Copspeak is all around us. Nearly everything we think we know about police comes to us through a vocabulary patrolled by police. It is safe to say that, to one degree or another, we all have a cop in our head. A cop who sees the world through the lens of security. Who is obsessed with order. Who sees threats, crime, and disorder everywhere they look. The purpose of Police: A Field Guide has been to challenge the world of copspeak. Our contention is that a rigorous critique of police and police violence must take the language of police seriously; must take into account the ways the vocabulary of police reform often sets the very terms of debate, blunts any criticism, and makes any alternative to business as usual all but impossible. This book challenges the police definition of reality by refusing its official language and rejecting the seemingly commonsense vocabulary of police.
We are not the first to offer an alternative to the lexicon of copspeak. “Fuck the police” emerged as the unofficial motto of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King. It was written on signs and shouted at police and graffitied everywhere on walls throughout South Central LA. Activists and protesters chanted these words in Seattle in 1999, in Ferguson and Baltimore in 2014 and 2015, and in Baton Rouge and Minnesota in 2016. Following the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, street signs and businesses were frequently tagged with FTP.
“Fuck the police” is a direct challenge to the police demand that the ideal police subject be polite and polished. It offers rage against political histories of racist state violence and the police occupation of the ghetto. Marvin X Jackmon’s poem “Burn Baby, Burn” was one powerful early example, written after the 1965 Watts riots:
Black people.
Tired.
sick an’ tired.
tired of being
sick an’ tired.
Burn, baby burn …
“Fuck the police” expresses the anger and fatigue of the oppressed, and refuses the passive, depoliticizing language of police reform. “Fuck the police” is all about refusal. It refuses to be polite, refuses to defer to police, and refuses to believe it will all somehow get better through reform.
We end with “fuck the police” because, as the terms in this book make clear, police power has always given itself the task of fabricating order by civilizing the “uncivilized.” “Fuck the police” strikes at the heart of this white bourgeois order by affirming a subaltern politics of the impolite, disobedient, and disrespectful. To the extent that police have come to be synonymous with civilization and order, “fuck the police” isn’t merely a negation of the police, but a demand for justice that calls into question the legitimacy of the very social order that police are tasked with producing and reproducing. It is the anthem of large-scale riots and mass mobilizations, and the transcript to the most ordinary interactions with a cop on the street. But it is more than just a shout, song, or tag. It is an expression that condenses into three words the cruel political economies of racial capitalism, and the radical despair, rage and insurgency of the oppressed.
To shout “fuck the police” is to invoke a political vision of a world without cops, a demand for a better future, even if we aren’t exactly sure how that future should look. But at least we know what it must not include: certainly not police as we know it, and not prisons full of people arrested by police, and not a world of order and security for only a privileged few. The language of copseak gives us police reform, which just gives us more police. “Fuck the police,” on the other hand, demands the abolition of police and a more just order than what’s offered by racial capitalism. This is a demand that requires being attentive to the enormous power of the modern state, and the ways it works to maintain and legitimize an unequal social order. Abolition rejects the fetish of security that animates all life and death under capitalism.
The goal of “fuck the police” is to reduce and eventually replace the police and prison industrial complex, that vast overlapping set of institutions that shape politics and society through the constant expansion of jails, prisons, parole and police, and in its place to offer alternative ways of dealing with inequality, violence, and racism. Yet abolition cannot offer a definitive end, because police and prisons lie at the heart of the capitalist state, which is always evolving, adapting and reconstituting itself in response to resistance and insurgency. Abolition must therefore continuously make and remake itself in response. And along the way, confront the individuals, institutions, systems and interests engaged with the capitalist state, because a different kind of order must not only include an end to the killing of people of color and the poor, and an end to their daily harassment and routine violence at the hands of the police. It must be an order in which the public good is not found in private property; in which public funds go toward education and healthcare for all, instead of more police and bigger cages. Abolition is achievable in the form of an organized political struggle that rejects police reform and instead challenges business as usual in the current political economy.
This view is dismissed by liberals and conservatives alike as too utopian, unrealistic, or naïve, just as “fuck the police” is dismissed as an expression of juvenile angst. Critics of abolition point to the absence of alternatives to police. Who will you call when you fear for your life? Only the police stand between order and disorder; only police patrol the thin blue line. Liberals and conservatives alike invoke these anxieties to argue for the persistence of police power. Cops for them are just like capitalism: there is no alternative.
This lack of imagination is what gives police reform its authority. Of course, police abolitionists and police reformists can agree on some points: limiting the police use of force, ending racial profiling, or halting stop and frisk. But where they diverge is on whether the institution of police is inherently democratic and socially beneficial, and whether it can be fixed. Reformists fail to recognize what empirical research so clearly demonstrates: police, as well as prisons, do very little to actually reduce crime and make ordinary people any safer. The police are not an institution essential for democracy; they are an institution for maintaining an order of racial capitalism and have never strayed from this mandate since the days of the slave patrols and colonial militias. Where police reform seeks only to transform the way policing happens, police abolition seeks to transform what police are.
Police abolition is not an abstract concept. Most people go through their everyday life without much contact with police, although this isn’t true for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized, for whom police are “enemies of the population,” as James Baldwin put it. For them abolition is a distant dream. Reformists, who refuse to even consider that a world without police and private property might actually be a safer and more democratic world than the one we know today, never get tired of telling poor communities, routinely terrorized by police, to simply be patient, follow police orders, and work harder to escape the ghetto. The “pious calls to ‘respect the law,’” wrote James Baldwin, “always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene.”1 Whether in Detroit in 1967 or Ferguson in 2014, insurgent movements of poor Black and Brown people know that police reform always leads to more criminalization, harassment, arrest and police killing in their communities, “no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up.”2 They know that the everyday terror of police violence is no aberration. So, “fuck the police.” The only way to improve the police is to abolish it.
Notes: