by Geo Maher
Often staffed by former militants, CRJ centers refused to work with the police—who at the time were only 8 percent Catholic. Instead, they brought all parties involved in a particular conflict together for a mediated resolution. Over the course of more than two decades, CRJ centers have responded to 25,000 cases involving nearly 100,000 people, closing over 90 percent of those cases.7 Under pressure from London, however, in 2007 Sinn Féin reversed course, embracing collaboration with the police and accepting positions on policing boards, prompting some high-ranking members to resign in disgust. No longer independent of the police, CRJ centers have become a palliative rather than a true alternative, and as in the United States, talk of reform today centers not on transforming the function of the police but improving their image and diversifying recruitment of underrepresented minorities, Catholics in this case.
A similar experiment emerged in South Africa, where apartheid police represented an enemy regime and provided little in the way of security in poor townships. In the 1960s and ’70s, community courts known as makgotla, though periodically outlawed, were called upon to resolve local conflicts. These courts tended to be controlled by older and more conservative community members, however, and verdicts were often punitive. But in the 1980s, younger anti-apartheid activists reinvigorated the makgotla, creating new people’s courts and street committees that “took over the functions of local government, especially in ungovernable areas.” In areas governed by the committees, “the distinction between the people and their organizations disappeared. All the people young and old participated in committees from street level upwards.”8 By the end of apartheid, 400 street committees were operating as an effective alternative to the police, mediating and resolving conflict within and between communities.
Punitive measures were not fully abolished, but the overarching goal of the committees and courts was to reintegrate perpetrators into a collective revolutionary struggle, and so rather than simply uphold tradition, “people’s courts took action against elders, and against men on behalf of women.”9 As with Northern Ireland, however, the committees faced the same fate as many other institutions of popular power when the state gets involved. While the African National Congress saw the committees as useful weapons against apartheid, they often viewed grassroots protest as either threatening to “rock the boat” of a negotiated settlement or as a useful resource that could be “turned on and off like a tap.”10 And once the ANC came to power, their directly democratic structure became a liability: many popular organizations were dismantled in 1994, and most remaining committees have since been incorporated into a system that has scarcely changed. The lesson is clear: wherever popular struggles recede to accommodate the capitalist state, the police return with a vengeance.
More recently, amid the carnage of the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011, the heavily Kurdish autonomous region of Rojava has seen similar experiments in building communities from the bottom up without the police. From a Turkish prison, Abdullah Öcalan, founding head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), developed an ideology, now known as democratic confederalism, rooted in direct democracy, community autonomy, and feminist principles. In terms of local security, this has meant maintaining a strict division between the Asayish (Internal Security Forces) and community-based Civil Defense Forces (HPC). According to Kurdish scholar Hawzhin Azeez:
It is always the HPC that protects a neighborhood, never the Asayish … Through this alternative method, the possibility of instituting hierarchies of power and authority are considerably reduced. The people are protecting themselves. Security forces protect those who they live with and interact with daily in the neighborhood. This proximity ensures that violations occur only rarely. When they do occur, the neighborhood communes immediately activate community mechanisms of justice, honor and restoration.
The HPC are required to be at least 40 percent women, although the number tends to be higher in practice, including even many older women. With “the matriarchs of a neighborhood stand[ing] confidently at street corners wielding AK-47 rifles for the people’s protection,” there is no need for police. For abolitionists in the United States, Azeez argues, Rojava provides a hopeful example of what is possible: “Although our chains may appear different, Kurds and Black Americans ultimately face the same oppressive system that continues to kill us and impose countless forms of violence upon us. With Rojava, we are trying to show that an alternative world is possible.”11
These experiences may seem a world away from our concerns. After all, most of this book—like many US-based abolitionist movements—has focused on the historical contours of policing and anti-Black racism in the United States. And yet, these experiments share more than we might think with struggles for community control closer to home. Of course, not all police function exactly the same, but capitalism is nothing if not a global system, and private property its precondition. Where labor is extracted as profit and accumulates as capital, you will find police to protect that accumulated wealth and attend to the divisions of labor that create it. And in a global capitalist system born of colonialism and chattel slavery, the police uphold and reproduce the rule of whiteness as well. While police in the global South tend to be poorer and rulers tend to govern more through abandonment and neglect, the US experience shows that this is the ultimate tendency of all policing. In rich countries, the police simply clamor for more resources for themselves, while politicians earmark millions for flashy reform efforts. And for the most part, even poor police are still police—if anything, low salaries stoke corruption and abuse.
In fact, the abusive blackmail of police protection originates in a deeper lie that provided the backbone for the colonial system: that colonized people were incapable of governing themselves, and that they consequently needed colonial rule. If policing enforces territorial segregation along racial lines to ensure the easy extraction of labor and resources, it isn’t much of a stretch to view colonialism as a form of policing. And policing—from upholding segregation to facilitating gentrification—is undeniably colonial to its very core. Police forces in the US and the UK drew recruits and inspiration from colonial occupations in Ireland, Haiti, Texas, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. Moreover, the colonial constabularies they left in place were often taken over directly in the service of settler colonial domination. The case of Israel is particularly instructive here: Israeli police were modeled on Britain’s colonial Palestine Police Force, which itself drew heavily from the Royal Irish Constabulary, veterans of which would be deeply embedded in counterinsurgency worldwide.12
Little surprise, then, that the US invasion of Vietnam was described by its perpetrators as a “police action,” or that Black and Chicano militants of the 1960s began to understand their communities—oppressed, exploited, excluded from democratic rights, and segregated—as an internal colony and therefore as part of a broader international, anti-colonial revolutionary movement. Or that US interventions in Latin America today fly under the cover of regional policing strategies—like Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative—while pouring millions into strengthening domestic police forces that torture and kill with impunity. And little surprise that those on the receiving end of carpet-bombing or drug eradication campaigns rarely buy the narrative that this is all being done for their own good. For many in the global South, there is no illusion that either the global imperial police or their brutal local surrogates are truly there for the benefit of the community. From the 2005 riots against policing in the heavily Arab and North African banlieues outside Paris, to the policing of the southern US border, global North and South are far from separate spheres; they are interlocking realities marked by colonialism, segregation, racial discrimination, migration, and deportation.
Policing is global—and so is resistance.
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Latin America has a long history of filling the space left by neoliberal abandonment with organized communities, and grassroots social movements were the overlooked motor force behind the region’s
wave of progressive governments known as the Pink Tide. The economic crisis of the 1980s unleashed neoliberal reforms and austerity, which in turn provoked more crisis. By both accident and design, force and fraud, the neoliberal ideal of a “minimal state” became a reality across the continent. But while public services and education were decimated, the same couldn’t be said for cops, who became even more indispensable for wealthy Latin American elites. Policing strategies instead shifted toward the cheaper but even more heavy-handed approach known as mano dura, in which entire populations were targeted for repression and poor communities sealed off by police checkpoints and left to fend for themselves.
As a result, the 1990s were marked by a wave of self-organized experiments across the region: building roads and housing, digging wells and managing water access, and developing community sporting and cultural events. In every poor neighborhood racked by neoliberal austerity, moreover, safety was a central concern. This was as true in Mexico as it had been in Venezuela, although as elsewhere, the roots of community self-defense ran far deeper, going back to the guerrilla struggles of the 1960s and beyond. But during the “lost decade” of the 1980s, as the Mexican state withdrew from even its most basic functions—security included—grassroots movements stepped in to fill the vacuum. When a massive earthquake decimated the capital in 1985, it shook the very foundations of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) as well, revealing the craven neglect of a corrupt ruling class. As the wreckage of the earthquake piled on top of the wreckage of neoliberalism, a powerful new wave of community movements emerged with equally seismic effects, to fashion a future from the ruins.
On New Year’s Day 1994, armed Zapatista rebels stormed into San Cristóbal de las Casas in southern Chiapas state, seizing the police station and emptying the local jail before retreating into the jungle. There, they have since established a massive self-governed territory without any police at all. In Zapatista territory, security patrols are popularly elected and recallable—they are unpaid and wear no uniforms to distinguish them from those they serve. Zapatista principles of justice are famously reparative and restorative, revealing in concrete practice the fundamental absurdity of our own punitive system. If a murderer is locked up for life, then it is not one but two families that have lost a way to support themselves, since “the guilty just rest all day in jail and gain weight, but their families are the ones who have to work the cornfield and figure out how to survive.”13 Perpetrators, who after all are still members of the community, must instead do double labor under Zapatista law—supporting their own family as well as the family they have harmed.
However, the Zapatistas represent only one part of a broader patchwork of Mexican experiments in armed self-defense and community security. For instance, rescue and cleanup efforts after the 1985 earthquake spawned a distinct wave of urban social movements. In the shadow of the Xaltepec volcano in the eastern part of Mexico City, 500 families took over an empty terrain known popularly—and prophetically—as La Polvorilla (Spitfire), where they have since built a collectively managed community from the ground up. The families were members of the Francisco Villa Popular Front, a militant organization representing those left homeless and displaced with all the audacity of its namesake: revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. Today, La Polvorilla represents “an alternative order” to the disorder reigning across much of the Mexico City megalopolis, an “oasis amid a desert of poverty and gray houses.”14 Entry is limited, with checkpoints staffed by local women. Gardens and homes are well kept, cars drive slowly as children play in the streets, and the walls bear announcements for local events and workshops.
For César Enrique Pineda, a sociologist at the Universidád Nacional Autónoma de México, this is a community, in contrast to what so often goes by the name:
While you might not find opulence in this self-organized neighborhood, perhaps you will be able to find another kind of wealth, one based on cooperation, collaboration, reciprocity, and the organization of the poorest who have been able to build a new community from nothing, making decisions by assembly, with its own radio station and internal security system, its collective vegetable gardens and common spaces built in a largely self-managed way, all in the middle of a precarious marginalized slum.15
The police have no place here, because there is no need for them—they have been displaced and rendered obsolete by the fabric of the community itself. In the words of Rosario Hernández, one of the many women working the gates, “We don’t have any confidence in them, so we take care of security ourselves.” Whether it’s a conflict between community members, domestic violence, or a robbery—a rarity these days, unlike those areas beyond the walls—an elected vigilance committee resolves the dispute. La Polvorilla’s feminist praxis goes beyond addressing gendered violence, moreover: Hernández insists that her participation in community organizing has helped her overcome her own internalized patriarchal limits, and to become a “total woman” in the process.16
In 2006, police attacked a sprawling occupation that striking teachers had set up around the sprawling zocalo at the center of Oaxaca City, in southwestern Mexico. The attack galvanized mass resistance, giving birth to what many would come to call the Oaxaca Commune. Thousands of barricades went up, and the entire city was taken over, with the directly democratic Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) serving as its de facto government. Assuming political control of the city meant keeping people safe, so residents created the Honorable Cuerpo de Topiles. Named for the sticks carried by its deputies, this was “a group of civilians appointed by communal authority to enforce APPO resolutions, modeled on indigenous traditions of community policing.” “Neighbors and merchants organized block committees and patrols,” and the very same barricades built out of an urgent need to protect the community from repression also created a permanent network of relay points for political discussion, debate, and the further consolidation of communal bonds.17 For nearly six months, “there were no police in Oaxaca City.”18
It was in part to distract attention from this revolt in Oaxaca that the newly inaugurated president, Felipe Calderón, declared an ill-fated ‘war’ on narcotraffickers in December 2006. If anything, the narcos had a better record of defending and financially supporting local communities than the government did, even earning the nickname los valientes in some cases. But this is hardly a testament to the benevolence of the cartels; that same government was busy destroying communities and displacing their inhabitants under the guise of US-sponsored eradication campaigns, all while turning a blind eye to the main players in the drug game. Regardless, those days are long gone. In the end, narco-capitalism is still capitalism, and no matter who’s in charge it’s still poor, heavily Indigenous communities that bear the brunt of its costs.19 The result of Calderón’s war has been predictably horrendous: more than 120,000 dead and many more disappeared, as cartels battle one another and the Mexican state for control of lucrative markets and transit routes.
Amid and increasingly against this carnage, however, new experiments in grassroots power have materialized. In the 1990s, a police massacre in Guerrero state, just up the Pacific coast from Oaxaca, led to the creation of what are called, somewhat misleadingly, “community police.” In reality, the local grassroots vigilance networks that coalesced as the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities (CRAC) were part of a broader system of alternative justice grounded in Indigenous law and principles. Its elected coordinators prioritize reconciliation among all parties involved, and offenders participate in “reeducation” or rotating community service among nearby towns. Even the “police”—if you can call them that—are elected from their own communities and are unpaid, calling upon grassroots knowledge to ensure local security. In reality, community members empowered to safeguard their own streets have nothing in common with armed professionals sent in from afar to protect property and privilege. The CRAC, which quickly spread to more than a hundred local communities, “was able to significantly redu
ce local violence and insecurity … demonstrating the possibility of addressing crime, confronting insecurity, and working for peace when the force of a community and its cultural identities are mobilized to weave the social fabric.”20
Further north in Cherán, a municipality in Michoacán state, a 2011 dispute with narcos over illegal logging led the largely Purépecha Indigenous community to rise up, chasing the loggers out with sticks and fireworks before replacing the local police and government entirely. According to the anthropologist Gilberto López y Rivas, Cherán’s new government and security force has since reinvigorated and transformed traditional Indigenous principles: “There has been a renovation of neighborhood organizing, mutual aid (Jarhojperakua) and collective work [tequio]; the collective fire (Parhangua) has becomes an extension of the kitchen on the communal barricades; and patrols [la ronda] by community members themselves, mostly the youth, have become an effective form of territorial defense and citizen security.”21 While the Mexican government has sought to divide-and-conquer the CRAC, persecuting its more radical elements, Chéran has taken advantage of what little legal protections exist for Indigenous autonomy to establish a sort of détente with the state, staving off government aggression while avoiding many of the pitfalls of state incorporation. A microcosm of a world without police, Chéran remains today an “oasis of hope,” as a BBC report put it, “its peace and security a stark contrast to the fear that still dominates neighboring communities,” despite—or often due to—the police.22