Copspeak:
How the Police See the World

Threat

Threat is the category that animates all police power. To engage in policing is to engage in threat management through identifying, responding, containing, and eradicating various threats to a propertied, always racialized order. Always underpinned with the capacity to deploy legal violence, police exercise what is essentially an unlimited power of discretion when deciding what constitutes a threat, establishing the threat’s priority within an endless list of threats, and deciding what course of action to take.

The “threat scenario,” to use Bryan Wagner’s term, has been the primary standard that US courts apply to police cases, often using hypothetical thought experiments (such as the ticking bomb scenario) to place prevention and necessity at the heart of policing. As Wagner notes, the police are understood as having the discretion to deal with threats to the public welfare however and whenever they see fit.1

Declaring someone or something a threat is one of the most normalized of all powers internal to the police function, and among the most obvious and immediate examples are the routine stop and frisk, or when a cop rolls up alongside someone and asks them what they are doing in the neighborhood or demands to know where they are going. Of course, the logic of threat is always operative in official justifications of police violence, as the cop only has to claim that he or she felt threatened, or that he or she felt the suspect posed a threat to the public, to justify the violence. In these always unequal exchanges between the “street-level bureaucrat” and the citizen, cops perpetually engage in threat assessment and by extension an assessment of the police response. Given the fact that the courts have consistently refused to define police discretion or set predetermined rules of behavior for police officers, the police prerogative of preventing threats to the propertied order is by extension limitless and boundless.

So let’s recognize a stark reality: from the police perspective, only threats matter, which is also to say that only disorder and insecurity matter to police. Not people or rights or law, or even justice, and certainly not the protection of individual lives. The subject deemed a threat might hypothetically say to the cop, “What about my rights?” and the cop can only say, “I don’t understand your language. I speak only the language of threats.”

Notes:

1 Wagner, Bryan, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, Harvard University Press, 2010, 7.

Emergency

Police power is always emergency power, a power that police claim is essential to the construction of social order.1 It is not for nothing that police are often referred to as the “first line of defense” and “first responders” in an endless series of emergencies that go by all sorts of names, from the spectacular to the mundane and comical: disorders and disturbances, crime and criminals, riots and mobs, gangs and loitering, jaywalking and vagrancy, traffic accidents and violations, noise complaints, public intoxication and drugs, and even the cat in the tree. This is why police are called “emergency responders” and “emergency personnel” who drive “emergency vehicles” and often form “emergency response teams” like SWAT. From the police perspective, anything and everything is an emergency situation.

Etymologically, “emergency” has a long history, but the Oxford English Dictionary makes it clear that the idea evokes a “state of things unexpectedly arising, and urgently demanding immediate action.” “Emergency,” then, implies urgency, and of course there is the explicitly politico-legal use of the term “state of emergency.” But although the “state of emergency” is often declared by a state executive—in essence creating a break between “normal” and “exceptional times” when law is suspended—the ordinary existence of police is the ordinary instantiation of a permanent state of emergency.

Police power is enshrined into government as an executive power. Police are everyday executives who legally exercise a virtually unlimited power of discretion to decide on all sorts of emergencies. The implication should be clear: police and the law are not the same, and the rule of law was never meant to fully check the powers of the police, since liberal doctrine has always granted executive power the last word on deciding what and who is a threat to the public good and the interests of the state. Policing is nothing less than the everyday application of this emergency prerogative.

Notes:

1 Wall, Tyler, “Ordinary Emergency: Drones, Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror,” Antipode 48:4 (2016).

Bad Apple

Among the most common ways to describe a bad cop is to call him or her a “bad apple.” This is not an innocent phrase. The bad apple metaphor of police violence condemns the individual bad cop and preserves the perceived righteousness of police as a whole. As a metaphor the expression naturalizes the problem of police violence. It establishes that police violence is no more a political problem than a rotten apple. A bad cop is just an unfortunate fact of nature. It is simultaneously predictable, in that it is bound to happen, and unusual, in that it doesn’t describe an entire crop. It condemns police for “unjustified” police violence, but excuses the police as an institution by locating the problem as limited to the individual. After all, an apple tree grows apples, not rotten apples, and thus the bad apple must be understood as an aberration. And just as the orchardist confronts the problem of rotten apples by separating the bad apples from the good apples, so too must police separate the bad cops from the good cops (see good cop, bad cop). Thus the bad apple theory defines the problem of police violence as a problem of individuals, not police, and therefore gives momentum to police reform proposals that identify administrative solutions designed and carried out by police brass that focus on police professionalization, such as higher wages, more training, better equipment, and community policing, among others.

The bad apple theory is politically persuasive, however, because it is understood as more than just a metaphor. It is offered as an accurate depiction of the way police violence works, a depiction found as often in liberal political discourse as in the rhetoric of police chiefs and conservative law and order politicians. Few scholars take the theory seriously, but it is popular among some journalists as a common sense way to explain the violence of police. Consider the bad apples study by FiveThirtyEight, a website that uses quantitative methods to answer, mostly, sports and political questions. “Until recently,” the article explains, “[the bad apple] theory was difficult for civilians to investigate, but department data on complaints against officers obtained through a legal challenge shows that police misconduct in Chicago is overwhelmingly the product of a small fraction of officers and that it may be possible to identify those officers and reduce misconduct.”1 The study went on to confirm the bad apples theory by noting that only a small fraction of Chicago cops were “ill-intentioned or inclined to misconduct or violence, while the majority of officers are good cops.”

Just like all efforts that purportedly confirm the bad apple theory, the FiveThirtyEight approach assumes that all, or at least a statistically representative sample of all, police misconduct comes into view through complaints lodged against police with official police oversight agencies. In other words, the approach accepts the key premise of the theory: unjustified police violence is always and only a problem of individual decisions by bad cops. If this is true, then the only way to disprove the bad apple theory is to prove that all police officers are bad apples.

So, how do we get around the bad apple theory of police violence? One way would be to recognize that the bad apple theory poses the question of police violence as one always limited to police brutality. In other words, there is good police violence and bad police violence. The bad apple cop is the cop who engages in unjustified police brutality. The good apple cop uses good discretion to engage in justified police violence.

Another way to understand the bad apple theory would require taking the data on police complaints seriously, but not in the way the FiveThirtyEight study does. Recent Chicago police complaint data show that police misconduct complaints are more likely to be upheld if lodged by white people than by Black or Hispanic people. According to the Chicago Reporter, “Allegations by whites are nine times more likely to be upheld than those by blacks and almost three times more likely than those by Hispanics.” And perhaps more importantly, “allegations of improper arrest and lockup procedures are much more likely to be made by African-Americans and are sustained less than two percent of the time.”2 Thus police complaint data confirms the differentially racialized nature of police complaint adjudication. And this reveals that police violence must be understood as institutional, not individual. It is an administratively organized adjudication of police complaints that acknowledges the police violence by individual officers as a problem only when identified by white complainants, and that cannot see a problem when complaints are lodged by people of color. Thus the violence of individual officers occurs in a context of institutional indifference.

And this is made clear in the research on police complaint procedures that demonstrate that certain groups resist filing complaints not only because they suspect those complaints will not be taken seriously (the institutionalization of indifference), but also because they fear retaliation by police (the institutionalization of violence). This is individual violence matched with organized indifference, also expressed as individual indifference matched with organized violence.

A study of sex workers in South Africa concluded that “the highest levels of violence against sex workers come from the police.” Among the women interviewed, one in three “described being forced to have sex with police officers” (see rape). The pattern included indifference and retaliation when women complained. As one woman explained, “When I complained to the captain about how I was hurt when they arrested me he said ‘Ag dis maar net hoere en hy kan nie n saak van n prostituut aaneem nie.’ [Oh they are only whores and he can’t take a case made by a prostitute.]” Another said, “They just laughed at us.”3

A national report on racist violence against Aboriginal people in Australia concluded that “Aboriginal-police relations have reached a critical point due to the widespread involvement of police in acts of racist violence, intimidation and harassment.”4 As a result of organized violence by police, few members of Aboriginal communities are willing to complain. “The fear of retaliation against the complainant, or a witness, or their families, combine to discourage all but the rare person from pursuing complaints.”5

On October 11, 1994, Kim Groves, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three children, saw New Orleans police officer Len Davis pistol-whip seventeen-year-old Nathan Norwood just blocks from her house. The next day Groves identified Davis in an official misconduct complaint. And the day after that, Davis hired a local drug dealer named Paul Hardy to shoot and kill Groves. There’s small choice in rotten apples.

Notes:

1 Arthur, Rob, “How to Predict Bad Cops in Chicago,” FiveThirtyEight.com, December 15, 2015.

2 Emmanuel, Adeshina and Jonah Newman, “Police Misconduct Complaints by Whites More Likely to Be Upheld,” Chicago Reporter, November 10, 2015.

3 Fick, Nicolé, “Enforcing Fear: Police Abuse of Sex Workers When Making Arrests,” SA Crime Quarterly 16 (2006).

4 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report of the National Inquiry into Racist Violence (1991), 213.

5 Wooten, Hal, “Aborigines and Police,” UNSWLJ 16 (1993), 291.

Deterrence

Deterrence is a foundational principle of criminal law and criminology as a school of thought. The theory of deterrence, in short, claims people choose to obey or transgress the law based on calculating the possible pains and pleasures of their actions. The modern state, therefore, strives to prevent legal transgressions by increasing the pains of punishment or decreasing the pleasures of transgression. Criminologists usually distinguish between general and specific deterrence, the former directed at a general population and the latter directed at specific individuals. Deterrence, then, is a utilitarian choice theory about crime prevention through threats of a swift, certain, and severe punishment.

Deterrence is really a state euphemism for official strategies and tactics of fear and terror. As the novelist J.M. Coetzee points out, deterrence is etymologically linked to terror. The verb “deter” comes from the Latin terrere, meaning “to frighten,” and then deterrere, which means “to frighten from, discourage from.” Deterrence is part and parcel of political power, from nuclear containment doctrines of the Cold War to the wars against crime, drugs, and terror itself. In terms of criminal law, the terror of deterrence is often associated with a “tough on crime” policy, with the usual examples being “three strikes” laws, mass incarceration, capital punishment, mandatory sentencing, and efforts to increase the number of police officers. But using these as the only or primary referents for domestic deterrence fails to account for the ways that deterrence-as-terror is an animating logic of the most routine, workaday operations of law and order politics, including police power.

Although criminal deterrence is most often associated with state punishment, and therefore formal sanctions like prison, jail, and even fines, if we locate prevention of threats as one of the oldest and essential structuring logics of police power—and here we should recall the “preventative police” of the eighteenth century—then the terror logic of deterrence can more easily be understood as not merely a punishment or carceral logic, but a police logic. The distinction is important, and one implication here is that punishment, to the extent it is obsessed with future or potential transgressions, can itself be understood as a logic of police power/terror. To punish in order to deter future transgression is a police power in the way it aims to prevent potential, future threats to the social order. Prison, then, might also be understood as not merely an institution of punishment, but about policing the larger population, and rational choice thinkers see the population as always containing an unlimited pool of potential criminals.

Of course, articulated by officials as crime prevention, deterrence as a normalized form of public terror guides most all police activity. As a National Institute of Justice report states, “The police deter crime when they do things that strengthen a criminal’s perception of the certainty of being caught.” Note here how there seems to be a conflation or confusion between the criminal and the general population. Hence the routine vehicular patrol, hot spots policing, foot and bicycle patrol, and the police helicopter, for instance, are all projects of deterrence, or frightening the population into compliance. But deterrence is operative in more “velvet glove” scenarios, like public relations campaigns and even community policing, such as police officers reading books to public school children or organizing midnight basketball, or anti–drunk driving commercials, or the seatbelt campaigns of “click it or ticket.” Thinking about deterrence in specific relation to police power, it is clear that most things police do are guided by the logic and goal of frightening people into consent and compliance, however harmless the ends might appear.

Deterrence theory originated with the reformist Enlightenment liberal social contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, like Hobbes, Bentham, and Beccaria. Challenging spiritual and theological understandings of transgression and the arbitrary, brutal forms of punishment divvied out by monarchical regimes, these theorists argued that people are rational, self-interested, autonomous individuals who exercise free will in choosing their actions in any given circumstance. The job of the state, then, was to fulfill its role in the social contract of deterring individuals by punishing them in ways that contributes to the “greater good.” These theorists were interested in establishing the legitimacy of the modern liberal state, and its corresponding order of private property and wage labor, by offering humane forms of law—the punishment should fit the crime, so to speak. But as Poulantzas has argued, “This ‘State based on law’, conceived as the contrary of unlimited power, gave birth to the illusory opposition Law/Terror,” which didn’t banish violence from the social order, but merely recoded this terror within bourgeois “rule of law.”

Today, the debate over deterrence is largely reduced to a simplistic, positivist, and apparently straightforward question: “Does deterrence work?” In general, research establishes that swift, certain, and severe punishment is not nearly as effective at deterring crime as its advocates often claim. But this line of questioning should be refused for the ways it mystifies, legitimates, and normalizes public terror. It is a prompt for magical thinking, not empirical science, since we can’t say for sure why people didn’t commit a crime. Yet whenever police and prosecutors appeal to deterrence, they are participating in this mysticism, always pointing to those who aren’t committing crimes as proof that deterrence works.

The logic of police deterrence transforms thinking about the criminal law—and prevention and punishment—into an issue only concerned with the modification of the means of deterrence. For example, if the answer to the question “Does the deterrence of patrol work?” is “No, patrol doesn’t deter crime,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that police will stop patrolling. It only means that the police will then proceed to adjust or modify their methods of patrol by establishing a new type of police presence. This is exactly how practices like hot spots policing, directed patrol, and broken windows policing emerged—as reforms to ostensibly make deterrence more effective. If the answer to our question is “Yes, patrol does deter crime,” then we go down a path of easily legitimating strategies of public terror in the name of security.

Therefore, the problem of deterrence is a political problem regarding the ways the liberal state fabricates a racialized, propertied order by aiming to frighten its subject population—“the people”—into compliance through symbolic and material threats to human bodies. When state officials speak in the name of “crime prevention” through deterrence, they are simply talking euphemistically about frightening people into submission.

Disproportionate

The word “disproportionate” is commonly used by critics of police or by journalists who cover police as a way to describe the racial disparities in the use of violence by police. In the aftermath of the police killing of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, for example, journalist Wesley Lowery noted that “blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.”1 “Disproportionate” is also used to criticize police officer discretion in the use of violence. In September of 2012, an Albuquerque police officer Tasered a seventy-five-year-old man after a confrontation at a bus station. Officers ordered the man to leave. He initially refused but finally agreed, and when the elderly man raised his cane in order to rise up from the bench where he was sitting, an officer Tasered him. A sergeant later praised the Tasering as “exceptional” policing. The Department of Justice disagreed, concluding in a report on police use of force in Albuquerque that a “lack of accountability in the use of excessive force promotes an acceptance of disproportionate and aggressive behavior towards residents” and, in particular, “that APD officers used Tasers in a manner that was disproportionate to the threat encountered.”2

The use of the adjective “disproportionate” appears to interrupt police claims to unlimited discretion in the use of violence, and it focuses needed attention on the racialized patterns of police violence. The use of the word “disproportionate” echoes the use of words like “excessive” or “unjustified” in its refusal to accept prima facie police claims about violence. Disproportionate demands independent and objective criteria when judging the use of violence by police.

But be cautious when using the term disproportionate. Like excessive and unjustified, the word disproportionate questions or condemns individual decisions by police to use violence at the same time that it accepts without question the right, even the need, of police to use violence in general. For example, police violence is usually depicted as justified or unjustified, excessive or appropriate. The problem is not violence per se, but excessive violence. This is the problem of words such as excessive and unjustified, but disproportionate is even more troubling for the way it affirms police violence as not just an accepted given, but also, frighteningly, a social good. When we describe the “disproportionality” of police violence, we depict the issue as one in which the problem is not police violence, but the distribution of police violence. And this leaves us in a strange position. If disproportionality is the problem, the solution is not an end to police violence but a more equitable distribution of that violence.

Disproportionality as a concept is persuasive because, when applied in some contexts, it reveals the effects of institutional biases. For example, the US Department of Education reported in 2014 that “students of color are suspended more often than white students, and black and Latino students are significantly more likely to have teachers with less experience who aren’t paid as much as their colleagues in other schools.”3 Black and Latino students are disproportionately more likely than white students to have an inexperienced, underpaid teacher. Students of color are disproportionately more likely to be suspended than white students. If educational attainment is our concern, people of color are disproportionately less likely to graduate from college than white people. Poor people are disproportionately less likely to graduate from high school than wealthy people. In this example, educational attainment is the independent or controlled variable. We might expect to find implicit or explicit biases in the school system that limit the educational attainment of poor people and people of color. More white and wealthy students in advanced placement courses, for example, or a hostile campus climate to people of color, or poorly trained teachers in majority minority schools. And if we found these things—and we surely would if we looked honestly—the solution would be to adjust the independent variable. In other words, the solution would be to find effective means to distribute educational attainment more equitably.

Now, consider what happens when the independent variable is police violence. Consider the subtle shift that happens when the word disproportionate describes the racial disparities of police violence rather than the racial disparities of educational attainment. Police, we know, use violence disproportionately against people of color. This is true. But when we say that police use violence disproportionately against people or color, we imply that this disproportionality of violence is the problem. In doing so we establish “police violence” as the independent variable, like educational attainment. Just as the issue is not the college degree per se but the disproportionate access to the degree by people of color, so too the issue is not police violence per se but the unequal distribution of police violence. The solution to the problem of disproportionate school achievement by race or income is not to abolish educational attainment but to better redistribute the benefits of school, to improve access to school; in short the solution is to redistribute the social good of educational attainment.

This is not what critics of police violence intend when they use the word “disproportionate” in claims of racial disparity, but it is the logic of the argument: we identify some social good (educational attainment) whose unequal distribution or unequal access by race establishes a specific disparity that causes social ills. To say that police violence is disproportionately experienced by race is to say that the maldistribution of police violence causes social problems. We’re left asking strange questions: What proportion of police violence would be acceptable? Should we be content to have police kill Black people in proportion to their representation in the general population? It’s no wonder this logic of disparity gets us nowhere politically. Conservatives respond to every report that finds racial disparity in police violence with their own report that claims Black people commit disproportionately more crime than whites and therefore, they argue, the distribution of police violence might be calibrated just as it should be. The logic of disparity contributes to, rather than interrupts, the familiar conservative law and order narrative of Black communities as difficult to police. When we identify the problem as disproportionality, we risk legitimizing a logic that gives us racial profiling and stop and frisk. Disproportionality limits any analysis of police violence precisely as police prefer, because to say that police violence is disproportional is to demand that we better distribute it to the population that deserves it, not abolish it.

Notes:

1 Lowery, Wesley, “Aren’t More White People Than Black People Killed by Police? Yes, but No,” The Washington Post, July 11, 2016.

2 US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, “Report on the findings of the Department of Justice Civil Investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department,” April 10, 2014, 36, 16.

3 “Expansive Survey of America’s Public Schools Reveals Troubling Racial Disparities,” Report of the Department of Education, March 21, 2014.

Ferguson Effect

Also called the “viral video effect,” the “Ferguson effect” is a theory advanced by police leaders that attempts to link the anti-police protests that began in the United States in 2014 to an increase in violent crime, particularly murder, that they say followed. St. Louis, Missouri police chief Samuel Dotson coined the phrase following the protests of the killing of Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in August of 2014. “The criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment,” claimed Dotson, and he called it “the Ferguson effect.”1 Right-wing pundits quickly took up the claim. When protests increase, they claim, arrest rates go down, and crime rates go up. Police can’t “do their job” because, as conservative author Heather McDonald argued in the Wall Street Journal, the protests in Ferguson represented a new “demonization of law enforcement.” The Ferguson effect was real, she claimed, and it’s “happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric.”2

The Ferguson effect is an argument in defense of police homicide. Police kill someone and protests erupt. And these protests against police killing, according to the argument, restrain police from “doing their job.” It is a lament more than an argument: “If only police could continue to kill as they have.” It is an argument that holds fast to the idea that police kill people as part of their job and that this killing is crucial to order and security. Police must kill people, in other words, and must be free of any scrutiny (which is to say, no protests) when they kill people, because killing people is the way order is made and kept. Thus the only problem with police killing is not the act of killing, but rather that the large and popular protests that sometimes follow them have a “chilling effect” on police officers, who are now afraid to “do their job”—which means afraid of killing people—and this encourages an emboldened criminal element. The police killings may not be legal or consistent with the rule of law but they produce order, and order is the job of police. This is the logic of the Ferguson effect.

The former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, took up Dotson’s claim and became among the most vocal proponents of the theory, asserting in a 2015 speech that the Ferguson effect produced a “chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year.” He called for a return to “actual, honest-to-goodness, up-close ‘What are you guys doing on this corner at one o’clock in the morning?’ policing.”3 We should remember that this was precisely the kind of policing Darren Wilson was doing when he killed Mike Brown, or that Timothy Loehmann was doing when he killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. In other words, police need to kill, must kill, and if this makes you angry, if this makes you distrust police, that’s your problem. Keep it to yourself.

Notes:

1 Byers, Christine, “Crime up after Ferguson and More Police Needed, Top St. Louis Area Chiefs Say,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 15, 2014.

2 MacDonald, Heather, “The New Nationwide Crime Wave,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2015.

3 Comey, James B., “Law Enforcement and the Communities We Serve: Bending the Lines Toward Safety and Justice,” Speech delivered at the University of Chicago Law School, October 23, 2015.

Furtive Movements

Furtive movements can get you killed, harassed or arrested. Just ask the family of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who was shot and killed in 1999 when officers said he made a furtive movement for his gun. Of course, the gun turned out to be a wallet, since police were demanding he identify himself. But this fact isn’t of concern for cops, since officer safety and the elimination of a perceived threat takes precedence over everything else. Furtive movements—a fleeting movement of a hand, a turning of the waist, a glance of the eyes—marks the line between freedom and captivity, life and death.

What exactly are furtive movements? “Furtive” implies actions that are stealthy, secret, shifty, cunning and underhanded. It describes a state of guilty nervousness. And since in the eyes of police everything and anything can be deemed a furtive gesture, you’re always a threat. A furtive movement is whatever a cop says it is. The courts have consistently ruled that officers can violently intervene based solely on their perception of danger and threat. Furtive movements, therefore, do not reveal criminal intent but rather are gestures that a “reasonable” officer would find consistent with going for a weapon, even if that weapon were a wallet or a cellphone. The officer only has to claim after the fact that he or she thought you were going for a weapon in order to license bodily intervention, whether it is a routine stop and frisk, a Taser to the neck, a bludgeoning by a nightstick, or a deadly shooting. Furtive movement is the legal category that justifies and legitimates the police killing of so many unarmed people with impunity.

Given the highly racialized and classed nature of police power, it is not a coincidence that police most often see people of color and other marginalized populations as prone to furtive movement. Indeed, officers frequently cite the “waistband grab” as justification for violence against people of color, such as the unarmed Ricardo Diaz Zeferino who was shot and killed by police in Gardena, California in 2013. In July 2015, the Huffington Post compiled a list of at least twenty cases since 2010 where police justified the killing of unarmed people of color with the “reaching for the waistband” explanation.1 Interestingly, to those populations most subjected to racist police violence, the very presence of police officers can actually produce fear, a fear officers then perceive as furtive and “threatening.”

It is so easy to think of the “furtive movement” justification as evidence of first and foremost the conscious or unconscious bias of individual police officers. Similarly, it is easy to chalk up the furtive movements justification as a boilerplate excuse deployed by biased officers to justify, and to lie about, their violent, racist actions after the fact—just another case of a bad apple cop. But the justification of furtive movements is not only about individual bias or individual decision-making. It is a legal doctrine, sanctioned by law and legal rules and precedent, and built into the police institution and workaday routines of policing. Furtive movement is law’s blank check that police cash to justify their lethal force. The doctrine of furtive movements is animated by law and put into practice by police discretion.

Cops have the sole prerogative to decide what is or is not a furtive movement. You might think what you are doing—say, reaching into your pocket to obtain your wallet—is the right or sensible thing to do. But the only thing that matters in the police encounter is the cop’s perception of your actions.

The doctrine of furtive movements is also a mode of political address to a larger public. After a cop kills someone the public is asked to consider the incident from the cop’s perspective. The police interpret and narrate the incident to the public, telling us the officer mistakenly thought that reaching for a wallet was really reaching for a gun, and so it is the officer with whom we must empathize: “See, wouldn’t you have thought the same thing? Don’t you now understand that this killing, however tragic, is actually understandable and justified? Yes, there is a body lying in a pool of blood, but it is the cop with whom we must sympathize.” “Furtive movements” is just another way in which we are told to see the world like a cop.

Notes:

1 Delaney, Arthur, “Ricardo Diaz Zeferino’s Death Shows The Danger Of Owning A Waistband,” Huffington Post, August 22, 2015.

Justified

The use of violence by police is often judged, whether by police, district or state attorneys or anti–police violence activists, as either justified or unjustified. The justified/unjustified binary establishes a continuum of police violence as either good and therefore justified, or bad and therefore excessive.

The language of police violence as either justified or unjustified is how police want you to talk about police violence, because the question of justification is a question only police can answer. This is because the decision to use violence is evaluated, by police and law, according to the use-of-force continuum, which establishes a seemingly objective and independent standard against which all police violence is judged. The continuum begins with a cop’s order: “Put your hands up,” or “Get out of the car,” or “Show me your ID.” If a subject is compliant but police use force anyway, the violence is excessive, and therefore unjustified. But when police officers confront a “noncompliant” subject, they are authorized to use escalating force, up to and including lethal force, until compliance. On its surface, the use-of-force continuum appears to hold police accountable. It appears to protect the public from the bad apple cop. But the continuum does quite the opposite. It invests in a police officer the sole discretion to choose when, where, and how to use violence based on a police officer’s interpretation of noncompliance. And remember that any limit placed on the police use-of-force standard is a limit only imposed after the fact. Law may deem it unjustified, but only after the blood has been spilled

According to the continuum, for example, police are justified if a person is armed and a threat, which is why law extends to police the discretion to define not only who is a threat, but also to define what armed means and what unarmed means. You might be armed, and therefore a threat, if you raise your hands while holding a cellphone, like Daniel Tillison, or even if you have nothing in your hands at all, like Terrence Crutcher. When we judge police violence as either justified or unjustified, we weigh only what police officers think and if they fear for their lives. In other words, the question of justification asks us to see the world solely through the eyes of police, never through the eyes of their victims. Was Tamir Rice scared? Did he fear for his life? Yes, of course he was scared. But this is immaterial to law. What matters to law is how the cop felt.

On the rare occasion police violence is declared unjustified, it is always depicted as a question of individual volition. Unjustified police violence is always the result of an independent decision by a bad apple cop who chose to engage in police brutality. This is why when police reform measures are proposed in the wake of police brutality cases, they almost always focus on the mythical bad apple, not police in general. Fire the bad apples, raise hiring standards to avoid hiring new bad apples, and improve training in order to teach current police officers how not to be a bad apple.

Police violence, whether justified or unjustified, is always rare and exceptional, rather than routine and everyday. No district attorney investigates a handcuffing. And rarely a chokehold or a rough ride or a hog-tying, unless you die as a result. It’s not violence, it’s policing, which is to say that policing is always violence.

The justified/unjustified binary is animated by the logic of innocence and guilt. Did he have a knife? Then he must be guilty. The killing must be justified. When we see the world this way, like a cop, only the innocent deserve our sympathy, and it is perfectly acceptable, even preferable, that police kill those deemed guilty. But just like armed versus unarmed, guilty and innocent are cop categories. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains, “By campaigning for the relatively innocent, advocates reinforce the assumption that others are relatively or absolutely guilty and do not deserve political or policy intervention … Such advocacy adds to the legitimation of mass incarceration and ignores how police and district attorneys produce serious or violent felony charges, indictments, and convictions. It helps to obscure the fact that categories such as ‘serious’ or ‘violent’ felonies are not natural or self-evident, and more important, that their use is part of a racial apparatus for determining ‘dangerousness.’”1 The problem is not only that police kill the innocent, but also that police determine who is guilty, who is innocent, and who must die.

And police oversight will not save us. It does not confront the problem of police violence; it only confronts “unjustified” police violence. The unjustified/justified binary works to bind the two together. Unjustified violence is kin to justified violence. The proposals of police reform—improved training, better equipment, and more cops on the beat—promise to make the unjustified killing of today the justified killing of tomorrow.

Notes:

1 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” Social Justice Journal, February 23, 2015.

No Humans Involved (NHI)

Police use the classifying acronym NHI to refer to suspected gang members and Black-on-Black crime. “No humans involved,” they say. According to Sylvia Wynter, the acronym banishes the poor and Black people from the category of the human: “Humanness and North Americanness are always already defined, not only in optimally White terms, but also in optimally middle class.”1 In the early 1980s, LAPD officers used chokeholds to kill sixteen people during routine arrests, twelve of whom were Black. When a reporter asked Los Angeles police Chief Daryl Gates to explain why LAPD officers were choking so many Black people to death, he explained that “the veins and arteries do not open up as fast in blacks as they do in normal people.”2 In other words, according to Gates it was impossible for LAPD officers to commit a crime against a Black person, because there were “no humans involved.”

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of “the color line” as the “central problem of the twentieth century.” And the use of NHI by police and other violence workers demonstrates that this line is not a metaphor, but rather a line literally policed by the state. This racist language marks people of color as less than human, and it was (and remains) prevalent among police in Miami, St. Louis, Phoenix and, particularly, Los Angeles, where the use of the term has been carefully documented. In the late 1980s, LAPD officers began referring to murders of gang members by rival gangs as NHI. Following the beating of Rodney King in 1991, the Christopher Commission investigated racist violence at the LAPD. The subsequent report devoted page after page to examples of racially motivated police violence rationalized by a pattern of racist speech. LAPD officers routinely used epithets to describe Black and Latino people as animals. The practice was so widespread in fact that officers typed their racist epithets directly into a mobile communications system they knew to be monitored by supervisors. In one communication profiled in the report, officers discussed killing Black people: “Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife.” For police to say of Black deaths that there are “no humans involved” is to deny Black personhood. What does it say about police power that it routinely engages in the discursive production of Black people as less than human and prescribes violence as the means to an end that culminates in a return to Black slavery?

But NHI in the police lexicon refers also to the murder of women they consider prostitutes, whose slayings they describe as “misdemeanor murders,” a reference to the total lack of concern regarding their deaths throughout the criminal justice system. Donna Gentile was one of forty-five women raped and murdered in San Diego between 1985 and 1992. Gentile, who was both a sex worker and a police informant, was found strangled and choked to death after she testified against police. Her killer or killers had violently forced gravel into her mouth. Few of the murdered women were sex workers, but San Diego police referred to all of the women as prostitutes.3

The police project thus is fundamentally a politics of personhood. NHI reveals the ways that police power is intimately bound up with the category of the human. But it is not simply that the police exterminate an already existing person through dehumanizing language that seeks to justify (if not celebrate) acts of repression against those who police consider nonhuman. Rather, police power can more usefully be understood as a power that actively produces the very category of the human by conjuring up its opposite: animals, savages, brutes, rodents, slaves and even inanimate objects like “trash” and “scum” and “filth,” for instance. Or snitches who need to eat gravel.

Establishment definitions of police power generally imagine police authority as limited to deciding who to identify as a threat, and when to use force. But the violence marked with the acronym NHI reveals that police power defines the limits of the human, and includes the authority to decide who is or isn’t one. Identifying threats is also to identify who might or might not be a person. Policing is the work of death.

Notes:

1 Wynter, Sylvia, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Voices of the African Diaspora 8:2 (1992), 14.

2 Associated Press, “Urban League in Los Angeles Asks Police Chief Suspension,” New York Times, May 12, 1982.

3 Mydans, Seth, “Police Criticized in San Diego Killings,” New York Times, September 22, 1990.

Noncompliance

Police is a power premised on an imaginary world of disorder, populated by unpacified subjects, who can be restored only through its application. When police speak of noncompliance, they speak of these fictional subjects in a state of disorder. It is a word that permits only one alternative to disorder, only one solution to noncompliance: police. Only police produce the pacified, compliant subject. Without police there will be disorder; without police you will be noncompliant.

“Noncompliance” reveals the impossibility of an equal exchange between a cop and a subject.1 It describes the moment after the police use of violence—after the handcuffs are tightened, the Taser fired, the chokehold applied. Anything other than complete obedience and respectful deference is noncompliance, usually referred to as “resisting arrest.” Noncompliance is not just the absence of compliance, but the way cops legitimize police violence. Pain compliance is another word for terror.

Policing seeks to turn unpacified subjects into polite subjects and uses pain compliance to do so. A ninety-pound K-9 is set loose on you. If you move at all—turn to run, cover your face, strike the dog—you will be charged with resisting arrest. You are mauled by a trained attack dog, left bleeding, flesh torn from your body, because you were noncompliant.

Or imagine that you are Sandra Bland. Texas state trooper Brian Encina pulls you over in July of 2015 for failing to signal a lane change. You’re sitting in your car, smoking a cigarette, waiting for him to return with your ticket. Encina walks back to your car and orders you to put out your cigarette. What? “Why do I have to put out a cigarette when I’m in my own car?” you ask. Encina is now agitated and he orders you to get out of the car, but you refuse. You are now noncompliant and things escalate quickly. Encina starts shouting and grabbing at your car door. “I am giving you a lawful order.” He pulls open your door and grabs at you, yanking you out of the car. You pull back, struggling to stay in the car. And Encina keeps shouting, and he’s pointing his Taser directly at you. “I will light you up! Get out! Now!”

Encina arrests you and transfers you to the Waller County, Texas jail where they find you three days later hanged to death in your cell. In the wake of your death, the New York Times, while pointing out that Encina had no reason to fear for his safety and thus no reason to order you out of the car, notes that he had “almost complete discretion” to do so and that you were “legally obligated to get out when asked.”2 In other words, forget what the law may say; it’s what the cop says that matters. As far as law is concerned, you were noncompliant and thus your death was your fault.

According to the Texas Department of Safety, Encina did not comply with official policies and procedures and was fired for his actions. Encina is out of a job for being noncompliant; Bland is dead for being noncompliant. And this is the key point. “Noncompliance” is not descriptive; it is prescriptive. It does not merely describe a deviation from a normative behavior; it describes a condition under which police can kill you.

Notes:

1 Calder Williams, Evan, “Objects of Derision,” The New Inquiry, August 13, 2012.

2 Lai, Rebecca K. K., et al., “Assessing the Legality of the Sandra Bland’s Arrest,” New York Times, July 22, 2015.

Officer-Involved Shooting

Language, George Orwell reminds us, is always political. It can be used to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” The euphemism, he wrote, is the weapon of choice: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”1

Consider the phrase “officer-involved shooting,” which does not refer to shootings that merely involve police, but refers exclusively to situations in which an officer fires a weapon at a person. It is an intentionally misleading phrase used to obscure the patterns and politics of police violence. And its use is not restricted to police. “A bad usage,” according to Orwell, “can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.” And so journalists, particularly local TV journalists, happily repeat the copspeak daily, which serves to further obscure police violence.

The syntax of the phrase does not just obscure responsibility, it works to divert our attention from police entirely.2 The phrase equates the perpetrators of violence—police—with its victims. And so instead of any scrutiny of police actions, professors of criminology wonder after the cops’ feelings and worry over their suffering: “What goes through police officers’ minds when they are involved in shootings? How does facing deadly force affect what they see, hear, and feel?”3 Orwell would marvel at the work such a question does, transforming homicide into “facing deadly force.”

We’re asked to empathize with cops, to see and feel like a cop. And the obfuscatory syntax of “officer-involved shooting” is usually paired with the active voice that describes the person who the cop shot. He menaced officers; he threatened officers; she made furtive movements; he went for a gun; she wouldn’t show her hands. Paired together, we find a grammar of exoneration. “How can agency leadership expect law enforcement personnel involved in one of the most critical incidents in their lives, who are operating under stress and fear, to remember what just happened in a rapidly evolving event?” asks Police Chief Magazine. “This is not a realistic expectation. What also must be realized is that civilian eyewitness testimony may be based on beliefs and values and may not be a fair replication of the actual facts.”4 In other words, what police think is realistic and fair: that cops have total discretion to use violence because of their training and expertise. What victims of police violence think is unrealistic and unfair: that cops should or even could explain why they used violence in any single instance because of the trauma they suffer.

A critical inquiry into the usage of “officer-involved shooting” reveals it as a familiar ploy of copspeak. The grammar of copspeak offers a phrase (“officer-involved shooting”) that obscures an act (police killing a human being). This ploy individualizes at the same time that it anonymizes police violence. There are other such words and phrases in the copspeak glossary. Community policing, deterrence, force, broken windows, crime and more. These are all words that not only obscure real relations of violence but reserve for police permanent virtue, and an always-pure authority. Most criticisms of the phrase “officer-involved shooting” complain that the phrase releases the cop from blame or culpability. But in this way the syntax accidentally reflects a real truth: there is a dreadful inevitability to police violence. “Officer-involved shooting” is copspeak in fatal voice.

Notes:

1 Orwell, George, Politics and the English Language [1946], Benediction Classics, 2010, 22.

2 Lennard, Natasha, “Some NYPD Officer-Involved Shooting Narratives Just Don’t Fly,” Vice News, May 19, 2014.

3 Klinger, David, “Police Responses to Officer-Involved Shootings,” Report submitted to the National Institute of Justice, NIJ Journal (2006), 253.

4 Tracy, Drew J., “Handling Officer-Involved Shootings,” Police Chief, June, 2016.

The Public

The idea of the public is crucial to law and order mythology. Police authority is a public authority in that the very existence of the police is thought to come from the consent or desires of the people. Robert Peel, the original gangster credited with forming the first modern police force, save for the earlier slave patrol, famously quipped that “the police are the public and the public are the police.” Of course, the public always wants public safety and public decency, so this demand by the people explains why police officers, as public officials and public authorities, are always working at all costs towards the public good and public order. Police officers are also public employees who work for the public in public space and in public view while simply trying to do their best with low salaries, high stress, real dangers, and lots of negative public opinion. Cops are always getting frustrated with the public because the public simply demands too much from police, their public servants. Not only must they reduce or eradicate crime but they must also respect civil liberties and submit to public accountability and public oversight. The police work for the public, but when push comes to shove, to hell with the public. They just can’t really understand the unique challenges of being a cop, so it is best the public just trust cops and respect police.

This fetish of “the public” is nothing but political deception, what Nina Power calls a “bad joke.” “The police are not the public, and never were,” she explains. “They were always just police.”1 This bears repeating over and over again because the fetishization of the police as somehow forming out of the consensual desires of some mystical entity called the public is so insidious and normalized that it holds sway over most all discussions of police violence and police reform. As Christopher Wilson demonstrates, the public is not some objective entity that simply corresponds to police power, but is a political construction often created by police, elite sponsors like business owners, and journalists. That is, the police and their cadre of stakeholders are often responsible for constructing the very public they claim to represent and serve, and of course the very publics, or anti-publics, that apparently threaten the public good. In this formulation, “the police officer actually becomes the public’s representative, agent of its own desire for order.”2 That is, in their noble duties of securing public order, the police are simply following the wishes of the public as if the police are saying, “We killed this person because you asked us to,” or “We are busting people for selling untaxed cigarettes and jaywalking because you have given us those orders.” How dare the public complain and criticize police for injustice or injuries to members of the public.

The public belongs to that other fairytale about the democratic state: the social contract. This is also why the notion of the public is fraught with confusion: it simultaneously refers to private individuals agreeing among themselves to consent to be governed by, and unquestionably obedient to, a sovereign authority. This process, liberal state theorists argue, renders the modern state a public authority that is of the people and for the public good. In this view, the public simultaneously refers both to state authorities and their subjects, the policers and the policed. This abstraction that the state is borne out of some mystical public authority provides an illusory account of how law, because it is of the people, holds police accountable to the people while making humane and civil the violence of the liberal state. One insidious problem with the mythology of the public, then, is how it makes any alternative to the police, or really the administrative, coercive state itself, seem impossible, and downright foolish. We need the police, or the police must operate in such and such way, because certain publics require police.

At the same time, the public can never really be the police because the fairytale requires a partition between both entities—a public made up of private individuals pursuing their own interests and of public officials who reject pursuing their own private interests in the name of the public good through their own professionalization and badge of honor. Police advocates frequently argue that actual members of the public shouldn’t interfere with the practice of policing, while trusting that the police, as the real public, always know best the public good. Moreover, the public is an object of police concern because it is often found wanting in its alliance with and support of the police, setting off police efforts to rectify this by all sorts of strategies and tactics to win hearts and minds, like Officer Friendly and community policing.

The idea of the public enshrines in police an abstract foundation of consent and mutual agreement at the same time that the threat of public disorder is found in the public. Here it is easy to speak of the highly racialized, classed, and gendered dynamics of the public. For instance, the public that consents to police is supposed to include all people, but the public that threatens order is only some people. It could be panhandlers in one place, or sex workers in another, or Native homeless trans women in another. Poor people, the jobless, the homeless, and a multitude of racial others are first and foremost constructed as public enemies, and therefore not a part of other bourgeois, frequently white publics consisting of obedient workers, consumers, clients, customers, and good citizens.

The power of the public is its malleability to be many things at once: orderly and disorderly, obedient and unruly, threatening and nonthreatening. When certain publics take to public space to resist or contest the public authority and its role in inequality and injustice, then it is only a matter of asserting public order, or the security of the public good, over public space and public assembly. It is through constructing the public that police defend their unlimited discretion, deflect calls for oversight, define threats and emergencies, distinguish between a rioter (who gets a Taser to the stomach) and a citizen (who gets a sticker), and claim to be merely imposing the normative values of the public that guide policing and its never-ending cycles of reform. If the police are of the public, it is a very limited, insular, and narrow public of accumulation and private property. The police want to cut down the insurgent public and plant in its place other publics like the consuming public, the working public, and the obedient public.

Notes:

1 Power, Nina, “The Public, the Police and the Rediscovery of Hate!” Strike!, December 5, 2013.

2 Wilson, Christopher P., Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America, University of Chicago Press, 2000, 70.

Reasonable Suspicion

This is how law books explain “probable cause”: A police officer may stop and search a person only if objective facts and circumstances, known to the officer, would lead a reasonably cautious person to conclude that a crime had been committed. Most importantly, the right to engage in that search is only permitted with a search warrant issued by the independent judgment of a judge or magistrate. This view advances the idea that the law protects you from police.

But probable cause does not protect you from police, especially if you are a person of color or you are poor, and God help you if you are both. Police will lie on search warrants (see CRASH); they will lie in court (see testilying). They will plant evidence and concoct “anonymous tips.” And they will get their search warrant. But liberals, not just conservatives, will never tire of the myth. They will assure you time and again that the law will protect you, that law will constrain police power. But law, like the irrigation water that a farmer carefully draws into her field, knows its master and nourishes only police power.

And making law consistent with police practice was what the Supreme Court had in mind in 1968 when it established a different standard than probable cause for police stops and searches in Terry v. Ohio. In that case the Court ruled that a police officer could stop and frisk a suspect on the street without a search warrant, and without violating the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, as long as the stop was based on “specific and articulable facts.” But despite subsequent court rulings regarding what constitutes “specific and articulable facts,” the court has never provided a definition of this different standard, reasonable suspicion, thus leaving it up to police to define. Thus the power to stop, to search, to seize, to arrest, is entirely at the discretion of police. Are you in a “crime-infested” neighborhood? Are you running? Are you walking? Are your movements evasive? Furtive? Are your hands in your pockets? Are you congregating on a street corner? Are you by yourself? Are you walking down an alley? Are you whispering in someone’s ear?

But before we conclude that reasonable suspicion constitutes an expansion of police powers, let’s remember that cops have always stopped and frisked people on little or no evidence, particularly Black people. Terry didn’t create the police stop, it legitimated it.1 The practice is built into policing. Reasonable suspicion is just a way to explain the exercise of police power.

The courts endlessly defer to police practice and experience, and thus the concept of reasonable suspicion is embedded deeply in policing and law as an institutional imperative to conflate race and criminality. Recall that “reasonable suspicion” emerged as a new legal standard during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Law and order politicians responded with tough-on-crime proposals based on the claim that probable cause handcuffed police and limited their ability to do their job during this period of rising Black crime.

Without reasonable cause there would be no predictive policing. The rise of the computer modeling of crime by police is a direct result of the only limit that the standard of reasonable suspicion places on police. A hunch or intuition does not itself establish reasonable suspicion, unless it can be rendered as a statistical probability by a computer algorithm. The condition of poverty also does not establish reasonable suspicion, unless it is rendered as a statistical probability by a computer algorithm. And the result of reasonable suspicion and the practices it permits, such as broken windows policing and CompStat and racial profiling, is not lost on the people constantly stopped and frisked. As Michelle Alexander writes, “For black youth, the experience of being ‘made black’ often begins with the first police stop, interrogation, search, or arrest. The experience carries social meaning—this is what it means to be black.”2

Notes:

1 Harris, David A., “Factors for Reasonable Suspicion: When Black and Poor Means Stopped and Frisked,” Indiana Law Journal 69 (1993), 659, fn6.

2 Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press, 2012, 199.

Unarmed

According to the police violence counting project, Mapping Police Violence, 102 unarmed Black people were killed by police in 2015. This means that of all the Black people killed that year, almost one in three were unarmed, which is five times the rate that police kill unarmed white people. The most high-profile police killings of Black men and women over the last thirty years—for instance, those of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Walter Scott—are all tied together through the fact that this state violence was directed against unarmed people of color.

But we should be careful when using unarmed as the primary or sole criterion to judge and protest police killings. It is a term that hides a deceptive logic designed to justify the police killings of those persons deemed armed, which characterize the overwhelming majority of police killings.

Put in more direct terms: the category of unarmed, as a means of politicizing police killings, risks depoliticizing the killing of armed people, a category that shouldn’t be taken for granted. For example, what exactly do police mean when they declare a person armed? In 2015, according to the Guardian, police killed 1,140 people in the United States, and 853 of these victims were considered by police to be armed. Although the majority were listed as possessing a firearm or knife when police killed them, over 200 of these armed people were said to possess “other weapons.” One of the most common weapons was a car. Other weapons included flagpoles, steel pipes, bicycle chains, or replicas of firearms, including toys such as water pistols.

From the police perspective, everyone is always potentially armed, and as the racialized demographics of the victims starkly show, police see people of color as the most likely of all. Remember, police officers killed Sean Bell because his friend had just mentioned going to get a gun. Darren Wilson described the body of Michael Brown as essentially a weapon in “demon” form, and of course police claimed they thought twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s toy gun was an actual gun.

To engage in a debate about police violence structured by an armed versus unarmed binary is to be seduced into thinking like police. The result is that all other forms of police violence are normalized and obscured as “nonevents,” stripped of any political content. It is to conclude that there is a who and a how that police ought to kill.

Use-of-Force Continuum

The use-of-force continuum is common in police parlance as a way to describe and prescribe an escalating progression of police violence. The continuum begins with the mere presence of one or more officers. An officer makes a verbal command. “Show me your hands,” for example. If the person does not comply with the order, the officer escalates force, using first nonlethal and finally, depending on the threat and the circumstances, deadly force.

The continuum is taught to police officers in training, and it is invoked by police in response to public outrage following the unjustified use of force. It is often an effective tactic in these situations because on its face it purports to merely explain when and why an officer would be justified in escalating force in any given situation. It appears to describe an “if this, then that” cause and effect relationship. In this way, police can depict the use-of-force continuum as an objective way to evaluate the choice by a police officer to use force. We’re told that it is a kind of checklist that not only governs police behavior but also allows for the independent evaluation of police behavior. It judges whether force was warranted and therefore justified. This is the appeal of the use-of-force continuum: it appears on its surface, particularly to police reformers, to actually challenge police brutality through the creation of professional, regulatory standards that independently evaluate and criticize police violence. Those who hold fast to this view, however, forget that police violence is not an abstraction. Police escalate their force not because of some objective set of standards or checklist that they merely apply, but rather because an officer or a group of officers decides to tackle a person to the ground and Taser him in the back, chooses to restrain a noncompliant motorist in a chokehold, or lets loose a K-9 police dog on a person in a mental health crisis who is acting erratically. In all of these cases, the use-of-force continuum would prompt one to ask, “What justification did the officer have to use force?” And the only way to answer that question would be to consider the encounter from the perspective of the police officer, not the victim. The use-of-force continuum thus invests the officer not only with the authority to choose when and how to escalate force, but also with the authority to evaluate whether it was justified. From this we can see that the use-of-force continuum masquerades as a kind of safe standard theory of police force that promises to hold police accountable but, in practice, serves to inoculate police officers from any and all sanction.

Despite all of this, the use-of-force continuum does reveal a profound contradiction in how police defend the discretion to use force. On the one hand, the continuum proposes a set of standards that limit police violence, but the police have long claimed that police power cannot and should not be defined or limited in advance. Any given circumstance could pose a threat or create disorder, and thus, the argument goes, police should be given wide latitude to use their discretion however they deem fit. What do we make of this apparent contradiction? In practice, the continuum serves only to protect police from any and all judgment, but it is also a theory elaborated by police that, at its most basic level, admits that police should be limited in their day-today discretion to use force. This is the genius of the use-of-force continuum: it admits that police use of force should be limited and regulated by independent standards, and this satisfies advocates of police reform, but it also reserves for police the right to establish those standards. And that satisfies police.

And this is not all that it does. Note the similarity between the use-of-force continuum for police officers and what the military calls “escalation of force.” Like police departments, the military defines a set of abstract conditions under which soldiers are permitted to use deadly force. A progression of force is predicated on the presence of “resistance” to officer (or soldier) authority at each step along the force continuum. These similarities are not an accident but instead point to a more general and historical correspondence between the police and the military. Police reformers and even many anti–police violence activists imagine that the police and military are and must remain distinct institutions, forever divided by a bright line that separates the different purposes they serve (that is, the police should “keep the peace” domestically while the military should “defend American interests” abroad). But this view ignores both what the police and military actually do and how similar those things really are. “Police officers and military veterans are kindred spirits,” writes Mark Clark for Police Magazine in a January 2014 article that explains that military skills are in high demand by police departments. The skills learned on the battlefield, it turns out, translate directly to the beat. And police and military share more than personnel, they also increasingly share similar tactics (see SWAT), training, and equipment (see militarization). The similarity in how the police and military escalate force tells us that these similarities are not just in style but also in substance. In other words, police look and behave like the military because police and the military do the same things and share the same goals. The police and military use violence to occupy territory. Military outposts in hostile territory and police substations in “crim-infested” neighborhoods. The military engages in pacification in order to win “hearts and minds.” The police engage in community policing in order to secure community support for police authority. And, most importantly, the police and military decide when, where and how to use violence and reserve for themselves the right to call it justified.

Criminology

If anyone understood the bloody truth of criminology, which describes itself as the academic home for the scientific study of crime and criminals, it was George Jackson, who in 1961 received an indeterminate prison sentence of one year to life for stealing seventy dollars from a gas station. Before prison guards shot and killed Jackson in an escape attempt, they caged him for ten years, nearly nine of which were in solitary confinement. Criminology helped construct Jackson as a criminal, and his torture via solitary confinement is a form of captivity long justified by criminological knowledge. In his letters from prison, Jackson suggested that we “burn all of the criminology and penology libraries and direct our attention where it will do some good.” He was convinced that the discipline of administrative criminology failed to properly admit that “racism is stamped unalterably into the present nature of Amerikan sociopolitical and economic life” and that “criminals and crime arise from material, economic, sociopolitical causes.”1 For Jackson, administrative criminology is not an objective and neutral academic discipline, but a political project of the capitalist state that is part and parcel of the class violence carried out daily by all of its actors, stem to stern. From his vantage point, the scholarly project known as criminology did little more than underwrite the legal terror that fabricates a racial capitalist order.

Our era, the era of daily police killings and the mass caging of Black and Brown men and women, is the era of the rise of criminology and criminal justice as academic fields, one that explicitly animates liberal notions of reform that always result in more people in cages, more people on parole, and more people on probation. Criminology serves a legitimating function to the patterns of police violence because it takes crime for granted. The “prison didn’t come to exist where it does just by happenstance,” argues Jackson. “Those who inhabit it and feed off its existence are historical products.”2 They are products of criminology’s history.

In the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, criminology grew with help of the Law Enforcement Administration Act (LEAA) that funded both local police agencies and academic units. Today criminology and criminal justice departments litter university campuses like so many candy bar wrappers and beer cans. It certainly isn’t a coincidence that criminologists regularly work with and conduct research for police and prisons and other law enforcement organizations on program evaluations, to say nothing of the Department of Justice and other large police departments like the NYPD that maintain their own research departments. This is what criminology was always meant to do. College students who major in criminology in the United States can get a Bachelor’s degree, and even a Masters and PhD, without ever taking one required course on police violence or the racist history of prisons. If anything, these courses are usually listed as electives, relegating the material violence of police and prisons outside the fundamental historical premises of the discipline. Of course, as an academic major, criminology also is primarily responsible for generating new recruits who will staff police departments, jails and prisons, and parole and probation offices. They are “cop shops” and they provide degrees for future police and prison guards.

Criminology exists to legitimate the amorphous, cruel state juggernaut known as the “criminal justice system.” Take a class in criminology or read a textbook from the field and consider Michel Foucault’s argument about the discipline. He was asked once in an interview, “You are very hard on criminology, its ‘garrulous discourse,’ its ‘endless repetitions’ … ‘Have you ever read any criminological texts?’” he responded: “They are staggering. And I say this out of astonishment, not aggressiveness, because I fail to comprehend how the discourse of criminology has been able to go on at this level. One has the impression that it is of such utility, is needed so urgently and rendered so vital for the working of the system, that it does not even seek a theoretical justification for itself, or even simply a coherent framework. It is entirely utilitarian.”3

The work of abolishing police and prisons might require that we first abolish criminology. There is no escaping the fact that the history of academic, administrative criminology is a history of police violence and putting people in cages. The history of academic criminology is the legitimation of the violence of capitalism and the capitalist state, all in the name of “better” policing, “more humane” prisons, “more democratic” rules and laws. The history of criminology is a history of state violence in the name of reform and progress. The history of criminology is a history of the security state, whose grant dollars flood criminology departments staffed by academics who gleefully write crime reports and policy evaluations, all the while justifying this affair as an unfortunate but necessary arranged marriage in the name of progress and knowledge. The history of criminology is a story of the distrust of the poor and love for the liberal administrative state.

George Jackson, caged and killed by the state, understood this better than most. So next time the streets erupt in flames, heed his words and stoke the fire with criminology textbooks and criminal justice treatises. Man the barricades against the riot cops, but also the criminology professors who justify the police response and offer only piecemeal reforms on ways the cops restore its legitimacy. And only then, as George Jackson said, can we finally “direct our attention where it will do some good.”

Notes:

1 Jackson, George, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Lawrence Hill Books, 1994, 18.

2 Ibid.

3 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Pantheon, 1980, 47.