A World Without Police
Page 11
The police cannot be reformed—more than a century of experience proves this beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if we tried, and we do continue to try, police resist tooth and nail even the smallest reforms and the most minimal accountability. They do so, in part, because ultimately they want zero accountability. They also do so simply because they can. As we have seen, the history of American police is the history of their expanding power, and it is a voracious power that accepts no limits: a fascist power. While some non-reformist reforms can help to chip away at policing and undercut the ideological foundations of the world of police we inhabit, the question of power remains. Any path to abolition passes through a confrontation with the foundations of police power and must systematically break that power.
4
Breaking Police Power
It’s September 30, 2012, and Philadelphia’s annual Puerto Rican Day parade is just winding down. A crowd of revelers can be seen on video heckling a group of police officers when one, a white-shirted lieutenant, wheels around and takes several steps forward before throwing a hard right hook into Aida Guzman’s jaw. At six foot three and 215 pounds, the officer, Jonathan Josey, who is Black, is easily twice Guzman’s size, and when police drag her past the camera, she is visibly bleeding from her mouth.
This was the scene captured in viral footage that immediately garnered a million YouTube views. Within days, Commissioner Charles Ramsey was playing the oxymoronic role of good cop, suspending Josey with the intention to fire, and he was quickly charged with misdemeanor assault. Officers accused Guzman of throwing water on them, but even this bogus charge was eventually dropped, with the city paying her a $75,000 settlement for the attack. What did the Fraternal Order of Police do? They threw Josey a party, or more specifically, a thirty-dollar-a-head fundraiser advertised with fliers reading: “Come on out and support ONE OF OUR OWN.” The event drew protests from the left and the Puerto Rican community, and I was among those who showed up to express disgust at the FOP’s brazen display of solidarity with the cop who delivered the cowardly sucker punch. This was only the beginning, however.
Early the next year, Josey was acquitted in a bench trial by a judge who pointedly dismissed viral footage of the assault as a “social media contest.” Only later did it come out that the judge in question is married to a police officer, and that she had been present in the courtroom during the trial in support of Josey. Acquittal wasn’t enough for the FOP, however. They wanted to do more than simply show their support and fundraise for an abusive cop: they wanted him back on the force, and they filed an arbitration grievance to that effect. In the words of John McGrody, vice president of the local FOP, “sometimes police work isn’t pretty, but it’s actually correct.” In August 2013, Josey was reinstated with back pay to the tune of $100,000. If this were not proof positive of the brutal arrogance of the police, their unions, and the judicial apparatus that supports them, the story had yet one more twist. When Josey was later passed over for promotion by a committee clearly worried that the Guzman incident would undermine police–community relations, the FOP filed a lawsuit in federal court demanding Josey be fully promoted with, you guessed it, back pay. After all this, Lieutenant Jonathan Josey had the audacity to complain on Facebook about how, as a Black cop, he feels “ostracized” by both his community and colleagues, declaring in a faux plea for sympathy, “I’m a jurisdiction away from being George Floyd.”
It says a lot that anyone familiar with the FOP won’t find this story surprising in the least, and there are dozens more I could mention.1 Like the fact that when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem at a 2016 preseason game to draw attention to police brutality, the San Francisco Police Officers Association threatened to withhold security from 49ers games if Kaep wasn’t punished. “A work stoppage to punish a player for expressing his opinion may seem extreme,” James Surowiecki wrote at the time in The New Yorker, “but in the world of police unions it’s business as usual.”2 Or the fact that after the killing of Mike Brown, the local FOP surreptitiously sponsored a crowdfunding campaign for his murderer, Darren Wilson.3 John McNesby, the bloviating, red-faced president of the Philadelphia FOP, once called Black Lives Matter protesters “a pack of rabid animals,” while his Baltimore counterpart—impervious to irony—called them a “lynch mob.” Not to be outdone, Minneapolis police union head Bob Kroll, who denounced George Floyd as a “violent criminal,” has also called BLM a “terrorist movement.” More recently, the head of the Portland Police Association even proposed a ballot initiative to limit freedom of assembly in the city.4
Police unions routinely harass and threaten elected officials who cross them. The head of the St. Louis police union referred to special prosecutor Kim Gardner, who is Black and has pressed for police reform, as a “menace to society” who needed to be removed “by force or by choice.” Most notoriously, the New York City Police Department “declared war” on Mayor Bill de Blasio for expressing even the meekest concern about the police killing of Eric Garner. After two cops were shot dead in Brooklyn in 2014, Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) blamed BLM and the mayor directly, and officers turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital and the funeral—a performance they would repeat in 2017. And amid the George Floyd protests of 2020, the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA), doxed the mayor’s daughter by releasing private information on her arrest, in an effort to twist the mayor’s arm to approve mounted police units.
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Police power doesn’t just exist on the street or in the local precinct, it doesn’t rest in the chief or commissioner, and it doesn’t originate in the mayor or other civilian authorities who are its formal overseers. The power of the police is much bigger, much more ambitious, and far more dangerous than many realize—although this is getting harder to deny by the day. The central weapon for guarding and expanding the power of the police is not the department itself, but a parallel structure: the benevolent association, the fraternal order, all those organizations that masquerade misleadingly under the heading of “police unions.” Behind closed doors, it is these organizations that negotiate police contracts—placing impunity from accountability front and center—and lobby for special legal protections. In public, police associations smear the victims of police abuse, engage in racist attacks on social justice movements, and seek to leverage public fear toward openly authoritarian ends. They are a bully pulpit that has increasingly made leaders like New York’s Lynch and Minneapolis’s Kroll fixtures on the right-wing media circuit and at conservative political rallies for former president Trump.
To abolish the police, we must first break police power, and breaking police power begins with confronting and destroying these so-called police “unions.” To be clear, police associations aren’t like other unions; in reality, they aren’t unions at all. Police themselves are little more than glorified slave catchers and strikebreakers with a long history of providing their muscle as hired guns for big business and white supremacy—which are often the same thing. American police emerged to contain slave resistance prior to the mass exodus from plantations during the Civil War that W.E.B. Du Bois called a “general strike”—and after the war had ended, hand in hand with the Klan, the poor-whites-turned-police helped crush the emancipatory project of Reconstruction.
As labor battles heated up in the early twentieth century, nascent police forces like the Pennsylvania State Police—modeled on the colonial troops that occupied the Philippines—earned the nickname “Pennsylvania Cossacks” for brutally crushing coal strikes in the western part of the state.5 In the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor rebellion since the Civil War, thousands of armed miners faced off against Pinkerton-style private detectives, local deputies, and county and state police. An estimated 1 million rounds were fired, and when the smoke cleared, more than a hundred lay dead. As they had a generation prior, and as they continue to do today, police collaborated openly with right-wing vigil
antes like the American Legion, which viciously attacked the IWW throughout the 1920s, and later with the Black Legion, an anti-leftist heir to the Klan.6
Given this history, it’s strange that police would have—or even want—unions at all, but the twentieth century has seen police shift opportunistically, in the words of anarchist author and preeminent historian of the police Kristian Williams, “from strikebreakers to strikers (and back again),” their power increasing at every turn. In fact, at the same time that police were crushing workers’ movements, their own early labor aspirations were being defeated. Grasping cynically at the coattails of a labor movement they were actively undermining, what were at the time poorly paid police formed their first unions in the early part of the century under the aegis of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But a disastrous police strike in Boston in 1919 saw these early unions discredited and crushed after rioting and looting left eight dead. Police lost this early battle, but they won the longer war, trading away union status for special privileges, thereby setting the template for what was to come. Police unions were outlawed nationwide, but the demands of the striking cops were met regardless—in some cities, police salaries were doubled.7 It’s a strange strike indeed that wins in the process of losing.
Since Boston, most police organizations have not been unions strictly speaking. Legally, they could only be associations like the PBA (an independent association of beat cops) or fraternal orders like the FOP (a national organization open to any officer—including the top brass). As we saw in the previous chapter, the 1920s and ’30s saw a push toward police professionalization, and police associations came to reflect a rank-and-file resentment toward management—police chiefs and commissioners, often tasked with balancing the demands of officers with those of city leadership. This tension has never been a true contradiction, however. As a result of their nonunion status, not to mention their function as a means of social control, police orders and associations developed in isolation from the broader labor movement, and instead collaborated with commanders and city leaders eager to grant them special privileges. Though once drawn from the working class and poorly paid, police were soon treated differently and paid far better than other workers.
Moreover, police organizations gained their privileged position as separate from and above workers precisely by leveraging two related threats: from the labor movement itself, and from the surging Black freedom struggle. When the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters started to recruit cops to their organizations in the 1950s, PBA and FOP leadership were as eager to protect their own positions as police departments were desperate to prevent broader labor solidarity. Both management and rank-and-file cops won when police associations traded the right to strike for binding arbitration—stability for city leaders, negotiating power for police associations. The labor insurgency of the beat cops had been a flash in the pan: now they were a part of the system. From this point on, all labor-like activity by police would in reality be a ploy to leverage special privileges, and an incredibly successful ploy at that.
The real turning point in police power, however, would come a decade later, in reaction to the burgeoning radical and anti-racist movements of the 1960s. Police brutality had provided the spark for rebellions in Harlem, Watts, Newark, and elsewhere, provoking public outrage and scrutiny. Police, in turn, felt that their hands were unduly tied by Warren-era Supreme Court decisions like Mapp and Miranda, upholding Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections against illegal searches and coerced confessions. When John Lindsay, the incoming mayor of New York, restructured the city’s police review board in 1966 to ensure a civilian majority, the PBA debuted what would become central tactics in the arsenal of police unions. In a two-pronged campaign, the PBA stoked fear with an openly racist law-and-order media blitz, and even cynically denounced dissenting Black officers for “put[ting] their color before their duties as policemen.”8 This public campaign provided the PBA with the necessary ammunition to force a ballot initiative to overturn the mayor’s civilian review board. The victory sent shock waves nationwide, discouraging civilian oversight of the police elsewhere.
Police continued to leverage the twin fulcrums of their expanding power: capitalist fear of organized labor and white fear of Black people. The two coincided the following year when Detroit police engaged in what would become a standard police tactic: the sick-out or “blue flu.” While the head of the Detroit Police Officers Association denied that the action constituted a strike—these were prohibited—his denial was also couched in the threat that police were “beginning to think and act like a trade union.” The message was clear: police weren’t unionized workers, but they wouldn’t rule out using union tactics or seeking support from allies in the AFL-CIO if their demands were not met. The deadlock was broken in the most traditional of ways, however: to suppress the 1967 Detroit rebellion. As Williams notes, “With the Black community in open revolt, the cops, the city government, and local elites very quickly rediscovered their previous affinity.” And once again, “the cops got their raises.”9
The tragic origin story of policing—white solidarity against Black insurgency—was thus repeated. Just as countless poor whites had sided with their class enemies during and after the Civil War, so too did police unions show that their class solidarity was exactly skin deep. Rather than joining labor, they opted for a fraternity stretching “from the highest commander to the rookie on the beat,” which helped commanders maintain loyalty from the rank and file, and ensured brutal and corrupt cops the silence of their brothers-in-arms. Those in power showed they were willing to buy police off with the wages of whiteness—which by now included very real and rapidly increasing salaries—even if nonwhite officers also benefited. From this point on, policing would be defined by a corporatist partnership between commanders and the rank and file, with police unions playing the prized role of mediators. This cross-class solidarity of the police brotherhood set the stage for an ambitious power grab that would mark a return to their role in the machine politics of a century prior.
Already in the late 1960s, political elites from New York to Los Angeles began to speculate that the police had become more powerful than civilian authorities, and during the 1970s police became local kingmakers in many cities—with unions as their muscle. In Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo made the most of this violent symbiosis. The openly white supremacist police commissioner, best known for stripping members of the local Black Panther Party naked in a humiliating press display, rode police power to the mayor’s office in 1972. And from City Hall, Rizzo only expanded the power of the police even further: in the words of a former city manager, “the police were bulletproof, especially under Rizzo.” Soon they were fielding their own candidates and sponsoring local, state, and federal legislation. The direction of this activism was uniformly conservative, as exemplified by the Los Angeles Fire and Police Protective League (the Fi-Po), which “lobbied for counter-subversive laws, promoted right-wing rallies, sponsored conservative speakers,” and in a display of anti-labor solidarity even “sold businesses a blacklist naming union organizers and radicals.”10
The conservative, corporatist, white supremacist agenda of police unions has changed little in the past half century. History even repeated itself in New York in 1992, when police fought back against yet another effort at civilian oversight, this time under David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. Thousands of off-duty cops rioted while on-duty cops passively looked on: “Several officers, including one captain and two sergeants, failed to hold police lines, and a uniformed officer—Michael P. Abitabile—waved protesters through the police barricades while shouting racial slurs.” In retrospect, the 1992 police riot looked a lot like a “municipal-level coup”: catapulting Rudy Giuliani to the mayorship on a tough-on-crime platform, and with him Commissioner Bill Bratton and broken windows policing, continuing the cycle of expanding police power.11
American police were created to
safeguard class domination and white supremacy, and they have built their own power by playing up popular fear of unions and people of color—and repressing the movements of both. But these twin objectives produced a tension—if not a contradiction—between racial solidarity and police solidarity, one that cuts across an increasingly multiracial police force, and even into the associations representing them. As Williams documents:
Historically, most police associations barred Black members, and police in Detroit and St. Louis threatened strikes to keep Black people off the force. The police departments accommodated the White officers in various ways, sometimes by refusing to hire Black people, in other cases by keeping Black officers out of uniform, restricting them to Black neighborhoods, or barring them from arresting White people. As recently as 1995, a group of Black LAPD officers sued the Police Protective League for its role in preserving discrimination on the force, describing the union as a “bastion of white supremacy.”12
To this day, dozens of cities, like St. Louis, maintain a separate-but-equal division between Black and white police associations.13
The racist and classist history of police unions has produced what Williams calls the “collusive bargaining” of today, in which the police, their commanders, and city officials perform antagonism toward one another, even though they ultimately, with some minor exceptions, want the same things. In this sense, the relationship between beat cops and the top brass is not a class relationship, but a symbiotic one: racial capitalism needs the police, and the privileges and power that the police enjoy depend on racial capitalism. Rather than seeking to change the underlying inequalities that govern society, the police are the vicious glue holding those inequalities together. Such corporatist collaboration is always anti-worker at best and a hallmark of fascism at worst, and the police are no exception. Thus, while many commanders feign antagonism toward police unions, we shouldn’t take such displays seriously. So long as police associations embrace with open arms those most reactionary elements that even the commanders don’t want, this is little more than a game of good cop versus bad cop.