by Geo Maher
As the catastrophic violence of the drug war reached its apex, the most devastating symbol of which was the 2014 disappearance in Iguala, Guerrero, of forty-three student teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, more Mexican communities would be pushed to the brink. This was the case most spectacularly in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, not far from Chéran. There, entire towns fed up with extortion and violence took up arms and drove the brutal Knights Templar cartel out of broad swaths of the state—doing in mere weeks what the entire force of the Mexican state couldn’t accomplish over eight years of counterinsurgent warfare. Membership in these autodefensas quickly surged to 20,000, but it was never clear whether they represented poor communities or the local landholders who supplied most of their weapons. Lacking the solid anchor of Indigenous tradition like Cherán, the autodefensas were politically vulnerable from the outset. When the state pressured participants to join the official state police or lay down their arms, the movement fractured, and those who tried to chart a more radical course were jailed.
All across Mexico, communities have—by will or out of urgent necessity—taken security and justice into their own collective hands. But while Indigenous customary law, understood across much of Latin America under the heading of usos y costumbres, is often based on restorative principles, it isn’t always egalitarian, and it can reinforce hierarchies of age and gender. Moreover, customary law and popular justice have been linked to a spate of mob lynchings in Mexico as elsewhere, most famously in 2004 when two undercover police were burned alive in San Juan Ixtayopan, on the southwestern outskirts of Mexico City, after neighbors observed them taking photos of children. While the connection between Indigenous tradition and mob violence is often mobilized by the racist right and has been used to discredit progressive president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, it nevertheless raises important challenges for the left across the region and beyond.
For the Uruguayan intellectual Raúl Zibechi, the experience of El Alto, Bolivia, offers not only inspiration but also some important caveats about Indigenous democracy and community self-defense. Here, perched above La Paz at 13,000 feet, a million heavily Indigenous Bolivians persist at the intersection of abandonment and tradition. Since “the police do not exist or are an accomplice to the thieves, rapists, and those who attack the residents, and state justice is a bad joke,” local residents have turned to traditional councils to resolve local conflicts. But community reactions to “extreme conditions of state abandonment” often take the more immediate and brutal form of mob justice in the streets, in the beating and even lynching of thieves—or those wrongly identified as such.
For Indigenous feminist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, however, community justice and mob violence could not be more different. The spate of lynchings, she argues, is a direct reaction to and cathartic expression of neoliberal powerlessness. Community justice, by contrast, is “a form of reintegrating the person who had violated the rules. On a third offense, they can kill you … But there is always a long, considered, and deep period of deliberation. The decision is not taken in the heat of anger. The defendant is allowed to speak; everyone has their say, and that is community justice.”23
The power of community, in short, is an organized power.
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Straddling the artificial dividing line between First and Third Worlds in the still-colonized territory of Puerto Rico, a century-long denial of self-determination has given rise to what University of Texas professor Marisol LeBrón has described as a form of “punitive governance” that relies increasingly on the policing of life and death. Here, policing is quite literally a colonial project, but one that is never fully victorious, and LeBrón has documented the stubborn persistence of “alternative understandings of justice, safety and accountability,” efforts to “imagine new ways of living” by forging “local solutions to violence that decenter policing.”24
The town of Loíza, LeBrón notes, was a former destination for the slave trade and today remains “synonymous with Blackness.” It has seen some of the worst police brutality on the island, at the same time that a “near-constant police presence” has done little to make communities safer, leading local residents to develop alternatives.25 In 2012, a local feminist organization called Taller Salud adapted what is known as the Cure Violence model in an attempt to build what LeBrón calls “security from below.” First developed in Chicago in the 1990s, Cure Violence takes an epidemiological approach to community violence—as a disease to be cured—training community members to “interrupt” conflicts before they become deadly. In Loíza, this took the form of interventions that were explicitly feminist, and not only for their restorative nature. Taller Salud taught participants how violence between young men was also gendered violence, and that ultimately, “women will never feel safe if the territorial battles between young men in the community are allowed to continue claiming lives.”26
By intervening in community disputes, Cure Violence mediators were able to empower local activists and dramatically reduce violence over the course of several years. But the program’s shortcomings are just as important as its accomplishments. Cure Violence—with its reliance on metaphors of disease and targeting of “high risk” individuals and communities—threatens to distract from the social inequality that drives violence while pathologizing those same communities already subject to colonial domination—seeing the community as the disease rather than the cure. This danger seems to have been confirmed in the most obvious of ways: US occupiers have deployed the Cure Violence model as part of imperial pacification campaigns in Iraq and Syria—evidence that even restorative justice can play handmaiden to a global police state if not supplemented with genuine grassroots power. In the end, the Cure Violence model in Loíza collided with the fiscal and political contradictions of alternatives to policing that rely on state support. Amid the 2014 Puerto Rican financial crisis, funding for the intervention program in Loíza was cut. But if financial disaster revealed the weakness of the Cure Violence model, a different kind of disaster soon revealed other possibilities.
In Nicaragua, a 1972 earthquake set into motion the long march of the Sandinista Revolution; the 1985 temblor in Mexico spawned a wave of community organizing; and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina inspired the creation of organizations like the Common Ground Collective, which rescued people from the storm, patrolled communities, and even engaged in armed standoffs with roving white vigilantes.27 In Puerto Rico, it was Hurricane Maria in 2017 that revealed the utter ineptitude of the local government while reinforcing the idea that “only the people will save the people.” When the state fails, people often step up to establish grassroots mutual aid and self-defense networks—what LeBrón revealingly calls “survival programs,” echoing the Black Panthers.28 In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein rightly warns that natural disasters provide dangerous shocks that well-prepared right-wing forces can leverage to advance a radical neoliberal agenda.29 This dynamic is undeniable: if the police withdrew after Katrina, they returned with a vengeance in its aftermath as the foot soldiers of a post-disaster land grab that can only be understood as ethnic cleansing. In the end, New Orleans lost 100,000 Black residents and the public school system was gutted.
But when all that is solid melts into air, new possibilities can also emerge in the form of the stubbornly resilient fabric of community. From the beginning, the state has been a kind of organized blackmail: without it, we are told over and over again, things would be so much worse. Every outburst of violence, every act of human cruelty, serves to bolster the otherwise-absurd argument that we need far crueler a power to keep us in line. This blackmail is doubly true for the police, the curators of that organized cruelty. As with the state, however, the question is always this: How bad do things need to get before the argument breaks down and we see policing for what it is? Before we realize that the “protection” offered is illusory, and far less than the devastation wrought? Sometimes, when the state withdraws or coll
apses, the promised catastrophe fails to materialize.
While we don’t wish for disaster, the simple fact is that racial capitalism—and the policing it inevitably brings—is the real disaster. It is this perpetual, slow-moving catastrophe, what historian Gerald Horne deems the “apocalypse of settler colonialism,” that determines who lives and dies every day, and this is only more true when a storm hits.30 Real demands for police abolition often emerge from the depths of disaster and catastrophe, from those communities all too intimately familiar with both the danger of social violence and the equally dangerous devil’s bargain of policing. If South Africa and Northern Ireland can develop alternatives to the police amid armed struggle and revolution, if Puerto Ricans can do so during and after a hurricane, if Mexicans living through the automatic cross fire of a drug war with no end can turn to the organized community as an alternative, then we can too. The difference isn’t danger or insecurity, and it isn’t that police in the United States provide safety and security—they don’t.
It’s that extreme circumstances can tear away the mythical veil of policing and force people to see what was already in front of their faces: that the police don’t protect us. Only we protect us.
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More than a half century ago, James Baldwin famously described Harlem as “occupied territory” where every rooftop was suspected of harboring a treacherous “guerrilla outpost”—think of the militarized occupation of Ferguson. In occupied territory, Baldwin wrote, “any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child” provokes a response from “the full weight of the occupying forces”—think of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, or Tamir Rice. Communities of color, and Black communities in particular, have always been subject to the brutal military force ostensibly reserved for the colonized, and have always been deprived of due process and the right to self-defense, because they are insurgents by definition. “Occupied territory is occupied territory,” Baldwin wrote, “even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered.”31
For wealthier and whiter communities, and the suburbs in particular, the line between the military and the police is stark: they have never seen occupation and will never know what it feels like to be labeled an insurgent. But for the rest, this line is as elusive as it is illusory. In moments of calm, the police act like police, which is to say they harass, belittle, stop and frisk, and often resort to the kind of brutal individual discretion that is the divine right of occupation. When things get out of hand—too much humanity, too much dignity, too much faith in rights—things shift unpredictably and dramatically: the police become soldiers, and when that isn’t enough, they call in the National Guard.
This is a global reality. From Northern Ireland to South Africa, across Latin America and beyond, capitalist exploitation, colonial occupation, and white supremacist rule terrorize local populations, forcing communities to seek out radical alternatives that can provide an everyday level of security the occupier never will. In fact, the poorer communities get, the more obviously the police are reduced to their fundamental role. With no surplus funding for community barbecues and basketball tournaments, cops do the bare minimum required: protecting property, whiteness, and colonial, capitalist power.
Between the British armored vehicle used to brutalize Irish nationalists during the “troubles” (nicknamed the Humber Pig) and the mine-resistant Casspir designed to patrol South African townships, the differences are cosmetic. But so too the differences between these and the armored vehicles deployed by Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama, by the Missouri National Guard in Ferguson, by local, county, state, federal, and private forces at Standing Rock, or the MRAP (mine-resistant ambush protected) vehicle that rolled through my neighborhood of West Philadelphia during the George Floyd rebellions, tear-gassing my neighbors in their own homes. But if the line between the police and the military, between domestic white supremacy and global imperialism, is illusory, this also points toward the task of stitching together broader solidarities in a broader fabric of struggle against the global police state.
As with all abolition, however, to be against the police is to be for a very different kind of community and world. Poverty, inequality, and violence so often go hand in hand for a reason. Organizers in Venezuela, for example, knew that it wasn’t enough to simply expel the police if they didn’t also work to rebuild their communities on new, collective foundations. Spontaneous grassroots assemblies provided the model for the establishment, in 2006, of communal councils—neighborhood organs of directly democratic participation that interfaced with the Chávez government to fund local development projects and build an alternative, socialist economy. In 2009, this project became more ambitious still with the establishment of larger units called “communes” that brought the communal councils together with socialist producers in an expansive and democratically managed socialist project. Moreover, these organized communities do more than simply provide local security: strong collective structures have become central to defending Venezuelan socialism from infiltration by Colombian paramilitaries and global imperial aggression from the United States.
It may seem strange to some to speak of police abolition and armed self-defense in the same breath, but this is exactly the point. Especially as abolitionist discourse enters the political mainstream, we need to be clear that just as abolition is not a suburb, nor is it an abstract ethical critique of violence or a purely prefigurative gesture—building the new world without fighting the old. Abolition is a material struggle, one that entails destroying the old and building the new. And for those most vulnerable to the many interlocking violences of our world, this means securing the community in order to rebuild it. This doesn’t mean the police, of course: self-defense by and for the community has nothing at all in common with those professional armed outsiders sent by the state. It’s about new, community institutions born of the struggle against policing.
When London’s Metropolitan Police targeted the Mangrove restaurant in 1970, these racist attacks only cemented the space’s importance as a center for Black organizing. In the words of the Trinidadian radical Darcus Howe, recently dramatized in Steve McQueen’s film about the Mangrove Nine trial: “In defending themselves against attack a community is born, and wherever a community is born it creates institutions that it needs.” Of course, we should always remain alert to how community alternatives can reproduce carceral logics, but these logics emerge most clearly through collaboration with the state. If we can’t abolish the police without building alternatives, the opposite is true as well. And for those communities most besieged globally, there can be no abolition without self-defense.
Seen from an international perspective, police abolition becomes even more urgent and the constituency of abolitionist struggles even larger. But the global imbrication of policing with imperialism and counterinsurgency poses challenges for abolitionists as well. When Venezuela sought to “humanize” policing, it soon became clear that even as part of a revolutionary project, reforming the police under capitalism remains an elusive if not impossible task. Moreover, when the government purged police forces of corrupt and violent officers, they simply joined the organized crime networks with which they had already become enmeshed. This challenge becomes even more daunting in countries like Colombia and Mexico, where US-backed counterinsurgency wars created a reservoir of hundreds of thousands of available mercenaries—trained killers walking the streets in search of work suited to their particular brutal skillset.
Most infamously, the Mexican cartel known as the Zetas was formed when dozens of elite soldiers defected from the Mexican military to join the Gulf Cartel. Their tactics, learned from Israeli and US special forces (one-third of the original Zetas were trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia) have led to a reciprocal escalation of carnage on all sides of the drug war. As we have seen, the problem of violence workers goes beyond the police, and even if the police were to be abolished, professional violence workers won’t sim
ply disappear. But the solution to both is, once again, stronger communities. The struggle for community control against the police is a global struggle that seeks to establish ever-expanding liberated territories, insurgent zones where occupiers—domestic or imperial—dare not set foot without always glancing fearfully toward the rooftops.
What would this global solidarity against the police look like? How would it remain faithful to the amplitude of the George Floyd revolt, in which police chiefs—like statues to slave traders and colonizers—began to fall like dominoes? How to demand not only an end to the police as a specific institution, but to the global white supremacist, capitalist order that sees police as its only line of defense? It looks like radical organizers from Cooperation Jackson who, in their attempt to build a communal economy in Mississippi, looked consciously to Venezuela’s communes, alongside other experiments in grassroots democracy. Of course, this entailed confronting police power, through the proposed establishment of a “police control board,” elected by the people with the “right to monitor, subpoena, and indict police officers for gross misconduct.”32 Or inversely, it looks like Afro-Venezuelan organizers who put this global solidarity into practice when former NYPD commissioner and “broken windows” guru Bill Bratton was invited to Caracas to advise the historically brutal Metropolitan Police—graffiti reading “Bratton go home” quickly appeared, and amid an overall atmosphere of grassroots resistance, Bratton beat a hasty retreat.
Police abolition is a global task, in part because the police are synonymous with the white supremacy that has always sought to divide the poor and legitimize their oppression in the name of capitalist accumulation on a world scale. If the self-defense movements that we have seen in Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere share many of their objectives with the Black Panther Party, we would do well to embrace the Panthers’ radically expansive, transnational vision of struggle as well. As the New York City Panther 21 put it in a 1971 open letter to the Weather Underground: “We don’t accept the pig’s boundaries—thus when we talk of an American revolution—we are speaking of America—north, south, and Latin—ALL of America.”