The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  Thus while the police as individuals are part of the 99 percent, as an institutional structure they are the most basic support for that entire structure of institutional authority that makes the wealth and power of the 1 percent possible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with dealing with police in a friendly and respectful way as individuals—it is clearly the right thing to do, not just because it’s good to be friendly and respectful to everyone, but even from a strategic perspective: when regimes do crumble and fall, when revolutionaries actually win the day, it’s always because the soldiers or police sent to shoot them refuse to do so. But we should also remember: that’s the endgame. In the meantime, we need to remember that we’re never likely to get anywhere near that endgame if we engage with the police as an institutional structure, and maintain ourselves within the overall structure of power they represent.

  Note that I say “structure of power,” not “structure of law.” On most such issues, legality is largely irrelevant. After all, almost every aspect of our lives is in theory governed by laws and regulations many of which we’re barely even aware of; almost everyone in America violates ten or twenty such a day; if a policeman really wanted to just rough up some random citizen, kick them in the testicles, break a tooth or thumb perhaps, they could in almost any case find a justifiable excuse to do so. (In fact, it’s a notorious activist paradox that police have much more discretion to visit random violence if they are not trying to ultimately convict the victim of any crime, since if the victim is in fact guilty of something, and will face trial, any violation of codes of conduct by the arresting officer might prejudice a conviction; if the police aren’t aiming for a conviction anyway, from a legal standpoint there’s really no reason not to physically abuse them. The very worst that could happen, in the case of a national scandal, would be the loss of a few weeks’ pay.) This is why if police wish to enforce unstated racial codes—to harass African Americans who go into the “wrong” neighborhood—they can usually do so legally, simply by enforcing rules that are not enforced on white people. Similarly with activists.

  That law has very little to do with the matter becomes apparent the moment members of a group do decide to engage with the police as an institutional structure, by appointing a police liaison and beginning to negotiate. After all, if it were simply a matter of each side acting within the law, what would there be to negotiate about? It would just be a matter of exchanging information about what the legal rules are, what the occupiers, or marchers, intend to do, and then allow the police to protect those members of the public who intend to protest. This is never what happens. In fact, the first thing police commanders will do is create their own, impromptu rules, based on translating their sheer power (they are allowed to hit you, you are not allowed to hit them; they can arrest you, you cannot arrest them) into a larger structure of authority.

  Let me give an unusually clear example. In New York, it is the custom of police to use metal barriers to create narrow pens, and then try to contain all picketers and protesters inside them. It’s very demoralizing for protesters. It’s also fairly obviously unconstitutional. What’s more, police commanders seem to be aware that it is: at least no one to my knowledge has ever been arrested for refusal to enter a pen (though protesters who have refused to enter pens have occasionally been arrested on other, made-up charges). The very first thing the police do if there are protest marshals is to tell the marshals that they are not themselves obliged to enter the pens, but that the police consider it the responsibility of the marshals to make sure everyone else stays inside. In other words, if there is a structure of authority, police will immediately grant those who are in it special privileges (which they have just invented) and try to make them an extension of their authority, effectively an unofficial extension of their own chain of command. I have experienced this myself when I’ve volunteered to be a marshal; refusal to beg or bully other protesters into getting inside pens will immediately be greeted by accusations that “you’re not doing your job!”—as if by agreeing to be a marshal, one has effectively volunteered to work for the police.

  If there is no structure of authority within the group, the police commander in charge will, just as inevitably, try to see if one can be created. Liaisons will be granted special privileges, and commanders will try to make informal, extralegal arrangements with them that they will be expected—made to feel honor-bound, if possible—to enforce, with the knowledge that others in de facto authority will then have to support them and a formal top-down structure will gradually come into place. Here’s another personal experience, this time from the other side: during the early days of Occupy Austin, one activist (I remember him as a dreadlocked libertarian hippie much given to meditation, who seemed to be close to most of the core members of the facilitation team) volunteered at an early General Assembly to act as liaison with police, or, as he said he preferred to call them, “peace officers.” The proposal was not approved but he decided to take on the role anyway. One of the very first issues when occupiers established themselves in front of City Hall was about tents: could we establish a camp? The legalities were ambiguous. Some occupiers immediately tried, the police appeared menacingly; most of us surrounded the tent prepared for nonviolent civil disobedience. Our self-appointed liaison sprang into action, sought out the commander, and reappeared a short while later saying he’d negotiated a compromise: we could keep the one tent for symbolic purposes, so long as we did not raise any more.

  Many—I’d dare say most—of the occupiers assumed that this was just a way of saving face, since the police clearly didn’t want to have to attack peaceful campers on their first day, and were feeling out our willingness to resist. So the next day, a small group of more experienced activists decided the obvious thing was to slowly expand our liberated territory in the most nonconfrontational way possible, and discreetly raised another, small tent by its side. One grows by accretion, constantly pushing at the borders. This was the approach taken in Zuccotti Park as well, where it proved successful. Here, however, the activists raising the tent found themselves besieged by friends of the self-appointed liaison, who declared that this was a betrayal of the trust that had been placed in him by the police commander the day before. The vibes watcher at the General Assembly employed the People’s Microphone to collectively demand we take the tent down, one woman tried to call in the police (who themselves appeared uninterested in the tent) to arrest us, another man appeared declaring “I am a combat veteran and I am going to tear this tent down!” and only stopped trying to shove his way past the activists who had raised the tent (who by now were trying to lock arms in passive resistance) when it became clear he was endangering a small child who was inside. While the camp’s security team eventually de-escalated the overt confrontation, the tent did ultimately come down, and no further attempts to raise others were made; subsequent attempts to at least establish the principle that nonviolent fellow occupiers should not be threatened with violence or arrest were ignored by the facilitation team (or even met with objections that those who acted in such a way as to make the police more likely to attack, thus endangering children, were themselves being violent!). Once the police and City Council, in turn, observed that unity in the camp was broken, and those more committed to civil disobedience had been marginalized, they realized they once again had the initiative and began imposing all sorts of new restrictions: on tables, on the serving of food, on staying overnight, until within a few weeks the occupation in front of City Hall had been cleared entirely.

  The reason this story is worth recounting at length is because it illustrates so clearly that we are not talking about a legal order, but a balance of political forces, where each side was essentially improvising, trying to get a sense of the state of the game and what they could get away with at any given moment. Appealing to the letter of the law—which was rarely clear-cut—was just one weapon among many that each side could deploy, alongside appealing to the public (whether via the media, or directly), to the
threat of force (truncheons, handcuffs, chemical weapons in the case of the police, civil disobedience such as blockades in the case of the occupiers), to political allies of one sort or another, or even to conscience.

  The police strategy was, from the beginning, clearly political, and presumably based on instructions from above: they aimed to minimize any disruption caused by the camp and clear it out as soon as possible. (It later came out that they had also sent undercovers to join the camp, to try to convince occupiers to engage in more militant tactics—blockades using lockboxes—knowing that Texas had recently passed laws making it easy to obtain felony convictions against anyone adopting them.) Making one strategic concession (the one tent) and using that as a wedge was a perfect strategy, as it made it possible for the authorities to create a cadre within the occupation that was essentially willing to act as an extension of the police’s power, to translate the mere threat of force (“the police will attack us!”) into moral authority (“we promised!”), and thus ultimately either control, or easily break up, the occupation. It is absolutely essential never to allow this translation of threats of violence into morality. The only way to oppose the threat of physical force is by moral force, and moral force has to be based, first of all, in solidarity. The moment some people participating in an action feel they have more of a moral commitment to those who are threatening to attack them than they do to another activist, the game is basically over.

  It is best, in fact, to think of all occupations and street actions as a kind of war. I know this sounds extreme, but years of reflection and experience have driven me to the conclusion that there’s really no more appropriate way to describe what happens. I should emphasize: this is not in any way a call for violence. It is always best not to hurt other human beings if one can possibly avoid it, and in the contemporary United States, one is rarely in a situation where violence is the only option.b However, there are two sides to any conflict, and in any street action, one side does show up prepared for a war: armed, backed up by SWAT teams, helicopters, and armored vehicles, making it known from the beginning that they are prepared to use violence in the pursuit of political ends. Neither is it, generally speaking, up to someone conducting an unauthorized march whether that force will actually be deployed. Certainly, if the protesters begin trashing vehicles or setting fires, one can pretty much guarantee the police will begin throwing people against walls and handcuffing them. But it will often happen anyway. In fact, it may well happen less in, say, a march where police think there is the possibility of real violence breaking out on the part of the marchers, but in which it has not yet happened, than in one where they think the marchers are unlikely to offer any sort of resistance at all. It all depends on a whole series of calculations about the likely reaction of protesters, communities, media, and important institutions. The rules of engagement between occupiers and police are continually being negotiated and renegotiated.

  A few examples from Zuccotti Park might prove illustrative:

  • According to one journalist who interviewed numerous police and city officials in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, one of the main concerns of those giving the street officers their orders was the presence of Guy Fawkes–masked members of the hackers collective Anonymous in Zuccotti Park. Most, he said, were genuinely worried that if they attacked the camp and expelled the protesters, Anonymous would hack their bank and credit card accounts, and the fear of this played a major role in their decision to hold off from doing so.

  • New York mayor Bloomberg’s first attempt to expel the occupation from the newly renamed Liberty Park on October 14, 2011, proved an embarrassing failure. After he announced his plan to clear the space for a “cleaning,” activists mobilized on all possible fronts simultaneously: thousands arrived prepared to defend the camp through nonviolent civil disobedience; at the same time, legal teams prepared injunctions, potentially sympathetic members of the media were called in, and unions and other allies mobilized political allies in the city legislature. Finally, the mayor backed off. It was not any one approach, but the combined weight of so many different ones, that ultimately forced him to do so.

  • The 1 A.M. raid on November 12, 2012, that did evict the occupation appears to have been based on a nationwide political decision, and it was planned as a sudden surprise attack, using overwhelming force, with all media banned from the scene. It also simply ignored legal authority. By 2 A.M., the occupiers’ legal team had secured a judicial order to halt the eviction until the legalities were clarified; Bloomberg ignored the court order until he could find a judge that would rule in his favor. It was during the period that the raid was, technically, illegal, for instance, that the Liberty Park library was seized and systematically destroyed.

  What these examples make clear is that we are dealing with a balance of political forces that has almost nothing to do with law. If the police are able, as they were in Austin, they negotiate arrangements, backed by the threat of force, that stand independent of any laws and regulations. If they are not able to do this, as they were not in New York, their first move is to make sure everyone knows they are willing and able to make illegal arrests. The Anonymous example above also demonstrates that the lines of force might exist largely in the imagination—hackers can’t really do most of the things that they do in the movies—but that the game of politics is largely a psychological war of bluffs and feints, even at the same time as it is a moral conflict. And as the final example illustrates, local victories might prove ephemeral if one is not able to mobilize the same sort of forces on a national or even international level.

  Debates within the movement are almost never really about whether to be nonviolent, but rather over what form of nonviolence to employ. (Within the faith community, these debates are often referred to as the difference between the Gandhi/Martin Luther King tradition of nonviolence, which eschews damage to property, and the Daniel Berrigan or Plowshares Eight tradition, which holds that certain types of damage to state or corporate property can be a legitimate way of preventing greater harm.) What I would like to propose are a few principles we need to think more about when considering tactics.

  First, here are some principles to consider on a broader level: just as we need to think about what sort of social arrangements would allow us to create a truly democratic society, we need to think about what sort of tactics would best allow us to maintain the democratic nature of the movement. The question is rarely framed this way, but it should be. One example of a social movement that considered it quite explicitly was the 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the conclusion was that either a strategy of armed uprising, or of pure Gandhian nonviolence, would necessarily have to rely on charismatic leaders and military-style discipline that would ultimately undermine any genuine participatory democracy. Conversely, it makes sense that right-wing political movements, such as the Tea Party, which had no problems at all with top-down forms of authority, combined scrupulous attention to legality with threats of outright armed insurrection.

  Second is a practical point. That middle zone, between actual uprising and ritualized Gandhian nonviolence, is also a zone of maximum creativity and improvisation and that is entirely to our advantage. On the streets, creativity is our greatest tactical advantage. This is why the clowns and spiral dance rituals and women in tutus armed with feather dusters were so effective during the Global Justice Movement. The police (speaking again of the police as an institution, not as individual officers) are not very bright. This is especially true when masses of them are arranged in riot gear. In such a circumstance, the most effective method of dealing with police is always to do something they have not been trained to respond to. This is the cost of that sort of military discipline that allows otherwise decent human beings to engage in a baton charge against nonviolent protesters: in order to be able to do what one is told, one has to agree to do only what one is told. The other cost is that those in charge of training riot police seem to feel that in order to be psychologically
able to engage in violence against activists, police have to be trained how to respond, not to the tactics that they are actually likely to face, but to forms of extreme violence that activists never really engage in at all. After Seattle, for instance, there were squads of police trainers circulating through America instructing police in cities preparing for trade summits in how to deal with activists hurling Molotov cocktails, human excrement, and lightbulbs full of acid or ammonia, firing ball bearings from slingshots, or armed with squirt guns full of bleach and urine. In fact no activist at Seattle or any subsequent summit had ever done any of these things. But it appears that commanders felt it was more important to convince the police that activists were the moral equivalent of Bond villains than to prepare them for the tactics they would actually have to face. As a result, many police found the actual experience profoundly confusing, and were forced to constantly radio back for orders. On more than one occasion in those years, I witnessed groups of surrounded activists escape arrest when police lines fell into momentary confusion when confronted with clowns on high bicycles or theatrical troupes. On other occasions I’ve seen lines of riot police who had been methodically beating back a line of activists stop dead in their tracks, like so many robots, when the activists did nothing more than all simultaneously sit down.