by Geo Maher
This book draws inspiration from the many heirs of Tubman and Du Bois whose names seem almost redundant since their brilliance flows like an undercurrent throughout, but here are some: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Angela Davis. This book draws insights, moreover, from an entire generation of comrade-scholars of policing: Kristian Williams, whose authoritative work I first read as a young organizer, and more recently Alex Vitale, Ben Brucato, David Correia, and Tyler Wall.
Concretely, this book would never have been written were it not for the patient efforts of both my agent Róisín Davis from Roam Agency and my editor Ben Mabie at Verso, who helped transform my involuntary exile from academia into the words you are reading here. Róisín has been a thoughtful, creative, and persistent sounding-board and advocate; Ben is a truly gifted and intuitive editor who grasped the essence of this project and has helped to shape it indelibly.
This book has benefited from a decade of conversations—some short, others endless—with countless comrades, especially Christina Heatherton, Jordan Camp, Sina Kramer, Joe Lowndes, Andrew Dilts, Charmaine Chua, and of course Viktoria Zerda. Thanks as well to those who provided useful commentary and insights: Ian Schiffer, Laleh Khalili, Ashley Bohrer, Marisol LeBrón, Kali Akuno, Zach Levenson, Richard Pithouse, Bret Grote, and Mae Boda. For leading by example and for her unflinching generosity and support, I owe an enormous debt to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Thanks, finally and as always, to my parents who, by teaching me to love equality, also taught me to hate its opposite.
May we live life according to the late Fred Hampton’s golden rule: “I am the people, I am not the pig.”
Notes
Introduction
1. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot. A New Era of Uprisings (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 180.
2. “‘We’re Not Abolishing Safety’: Minneapolis Councillor Explains Plan to Dismantle Police,” CBC, June 9, 2020, cbc.ca.
3. Julia Lurie, “They Built a Utopian Sanctuary in a Minneapolis Hotel. Then They Got Evicted,” Mother Jones, June 12, 2020, motherjones. com. This has been a difficult experiment indeed. Security became a central challenge at the Sheraton, both internally and from cops and vigilantes threatening from the outside, and the same was true of the encampments that emerged at Powderhorn Park and elsewhere. One, in Brackett Park, sought to provide a safe haven for largely Indigenous women without involving the police—surveys of the encampments showed that nearly half of residents were Indigenous.
4. A Bloomberg investigation concluded that, despite embracing the language of defunding, most departments in fact increased police budgets. Sarah Holder, Fola Akinnibi, and Christoper Cannon, “‘We Have Not Defunded Anything’: Big Cities Boost Police Budgets,” Bloomberg CityLab, September 22, 2020, bloomberg.com.
5. Miles Parks, “Confederate Statues Were Built to Further a ‘White Supremacist Future,’” NPR, August 20, 2017, npr.org.
6. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
7. Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, nytimes.com.
8. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 346.
9. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 239.
10. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 30.
11. Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 73–4.
12. See the late comrade Joel Olson, “The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry,” Perspectives on Politics 5, n. 4 (December 2007).
13. A 2017 ACLU poll showed that 91 percent of Americans support criminal justice reform, while 71 percent support reducing the prison population.
14. “What Is the PIC? What Is Abolition?,” Critical Resistance official website, criticalresistance.org.
15. As Robin D.G. Kelley reminds us, such calls go back at least as far as the 1968 vice presidential bid of Black socialist Paul Boutelle (later Kwame Somburu). “Insecure: Policing under Racial Capitalism,” Spectre 1, n. 2 (Fall 2020), 16.
16. “The Strategy,” A World without Police official website, aworldwithoutpolice.org.
17. Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”
1. The Pig Majority
1. Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 68. As Ida B. Wells described it in 1893: “Over a thousand black men, women and children have been thus sacrificed the past ten years. Masks have long since been thrown aside and the lynchings of the present day take place in broad daylight. The sheriffs, police and state officials stand by and see the work well done.” The Light of Truth (New York: Penguin, 2014). And as David Correia and Tyler Wall put it, “Lynching was lawmaking.” Police: A Field Guide (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 53.
2. Simon Purdue, “The Other Epidemic: White Supremacists in Law Enforcement,” Open Democracy, August 6, 2020, opendemocracy.net.
3. Haley Willis et al., “Tracking the Suspect in the Fatal Kenosha Shootings,” New York Times, August 27, 2020, nytimes.com.
4. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 79.
5. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 12.
6. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996), 145.
7. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 700, 12.
8. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 145; Black Reconstruction, 12. More than sixty years later, James Baldwin succinctly summarized the two functions of the police: “to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests.” “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966.
9. James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), 9.
10. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 132.
11. Well-known studies have shown how participants in video game simulations are more likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects and less likely to shoot armed white suspects, and that Black participants are as likely as white participants to exhibit these biases. Joshua Correll et al., “The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, n. 6 (2002). One study even shows how Korean participants are more likely to shoot suspects if the police officer they are playing in a simulation is white instead of Black. S.H. Park and H.J. Kim, “Assumed Race Moderates Spontaneous Racial bias in a Computer-based Police Simulation, Asian Journal of Social Psychology 18, n. 3 (2005).
12. Terrence McCoy, “Ferguson Shows How a Police Force Can Turn Into a Plundering ‘Collection Agency,’” Washington Post, March 5, 2015, washingtonpost.com.
13. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 76–9.
14. Brian Mann, “Charles Rangel: America’s ‘Front-Line General’ in the Drug War,” North Country Public Radio, August 19, 2013, northcountrypublicradio.org.
15. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 100–1.
16. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 78–9.
17. Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 11.
18. Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 2.
19. Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 157. Vesla Weaver paints an even more sympathetic picture of Black leadership, although one wonders on what level leaders should have known that their demands would be only selectively embraced. “The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration,” Boston Review, October 24, 2017, bostonreview.net.
20. Elizabeth Hinton, “The Minneapolis Uprising in Context,” Boston Review, May 29, 2020, bostonreview.net.
21. Between 1972 and 1991, Chicago Police Department officer Jon Burge, a Kore
a and Vietnam military police veteran, oversaw the torture and coerced confessions of dozens. See Kelly Hayes, “Chicago Police Torture: Explained,” The Appeal, December 5, 2019, theappeal.org. Burge’s methods were drawn from the arsenal of global counterinsurgency warfare, and like many Latin American countries that have experienced brutal dictatorships, Chicago too has an entire institution, the Chicago Torture Justice Center, dedicated to victims of police torture. Burge himself learned torture techniques at Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the infamous School of the Americas.
22. Alex Vitale makes this point eloquently in an interview with Madison Pauly, “What a World without Cops Would Look Like,” Mother Jones, June 2, 2020, motherjones.com.
23. “Criminal Justice Expenditures: Police, Corrections, and Courts,” Urban Institute, urban.org.
24. Carlos Ballesteros, “Chicago Has Nearly Tripled Per Capita Police Spending since 1964, data show,” Injustice Watch, June 9, 2020, injusticewatch.org.
25. Brian Barrett, “The Pentagon’s Hand-Me-Downs Helped Militarize Police. Here’s How,” Wired, June 2, 2020, wired.com. For the full article, see Casey Delehanty et al., “Militarization and Police Violence: The Case of the 1033 Program,” Research and Politics 4, n. 2 (April 2017).
26. “Criminalizing Children at School,” New York Times, April 18, 2013, nytimes.com.
27. Maya Lindberg, “False Sense of Security,” Teaching Tolerance (Spring 2015), 24.
28. Melinda D. Anderson, “The Rise of Law Enforcement on College Campuses,” The Atlantic, September 28, 2015, theatlantic.com. In Philadelphia, controversy erupted when it was revealed that local universities like the University of Pennsylvania had been involved in policing the George Floyd protests far off campus. As Anderson explains, the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD), whose patrol areas are home to far more nonstudents than students, are notorious for off-campus enforcement. While local critics assert that UCPD “systematically racially profiles and harasses … with complete impunity … Under current Illinois law, as a private institution the university is not required to disclose arrest reports, traffic stop data, or information concerning its off-campus patrols.”
29. Emma Reynolds, “Calls Are Growing to Defund Police in the US. Here Are Some Lessons from Overseas,” CNN, June 24, 2020, cnn. com.
30. Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto, 2000), xi.
31. Correia and Wall, Police: A Field Guide.
32. Peter Linebaugh, “Police and Plunder,” Counterpunch, February 13, 2015, counterpunch.org.
33. Kelley, “Insecure,” 19.
34. Beth E. Richie and Kayla M. Martensen, “Resisting Carcerality, Embracing Abolition: Implications for Feminist Social Work Practice,” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 35, n.1 (2020), 12, 14.
35. See especially Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color Of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Civitas, 2002).
36. Vitale, The End of Policing, 42.
37. Roberto González, Hugh Gusterson, and David Price, “Introduction,” in Network of Concerned Anthropologists, ed., The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2009), 13.
38. Alfredo Mirandé, Gringo Justice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 67, 72.
39. Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 20.
40. Mirandé, Gringo Justice, 74.
41. Mirandé, Gringo Justice, 146.
42. Ryan Devereaux, “The Bloody History of Border Militias Runs Deep—and Law Enforcement Is Part of It,” The Intercept, April 23, 2019, theintercept.com.
43. Michael Muskal and Lauren Raab, “Cleveland blames Tamir Rice, 12, for his own death, then apologizes,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2015, latimes.com.
44. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 42, 631.
45. Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counter-insurgency Transformed American Policing (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 13.
46. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (London and New York: Verso, 2016).
47. Schrader, Badges without Borders, 25.
48. Sean McFate, “Mercenaries and War: Understanding Private Armies Today,” National Defense University Press, December 4, 2019, ndupress.ndu.edu.
49. Schrader, Badges without Borders, 24.
50. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 16.
2. Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect?
1. Thanks in large part to the efforts (or lack thereof) of the police themselves, there is no good overall data on killings by police, but a growing consensus places that number around twice previously existing official and self-reported data, somewhere around 1,000 deaths annually. See the methodological discussion in Franklin E. Zimring, When Police Kill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
2. Ryan Gabrielson et al., “Deadly Force, in Black and White,” ProPublica, October 10, 2014, propublica.org; Gabriel L. Schwartz and Jaquelyn L. Jahn, “Mapping Fatal Police Violence across U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Overall Rates and Racial/Ethnic Inequities, 2013–2017,” PLOS ONE, June 24, 2020, journals.plos.org.
3. The relationship between many Asian American communities and the police is complex, as underlined recently by Tou Tho’s complicity in George Floyd’s death, and by NYPD officer Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley in East New York—not to mention the defense of Liang by many in the Chinese American community. Polling shows, however, that younger Asian Americans are more attuned to racial discrimination in policing: whereas 40 percent of elderly Asians believe the police treat different races equally, this number is as low as 15 percent for younger generations. Hansei Lo Wang, “On Police Treatment, Asian-Americans Show Ethnic, Generational Splits,” NPR, April 18, 2017, npr.org.
4. Heather Mac Donald, “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2020, wsj.com.
5. See Andrew Gelman et al., “An Analysis of the New York City Police Department’s ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 102, n. 479 (2007).
6. Dean Knox et al., “Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing,” American Political Science Review 114, n. 3 (August 2020).
7. This is what Aubrey Clayton calls “the statistical paradox of police killings,” Boston Globe, June 11, 2020, bostonglobe.com.
8. Mapping Police Violence, “2020 Police Violence Report,” police-violencereport.org.
9. Rob Arthur, “New Data Shows Police Use More Force against Black Citizens Even Though Whites Resist More,” Slate, May 30, 2019, slate.com.
10. Heather Mac Donald, “I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It,” Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2020, wsj.com. One of the authors, Joseph Cesario, responded that “the reason for the retraction had nothing to do with the claims made by Heather Mac Donald,” but instead that the authors had “overstepped with the inferences we made from our data.” Cesario further revealed that he had informed Mac Donald of this decision, and the reasons for it, before her op-ed misrepresenting and denouncing the decision. “Why We Withdrew the Police Shooting Study,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2020, wsj.com. The official PNAS retraction statement is available at psyarxiv.com/dj57k.
11. Chris Polansky, “TPD Major: Police Shoot Black Americans ‘Less Than We Probably Ought To,’” Public Radio Tulsa, June 9, 2020, publicradiotulsa.org.
12. Adolph Reed Jr., “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence,” Nonsite, September 16, 2016, nonsite.org.
13. New Mexico routinely boasts the highest rate of police killings in the country, with Albuquerque police killing at a rate eight times that of the NYPD—much of it directed against Latinx and Indigenous people. See Rachel Aviv, “Your Son is Deceased,” The New Yorker, January 26, 2015, newyor
ker.com.
14. Schwartz and Jahn, “Mapping Fatal Police Violence.”
15. German Lopez, “Why Police So Often See Unarmed Black Men as Threats,” Vox, September 20, 2016, vox.com.
16. Jamelle Bouie, “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon,” Slate, November 26, 2014, slate.com. Racism is nothing if not opportunistic. When LAPD chief Daryl Gates sought to excuse deaths caused by police chokeholds, he argued that “in some blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.” “Coast Police Chief Accused of Racism,” New York Times, May 13, 1982, nytimes.com.
17. “Black Boys Viewed as Older, Less Innocent Than Whites, Research Finds,” American Psychological Association (March 2014), apa.org; Naa Oyo A. Kwate and Shatema Threadcraft, “Perceiving the Black female body: Race and Gender in Political Constructions of Body Weight,” Race and Social Problems 7, n. 3 (July 2015); Tom Jacobs, “The Dangerous Delusion of the Big, Scary Black Man,” Pacific Standard, June 14, 2017, psmag.com.
18. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 211. Somewhat embarrassingly, Reed appears to have criticized Taylor’s book without having read it, or even perused the table of contents. He writes that her “point of departure requires harmonizing the interests of the black poor and working class with those of the black professional-managerial class,” when much of the book—and the entirety of the third and fifth chapters—makes the opposite argument. “On the End(s) of Black Politics,” Nonsite, September 16, 2016, nonsite.org.
19. Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 76.
20. Bill Hutchinson, “‘They Didn’t Give a Damn’: Mother of Slain Walter Wallace Says Police Knew Her Son Was in a Mental Crisis,” ABC, October 28, 2020, abcnews.go.com.
21. Doris A. Fuller et al., Overlooked in the Undercounted: The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters (Treatment Advocacy Center, 2015), treatmentadvocacycenter.org. Some estimates, moreover, indicate that one-third of those killed by police—including Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray—suffered from a disability broadly understood, leading campaigners to draw attention to the connections between disability and police murder. Dominic Bradley and Sarah Katz, “Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray: The Toll of Police Violence on Disabled Americans,” Guardian, June 9, 2020, theguardian.com.