester Bell, agents in the FBI’s San Diego field office wrote a secret memorandum to Hoover in Washington, DC, uncovered by the Church Committee, which reported that “shootings, beatings and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of Southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to [COINTELPRO].”2
Throughout the fifteen-year period of illegal activities, the FBI used race as a way to sort the activists and groups it considered “subversive.” Groups such as the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, for example, were considered a “domestic threat” because its leaders and members, according to FBI language, fomented “racial discord.” The Church Committee uncovered memos Hoover himself wrote that defined race as the central, organizing logic of COINTELPRO. In August of 1964 Hoover wrote to all FBI field agents that “there are clear and unmistakable signs that we are in the midst of a social revolution with the racial movement at its core. The Bureau, in meeting its responsibilities in this area, is an integral part of this revolution.”3 It was through COINTELPRO that the FBI waged its anti–civil rights counterinsurgency. The program focused in particular on civil rights leaders considered “vociferous rabble-rousers.” In August of 1967, the FBI ordered of its agents that “an index be compiled of racial agitators and individuals who have demonstrated a potential for fomenting racial discord. It is desired that only individuals of prominence who are of national interest be included in this index.”4
Once a group or individual was identified by the FBI as a domestic threat, FBI agents often worked closely with local police departments, or red squads, in order to carry out its various programs, including illegal search and seizures, harassment, false arrests, and to recruit agents provocateurs to infiltrate groups. FBI cooperation with municipal police departments throughout the United States went both ways. Following the reports of police violence outside the 1968 democratic national convention in Chicago, for example, the FBI, despite being aware of an organized pattern of violence against protesters, conspired to “refute allegations” against the Chicago Police Department and engaged “cooperative” media to “counteract these allegations.”5
COINTELPRO was a central vehicle through which police, at both the federal and local level, used violence to defend a socio-spatial order based on white supremacy and the criminalization of the poor. This contradicts one prominent narrative of 1960s civil rights transformation, in which the federal government deserves credit for dismantling officially sanctioned racism in the United States. Through federal legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act and more, it was the federal government that confronted and undid institutional racism. But if this is true, it is also true that, at the very height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the federal government assembled its police powers in the form of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program to organize and use police violence against the very people calling for that transformation.
Notes:
1 26 April 1976 Report of the Unites States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.
2 15 September 1969 memorandum from San Diego Field Office to J. Edgar Hoover, Senate Report, “Using Covert Action to Disrupt and Discredit Domestic Groups.”
3 28 August 1964 Memo from J. Edgar Hoover to all SACs, Senate Report, “The Development of FBI Intelligence Investigations.”
4 4 August 1967 memorandum from Hoover to all SACs, “The Development of FBI Intelligence Investigations.”
5 28 August 1968 memorandum from Hoover to Chicago SAC, Senate Report.
Officer Friendly is an agent of pacification. His “friendship” comes at a price: accept the police definition of reality and mold yourself and your family into ideal police subjects—polite, polished, obedient workers and snitches who never question the racial order of capitalist property relations. So don’t let cops read to your kids and don’t join the police basketball league. “Coffee with a Cop” is not what it sounds like. In short, don’t be fooled by Officer Friendly. He is not a genuine figure of goodwill. He is a strategic ploy to pacify you.
The figure of Officer Friendly is a central trope of community policing. Under the guise of community policing, departments have established programs designed to promote the image of good and friendly policing that downplay more overtly aggressive forms of policing, often called police militarization, like SWAT. The cop on foot or bike patrol has long been a key image and tactic of community policers, as these methods allow cops to have more face-to-face, seemingly friendlier interactions with citizens. The creation of “citizen academies” where community members attend educational sessions with police officials to learn about the job of policing is another increasingly common program, to say nothing of the National Crime Prevention Council’s cartoon campaign with McGruff the Crime Dog, as well as the well-known DARE program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education).
Many of these efforts focus on promoting positive images of police to young children and teenagers. Officers visit public schools where they play games and read books to students and give out pro-police coloring books. These are tactics designed to remake the image of police into the friend who’s got your back. The National Child Safety Council maintains a Friendly Police Program, which they explain as providing “departments with a specific program of materials that explain the vital job members of local Police Departments perform every day to help keep us safe.” The NCSC explain that police departments “will find the materials helpful in presenting programs when visiting daycare facilities, preschools, and elementary schools.” A twenty-four-page manual, “Our Friendly Police Officers,” is “designed to help develop an early awareness and understanding of the many ways the police department protects and aids the community. It helps children develop a healthy perspective of the job of a local law enforcement officer and encourages them to trust and respect their local police officers.”1
Chicago police along with the Chicago Board of Education started an Officer Friendly program in 1966, paid for by the Sears-Roebuck Company. It was designed to “humanize the police force” to urban youth. “If we catch them at 5, 6, 7, or 8 years old, we can nip disrespect in the bud,” explained one of the founders. “By the time they reach secondary level, they’ll think of law enforcement as a good profession to have.”2 Officer Friendly has recently been “resurrected” on Chicago’s South Side in Englewood, a place known as a hotspot for crime, violence, and citizens’ lack of trust for police. As one officer stated, “With the young kids, they really love the police. Somewhere along the line we are losing these kids.”3
But despite these efforts to render policing a friendly form of state power, they are in no way innocent and apolitical. Officer Friendly is premised on the goal of getting children accustomed to obeying and respecting the commands of state authority. Officer Friendly hails his subject with a wink and a nod, a smile, and a coloring book, or by giving a lesson in how to catch a fly ball. Officer Friendly is not merely about rendering the cop a friend, but about rendering the cop a parent. This police logic of parental authority can be expressed like this: “We need to discipline you, and you need to respect our discipline, since we keep your best interests at heart.”
In the most practical terms, Officer Friendly, as both a specific program and an ideological framing of community policing writ large, is nothing other than a form of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency was imagined as a strategy that relied not simply on violence and destruction of enemy forces, but also on implementing more friendly programs designed to gain the consent of the native population, from building schools and roads to passing out candy to local youth.4 Indeed, it isn’t a coincidence that these programs were introduced in the United States at the same time as US military pacification campaigns in Southeast Asia.
What emerges here are the ways that Officer Friendly, and its paradigm of community policing, renders police power as a productive power that works to produce and build a particular social order by consent and not simply by force. This isn’t to say that Officer Friendly’s pacification strategies don’t also rely on threats and violence; rather, it is to stress the creative ways police work to gain a population’s consent and support. It is much easier to be opposed to the violence of the SWAT team and the problems with police militarization, and even the violence of police killing hundreds of poor people every year. But we should not forget the velvet glove strategies that work in tandem with the iron fist by making policing into a social and civic good through all sorts of “image work” and projects for producing obedient, polite citizens.5
The tactics of smiling cops reading to school children, coaching baseball teams, or giving out coloring books to youth exist on a continuum with arrest powers, nightsticks, Tasers, K-9s, guns, and even SWAT. Although there might not be any bloodletting or bruised and battered bodies, Officer Friendly is still an officer whose very authority is premised on the state’s monopoly of violence. Officer Friendly is a tactic that obscures its goal: to normalize and humanize the role of this violent monopoly in the racialized production and reproduction of suffering and degradation. Of course, many see through the lies of the benevolent Officer Friendly and reverse its meaning by sarcastically using the term to refer to violent and rude cops. Indeed, Officer Friendly has never existed for the poor and oppressed. Officer Friendly only really exists in liberal, bourgeois ideology (and their neighborhoods). Even when it comes in a smiling, friendly face, police power is never disinterested, never objective, never neutral, and comes always armed with handcuffs and an arsenal of weapons. Beware of cops reading to your children. Throw away that coloring book.
Notes:
1 The National Child Safety Council, “Friendly Police Program.”
2 “The Officer Friendly Program: Bridging the Divide Between Police and the Public,” YouTube video, posted by Neil Rockey, April 8, 2016.
3 Sweeney, Annie and Angie Leventis Lourgos, “Officer Friendly Back on City Beat,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2010.
4 Neocleous, Mark, “‘A Brighter and Nice New Life’: Security as Pacification,” Social & Legal Studies 20 (2011), 191–208; Williams, Kristian, “The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing,” Interface 3:1 (2011), 81–117.
5 Ibid.; Platt, Tony, et al., The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975.
Specials Weapons and Tactics, known by its acronym SWAT, is a fairly recent, but increasingly common, development in policing—the creation and use of specially trained and heavily armed military-style units by local, regional and federal police agencies worldwide. These are units generally described, both by their members and critics, as paramilitary in character. The description is accurate because SWAT units train in military tactics—close quarters combat, urban warfare, assault and rescue, and civil unrest—and they use military equipment when doing so: body armor, high capacity weapons, and armored vehicles. Today nearly every police agency of any size in the United States has a SWAT unit. Nationally, SWATs have a combined deployment rate greater than 45,000 times per year.
The phrase paramilitary, however, implies that police are not quite the same as the military and that the rise of SWAT marks a troubling trend in policing, one often referred to as police militarization. Critics who say police militarization in the United States is a new problem are quick to point to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act that allows for the transfer of military surplus equipment to local and state police agencies—sniper rifles, helicopters, night vision gear, mine-resistant tanks, body armor, and much more. This is certainly true, but the link between police and military reflected in SWAT goes back much further and reaches much deeper. Mainstream histories of police often ignore the foundational role militia groups and military soldiers played in the establishment of the police.1 The first police departments in the United States emerged out of the militias and slave patrols of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. By the 1990s, all branches of the military were actively involved in domestic and international law enforcement, particularly regarding drug laws.2 Both police and military engage in “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency policing (see community policing). Many SWAT units receive training from active duty or retired military personnel. Police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for example, train specialized military units in urban assault tactics. Many police serve also as reserve officers in the military. And nearly all police departments recruit and employ police with former military experience.
The history of SWAT units in the United States is usually traced to former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, cited by many as one of the developers and early adopters of SWAT. Gates started the first LAPD SWAT unit in 1966 and called it the Special Weapons Attack Team. The name was quickly changed to Special Weapons and Tactics in order to steer clear of the obvious connection with military violence.3 But Gates’s preferred name better reflects the intended purpose of SWAT—urban counterinsurgency. The first SWAT units in the United States began in earnest during the mid to late 1960s, a period of poor people’s movements, civil rights struggle and urban unrest in the United States related to Black, Brown and Red liberation struggles.
Where some saw civil rights struggles as a principled confrontation with Jim Crow racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and the criminalization of poor people, others, particularly police and law and order conservatives, saw increased lawlessness. SWAT was one of the answers to civil rights movement demands for justice (mass incarceration was another). With SWAT units, police agencies could rapidly respond to civil unrest—otherwise known as political protest—with overwhelming displays of force, a tactic the military refers to as the “shock and awe” doctrine. Shock and awe is as much about pacification as it is about tactics. Thus SWAT is not new but is cut from the same cloth that gave us community policing. SWAT units often look ridiculous, storming peaceful protests with cops clad in Robocop-like body armor riding down city streets in anti-mine tanks or massive armored Bearcats.
The criticism that SWAT represents a departure from the real work of policing is based on two erroneous assumptions or myths. The first is based on a timeline of SWAT as the exemplar of police militarization. SWAT is depicted as coming from a moment, generally traced to the mid 1960s, in which police abandoned community policing and embraced aggressive, military assault–style policing. This type of criticism, based on the periodization of militarization, would be a compelling condemnation of SWAT as the moment police became militarized—if there ever existed a kinder, gentler Officer Friendly who once protected citizens but now has been displaced by kicking-ass-and-taking-names SWAT units, who see only enemy combatants. This view imagines that police do something other than use violence to enforce order and ignores the close historical connection between police and military described above.
Second, the idea that police militarization describes all that is wrong with contemporary policing is based on the erroneous view that police brutality can be traced in part to the growth in aggressive police units such as SWAT, and its reliance on military weaponry and aggressive search and destroy tactics. This is an argument that tells us SWAT is bad for policing and thus for civil liberties, and Officer Friendly is good for policing and the safety of our communities. Civil libertarians find in SWAT an ominous sign. They worry that the rise of the warrior cop signals a slow descent into a police state. They want their friendly neighborhood cop back. But such a view ignores the fact that it wasn’t the jack-booted thug who killed Jamar Clark. It wasn’t a police SWAT sniper who gunned down Yvette Smith. It wasn’t a body-armor-clad SWAT specialist who arrested Sandra Bland. And it wasn’t a munitions expert who tackled and choked Jonathan Sanders to death. In all cases it was Officer Friendly out on patrol engaging in community policing and keeping the streets safe.
Notes:
1 Kraska, Peter B. and Victor E. Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems 44:1 (1997), 2.
2 Ibid., 1.
3 Parenti, Christian, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, Verso, 2000, 112.
Police militarization has emerged as one of the most common narratives surrounding police violence, usually referring to the introduction of military weaponry, technology, language, and aesthetics into the realm of domestic policing. Most critiques of police militarization rely on the view that police and military are separate institutions with distinct logics and mandates. The military serves the goals of foreign policy, while the police are concerned first and foremost with domestic law enforcement and are accountable to law. But it is more useful to point out the similarities between the police and the military. Both are state apparatuses sanctioned to exercise violence in the name of security and order, which are often just euphemisms for the protection of private property and white supremacy. There is a reason that oppressed populations often speak of police and military as one and the same.
The public concern today over police militarization in the United States often glosses over the fact that the military and police have never been completely distinct in the first place. Instead police militarization is usually considered a relatively new phenomenon that emerged with new experiments in policing social unrest during the civil rights era, and later extended to the war on crime and war on drugs. But the interplay between military and police has a much longer history. Police have long adopted military technologies, and militaries have adopted police tactics and strategies. For instance, the slave patrol, as the first form of US policing, grew out of militia and military forces. Similarly, though rarely mentioned, the historical structure of police organizations that emerged during the rise of industrial capitalism was modeled on the military chain of command. Police adopted the form and style (see police uniform) of the military. Some of the first police administrators had significant military colonial experience, and it was this experience that made them ideal candidates to keep the peace domestically.
What counts as “police militarization”? Some libertarian critics, so concerned about state power infringing on the rights of private property, for example, limit their concern to the most overt displays of military power—tanks, assault rifles and body armor. The use of K-9 police dogs, however, is rarely ever mentioned in critiques of police militarization, despite the long history of dogs used by colonial militaries. Likewise, community policing, often taken as the antithesis of “militarization,” grows out of the US military’s pacification and counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam.
Importantly, some of the most influential police “reformers,” such as August Vollmer and O.W. Wilson, served first in the military and “militarized” the police through policies of police professionalization. Militarizing the police has historically been a means of reforming the police by making police a more organized and efficient domestic institution to deal with order and security, including through the use of coercion and police violence. Today, we see a twisted reversal: calls for the end of police militarization are calls for police reform and professionalization, and these calls are usually unconcerned with challenging the very foundations of police power. These calls to demilitarize police often rely on the myth, either conceptually or historically, of police as a noble institution that has in the past been held accountable and could once again be held accountable in the future. Their proponents cry, “If only the police weren’t militarized, they could return to democratic policing!” But we should ask: What democratic history of police can we honestly speak of? What history is there where police and military were not bedfellows? There is something to be said for the fact that even former police administrators and current police officers join forces with civil and free market libertarians to identify the “militarization of police” as a bad thing, and all join in united calls for reform, usually under the rubric of community policing and “hearts and minds” campaigns.
This is not to deny the very real and frightening tactical and strategic implications of the police use of weapons of war. And it is certainly not to deny the importance of efforts to eliminate military weaponry from policing. Rather it is to insist that the military and the police share much more common ground than is recognized in many critiques of police militarization. It therefore cannot, as a political project, confront the unity of racialized state violence. After all, even if we could take the military out of the police, we would still be left with the iron fist and velvet glove of police power.1
Notes:
1 Platt, Tony, et al., The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975.
You’re walking down the street and a cop yells, “Hey, you there!” You turn around and in turning, according to Louis Althusser, you are interpellated as a subject, you are brought into a power relationship; you are forced to submit to a coercive authority. It is a famous example, but consider what’s taken for granted in this story: how did you know it was a cop in the first place? Subjection, according to Althusser, turns on “recognition.” The cop recognizes you as a “suspect.” You recognize the shouter as a cop. But the shouting police officer goes undescribed in the story. No mention of a nightstick or a flashlight. No gun described as pointed at you. He is not running toward you. There are no sirens. It’s just a person on the street yelling, “Hey, you there,” and you turn and immediately you somehow know that it is a cop and that you are a subject of police authority. But how do you know it’s a cop? It must be the uniform—so common and ubiquitous that it goes without mention—that Althusser thinks triggers your recognition of police.
Ice Cube is not so sure. Ice Cube, the hip-hop artist and actor most famous for writing and performing the NWA song “Fuck tha Police,” was once asked if he thought it ironic that he frequently plays police officers on TV and in movies. He responded by saying, “Why is that ironic? That’s acting. It would be ironic if I was a real cop.”1
So here we have a dilemma. The police uniform either does or does not help us locate the real cop. For some, the history of the police uniform leads us directly to the military. Historically police uniforms have resembled military uniforms, and nearly all still do. Like the military, their uniforms include the insignia of their rank—sergeants, captains, and chiefs. The first municipal police officers in New York wore the surplus uniforms of the Union Army following the Civil War. Most police departments in the United States in the 1950s modeled their uniforms on those worn by officers and enlisted men in World War II. But before we conclude that this is all the evidence we need in order to claim that police and military are one and the same, look at what you’re wearing right now. Are you wearing a business suit? Is there a trench coat in your closet? Do you wear combat boots and cargo shorts? Do you have a T-shirt or cap in a camouflage pattern? Are there shoulder straps on your members-only jacket? If police are “militarized” then so are we. We find the clothed body, not just the police body, draped in martial signs.
But the uniform of police and the uniform of the street, though apparently similar, are distinct and deserve a different analysis. Roland Barthes reminds us of the “methodological difficulty of linking a history of clothes at any one moment to its sociology.” The spit-shined combat boots of a military colonel represent a form of what Barthes calls dress, an “organized, formal and normative system that is recognized by society.” But the scuffed and soiled combat boots of the punk, however, represent an act of dressing, defined as a “personal mode with which the wearer adopts … the dress that is proposed to them by their social group. It can have a morphological, psychological or circumstantial meaning, but it is not sociological.”2
Patrizia Calefato tells us that the police uniform represents a normative system that signals the “guarantee of state power” and serves as the “watershed between order and disorder.”3 The police uniform must be understood as part of a process of uniformity, the production of order. The police uniform draws attention to the body as the proper object of concern in the police fabrication of order. The police body is uniformed to represent order. But the police project requires that someone embody disorder as well. Therefore it is not just the police who must wear a uniform, but disorderly subjects too. The orange jumpsuit of the prisoner is as much a part of uniformity as police adorned with rank and insignia.
The word uniform in the case of police therefore has a double meaning. It refers to dress in the way that Barthes intended, but is also a synonym for “ordered” or “orderly.” The police project is the fabrication of a uniform order, accomplished by a uniformed order.
Notes:
1 Cox, Ana Marie, “Ice Cube Might Have Dinner with the President,” New York Times Magazine, August 6, 2015.
2 Barthes, Roland, The Language of Fashion, Bloomsbury, 2013.
3 Calefato, Patrizia, “Signs of Order, Signs of Disorder: the Other Uniforms,” in Bonami, Francesco, Maria Luisa Frisa and Stefano Tonchi, eds., Uniform: Order and Disorder, Charta, 2000.
From the 1700s to the end of the Civil War, organized groups of slave catchers patrolled Southern cities and rural areas in order to control the movement and behavior of enslaved Black people. These groups were known as slave patrols. As a slave-catching institution, the slave patrol controlled Black life in the service of plantation owners and overseers. Slave patrols assumed every Black person was an escaped slave and every meeting of Black people signified a coming slave insurrection. They searched lodges, checked papers, and broke up meetings for fear of a rebellion.1
Slave patrols enforced slave laws. The Fugitive Slave Act (1793) and other slave laws established the legal foundation for the slave patrols. One slave law ordered patrols to “prevent all caballings amongst negros [sic], by dispersing of them when drumming or playing, and search all negro houses for arms or other offensive weapons.”2 The slave patrol, like police, did not fight crime; it was set up to enforce a social order based on the theft of Black life and labor and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.3
The hunting powers of police were first codified in the slave laws and in the practice of the slave patrol. The language that describes the work of police, “patrolling the beat” for example, is a language borrowed directly from the slave patrol. The police are not a departure from the slave patrol but “a more delicately obscure adaptation of the slave patrols,” in which “measures such as stop-and-frisk, racial profiling, or driving while black,” offer a contemporary version of police as the slave patrol: police watching, arresting, shooting Black people.4 The police operate with a hunting logic, a logic first codified in the United States in the slave laws.5
The slave patrol confronted Black life as property. Slave patrols were known to rape Black women, and kidnap and sell free Black men and women into slavery. To be subject to the slave patrol was to be already dead. Slaves in French colonies described escape as “stealing one’s own corpse.”
In some Southern cities, slave patrols persisted well into Reconstruction and Jim Crow and were transformed into municipal police. While it might be inaccurate to draw a direct line from the Southern slave patrol to all contemporary police forces, the slave patrol provided the template for the organization of police more generally. The police share the logic of the slave patrol, in which violence is used to establish an order based on the conflation of Blackness and disorder. If we begin with the slave patrol, we end up with police.
Notes:
1 Hadden, Sally E., Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, Harvard University Press, 2003.
2 Quoted in Williams, Kristian, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, AK Press, 2015, 65.
3 Singh, Nikhil Pal, “The Whiteness of Police,” American Quarterly 66:4 (2014), 1093.
4 Chamayou, Grégoire, Manhunts: A Philosophical History, Princeton University Press, 2012.
5 Durr, Marlese, “What is the Difference Between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color,” Critical Sociology 41:6 (2015), 875.
In October of 2014 an off-duty St. Louis police officer moonlighting as a rent-a-cop with a private security firm shot and killed eighteen-year-old VonDerrit Myers Jr. The officer, Jason Flanery, was in his police uniform, wearing his police badge, and patrolling public streets when he killed Myers with his police gun. In other words, he was doing the work of police. St. Louis, along with New York, Los Angeles and other cities, officially endorses officer moonlighting, and even sets wages and selects approved employers for officers. Flanery looked like a cop when he killed Myers. Flanery worked as a cop when he killed Myers. But to some, because he was “off duty” at the time he killed Myers, he wasn’t a cop. “What happens,” asks law professor Elizabeth Joh, “when an officer’s private employer has a different idea of ‘disorder’ than what the public police department does?” This “blurring of the private and public,” according to Joh, “raises unique and troubling questions if public police are to be responsive to the communities they serve, and not just to parts of them.”1
Myers’s killing and the “blurring” of the private and public do indeed raise troubling questions, but not exactly the ones Joh asks. It might be true to say that private policing is a commodification of police, but this is not to draw a distinction between public and private police; rather, it is to say that private companies find use value in what police do, and are willing to—have long been willing to—pay for it. In other words, Jason Flanery imposed order, whether with the St. Louis police department or a private security company. So rather than asking if public police working for private firms blur the line between public and private, we might consider the possibility that for police there is no distinction between public and private.
As the killing of Myers demonstrated, cops operate the same whether they work for a private firm or a public agency. But despite this, rent-a-cops are usually depicted as distinctly different in form and function from public sector police. This idea that there is a bright line between policing for private interest and policing for “public good” is among the most pernicious myths of policing. And yet it is from the private police that the modern public sector police derive, and the work of public sector police has long mirrored the work of private police.
The rent-a-cop, or security guard, is an armed employee working for a private firm that engages in policing for profit. It finds its modern origins in the late-nineteenth-century union-busting tactics of industrial capitalism—the era of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and other firms—during a time in which the “right” to break strikes was the authority of private firms.2 What’s clear from these origins is that security and order were defined as anything that served the interests of private industry. Before police worked for the “public good” they broke strikes and busted unions for private interests.
The shift from an emphasis on private security guards to public sector policing in the early twentieth century is often depicted as a Progressive Era commitment to professional policing and the role of the public sector in providing services. But this ignores the fact that the emergence of public sector police departments at the municipal and state level was as much, if not more, a result of demands by private companies that the state pay the Pinkertons to break legs and bust unions. After the Progressive Era, public sector police were paid by local taxpayers to do the same work they did for private interests. What was considered order and security in the Pinkerton Era—the disciplining of what capitalist firms considered an unruly working class—remained, and remains, the same in the era of public sector policing.
But this timeline is not entirely accurate. There has been no post–Progressive Era shift from private to public policing. Private security firms and public sector police both expanded throughout the twentieth century. And from the very beginning, there was little distinction between private and public police. There are more private police patrolling today than at any other time in history. By the 1970s, two-thirds of all police officers were on private payrolls.3 The nearly 20 million security guards today represent an increase of around 300 percent over the past thirty years.4 And many of them work as both private and public police. Like Flanery, most wear their uniforms and carry their service weapons while working for private firms contracted by private clients. And they do the same work for corporate employers that they do for police departments. Their “major customers are large-scale organizations who invest in policing for the same reasons they make other investments: to guarantee profits and secure an environment for uninterrupted growth.”5 Police fabricate order, and that order is for sale.
Notes:
1 Joh, Elizabeth, “When Police Moonlight in their Uniforms,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2014.
2 Williams, Kristian, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, AK Press, 2015, 179.
3 Spitzer, Steven and Andrew T. Scull, “Privatization and Capitalist Development: The Case of the Private Police,” Social Problems 25:1 (1977), 18.
4 Evans, R., “World Has More Private Guards than Police,” Reuters, July 7, 2011.
5 Spitzer and Scull, “Privatization and Capitalist Development,” 27.
Police oversight, sometimes called civilian, community, or citizen police oversight, is the idea that police should submit to a local, independent authority of elected or appointed officials who audit or monitor police departments for misconduct including, but not limited to, the use of, and discretion to use, force.
Contemporary police oversight generally follows one of four models. Some investigate police misconduct only when official complaints have been filed. They make recommendations on discipline to the chief of police or the sheriff, who has final authority to accept or reject those findings and recommendations. Some have no investigative authority whatsoever and instead review police internal affairs investigations of misconduct and then make recommendations to the chief of police or sheriff, who has final authority to accept or reject the findings and recommendations. Others only hear appeals by complainants whose charges of misconduct have been previously heard and denied by the chief of police or sheriff. But as with the first two, the appeal culminates in a recommendation that can be rejected by the chief of police or the sheriff. Lastly, some are constituted as independent agencies with a director, a board of commissioners and a staff of investigators. Some of these even hold the authority to issue subpoenas and others have the authority to examine and make recommendations regarding specific police policies. But like the other models, their findings and recommendations are advisory only. No police oversight agency or board operating anywhere in the United States has the authority to discipline or fire police officers. In the history of police oversight in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for example, every police chief has rejected every police oversight commission recommendation regarding police misconduct since the formal practice of police oversight by commission began in the late 1990s.
The guarantee that police oversight will hold police accountable even though it hasn’t, and that police oversight will resolve the problem of police violence even though it won’t, is among the most frequently claimed and widely believed promises of police reform. Despite the fact that the authors of the May 2015 report issued by President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing concluded that there existed no “strong research evidence that [oversight] works,” new or improved police oversight procedures were among the first reforms the US Department of Justice called for following the police killings of James Boyd in Albuquerque, Mike Brown in Ferguson, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, among many other places and following many other police killings.
This faith in police reform via police oversight as a way to end police violence, despite the failure of police oversight to end police violence, is shared by some anti–police violence activists as well. Campaign Zero, a series of police reform policies proposed in August 2015 by a number of prominent Black Lives Matter activists, put police oversight at the center of its call to “end police violence in America.” Their online campaign demanded “effective civilian oversight structures” that included a “Police Commission” with the power to “discipline and dismiss police officers” and a “Civilian Complaints Office” with the power to “interrogate officers … where deadly force is used.” Campaign Zero’s faith in oversight appears at first glance as something altogether different from the reformist models that reserve for police chiefs and sheriffs the authority to discipline police officers. If the “community” holds the power to monitor and discipline police, then police will be held accountable to the “community.”
There are three primary reasons, however, why police oversight of existing police will not end police violence. First, even if there had been a Campaign Zero–like model of police oversight in, say, Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, Mike Brown would still be dead. The only difference would be that a community oversight commission could have used its authority to investigate the actions of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Mike Brown. That commission might have fired Darren Wilson, the strongest disciplinary action available, whether wielded by a Chief of Police or a community oversight agency. But Darren Wilson is no longer working at the Ferguson police department as it is. And since no police oversight model includes the authority to charge an officer with a crime, the establishment of the kind of police oversight called for by Campaign Zero would have produced the same outcome that happened in Ferguson without oversight.
Second, police oversight is as old as policing itself. The first police departments in the United States submitted to oversight by, usually, a local political boss. This structure served the interests of police and political elites. The lack of transparency and accountability in the political boss model of oversight gave way in the Progressive Era to supposedly independent police oversight commissions. But these were usually made up of prominent and politically connected businessmen appointed by local mayors—the same political bosses whose political authority over police Progressive Era reformers sought to replace through independent oversight. Contemporary models of oversight limit authority to an advisory capacity but have sought to sever the influence of local mayors or political authorities by providing police oversight agencies with legal representation and budgets and staff that are all independent of local political authority. And despite all these models and reforms, none of them, whether with or without the authority to discipline, or under or free from local political influence, have been able to hold police accountable or end or even significantly reduce police violence.
And lastly, if the goal is to end police violence, a better approach would be to abolish police, or at least reduce police in size and authority, rather than improve police oversight. After all, there is police violence because there are police. Police oversight, unlike abolition, does not reject police violence per se, but only rejects unjustified police violence. The goal of any form of public oversight, whether of police or any other government activity, is to improve, not abolish, services and practices. Police oversight thus subscribes to the notion—one shared by conservatives and many liberals—that police are necessary for good order, that cops need to use violence to impose that order, and that police oversight works to improve that violence, which means justified violence. Conservatives are content to let police chiefs provide that oversight, while progressives want that oversight to be “independent.” Either way the outcome is the same. So picture the best police chief or police oversight agency you can imagine. Imagine that it (or she) is independent, aggressive, community-minded, and highly critical of the police use of force. And then remember: Mike Brown would still be dead and Darren Wilson would still not be held accountable.
Policing is a heavily unionized profession in the United States. Nearly three-quarters of the hundred largest police departments in the United States operate under union contracts. And these unions, like organized labor more generally, advance the shared interests of its members. But unlike other trade unions, the interests of police unions often come into conflict with the interests of other workers.
While policing is among the most unionized professions in the United States, historically it has been a profession most associated with defending racist Jim Crow laws in the South and the repression of organized labor in the North. Despite this history of anti-unionism, police unions enjoy unique protections. Police unions were exempted from Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 2014 union-busting law, which stripped public employees of collective bargaining rights.
Police unionism represents a profound irony. Where trade unions emerged during the industrial revolution to defend the shared interests of workers, modern police unions in the United States emerged in reaction to Civil Rights–era organizing that highlighted the role of police and police violence in defending racism and segregation.1 Police unions thus drew on the language of unionism not as a means to stand in solidarity with other workers but rather in order to give credibility to their efforts to protect police officers from police oversight and the criminal investigation of officer misconduct.
While there are no national police unions in the United States, the Fraternal Order of Police counts more than 300,000 sworn police officers among its members. The FOP, like local police unions, opposes community police oversight, supports legislation that limits independent investigations of police misconduct, supports tough-on-crime political candidates, paints any criticism of police as reckless and un-American and, in 2015, despite widespread protests against racialized police violence in the wake of dozens of police killings of unarmed Black men and women, lobbied Congress to add police officers as a protected category in federal hate crimes legislation, a law subsequently adopted by a number of states.
Through collective bargaining, police unions have transformed police violence into a contractually protected condition of their employment. This has had the effect of expanding the right by police to choose when and where to use violence at the same time that it has limited civilian police oversight or criminal investigation of that use of force by police.
Notes:
1 Walker, Samuel, “The neglect of police unions: exploring one of the most important areas of American policing,” Police Practice and Research 9:2 (2008), 95–112.
Police reform comprises a vast complex of institutions and agencies across the political spectrum that share a narrative of police as an essential if occasionally flawed institution that requires total respect but occasional tinkering. When crises in police legitimacy strike—often in the aftermath of dramatic and popular protests against spectacular or long-standing patterns of racialized police violence against the poor—the various actors and agencies of police reform mobilize. These include think tanks, such as the Police Executive Research Forum, scores of criminology and criminal justice departments at institutions of higher education, various federal research divisions, such as the National Institute of Justice and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, and prominent law and consulting firms that hire former police chiefs. These police reformists convene special commissions where they conduct investigations (and come to similar conclusions) and propose solutions (which rarely differ) in “commission reports.”
The organizing principle of police reform is the idea that the institution of police is perfectible. This notion of perfectibility depicts police, whether good or bad today, as absolutely essential and always on a path of improvement tomorrow. Perfectibility includes concepts such as accountability, police oversight, and professionalization. These are police reform’s key terms, but they are not terms that call the police institution into question. To hold police accountable is to assume that police as an institution is necessary and required in the first place. Likewise police oversight refuses to examine the police outside a justified/unjustified binary. The problem is not the police but a public that requires a better understanding of the police project. Police reform, then, is mostly about reforming the public’s view of the legitimacy of police.
Reformists want us to know that we may see the problem as inhering in police, but in reality the problem is with us, with our loss of faith. The public misunderstands police and thus misunderstands the problem. The problem is not police violence, which is systemic and institutional, but rather police brutality, which is temporary and individual. The problem is not police in general, but a few bad apples. The problem is not institutional, in other words, but situational. Reform, as the primary driver of this eternal pursuit of improvement, is always calibrated to restore our faith in police by reminding us of their essential goodness and the very temporariness of any problem. New professionalization standards are proposed and described at “coffee with a cop” meetings around town. New use of force policies are written in consultation with police experts and paid consultants and then presented at “community–police forums” to great fanfare. Existing police oversight mechanisms are overhauled and premiered at ribbon-cutting ceremonies held with community stakeholders. All of this heralds a new era in police–community relations.
Reformists always claim that their reform measures herald a new era for police. Reform will demarcate some break from the violence of the past. This is partly why police historians love to talk about police eras through the lens of reform, the effect of which is an ideological rescue of present police from past sins. The politics of police reform are animated by a particular vision of police history. The structure is familiar: in the past, the police were certainly corrupt and violent and racist, but eventually reformists arrived and instituted all sorts of professionalization standards, such as better technology and training and education, and these standards effectively solved the problem. Reformed police thus belong to a different era in policing. This history seeks to interrupt efforts by activists to draw a line from the racialized police violence of the past to the racialized police violence of the present.
But the reforms of one era become the problems of another. And reform is always followed by a new crisis. And each time new problems arise (which of course are really old problems): a cop is caught perjuring himself, for example (see testilying), or a cop shoots an unarmed man in the back, or an entire department engages in racialized policing (see CRASH) or violence against women (see NHI). When this happens the agents and institutions of reform mobilize again, as though for the first time, and with concerted, collective amnesia, they diagnose the problem as an unfortunate, temporary, and totally unexpected diversion from the path of police perfectibility. It is the diversion and our persistent lack of faith, not the beating or the lying or the killing, that represents the real intractable problem. Thus all problems are always temporary aberrations from the righteous path of policing, and only reform experts—most of whom are former cops—can truly understand and repair this problem. And for all these reasons reform always fails. Cops kill and lie and rape, even Officer Friendly. So the failure of reform to make police perfect is always depicted as a failure of the public to believe in police, not a failure of reform itself. This constitutes police reform’s built-in alibi.
One of the most insidious problems of police reform is how police departments that have been subjected to reform measures, usually by a federal consent decree, are actually rewarded for their misconduct. Reform is a windfall of more money from new grants to hire more cops and purchase more weaponry, technology, training and education.
Police reform often limits its proposals to the panacea of technology—what we might refer to as technological liberalism—as a way to resolve police misconduct or police brutality.1 Better equipment and better technology. Tasers instead of guns, drones and helicopters, lapel and dashboard cameras. These are the standard fixes that police reformists offer. Better equipment and better technology to go with better or more education, better and more efforts of understanding the public, more efficient administrative means to ensure accountability and oversight. Better recruitment practices and hiring standards. These are the solutions of police reform. Yet what improvement can we honestly say has come from all of this?
The great accomplishment of police reform is only an improvement if we consider the term a reference to the capacity of police to sanitize and legitimate their violence. Police reform is not simply about making police better, but about making police violence more efficient and more “civilized.” Tear gas provides one such example. The police use of tear gas was deemed a significant reform measure for police violence during the 1960s and 1970s. Commissions at the time saw in tear gas a more hygienic and less lethal form of policing protests and large crowds. Tear gas was the progressive, liberal technology that would limit the use of force, while still helping police to administer “good order.” Unlike the bullet that punctured flesh or the nightstick that cracked skulls, tear gas provided police with a weapon that seemed less violent. The use of tear gas, which is depicted as among police reform’s great accomplishments, is banned by international law as a form of chemical warfare. It kills and causes long-lasting and significant health and environmental effects. The Taser and the police K-9 dog are other such examples. They demonstrate the ways that reform solutions are not real solutions at all, but rather serve to rework the mode and means of violence while keeping violence intact. This is what police reform has given us.
Since the 1960s, police reform has also sought to make the police more diverse and multicultural, or colorblind. If only we could make police more representative of racial, ethnic, and gender demographics, then we could significantly reduce if not eradicate police violence, the reformists’ logic goes. A liberal multicultural argument has seized police reform, in which police are encouraged to hire more Black and Brown people and more women to make the police less brutally racist and misogynist. Women, in particular, must be a part of reform efforts because female cops, it is argued, provide a unique skill set and overall different personality than the white male cop. This argument ignores the long history of violence against Black and Brown men and women in places such as Memphis, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, which long have had a significant number, if not majority, of Black and Brown cops and even chiefs. As Robin Kelley points out, “It is a rare cop, even among Blacks and Latinos, who sees his or her primary task as working for, or being employed by, poor urban communities of color. Instead, the police work for the state or the city, and their job is to keep an entire criminalized population in check, to contain the chaos of the ghetto within its walls, and to make sure the most unruly subjects stay in line. They operate in a permanent state of war.”1
Police reform does not confront police, but rather attempts to co-opt the communities that hold animosity towards police. It is their rage and resentment that reform seeks to resolve. Reform is not motivated by a desire to see a world without police violence; rather, it is driven by a fear of a world without police. Reform’s rhetoric of progress, order and security, tied as it is to the view of police as the defense of civilization, gives reform both its powerful political authority and its alibi when none of its policies pay off. And so reform seeks to restore the legitimacy of police by destroying the legitimacy of protest against police.
This is not to say that everything under the heading of police reform should simply be dismissed. Not all reforms are created equal. Ruth Wilson Gilmore distinguishes between “reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms.” The former refers to those reforms that actually bolster and strengthen what one is challenging. “Non-reformist reforms” are “systemic changes that do not extend the life or breadth of deadly forces such as prisons.”2 Is the goal of reform to expand the police powers or constrain them? The abolitionist Mariame Kaba, for example, asks “Are the proposed reforms allocating more money to the police? If yes, then you should oppose them.” She goes on: “Are the proposed reforms advocating for MORE police and policing (under euphemistic terms like ‘community policing’ run out of regular police districts)? If yes, then you should oppose them.” If reforms offer technical solutions to police violence, we should oppose them, because it just “means more money to the police. Said technology is more likely to be turned against the public than it is to be used against cops.” Finally, she reminds us that “violence is endemic to US policing itself. There are some nice individual people who work in police departments. I’ve met some of them.” But this “is not a problem of individually terrible officers rather it is a problem of a corrupt and oppressive policing system built on controlling & managing the marginalized while protecting property.”3
Instead of these reformist reforms, Kaba identifies several “non-reformist reforms” that make sense to support and advocate for, such as: reparations to the victims of police violence (and their families), requirements for officers to be held personally liable to cover the costs of violence and death claims, divestment from police agencies and the redirection of those funds to social programs, proposals to disarm the police as well as dissolve local police departments, greater transparency, and the authority of oversight committees to have the power to investigate, discipline, and fire both officers and administrators. These measures do not eliminate police violence. The abolition of the police is the only reform that eliminates police violence, but these non-reformist reforms do strip power from police and refuse reforms that seek only to make police into a more acceptable force.
Non-reformist reform is premised on the idea that police in its current form—an armed institution of the state that uses violence and coercion to impose bourgeois order—is an indisputable good. It offers the forever-unfulfilled promise of fixing police as a way to defend the order of things and, more importantly, to put a lid on any abolitionist dreams of a world without police. Police reform is the sine qua non of police legitimacy. Without reform there is no police.5
Notes:
1 Wilson, Christopher P., Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
2 Kelley, Robin, “Slangin Rocks, Palestinian Style,” in Nelson, Jill, ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, 49.
3 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson and Craig Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” in Sorkin, Michael, ed., Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, Routledge, 2008, 145.
4 Kaba, Mariame, “Police ‘Reforms’ You Should Always Oppose,” Truthout, December 7, 2014.
5 Vitale, Alex S., The End of Policing, Verso Books, 2017; Schrader, Stuart, “The Liberal Solution to Police Violence: Restoring Trust Will Ensure More Obedience,” The Indypendent, June 30, 2015.