by Geo Maher
Conclusion: Democracy or the Police?
Picture this: there’s an armed gang roaming the streets, harassing the population, brutalizing the innocent, and taking more than a thousand lives each year—three Americans dead every day. No one would seriously propose reforming such a force. We wouldn’t tolerate it—we would attack and dismantle it. This seems obvious enough, but we aren’t talking about just any street gang, about the Bloods, Crips, or MS-13. We’re talking about what Tupac Shakur once deemed “the biggest gang in America.”
To call the police a gang is not hyperbole. As one recent headline put it, “Police killed more people in 2019 than Bloods, Crips combined.”1 It isn’t just about the killing, either. When the police kill, maim, and brutalize, they refuse all accountability. We have seen how police and their not-so-benevolent associations organize, bargain, and lobby for absolute impunity and resist any attempts at civilian oversight. Where negotiation and lobbying aren’t enough, they throw very public temper tantrums, taking to the literal bully pulpit of right-wing media or engaging in “blue flu” sick-out campaigns. And where all this fails or local elected officials are not sufficiently obedient, police and their unions don’t hesitate to buck civilian authorities entirely, acting outside and against, rather than under the control of, democratic oversight.
Rather than deny the accusation that they are a gang, many officers embrace it. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg once even boasted, “I have my own army,” and he wasn’t lying. But this is an army that has never been faithful to the chain of command, and in recent years has gone fully rogue. Since literally turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio during the attempted “blue coup” in 2014, the NYPD has continued to lash out at civilian oversight. In early 2020, Ed Mullins, head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA), tweeted that the NYPD was “declaring war” on the mayor. When the SBA doxed the mayor’s daughter, Chiara, leaking records of her arrest during the George Floyd rebellions, this wasn’t mere retribution: the SBA was demanding mounted horseback units to police protesters. The fact that the police don’t work for the people but in their own interests, and that these interests involve repressing protest and resisting social change, is a frightening prospect in itself. Even more alarming, however, is that the bullying worked—they got their mounted units.2
As this case shows, police are more than willing to harass and even threaten elected leaders who cross them, a fact that the case of Vallejo, California, only drives home. As Shane Bauer recently documented for The New Yorker, Vallejo boasts one of the state’s most violent police departments: so violent that officers bend the tips of their badges to keep track of fatal shootings; and so violent, in fact, that the insurance company covering settlements recently increased the city’s deductible fivefold. For decades, the city council was effectively in the pocket of the Vallejo Police Officers’ Association (VPOA)—as the former city manager Joe Tanner put it, “The cops owned the council.” When former city council member Stephanie Gomes was running for office, the VPOA asked her, straight up: “If you win, will you stay bought?” As the city fell into a fiscal crisis and the budget was balanced on the backs of Vallejo’s poorest, Gomes and Tanner struggled to rein in contractually protected police salaries—confronting this political power head-on in the process.
In response to their efforts, local police harassed both officials. Cops drove by Gomes’s house repeatedly, casting intimidating glances inside while revving their engines. When her security alarm was tripped, police used this as a pretext to pry open a window and snoop around—anonymous posts later appeared online about personal items of hers found inside. And when Gomes proposed a civilian oversight board for police misconduct, police packed the chamber to heckle her. The threats against Tanner were more direct: as Bauer writes, “A Vallejo cop approached him in a restaurant in a nearby town and told him, ‘You’re gonna get yours.’ An anonymous caller threatened to burn his house down. His Jeep was keyed several times and its tires were slashed.” In order to circumvent the power of the VPOA, Vallejo had to file for bankruptcy and, eventually, declare a public safety emergency.3 Cases like these are not the exception but the rule. Over at The New Republic, Sam Adler-Bell spoke to politicians nationwide who had confronted police power, noting that “their stories are remarkably similar. All expressed fear for their own safety and the safety of their families. They feel scrutinized by beat cops when they walk the streets and worry their movements are being surveilled.”4
Where negotiating, lobbying, and bullying city officials fail, when it’s not enough to have misconduct records scrubbed every few months, violent cops often resign and move rather than face discipline—passed around police departments like so many abusive Catholic priests. Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, had previously been forced out of another department, strategically resigning before he could be fired. After George Floyd was killed, nearly 200 officers resigned from the Minneapolis Police Department, fearing greater scrutiny. There is even an entire website—Law Enforcement Move—dedicated to the task of helping cops relocate to “police-friendly communities.” The website’s founder told Bauer that he had been contacted with more than a thousand requests in the course of a few short months.
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Police are more than just a gang, however—policing is a racket. This is not merely a metaphor. The sociologist Charles Tilly famously argued that war making and state making can be viewed as protection rackets that meet all the criteria of organized crime. A racketeer offers protection from violence—which they themselves threaten to unleash if their victims don’t pay up—and Tilly argues that governments do much the same:
To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers.5
The only difference, Tilly concludes, is that governments do so under the cover of the law.
What about the police? After all, they do more than harass elected leaders—they also extort them, and the public purse at large. Police promise protection that they conspicuously fail to deliver, but even empty promises come with a hefty price tag in the form of endlessly expanding budgets, devouring funds that could otherwise be earmarked for essential social services or local infrastructure. Despite falling crime rates, police bankrolls have continued to grow—and spectacularly, increasing by nearly 50 percent per capita since the 1990s. Per capita spending on Chicago’s notoriously violent police has tripled since the 1960s, and currently eats up 40 percent of the city’s budget.6 New York shells out nearly $6 billion annually, while spending in Los Angeles has doubled in just a few decades to $3 billion.
Not content to extort the public through the political system, many police departments steal in more direct ways, with entire departments nationwide funding their operations through the system of legalized theft known as civil asset forfeiture, in which police seize—and keep—assets that they claim to be involved in criminal activity, even where the owners are not convicted, or even arrested. As of 2014, civil asset forfeiture surpassed total losses from all burglaries nationwide—some $5 billion annually. So egregious is this practice that the Supreme Court stepped in with a unanimous 2019 ruling in the case of Timbs v. Indiana. Tyson Timbs had been convicted of a minor drug crime carrying a maximum fine of $10,000, but police had also seized his legally purchased Land Rover worth some $42,000. The court found that forfeiture can violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on excessive fines.
Occasionally, such extortion happens through collaboration with the powers that be, a scenario that was most notoriously true in Ferguson. There, police worked direc
tly with the courts and under pressure from city administrators to squeeze nearly a quarter of the city budget, like blood from a stone, out of an already-poor and majority-Black population. Through bogus fines and exorbitant court fees, Ferguson police oversaw the collection of what Robin D.G. Kelley has called “a kind of racial tax, an extraction of surplus directly by the state without producing anything besides discipline and terror and the reproduction of the state.” Kelley, evoking Marx’s classic description of the use of state violence in the service of wealth, describes this as “revenue by primitive accumulation.”7
As a protection racket, however, policing is a dismal failure—all racket, no protection, beyond the wealthiest and whitest segments of society. Where threats of community violence are real and imminent, police offer notoriously little help. But where they can be leveraged into broader impunity and expanding budgets, police routinely exaggerate existing threats or fabricate entirely new ones. And, whether it’s harassing and brutalizing people of color and the poor, or extorting resources that could otherwise be earmarked for early intervention, youth programs, drug treatment, social justice, or mental health care, the police produce the same violence they claim to prevent. The result, as we have seen, is a more dangerous world.
Police power is well-organized criminal blackmail, and police unions its ringleaders, taking to the media to stoke fear about imaginary threats or a “war on police”—and to communicate ransom demands.
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This is all true even when the police aren’t breaking the law—but they do so all the time. As we might expect in a job defined by access to both weapons and impunity, corruption is rife, and police have always been deeply embedded in organized crime as both “meat eaters” complicit in high-level crime and as small-scale bribe-takers, or “grass eaters.” Police nationwide, past and present, have planted drugs and guns for false convictions—notoriously in Chicago, where more than a hundred felony drug convictions linked to a single disgraced sergeant, Ronald Watts, have recently been vacated. Policing is corrupt and corrupting; and lawbreaking by the cops isn’t an exception—it’s the rule.
But while many police break the law for their own benefit or simply because they can, police lawbreaking plays a deeper role in fabricating the world of police that we inhabit today. Walter Benjamin argued that the police not only uphold but also remake the law every day, because “the separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended” by street-level police discretion and prerogative.8 The past century has only confirmed this fact. Policing walks the line between the law and lawlessness, but also shifts that line, breaking and reshaping the law every day through a million discretionary acts. But while police lawbreaking is often rationalized, and indeed lionized, in popular culture and even academic studies as what is known as “Dirty Harry Syndrome”—heroic cops breaking the law in the unflinching pursuit of a higher justice—the reality is far different. Police don’t break the law in the name of a more just world, but to transform the world in ever more authoritarian and anti-democratic directions. While crowing endlessly about law and order, they break the law in the name of the capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarchal orders governing our world. As the attack dogs of racial capitalism, police power tends naturally toward fascism: a permanent hierarchy of well-behaved white citizens.
The consistently reactionary orientation of police and their unions—their permanent hostility to labor movements and racial equality—is therefore no mistake. And it’s no surprise that the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), alongside the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unions, heartily endorsed a violent bully like Donald Trump, for whom law-and-order and lawbreaking were nearly synonymous. One of Trump’s first acts in office, in fact, was to issue an executive order denouncing the “dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America,” making perfectly clear that he would be the president of the police and not of the rioters and the looters—a thinly veiled threat directed at Black Lives Matter. While the lawlessness of the cops reached new heights under Trump, however, it’s a mistake to believe—as many liberals do—that Trump himself was the cause. Policing didn’t fundamentally change under Trump—he simply unleashed the police to do what police do best, and all indications suggest that Biden will do much the same.
Of course, the horizon of police fascism is far broader than policing. The FOP’s wish list for Trump’s first one hundred days in office was a truly intersectional pile of shit that extended well beyond police power. The FOP called for Trump to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, tighten immigration restrictions, ease oversight of privately run migrant detention centers, attack sanctuary cities, strengthen sanctions on Cuba, expand the 287(g) program to deepen relations between local police and ICE, and reverse a Bush-era ban on racial profiling.9 In short, they offered an overarching program for racial and class hierarchy in which the police are above the law, but the vast majority of us must obey or suffer the consequences. This thirst for obedience and social order, which combines racial resentment with a bootlicking fealty toward the rich, underlines the fascist tendency of policing in general, which manifests in the explicit sympathy many individual cops display toward openly racist and fascist organizations.
A recent report from the Brennan Center entitled Hidden in Plain Sight makes this astonishingly clear: “Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere.”10 These relationships are nothing new: police and far-right organizations have long been brothers-in-arms, intertwined branches of the same white supremacist tree. Police chiefs often led local Klan chapters, and as late as the 1980s Klan activity in police departments in Kentucky was found to be widespread. Police nationwide continue to work closely with far-right groups today, with new cases of ongoing police ties to the Klan and neo-Nazi organizations surfacing daily.
Los Angeles alone has seen a string of violent neo-Nazi gangs within its police forces, from the Lynwood Vikings to the Compton Executioners implicated in the 2020 killing of Andrés Guardado. After a 2016 clash between antifascists and white nationalists at the California state capitol that left several injured, court documents revealed how police later collaborated with and expressed sympathy for neo-Nazis while pursuing charges against the left.11 In 2017, right-wing militias were spotted helping the Department of Homeland Security arrest counterprotesters in Portland, and in 2019 a Portland Police Bureau lieutenant was found to have collaborated with the far-right group Patriot Prayer, exchanging hundreds of friendly text messages and even filing charges against antifascists at the group’s behest.12
If police in the past often looked on as Black people were publicly lynched, they do the same today as armed fascists attack Black Lives Matter and antifascists. The police know which side they are on, and sometimes they do more than just watch. Members of the Proud Boys, self-described “Western chauvinists,” have been seen fist-bumping DC police and attending a FOP event in Philadelphia, and cops nationwide have been sacked for direct membership in the far-right organization. During the George Floyd protests, Minnesota state troopers and other police retaliated against protesters by slashing the tires of every car in a Kmart parking lot—in their words, they “strategically deflated tires to keep vehicles from being used in attacks.”13 According to one militia member patrolling the streets of Kenosha alongside Kyle Rittenhouse on the day he killed two demonstrators, police had announced their plans to push protesters toward the militias and then leave.14 Indeed, such police collaboration with militias is widespread and well documented.
The so-called Patriot movement epitomizes this symbiotic relationship between police and the far right, and the lawless law-and-order vision they preach. The contradiction is right in the name: while professing loyalty to the US Constitution,
many “patriots” are more than willing to take up arms against the government and others. This is even more explicit for groups like the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, which recruit heavily from the ranks of current and former law enforcement while decrying the government as tyrannical. The United States is no stranger to self-proclaimed prophets, its hyper-individualism fertile soil for those claiming to be the sole interpreters of the word of God. For groups like the Oath Keepers, whose “oath” is to uphold the Constitution, every “sovereign citizen” is a constitutional scholar, empowered to interpret the scripture and strike down some laws in favor of others. This is the lawmaking prerogative of the police on steroids (often literally so).
Police routinely display far-right insignia—and notably the “III” logo of the Three Percenters—in tattoos and on uniforms, tactical gear, and bumper stickers. During the Ferguson rebellion, armed Oath Keepers were spotted on rooftops with semi-automatic rifles, and while the St. Louis County police chief ordered them to stand down, it turned out that he had Oath Keepers among his own ranks. One, Dan Page, was seen live on CNN shoving and threatening to arrest host Don Lemon and would later be fired after video of a violent racist tirade was leaked to the press. The contradictions of the Patriot movement were on full display when these avowed defenders of the Constitution stormed the US Capitol in early January 2021, in a quixotic attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election. Crowds of vehement Blue Lives Matter supporters fought uniformed police, killing one, and an Air Force veteran was shot and killed while invading the seat of government in whose name she had served four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What explains such close collaboration, even complicity, between law enforcement and the far right? The assumption is often that white supremacist have “infiltrated” police departments. While this is certainly true on some level, it neglects the historical function of policing and the ideology it produces. According to the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right, the presence of white supremacists in law enforcement has reached “epidemic” levels, but not due to infiltration from the outside. Instead, as we’ve seen, “links between the police and organized racism are as old as the institutions themselves,” and police forces “have been breeding grounds for far-right ideology for decades.”15 We can’t argue that the police have been taken over by white supremacists when their day-to-day function is to enforce racial domination, and it should come as no surprise that ideological adherents of white supremacy would be drawn to the job.