đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș tom-nomad-the-master-s-tools.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:21:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Masterâs Tools Author: Tom Nomad Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: warfare, insurgency, insurrectionary, strategy, war, Little Black Cart Source: Retrieved on 23rd May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/masters-tools-warfare-insurgent-possibility Notes: *The Master's Tools* was originally published by Little Black Cart and can be found in book form https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=384.
The following collection of essays began their current evolution around
2005, when some anarchists began a concentrated study of police tactics,
largely born out of necessity in the moment, but becoming over time a
focus for some of us. The first of the following texts, A Primer On
Police Crowd-Con- trol Tactics and Frameworks was released in 2007, in
the lead-up to the October Rebellion demonstrations in Washington DC. It
has been updated numerous times over the years, appearing under a
variety of titles depending on the context of its distribution, which
almost always occurred person-to-person at gatherings and workshops. At
the time that these initial writings were being done anarchist praxis
and direct action still operated under the assumption of the primacy of
mass street actions. As the summit era ended, the understanding of
street actions became more nuanced and these studies on tactics moved
beyond looking at crowd control and police procedure into discussions
and research projects about policing on a broad and theoretical level,
attempting to construct ways to understand particular police operations
in particular moments in the most nuanced way possible, to find a way
out of the tactical impasse that seemed to have gripped the scene after
2010 (a situation not helped by the problematic tactical assumptions and
police collaboration that saturated much of Occupy).
When people started moving away from the assumption of street actions,
and beyond mass movements (and their imposed, policed pacifism), they
began to focus on isolated acts of property destruction, and approached
property destruction as a primary objective, in isolation of the
tactical effectiveness of these actions in reference to broader tactical
dynamics. Combined with a mentality centered on affectivity, the
subjective desires that lead to action and the affective benefits of
action led to a form of analysis completely separating the dynamics of
the action from the terrain of the action, and totally eviscerating any
ability to even begin to discuss effectiveness. Oddly enough, even
though this approach to action began its trajectory with a rejection of
pacifism, these people came to replicate the exact same structure; their
actions became isolated from their dynamics and context and became
nothing but the manifestation of some concept, some ethical or
subjective imperative. Far from a conscious engagement with insurgency,
action became reduced to some odd politics of complaint, directly
replicating activist complaint, but through the medium of broken glass.
This question is dealt with in the second essay, âBeyond Property
Destruction,â which was released in the summer of 2012 around the
Radical Convergence in Philadelphia.
All of this is an attempt to push tactical discourses and narratives
into a discourse of effectiveness, and this necessarily means a
fundamental shift away from activism and into a mentality grounded in
insurgency, a tactical, immediate, and material confrontation with the
state, or its material possibility, the police. But, to begin to engage
with the materiality of police and policing we need to shift away from a
tendency in radical thought to analyze police based on a
sociological-historical framework, in which spatially and temporally
disparate moments are brought together into a single narrative of the
police as such. When this occurs we obscure the particular dynamics of
police actions in a particular time and space, and fail to have the
discussion of what insurgency and effective action could look like in
that terrain. What is Policing?, a new essay that appears at the end of
this collection, engages this question through a broader discussion of
insurgency and tactical fluidity, the necessity of thinking of police as
a mobile logistics of force attempting to occupy all possible space,
which necessarily fails, leaving gaps in coverage and conflict in its
wake; this conflict and these gaps and the very impossibility of total
policing, and thus the very possibility of insurgency.
Following the main body of the text there are also three appendices that
build off some of the narratives presented in the main text. We Give A
Shit! is an analysis of the actions that occurred during the Pittsburgh
G20 demonstrations, and an analysis of how police logistics were almost
stretched to the point of rupture. This piece began as an internal
document to a single cluster, as a working paper contributing to a
series of wider analyses. âTactical Terrain Analysis: A How-To Guideâ
discusses ways to framework a nu- anced analysis of the terrain
structured through action and policing, and aims to provide some tools
and present some methods that have been used in this sort of analysis in
the past. The final appendix is an introductory reading list for those
who want to move on in this sort of analysis, which I fully encourage.
No single text could possibly fully discuss the nuance and conflict of
tactical terrain and how to understand it: this text is best approached
as one of innumerable possible narratives. The more we engage in this
sort of analysis, the more eyes and ears we bring to it, the more
detailed our analysis can be and the more effective our actions can be.
But, it is not just a conceptual shift that must occur, away from
hypothetical discussions of theory and into a focus on the materiality
of conflict and insurgency, but also a tactical shift, away from the
politics of complaint, even if that complaint is amplified through
breaking stuff, and into a more focused discourse based in effectiveness
and the immediacy of insurgency.
Once again, many of us are finding ourselves in the midst of a tactical
impasse. Following the final gasps of the summit era, and the failures
of Occupy, there is a question of where to go next, but on many levels
this is the wrong question to ask, or rather the wrong plane to engage
the question on. In attempting to depart from the narratives that have
been developed to discuss tactics within radical scenes there is a
tendency to reduce the question of the tactical dynamics that we face to
simple dichotomies and singular scenarios which can have simple and
clear answers, but if we can learn anything about warfare, it is
anything but singular and simple. The following essays trace a possible
line of flight out of this impasse, and a move from a traditional
approach to tactics that we often find within radical scenes to a
fundamentally different way of attempting to understand the immediacy
and materiality of conflict and warfare itself. Specifically, the
following essays are centered around an attempt to address two
fundamental problems in current tactical discourse that prevent us from
engaging in tactical discourse, with an eye toward the immediacy of
struggle and the effectiveness of action.
The first tendency in current tactical discourse that we see is to focus
all discussions of tactics around a separation between violence and
nonviolence, in which the action becomes an isolated site for the
expression of some magnitude of conceptual content; the action becomes
analyzed through conceptual content, rather than effectiveness. As we
see in Gelderloos and others, whether of a pacifist or insurgent
tendency, itâs common to attempt to essen- tialize tactical discourse,
to speak of immediate and material conflict not as a particular dynamic
that can be engaged on the levels of its particularities, but rather as
an attempt to manifest some transcendental conceptual approach. In
pacifist discourse this appears as an odd sort of ethical discourse, in
which the action and its dynamics are reduced to an isolated action that
becomes a manifestation of a certain quantity of ethical content, ie
whether or not the action is more or less ethical. In the rejection of
this tendency, political violence also ends up becoming a mantra of
sorts, and the rejection of nonviolence became a tactical essentialism
in itself, leading to anarchists differentiating ourselves from others
through our focus on political violence (whether this comes in the form
of direct resistance or property destruction). Thus we began to see some
absurd tactical trajectories, from the attempt to pad-up and confront
police directly (even though this is recognized as suicidal), or in the
fetishization of property destruction, which largely occurs in a vacuum
in the middle of the night, outside of concentrations of conflict. The
attempt has become to manifest some form of violent resistance as a way
to reject pacifism.
Now, rejecting pacifism is fine and good. Pacifism implies an arbitrary
definition of action based on arbitrary conceptual definitions, and
consequent limitations on possible actions (as well as the attempt to
police actions... peace police are still police). But building tactical
narratives around this rejection means that tactics began to be
approached as merely a question of the militancy of fighting, and loses
an important aspect of tactical discourse: the dynamics of conflict and
the relationship of these dynamics to effectiveness. This can be seen in
the fetishism of people like Ted Kaczynski and organizations like Deep
Green Resistance; the absurd assumption that the magnitude and force of
an action, taken against places or people reduced to isolated points, is
somehow the next logical step after the rejection of nonviolence. In
this approach, and in many like it, action is reduced to an expression
of the acceptance or rejection of some ethical imperative, the attempt
to manifest some abstract political ideal, or the attempt to act against
âsystemsâ that are understood as inert and unitary, and in this the
dynamics of policing and movement are completely forgotten. What results
is a fetishization of violent resistance, as if the necessity of direct
conflict is something to be celebrated, rather than a regrettable
reality due to historical dynamics. In this attempt to fetishize the
magnitude of action, the sheer force of isolated actions, we fail to
understand why these campaigns (and others based on similar concepts,
like the Weather Underground and Red Army Faction) ultimately failed to
be effective. In reducing the map to inert and isolated points we fail
to understand what constructs these points as convergences in political
or economic circulation, the policing of circulation itself, the
logistics of organized police force that attempts to structure space, a
logistics that is mobile and logistical. When combined with the
evacuation of everyday life that this form of action requires, what we
are left with is an isolated organization engaged in a frontal conflict
with the state, a conflict that small isolated organizations are highly
likely to lose, and that results in increasing isolation from the
dynamics of conflict, and thus from the ability to amplify the conflict
in time and spaceâinstead increasingly resorting to isolated strikes
that are easily contained. At this point we cease even being able to
discuss these organizations in the framework of insurgency, or an
intentional and conflictual engagement with the dynamics of policing;
the isolation and misunderstandings of these tactical dynamics reduces
them to an odd combination of an activist politics of complaint and
gunpowder.
This simplistic question of violence/nonviolence misses the point of
tactical discourse, and comes to obscure the immediacy of tactical
dynamics, removing our discussions of action from the particularities of
the conditions and dynamics of any specific action. In both
tendenciesâapproaching action through the absurdities of pacifism, and
rejecting this through a narrative of action-in-itselfâthe same mistake
is made; tactical dynamics are obscured and effectiveness becomes
impossible to even discuss. We cannot understand conflict separate from
the time and space of this conflict, or separate from the terrain of
conflict, and the ways that conflict can be amplified in space and
policing pushed to the point of rupture, a point also known as
insurrection. In attempting to even posit the question of violence and
nonviolence, transcendental concepts that exist separately from the
immediacy of conflict and effectiveness, come to be the center of the
discussion of tactics, so the discussion ceases to be about tactics or
tactical dynamics, but rather becomes a conceptual discussion of
abstract ethics. In all forms of warfare the tactical dynamics of
conflict exist at a fundamental separation from the ethical questions
that may be asked around these dynamics and the actions one may choose
to take in the midst of warfare. So we have to separate these questions
from one another. Someone may have ethical limitations; these are merely
limitations on the actions that person is willing to perform (and thus
they are a factor in tactical calculation), but cannot restrain tactical
discourses of effectiveness except to the detriment of our ability to
actually fight. To get out of this impasse we are not looking for some
new tactic that everyone can use in all moments, nor some grand strategy
that could be developed: both are impossible. Rather it is a question of
situating the discussion of fighting and warfare in such a way as to
discuss effectiveness at all.
The second tendency is to write about police through a
sociological-historical lens, framed as a discussion of inert and
situationally interchangeable tactics existing in some direct connection
to transcendental political concepts. In radical scenes, much of the
prevailing literature about police exemplify this tendency to discuss
police and policing on a qualitatively conceptual level (as if our
approval or rejection of police ethics has anything to do with police
action), and to frame this discourse around spatially and temporally
disparate events and practices. In this way, we have failed to grasp the
particularity and variance of policing from place to place and time to
time, even within the history of a single department, and even within
the space of a week, a day, or an hour. Policing, if we are to directly
engage with it, cannot be understood in these transcendental and
nonparticular ways, ways that reduce the material dynamics of policing
(as a logistics of conflict that moves through space) to conceptual
questions of approval, disapproval, ethics, and historical forms of
repression. Rather, policing has to be understood on an operational
level, grounded in a particular time and space, and thus on a level that
can inform tactical deployments against policing. If we are to engage in
insurgency, if we are to begin to approach this as a war, rather than as
a pointless activist campaign of complaint, if we are to seize control
of the situation and the conditions of our existences, then this means
coming to terms with the operations of the enemy, and these only occur
in particular and material ways in particular times and places that have
to be understood as such in order to be engaged with effectively. Once
we have made the decision to engage in insurgency, the only remaining
question is tactical, and tactics do not occur in isolation of the
operations of the enemy, but rather in intimate contact and direct
collision with these dynamics.
These two tendencies have resulted in an approach to action in which
discussions of inert principles come into conflict with inert,
conceptual police and policing to form an approach to action that is
completely divorced from any ablility to discuss tactical effectiveness,
and therefore completely unable to discuss insurgency as a material and
immediate conflict with policing. An insurgent approach requires
centering around material effectiveness, and its lack is the point of
generation of our current impasse. To overcome this impasse means
developing a fluid and immediate analysis of the dynamics of conflict
and possible points of effective intervention in these dynamics , and to
develop this as completely separate from the question of how we make
sense of this on a particular level. This means the rejection of both
the concept of some pure, correct analysis of police (that can apply
between moments or between spaces), and of generalized tactics; neither
can be essentialized or made into inert, transcendental concepts.
All of these tendencies have fundamentally prevented any discussion of
the immediacy of conflict and effectiveness within this immediacy,
whether framed within the violence/nonviolence dichotomy or the concept
of grand strategy. All are based on the same tendency to completely
ignore the particularity of tactical dynamics on the ground and the
complete impossibility of making sense of these in some generalized and
true form. In statist military theory a similar dynamic plays itself out
constantly, between fluid understandings of the dynamics of conflict (as
argued through Clausewitz), and attempts to form laws of war (as framed
through Jomini). In the Jominian approach all conflict is reduced to
predictable applications of transcendental rules. Since the advent of
mobile warfare this approach has been catastrophic, since the dynamics
of conflict shift but the understanding of conflict remains static,
leading to an increasing distance between the dynamics and the
understanding of these dynamics. This is not merely a conceptual
question of theory; in dynamic moments there can be no proper theory.
More the problem with Jomin-ian approaches is the fundamental removal of
the discourse of warfare from a discourse on effectiveness, which is
always positioned in a particular time and space constructed with
particular dynamics of conflict. But, just as the military has rejected
Jomin- ianism as unworkable, tendencies in the radical scene to
formalize conflict must collapse as well. We have to come to terms with
the immediacy of the war that we are fighting. And it is a war, a
fundamental and immediate conflict between those we identify as friends
and those we identify as enemies, and until we do so, we will always
remain in our current impasse.
It seems to make sense to begin this discussion of police crowd-control
tactics with a brief discussion of the the history of this Primer, now
in its third edition, and the thought behind assembling a text like this
(for all its limitations). The project grew out of a series of practical
and conceptual concerns relating to some relatively intense street
confrontations between anarchists and police in the mid-2000s in the
Midwest. Through these experiences a couple things became clear. The
first was that street actions can serve as an antagonistic dynamic in
escalating conflict against the police. Secondly, none of us had any
idea of how to make sense of this, channel it, or think through it,
outside of categories of analysis that we had constructed around our own
experiences (many of which were steeped in the limitations of the
discourse of activism). In other words, the enemy was clear, but we had
no idea how to think about it in ways that could point to more effective
actions.
As a result some of us began to compile and study military and police
documents, trading information and discussing the results of our
research. Around this time we came upon US Army Field Manual 3â19.15,
which serves as the basis of this primer. On researching the history and
use of the manual it became clear that it is a distillation of the basic
concepts and frameworks of analysis for police crowd- control
operations, as well as the basis of crowd- control training for National
Guard and police units before summit demonstrations. Beginning in the
late 1960s, collaboration between the military and local police became
more organized and focused, with SWAT teams being developed as a result
of police forces using equipment from military surplus stockpiles and
training from the US Marine Corp. Since then these collaborations have
become commonplace, with most local police departments training in
paramilitary tactics, using automatic weapons and heavy equipment (like
armored personnel carriers), reorganizing of police departments around
military structures, increasing incorporation of combat veterans into
police departments, and the militarization of operational analysis and
theory. We found a significant amount of cross-pollination between
police and military literature on crowd-control tactics, with FM 3â19.15
forming an important point within this matrix.
The first version of the Primer appeared in the middle of 2007, in the
lead-up to the October Rebellion demonstrations in Washington DC, and
was primarily used as a training material to accompany on- the-ground
police crowd-control tactics workshops, presented by some of us at the
National Conference on Organized Resistance in 2006. Since this initial
version the thinking behind the manual has changed dramatically, moving
it from a practical pocket guide to a baseline discussion of the
methodology and frameworks of analysis for police operations. Primary to
this shift has been a move away from an approach to street actions as a
more important site of struggle, or as a unique form of struggle in
itself.
The effectiveness of street actions, in their common form in 21^(st)
Century America, is questionable for a variety of reasons. Firstly,
street actions tend to be planned around events where police are
concentrated to begin with; we tend to default to attempting to take
action in moments where there is some central event, which means police
know about it and will be monitoring it. Usually, though there are
exceptions, these sorts of tactical terrains are not conducive to
effective action; in the calculus of concentrated force we are clearly
at a disadvantage. To the degree that street actions became more and
more effective by 2009, this was to the degree that we used asymmetric
tactics of mobility and speed, a lesson learned after repeated failure.
Secondly, these actions have limited resonance. They are preplanned
confrontations, generally occurring in isolated commercial areas of
major cities. As such, they are easily contained and donât escalate a
conflict beyond the time of the events themselves. Now, this does not
mean that these events are useless, but it is important to understand
the limitations of street actions as currently understood.
The potential of conflict within this context comes merely from the
concentration of action and resistance itself. However, this spatially
concentrated conflict is not necessarily the same as a situation in
which there is numerical mass (such as political demonstrations), and
definitely not limited to situations in which there is some central
event that people want to make a (generally useless) political point
about. At its core, the street action is nothing but a material
collection of events that generate more or less conflict and stretch
police logistics more or less to a point of rupture. During the G20 in
Pittsburgh this point of rupture was hit, with police operations
beginning to lose any semblance of coherence. But given the limited time
frame and the focus on the meetings and talk, the potential opened up in
this rupture was not realized, with the police getting the night and
following morning to reinforce, resupply, and reorganize.
What has remained consistent throughout the development of this Primer
are its potential uses, both practical and theoretical. Practically,
though large scale street actions are not the most conducive terrains
for insurgency, many of us do still find ourselves there. Regardless of
how hard many of us try to move outside of the âmovementâ context, that
context remains a strategic site of intervention; certainly many of us
saw Occupy that way. We also have to remember that street actions, and
police crowd- control tactics, are not limited to demonstration
contexts, but also operate in street riots, sports riots, public events
like block parties, and so on. Theoriti- cally, changing the focus from
just mass street actions into more general police and military
literature and histories, has made clear the reciprocal relationship
between tactics for controlling crowds and tactics and logistical
frameworks deployed on the street on any given day. The question of the
âcrowdâ is merely a question of concentration, but not a difference of
kind. Policing, regardless of the situation, is always the attempt to
project force into all possible spaces in all possible moments. In
situations of concentrated conflict, or potentially concentrated
conflict, the methodologies become more defined, the formations and
structures of force become more concentrated, but the basic frameworks
of police logistics and deployment continue to function along similar
lines. At its core, crowd-control tactics address the fundamental
problematic of all policing operations, the deceleration of conflict in
time and space through a process formed around a deployment of force in
space; it is the attempt to use a deployment of conflict to decelerate
conflict, to use war to generate perpetual peace. Central to this
attempt is the mitigation of uncertainty in the process of operating in
space, attempting to achieve an impossible material certainty of action.
Without being able to operate in all time and space simultaneously
policing, whether in concentrated terrains of conflict (as crowd-control
tactics), or in less concentrated resistant terrain (as everyday tactics
of surveillance and patrol), policing always must project its
operational terrain as far as possible, as consistently as possible.
This becomes infinitely more difficult the more fragmented and resistant
terrain is or becomes. Fragmentation and resistance is caused by the
concentration and speed of action within that terrain. As such,
policing, and this is clear in crowd-control tactics, revolves around
projecting through space, containing action within space, and moving
through space. Without this projection, containment, and movement,
policing ceases to function outside of zones of immediate presence. For
example, if we look at any large police force, break it down by shift,
subtract those with desk jobs, and compare the resulting number to the
space that is policed within the departmentâs jurisdiction, it is easy
to see how spatially limited police actually are. This spatial
limitation is then supplemented by surveillance cameras, patrol routes,
citizen snitch organizations (Neighborhood Watch, auxiliary police,
etc), and informants, to structure a general sense of deterrence. But
for all the money that police departments are given every year, and for
all the fancy equipment that they buy with this money, for all the tacit
and coerced support that they may have, their ability to project is
still incredibly limited. And it is increasingly limited the more
resistance to these operations there is. In order to be able to make
sense of this projection through time and space, and the logistical
movements involved in this projection, policing relies on a certain
legibility and predictability, an ability to see and limit the
possibilities of action within a space. Much of the material presented
in FM 3â19.15, other policing literature, and this Primer centers around
the process police use to make sense of space, and the tactical
operations that may result from this calculus.
It is only when we understand this process of making-legible and the
projection of logistical operations that we can begin to analyze this in
particular moments, and to disrupt this process. Just as in insurgent
operations against counterinsurgency op- erationsâand all policing is a
counterinsurgency operationâthe ability to engage in effective actions
requires an ability to maintain movement, a speed of action, an
understanding of the tactics deployed by police, and the terrain that
this deployment occurs within. But, just as police manuals and
literature can only form a framework for an approach to actual tactical
deployments, all of which are embedded within a particular dynamic of
conflict, this Primer can only exist similarly: a point of departure for
focused analysis of particular tactical terrains. The purpose of this
Primer is to begin a process of developing our own ways of making sense
of this terrain, and in doing so, to plan actions that disrupt the
logistics of the projection of policing, pushing them to a point of
rupture, a point also known as insurrection.
Before we launch into a discussion of how the police make sense of
situational dynamics of conflict and what we can learn from this process
(both oppositionally and directly), we have to discuss how forces may be
dispersed in space, and the possible limitations of forces. Unlike most
other governments, the United States does not possess a formal national
police force tasked with tactical operations. Rather, the American
police terrain is characterized by mission-specific federal forces with
distinct limitations and tasks, supported by a wide array of local,
county, and state-wide bodies that carry out tactical operations
involving physical force. For tactical analysis, this has both
advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, this dispersal of forces,
complete with layers of administrative limitations and fragmented
command structures, makes tactical analysis much more difficult, and
shifts the frame of reference to local operations, local commanders, and
so on. On the other hand, these divisions provide a series of tactical
advantages on the street, allowing for a much more specific, focused
analysis, with a much narrower scope, meaning more detail and
thoroughness.
The following is a brief description of a series of forces that one may
come across in conflictual terrains, some of their limits, and their
scope of responsibility.
FBIâThe Federal Bureau of Investigations primarily exists to investigate
violations of federal law, with their jurisdiction traditionally limited
to the domestic United States. However, this is loosely defined, with
the FBI now investigating overseas as well as gathering intelligence
(specifically regarding domestic resistance movements or groups). This
trajectory was set early on in the history of the Bureau, specifically
under the leadership ofj. Edgar Hoover. The Bureau grew out of the
Bureau of Investigations (founded in the wake of the assassination of
William McKinley) to monitor political radicals. Since its founding in
1932, the FBI has been engaged in subverting political organizations,
entrapping radicals, and sowing internal conflict between various
political groups. Given the scope of the FBI (with over 14,000 agents
and an $8 billion a year budget), and their past activities, we always
have to assume that FBI surveillance is present.
Federal Protective ServiceâThe FPS is currently a part of the Department
of Homeland Security. Their jurisdiction is formally limited to federal
installations, including office buildings, recruitment centers,
courthouses, and so on. Places like Washington DC, dense with federal
installations, have blurry lines ofjurisdiction.
Department of Homeland SecurityâThe DHS was created in November 2002 as
a fusion of roughly two dozen federal agencies. In its current form DHS
is responsible for all federal security operations within the domestic
United States, and includes the Coast Guard, Secret Service, Immigration
and Naturalization Service, Customs, Federal Protective Service,
Transportation Security Administration, and the Federal Law Enforcement
Training Center, among others.
JTTFâThe Joint Terrorism Task Force is an alliance between the feds,
mostly the FBI, and local police, including intelligence work. This
structure, which often operates through local Fusion Centers (offices
organized to gather, analyze and exchange information between agencies),
also serves a role in coordinating operations between agencies. These
structures were created for coordination, but also to preserve the
secrecy of this coordination. Fusion Centers and JTTF consortiums
maintain their own documents, and because their operations do not fall
under any specific entity, there is no body with which to file a request
for the release of documents. This gives these documents de facto
classified status.
Local PoliceâThese are the most common cops that confront us: beat cops,
riot squads, SWAT teams, detectives. Local police are differentiated
from other forces in the following ways. Firstly, they tend to be more
limited in numbers; local police forces usually exist in smaller numbers
than military units. Secondly, they are under local jurisdiction and
operate through local command structures. This means both that the
operational terrain of local police is limited to local administrative
borders (although there are exceptions), and that they have more
consistent engagement with the terrain, both political and social, of a
local area. Thirdly, local police are trained to operate through a
doctrine of escalation of force, and tend to be less well equipped than
National Guard and military units, which are primarily trained for
deadly combat roles.
MilitaryâThe Posse Comitatus Act prevents the US Military from being
used in domestic operations (except for in DC) unless a State of
Insurrection is claimed over an area by the President. The military can
also loan equipment to local and state forces if requested. Such a
request was made during the Rodney King Uprising in LA and for New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The legal barriers have been revised to
only include law enforcement, meaning that US troops can be used for
crowd control as long as they do not make arrests (recently military
police have been spotted at DUI checkpoints in southern California
alongside local cops and highway patrol). For this purpose the 3^(rd)
Infantry Divisionâs 1^(st) Brigade Combat Team (a brigade that will be
20,000 strong by 2011) has been stationed on US territory and trained in
ânon-lethalâ crowd-control techniques. Also, within the District of
Columbia, military units can be mobilized for security operations, and
have even been seen advising DC police in attempts to repress the
October Rebellion demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund
in 2007 (in this case Delta Force was advising police).
Military Intelligence: The Pentagon also maintains its own constellation
of intelligence agencies. The roll of these agencies is supposed to be
limited to the gathering of information for military operations, but
this has been interpreted broadly. These agencies include the following.
The Defense Intelligence Agency: This agency primarily focuses on
terrain research, mapping, and gathering information on particular
oppositional forces. For example, before the Gulf War the DIA assembled
maps of possible bombing targets and intelligence on these targets.
The National Security Agency: The NSA focuses on signals intelligence,
or SIGINT. The agency has grown from engaging in the surveillance of
radio communications to its current role, collecting as much of the
signal traffic that moves through public space as possible, including
cell phone calls and internet traffic. To accomplish this task the NSA
has morphed from an agency with dispersed listening posts to an
apparatus centered around the worldâs most powerful super-computers,
which are used to store, index, and decrypt as much of the
communications traffic circulating globally as they possibly can.
Intelligence Branches: Each branch of the military also maintains their
own intelligence wings that largely serve to collect specific forms of
operational intelligence. For example, intelligence units within the Air
Force largely function to collect information on oppositional air force
structures.
National GuardâWhen the situation escalates the National Guard may be
sent in. This requires the declaration of a state of emergencyâwhich can
be initiated by the governor or requested by a mayor. The National Guard
are state forces operating under state laws, unless they are
federalized, which puts them under national laws. The District of
Columbia, which has no National Guard, can call in a neighboring stateâs
National Guard or use military personnel based in the area, as they did
against the Bonus Army demonstrations in the 1930s.
There are any number of local variances on these force divisions. As
such, we always have to be researching and analysing local tactical
terrain, police operational capacities and methods, and the dispersal of
police forces through localized space. We must remember that insurgency
is always particular to the moment in which it occurs, and is shaped by
these moments. Therefore, for us to engage in an analysis of the
possibilities for disruption and the amplification of conflict in
particular spaces requires an analysis of the terrain where this
engagement occurs. There are innumerable ways to analyze these things;
for a break down of some of the methods and some of the information that
may be important to gather see Appendix 2 (the Tactical Terrain Analysis
Guide).
When attempting to understand police tactics it is fundamental to begin
with understanding terrain analysis. Terrain in this context is not just
physical terrain, but the dynamics of force in physical terrain. There
are many points of departure for terrain analysis, and endless
information that can be gathered about a conflictual terrain. Within the
framework of police crowd-control tactics we begin with an analysis of
the dynamics of conflict in space, which always includes a paradox. On
the one hand, conflict is a dynamic collision of force in space that, by
its very existence, changes the dynamics and terrain. Yet, on the other
hand, this is being made sense of with reference to conceptual
categories that are connected to a calculation of tactical operations
and approach. With this in mind it is important to understand the points
where categorical definitions shift, and the implicit operational shift.
Situation AnalysisâIn analyzing the (potential) dynamics of conflict in
space, this analysis relies on a simple tripartite categorization.
Remember, these are not just conceptual shifts that we are discussing
here, but fundamental categorizations in the process of attempting to
structure police strategy and tactical operations.
The first crowd type is impromptu gatherings, which have no formal or
announced plans to assemble, and which gather through word of mouth. In
this situation the police response tends to focus on monitoring; the
police may begin to position themselves to contain conflict but do not
engage directly. To engage directly runs the risk of escalating or
accelerating conflict.
The second type of crowd is organized, such as political protests or
gatherings that are pre-planned, announced, and accompanied by outreach
materials. This are typified by increased potential of conflict, but not
necessarily by direct resistance. In this situation police will tend to
contain the area, maintain some distance, avoid direct confrontation,
without interrupting the gathering. Again, the point of providing space
is to prevent an escalation and acceleration of conflict that could
result from direct confrontation. The tactical approach may change at
the point where direct resistance begins to organize itself in space, at
which point the goal shift from containment to dispersal.
Crowd DynamicsâAfter monitoring the general dynamics of the gathering,
police analysis will attempt to understand the concentration of people
and conflict in itself, in its particular aspects. As with all aspects
of police crowd-control analysis, this is reduced to a series of
categories that imply a set of tactics. Now, the attempt to analyze a
crowd is difficult. There is a concentration of conflict in space, but
itâs not necessarily dispersed evenly; some groups may be more
intentionally confrontational than others, and this becomes even more
difficult in highly dynamic situations like urban riots or other
situations that are very unpredictable. As always, there is an element
of constancy to these categorizations, even though the dynamics of
conflict can be radically modified almost instantly. It is important to
keep in mind how these categories are assembled. As in the analysis of
âcrowd typesâ there is a dramatic shift that hinges on the presence of
(possible) direct confrontation.
Public Disorder: This is a basic breach of civil order that has the
potential to disrupt the normal flow of things. Permitted protests can
fall into this category. This literally means that something outside of
the ânormâ is occurring, which could characterize any public gathering
of any sort. Again, as with all low intensity scenarios the primary
strategy revolves around attempting to monitor the situation, but to
avoid direct confrontation if possible.
Public Disturbance: A situation that has the potential to escalate. In
this situation people are yelling, chanting, singing, etc. A Disturbance
is separated from Disorder merely through the manifestation of a certain
form of disruption. The Disturbance is a situation that has already been
deemed hostile, and has the possibility to accelerate quickly, while the
Disorder is a situation which merely has the possibility of becoming
hostile. Disorder situations tend to a containment strategy, in which
the situational terrain is contained, limited, and monitored, with the
police positioned to deploy more force if necessary.
Riot: A situation including property destruction, defense against
police, and with the potential to spin out of police control. Riots are
defined as situations in which hostility has crossed over into direct
resistance, or situations that are clearly structured around the
possibility of direct resistance; black blocs for example, are
structured to engage in direct resistance. These immediately become
situations in which the tactical approach is likely to change from
containment to coercive dispersal.
Crowd TypeâGeneral analysis of crowd dynamics is always accompanied by
an attempt to understand the organizational, logistical structure of a
crowd, and thus the approach that will decelerate conflict. Contrary to
the maxim repeated ad nauseum in American media, the primary danger for
the police does not come from highly organized crowds. When a group is
highly organized and relies on this organization, the organization can
be attacked directly and the potential for action will largely disperse.
We see this with hierarchical organizations as well as during many
Occupies, when the loss of parks (as home base) usually spelled the end
of the trajectory of conflict on a local level. Highly organized groups
and networks are easier to read; there is a structure that can be
understood and targeted. This is not the case in dispersed or impromptu
forms of organization and communication. We see this in the ability of
insurgent groups to disappear to the degree that they operate
autonomously.
Casual Crowds: This is the normal gathering that one witnesses every
day, for instance a lunch hour crowd. Each person, or group of people,
comes separately and leaves separately. They have no common agenda. We
should think of this situation as a sort of baseline policed scenario
where police logistics and deterrence functions with maximum efficiency.
Sighting Crowds: These are the crowds that assemble for things like
festivals and sports games, but also events like police brutality
incidents and traffic accidents. They are brought together in one place
by an event or happening. On many levels this is the sort of
concentration that the police fear the most; the dynamics are
unpredictable and potentially volatile. The textbook examples of the
quick escalation of this sort are the Watts Riots, which began after a
group of people gathered around police engaged in a racist traffic stop.
There were always racist traffic stops in Watts, and crowds often
gathered, but for any number of reasons, a series of events that began
with some yelling at the police escalated into days of intense street
riots.
Agitated Crowds: An agitated crowd is a crowd that is starting to
develop a unity beyond an event. This type of crowd is defined by strong
emotions, yelling, screaming, and verbal confrontation with the
authorities. Like sighting crowds, these are thought of as volatile as
well, though more predictable. Police literature makes clear the
mentality based understanding crowds in singular ways, with the agitated
crowd being understood to be upset for some singular unified reason.
Now, this is a fiction. Even if there is common articulation of some
grievance, the ways that this is understood are always particular to
each and every person, in each and every moment. But, within this
assumption, which derives from early 20^(th) century crowd psychology (a
largely discredited discourse), there is an assumption that the crowd is
unitary, and so can be understood through the causes of this agitation.
When approaching potentially conflictual dynamics the posture of the
police will often switch from one of monitoring and non-confrontation to
one of containment. This approach involves controlled uses of force
against specific targets (what are called âleadersâ within police
literature) in the attempt to decelerate the dynamic. Mob-Like Crowds:
Mobs are crowds that have become confrontational in action as well as
(or instead of) just verbally. The categorical shift is marked by
potential resistance becoming actual resistance, or by a predictable
deployment of direct resistance. At this point the tactical posture will
shift from containment to dispersal (whether this dispersal occurs
coercively or through the use of tactics that limit movement, such as
kettlingâ funneling groups into enclosed spaces). The strategy in this
scenario centers around the attempt to completely contain and disperse a
concentration of conflict in such a way that the police can maintain
some level of control over the avenues of escape from the epicenter.
The police assemble a conceptual framework to make sense of any
concentrated conflict in space, framed through the lens of crowd
category, based on what they call Crowd Assessment Questions. The
questions here are from FM 3â19.15, with some analysis by us. Some
things are important to notice about the questions and their implicit
framework. Firstly, the questions themselves are based on intelligence
gathering combined with an understanding of past practices. This, of
course, assumes that there is tactical continuity over time, and that
those who they are attempting to counter are visible, and thus on a
certain level public. Secondly, looking closely at these questions we
notice that they assume a certain form of already regimented political
action, which has a beginning point, an immediate route of movement, and
a determinate end point, none of which is the case in open-ended
insurgency and long-term trajectories of conflict, or in the hit-and-
run tactics common in asymmetric warfare. As such, these questions
assume a crowd that is largely unitary, largely assembled to make some
rhetorical point, and largely linear in tactics. Thirdly, much of this
information is based on intelligence that is unfortunately easy to
gather from cursory searches of the internet and the event outreach
materials themselves. This poses an important problem. Often the idea of
public actions is to attract large numbers of participants, but this
requires doing public outreach, thereby providing important operational
details to the police. Now, this can be avoided through the use of
disinformation campaigns, but these can be hard to organize and require
good communication between various elements of an action. More commonly,
we have to calculate tactics based on publicity coming at the cost of
immediate effectiveness, unless the objective is to just gather large
numbers of people (the question always becomes, and this was the primary
question of the antiwar movement, why we are gathering people, and for
what purpose).
Who is in the crowd? What is the identity of the crowd?
What does the crowd identify as?
Police will determine this information largely from pre-action
intelligence and announcements by the organizers themselves. This is the
first step in how they analyze what the crowd is capable of.
What are the goals of the action?
This helps them determine whether they can try to placate the crowd (for
example, by offering a space to demonstrate in). They call these âgoals
of recognition.â But if the crowd has goals that go beyond a desire to
be seen and heard, then police are more likely to prepare for
confrontations.
What are the factions of the crowd?
They ask this question to develop a landscape of active groups in the
area and use this to decide how to allocate forces and which groups they
will attempt to negotiate or work with.
What are we [the crowd] capable of?
What are our [the crowdâs] traditional behaviors and norms?
This question is important for a couple reasons. Firstly, they want to
figure out how to contain certain groups and with how much force.
Secondly, the information generated in the answer is completely based
off prior actions and experiences.
When and where will we [the crowd] assemble?
Where will we [the crowd] go?
What are possible targets?
What is the âworst case scenarioâ? (often their worst scenario is our
best one)
This question may be the single most important calculation that is made
in forming police strategy. Through determining what the worse possible
scenario may be, all sorts of logistics begin to fall in to place. For
example, this calculation will determine the equipment that they use,
the supplies that they believe necessary to have available, the forces
that will be called in and how they will be arranged in space. During
the G20 in Pittsburgh the police ran out of gas on the first night, one
demonstration of the importance of this metric. This means that the
gasoline supply that they thought would last in the worst possible
scenario over a three day period, was exhausted in around 8 hours; and
this means that the events that happened on that day far exceeded the
worst possible scenario that the police projected.
When and where will we [the crowd] disperse?
What are our [the crowdâs] plans for meet-ups and follow-up actions?
It can never be forgotten that action and conflict occur in a place, as
well as at a time and in a form. All of these together form the terrain.
Variances in terrain play an integral role in the formation of a dynamic
of conflict, sometimes facilitating and sometimes hindering the ability
of police to project through space. Two examples will make this clear.
The first is the Cuban guerrilla war, in which the guerrilla fighters
took advantage of the mountainous terrain of the Sierra Maestra mountain
range to hide their numbers and engage in ambush tactics. Government
forces were forced to move down narrow roads with no escape routes. In
this situation there was no ability for government forces to really
project into this space, except in narrow concentrated columns, which
became more concentrated, and therefore projected through less space, as
attacks increased; this denial of movement was amplified through the
political resistance that was already present in the terrain, and the
history of government absence. This can be contrasted with the Haussman-
nian reconstruction of Paris, between 1853 and 1870, that created the
wide avenues which currently characterize the Parisian city-scape. This
reconstruction involved leveling working class districts in the city
(specifically districts that had been the staging areas for past
insurrections), and replacing them with wide, straight avenues that were
framed by long row buildings. This essentially cut off the remainder of
the neighborhood from the avenue, except through easily controlled
routes between the row buildings. This reconstruction was undertaken
primarily to make the city more easily defensible, both from internal
and external conflict. Internally, the wide avenues were difficult to
barricade off, while the straight lines of sight allowed for greater
range of weapon projection (usually in the form of gunfire, but later
through the shooting of tear gas). Externally, this form of street-scape
allowed for large contingents of government troops to move from
fortresses in the core of the city to the outskirts of the city, and
from forts on the outskirts to the center.
The analysis of terrain in police crowd-control tactics is an on-going
process that occurs on two levels simultaneously. One part includes the
relationship between areas of development, and in what form this
relationship occurs, where the concentrations of development,
production, and commodity circulation are in relation to outlying areas
and so on. The other moves down to street level, to understand the
actual structure of space within concentrations of development, or areas
in which development is less concentrated.
Four categories are used to analyze the relationship between areas of
development, each one implying a different approach.
SatelliteâA central hub supports outlying areas, and includes a
concentration of circulation. The most clear example of this is the
suburban relationship to the city, where the suburbs exist to the degree
that the city functions, and to the degree that commodities and people
can circulate to and from the city. But, this pattern of development can
also be seen around county seats in rural areas, or even resource
extraction sites in generally undeveloped areas like Northern Alaska. In
this sort of pattern the police priority is to maintain patterns of
circulation, necessitating a defense of avenues of movement, with a
specific focus on the core, or central area.
NetworkâAreas are structured not through a single hub, but rather with
direct connections to one another, with each area directly connected to
multiple other areas, and no area being central. For example, the
connections between isolated towns in south-central New York state,
where towns are connected both through the freeway system and also
through state routes, with no relationship of dependency. In this
pattern there may be some areas more economically central than others,
but none of the areas are dependent on the others, and each tends to
develop independent of others. In this pattern the police priority will
be keeping the primary routes open, with the secondary priority of
securing secondary routes (like county routes and so on).
LinearâAreas characterized by a central route between areas of
development, such as state routes and interstates, as well as rivers,
canals, and so on. This is common in flat farming areas, where towns
grew around concentrations of farming operations, and served as places
for farmers to find supplies, as well as to traffic commodities. This
pattern is common in areas like central Ohio, as well as the Great
Plains areas, where a single road may connect dozens of towns, stretched
out along the route. In this sort of pattern the police priority,
obviously, becomes keeping this main route of circulation open.
SegmentâAreas characterized by separation of a single space, or single
site of concentration, into areas that are distinct, but also
geographically connected. The most common example of this pattern is a
major city, is comprised of neighborhoods, each with a distinct history
and set of political dynamics. The segment pattern does not exist in
isolation from other patterns, for example, it is common to see a
discussion of a segmented space that is also the center of a satellite
pattern (this would just be a major city with suburbs). This focuses not
just on routes of transportation and circulation, but more on the
relationships between spaces and how the borders of spaces are
conceived. For example, during the Pittsburgh G20 actions moved through
a series of distinctly segmented areas. Early into the actions the
movement occurred in a largely working class area of Lawrenceville
(where anarchists found a large degree of support), then moved through
Bloomfield and into the border areas between Oakland, East Liberty,
Shadyside, and Bloomfield. These were areas characterized by more open
streets and lower concentrations of people, with much of the space being
commercial, and here the actions sped up and spread out. This eventually
ended in Oakland, the university district, when the riots spread to the
student population (with a history of confrontation with the police
during sports riots), characterized by open areas and wide streets
(facilitating quick movement and providing places for students and
anarchists to gather during the riots, as well as parks to retreat to
when necessary).
Figure C-2. Urban Patterns
From this general structural analysis, the framework of analysis will
become more specific to the actual structure of specific spaces, and the
ways that circulation functions in these spaces. In the attempt to
analyze these specific patterns, police analysis will come to rely on
three categories of spatial structure, framed around street patterns.
RadialâThe area has streets radiating out from a central point. Usually
that central point is the center of religious or political power. This
structure of space allows for easy concentration of force around primary
objectives, such as government buildings and so on, along with wide
avenues of deployment from these points. This pattern tends to exist
within planned cities, specifically capital cities like Washington DC,
and is structured specifically to construct a terrain that is easily
defensible. Within this sort of pattern the primary police tactical
imperative is to protect, and even to stage from, the hubs in this
radial pattern, which is usually the site of government buildings,
commercial concentrations, or open areas like parks. Through controlling
the central hubs police are able to control the routes that spread from
the central hub, allowing them maximum projection from a central point.
GridâStreets in a simple hash pattern, straight lines, simple to follow.
The grid pattern is often found in industrial cities that engage in, or
have engaged in, a heavy volume of shipping. This pattern is widely
characterized by wide open avenues, usually four lanes or more, running
both North-South and East-West, with smaller side streets moving in
straight lines between the avenues. With the wide avenues acting as the
primary arteries of movement, the grid pattern allows police the maximum
amount of visibility, projection of weapon fire, and speed of movement.
These patterns are the easiest to police and to maintain commodity
circulation, which is the primary impetus for this pattern.
IrregularâCharacterized by a generally organic pattern of development,
such as in parts of Pittsburgh or the Latin Quarter in Paris, these
areas have not been subject to standardized street plans. Within these
irregular formations there are often numerous small, narrow side streets
and alleys, streets that bend and wind and a wide variety of terrain and
elevation variance. Within these, the ability of police to move through
space is dramatically limited. Without long lines of sight it becomes
hard to keep actions visible and difficult to move cohesively as a unit.
Without straight streets it becomes difficult to project weapon fire
long distances without hitting structures that may stand at a pivotal
point in the road itself. The tendency of irregular patterns to be
characterized by a network of narrow streets and alleys also makes this
space more conducive to barricades, which limit the movement of police
even more. With the limitations on vision, movement, and weapon
projection, irregular patterns maximize uncertainty of police movement,
limiting their ability to move without concentrating force, which
dramatically limits their ability to project through space.
Figure C-3. Basic Internal Street Patterns
The result of this analysis is the formation of tactical operations, or
strategies for the deployment of police force into space. These
operations are based on the intelligence that police gather before an
event or gathering, as well as information gathered during the event or
gathering. Keep the following in mind. Firstly, the goal of this
constellation of objectives is always to decelerate conflict within
space, eventually dispersing that conflict through space. It is only at
the point of deceleration, dissipation of immediate concentrations of
conflict, that police can also disperse their deployments of force and
begin to project through space again. Secondly, any concentration of
police in a space comes at the cost of being able to project through
space, meaning that gaps are created in police coverage where conflict
can spread. Thirdly, this process of analysis is constant, but involves
a cognitive gap that can be (and has been) exploited in mobile tactical
scenarios. The goal of analysis of the dynamics of conflict is to
achieve what is called topsight, which faces two challenges. The first
is purely cognitive; police forces have an incredible capacity to
collect information, but this information needs to be processed to be of
value in tactical operations. Currently, their ability to gather
information far outpaces their ability to process information. Actions
are mobile and shape the terrain that they occur within, meaning that
the gathering of information (frequently automated) is far faster and
more thorough than the processing of that information (especially when
by humans). The second difficulty is that this information is always
interpreted, generating interpretive gaps. When analyzing information
the analyst is placing this information into a framework developed
before the information was generated, dramatically recontextualizing the
information. These two difficulties prevent either total awareness, or
true analysis, and requires delays; analyzing and making sense of
information takes time, and in this time other events are occurring. For
example, during the early stages of the American war in Afghanistan,
before the main force invasion in November of 2001, Special Forces and
CIA personnel were on the ground, buying off militias, but also
targeting air strikes. In this process an operator would spot a Taliban
vehicle, send the coordinates to a drone that was flying overhead, which
would send them to a satellite, which would send the coordinates to a
base in Saudi Arabia, which would beam orders back through a satellite,
which would send them to a B52 flying in the area which would drop a
bomb, and this process took 18 minutes, at which point the data was
obsolete, and this process was largely automated; this gap widens when
human analysts and communication is involved. But, even with delays, the
conceptual deployment of force takes shape in the form of orders, given
to direct tactical operations. These include the following:
MonitoringâMonitoring operations should be assumed to be the most
prominent form of tactical operation. It serves two primary purposes. Of
course, the first is to gather information, to assess the situation, and
even to probe the crowd to see how they will respond. For example, in
the mid- 2000s when groups would gather in Washington DC, the police
would always walk in to the park to find a âleader,â usually in a team
of two: a large, well trained cop and a commander. The primary purpose
here was not to negotiate with the crowd, but to use this interaction
(along with other forms of surveillance), to assess the level of the
crowdâs hostility to the police, and how willing to fight. From here the
police would determine their approach to the group. Outside of these
probes monitoring occurs through any number of mechanisms including, but
not limited to, aerial monitoring with helicopters; overhead monitoring
from the tops of buildings; monitoring from ground level; infiltrators,
and so on.
The second purpose of monitoring is to discourage and track actions.
On-the-ground monitoring units position themselves in visible spaces,
outside of projectile range (which they put at around 300 feet, or 100
yards), overtly taking pictures and taking notes. It is thought that,
when groups are monitored, they are less prone to hostile action. Now,
this process breaks down when people resisting the police are anonymous,
especially when combined with escape and changing of clothes. When
people do act, and resist the police, the copsâ task shifts to
identification of possible arrest targets. In groups that are not
coordinating dress and hiding identifying markers, this usually occurs
through the recognition of clothing and facial features. In groups that
are being careful, distinguishing features can be minor ones, like the
pattern of the sides of shoes, a tuft of hair that slips out from under
oneâs hoodie, gait, and even height and weight; we would think that this
sort of evidence would be too flimsy to hold up in court, but we would
be mistaken in many cases.
BlockingâThese sorts of tactical operations are structured to deny
access to specific areas or targets. As tactics have become more mobile
over the past decade this has become more and more rare for a very
obvious reason; at the point where police have to concentrate their
numbers and attention to deny access to a certain area or target, they
fail to project across space, generating large gaps in coverage. For
example, during the Quebec City Summit of the Americas in 2001, the
police set up a wide fenced-in perimeter around the convention center.
This held up to repeated attacks on the first day. The police
concentrated at the fence in anticipation of attacks there, and were
largely successful. But after the first day it became clear that the
rest of the city was fair game, either for actions or to use as staging
areas for actions on the protected zone. Police strategy was not able to
cope when the terrain of conflict expanded. Currently, we will see this
tactic used as a forward action in combination with other tactics. For
example, often during marches in Oakland, California[?] the police will
have units trailing a group through the streets, while at the same time
positioning forward units far beyond the front of the group, blocking
specific streets and attempting to contain the group within a certain
area by blocking access to areas outside of the containment zone. This
tactic was also recently seen being used by LAPD against people
demonstrating on the highway against the acquittal of George Zimmerman
in the cold blooded killing of Trayvon Martin; the police blocked many
of the freeway exits in the vicinity and contained the group on the
freeway, eventually moving them off the freeway, up an embankment, then
using more mobile tactics to split the crowd and finally dispersing
people one at a time. One rarely, if ever, sees a pure blocking
operation that is outside of other tactics to contain and disperse
groups, with the blocking operation used only to deny access.
DispersingâThe purpose of all police tactics are to disperse conflict
from concentrated points of collision, but there is a risk involved in
this sort of operation. All police tactics are based on the ability to
have a relatively comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of
conflict in a space, which requires that concentrations of conflict
remain relatively geographically narrow and tactically contained. The
risk of all dispersal operations is the potential expansion of the
terrain of conflict with such speed that conflict can no longer be
contained, and thus become unable to be seen and understood.
As conflict spreads out through terrain, and the speed of action
increases (often in response to police violence), police operations
become more mobile and more dispersed across space, scattering
themselves as well as as antagonistic forces. As we see in countless
studies of asymmetric warfare, this dispersal of police force fragments
their operation, and stretches logistical capacity (especially on the
level of supply and communications), to a point of rupture. We can
clearly see this in the failure of the main force strategy employed by
the US military in Afghanistan; when the main force invaded, and tens of
thousands of soldiers flooded into the country, insurgents just
disappeared by dispersing their forces throughout the terrain. After a
timeâmost place this as between one and two yearsâthese insurgents began
to contact one another again and to launch attacks across a wide and
varied terrain without a necessary front line, largely against supply
lines and patrols. This escalation, combined with the targets and the
variance of the terrain of attack, negated the idea that the US
controlled territory and, when combined with attacks on patrols and
supply lines, forced US forces back to large, heavily defended, forward-
operating bases that they could easily defend. The process of this
retreat created wide gaps in coverage that future attacks were staged
from. What is important about this example is to understand that it was
not any one attack, or even the combination of all the attacks, that
forced this retreat; it was that each attack pointed to a gap in
coverage that was being exploited that, combined with the speed and
variance of the terrain of attack, collapsed the ability of US forces to
trust their own operational understanding of their terrain, forcing them
into a defensive position. In other words, these attacks created vast
uncertainty, which prevented the US from understanding the terrain
thoroughly enough to plan operations.
Given the ability of uncontained dispersal to disrupt the entire
analytic apparatus of the police hierarchy, dispersal operations are
usually taken with extreme care. As is described in FM 3â19.15 and other
police literature, dispersal can only occur efficiently within a wider
containment operation, in which police force is spaced out across a
terrain to channel and contain the movement of people away from a
concentration of conflict. This is one of the primary differences
between European and American police tactics. In the US police tend to
contain large areas, like an entire downtown area, blocking access to
certain areas. creating a perimeter around a concentration of conflict
to contain that area in the case of movement or dispersal. Weapons like
tear gas are only used when the police have to disperse a group quickly,
or to push groups in certain directions, as we saw during the riots in
the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh during the G20 (tear gas was used
to push students and anarchists rioting on Forbes Ave away from the
commercial district). In contrast, European police, with the exception
of Germany, traditionally use access-denial and dispersal tactics
(although this is changing as more and more American police advisers
train EU police), in which projectile weapons are used to disperse
crowds quickly, without much focus on containing the areas of conflict.
This style can be seen in studies of the Poll Tax Riots.
ContainingâThese operations always exist in a relationship with
dispersal tactics, through the attempt to generate contained dispersal.
In situations of physical containment police set a perimeter that
isolates an area that more or less conforms to the borders of a terrain
of conflict. To do this police may use kettling, where groups are
surrounded and immobilized en masse, to decelerate the movement,
expansion, and speed of conflict in a space. Tight containment tactics
like these have an inherent fundamental problem. Initially, this tactic
can only be deployed if conflict is already geographically limited to a
narrow area, such as a march. But when the zone of conflict is
contained, increasing containment concentrates too much conflict in a
space, which usually generates attacks on the police lines that prevent
movement as well as on targets within the zone of containment. When
wider zones of containment are constructed police will space themselves
out, denying access to specific areas, usually closing in on the
perimeter as conflict disperses as they sweep the area. For example,
during the Spring 2009 IMF and World Bank demonstrations in Washington
DC, through the use of concealment, disinformation, and mobile tactics,
the police were forced to sweep the entire downtown area to make sure
that no concealed groups went undetected. This required dispersing force
around downtown, covering all streets within the containment zone,
starting on the edges of downtown and slowly tightening the perimeter
until they had contained all conflictual elements in a tight ring near
the perimeter fence and delegate checkpoints.
In containment operations the central dynamic revolves around the
relationship between force concentration and force projection. To
attempt to contain a wide perimeter, force has to be dispersed to
maximize projection, but this makes each unit able to mobilize less
force and less support. To attempt to contain a narrow area, force is
concentrated, but this means that less space can be contained. As one
can see in studies of mobile tactics, by widening the terrain of
conflict and maintaining mobility one can prevent concentrations of
opposing forces and stretch the logistics of opposing forces to the
point where units can become isolated, supply lines broken, and
communication cut.
To coordinate forces across space the police will often rely on
formations, or choreographed structures of force in space. There are
advantages but also shortcomings to this approach. On the one hand,
proximity of forces allows police to concentrate force in space,
effective when dispersing concentrated conflict in geographically narrow
spaces, or when protecting single targets. We can see what occurs when
formations are used to clear wide spaces if we look at footage from the
Chicago Democratic Convention protests in 1968; with a relatively, by
todayâs standards, small contingent, the police attempted to clear an
area wider than their formations. Formations collapsed as police chased
individual demonstrators. Formations function to the degree that they
stay coherent, limiting the amount of space that they can project
through. Also, we have to keep in mind that formations tend to function
in close proximity to a target area, rather than at distance. With
distance between a group and police formations the police have to rely
on forms of projection other than physical projection of units through
space. Usually they resort to the use of projectile weapons.
Formations consist of a variety of elements, not always apparent, that
coordinate movement between units, develop strategic approaches, and
maintain supply and communications. These elements consist of the
following.
BaseâWhat most people think of when they hear âpolice formationsâ is the
base element, which comprises the front lines of any police formation.
These can be police in lines on foot, with the first line for direct
confrontation and the second line (made up of team leaders) to relay
commands and fire projectile weapons. Remember though, that this base
element does not operate in isolation, including command hierarchy,
reinforcement elements, and supply lines. Failure to understand this has
led to the tactic by (usually inexperienced) American anarchists of
frontal charges on police lines; even if a line is broken the logistics
are not disorganized, and support is still present. It is true that,
with few exceptions, most force deployment will come directly from this
element. But focusing solely on the base element loses the wider context
of police operations and movements.
SupportâThis element fills in for base element police that need to be
replaced, performs extraction/ snatches, and provides general support.
The primary support elements tend to maintain a presence in immediate
proximity to, though not immediately engaged within, a terrain of
conflict. This allows them to quicker response times, including the
ability to organize targeted arrest operations, snatch squads, immediate
supply and logistical support, or immediate relief of units that may
need rotation or back-up.
CommandâIn modern policing tactics, with the proliferation of
computerized communications, the Command Elements tend to stay within a
command center structure, usually in a safe zone away from the primary
sites of engagement. This element serves to collect and process
information about the dynamics of this specific conflict and to disperse
orders back to the base and support elements in the field. Police
logistics rely on this relaying and processing of information. If that
process is cut, police logistics undergoes a profound crisis. For
example, most of American air strike tactics are completely based on
this concept, framed within a doctrine called Parallel Strike, in which
the primary targets of an air campaign consist of command and control
centers, radio transmitters, and radar sites. Successfully hitting these
targets blinds and deafens the opposing force, rendering them unable to
coordinate and plan operational responses. By targeting and fragmenting
the logistical support structure and severing base units from command,
the opposing force becomes critically disorganized.
Reserve SupportâNot technically part of the formation but readt to join
the formation if needed. Unlike Support Elements, Reserve Support
Elements are held back, usually maintaining a presence at some distance
from the primary points of engagement. This has a variety of
implications. Firstly, Reserve Support Elements can be difficult to
factor in to an immediate tactical calculus; their numbers and presence
are hidden. Secondly, their distance from the conflict means that they
can be used for a variety of roles, including supply and communications.
The use of concentrated military formations dates back to ancient
warfare. In the absence of electronic communications, units had to be
kept close to receive oral or visual commands. Since that time the
formation has taken on a different purpose, only being deployed in
situations of concentrated and geographically limited conflict to be
able to bring a concentration of force. We often see formations carried
out by single squads but, in situations where more space needs to be
secured or more force needs to be concentrated, formations can include
entire platoons, which are comprised of a number of squads. Diagrams and
force breakdowns for an average platoon follow these descriptions.
Formations generally fall into the following categories. LineâOne or two
ranks of police lined up shoulder to shoulder. This formation is mainly
used to clear and hold space in general. The line is a mostly defensive
formation which attempts to hold space; if it operates offensively it is
to clear space in general, rather than to secure specific locations.
EchelonâAn offensive diagonal line, used to push people away from a
certain location and toward locations desired by police. The point
person goes in the direction of the target and when the line reaches the
target it either becomes defensive or pushes forward and clears the
area. Unlike a pure line formation, which is a primarily defensive
formation meant to hold space, the echelon is a hybrid, beginning its
deployment in an offensive role, moving to secure an individual target
(rather than securing a space), and then moving to clear the immediate
area around the target (switching from an offensive to defensive role).
The echelon is structured to move through space toward a particular
objective, and to secure the objective, rather than to prevent movement
or to hold space.
WedgeâPrimarily deployed to split crowds into segments. In the United
States we often see this formation deployed with the use of vehicles,
specifically motorcycles and patrol cars. The police form a V, with the
point of the V leading, to drive into the middle of a space, splitting
the crowd into smaller and smaller groups.
DiamondâThe diamond is both offensive and defensive. Offensively, it is
used to enter crowds and is the formation most used by extraction teams/
snatch squads. Defensively, this formation is used when all-around
security is needed. This formation allows police to create a 360 degree
perimeter, with all sides of the formation secured. In an offensive
capacity, when moving through resistant terrain, this formation prevents
the possibility of being attacked from behind, while defensively it
allows for the securing of specific zones, even if these zones are
surrounded by resistant terrain. The trade-off of formations like this
is that, in the concentration of numbers to provide 360 degree
visibility and security, the formation can move or occupy less space.
CircularâSimilar to diamond formation except the rounded edges (or lack
of edges) allow some flow between the corners of a street for instance.
It is a way to have 360 degree vision without blocking the space
entirely.
The police communicate through a series of verbal cues, which can be
overheard when close enough, and nonverbal cues, which can be seen if
utilized, from a distance. Non-verbal commands either emphasize or
substitute for verbal commands. The team or squad leader will walk out
in front of, or to the side of, the other police in the squad and give
non-verbal signal that can include some of the following.
Raise both arms from the sides until they are horizontal. The aims and
hands should be extended with the palms down.
Extend one arm 45* above the horizontal and the other 45â below the
horizontal. The arms and hands should be extended. The upper arm shows
the direction of the echelon when the commander faces the troops.
Extend both arms downward and to the sides at a 45 ° angle. The arms and
hands should be extended with the palms down and in.
Extend both arms above the head. Bend the elbows slightly, and touch the
fingertips together.
Give the diamond signal. Then give a circular motion with the right
hand.
Figure 6â4. Hand-and-Arm Signals
In recent events a new signal has been noticed in Oakland and Los
Angeles, California. The signal is for an advance preceded by a volley
of weapons fire. In LA the movement forward was preceded with volleys of
rubber bullets. It looks like the following signal, from the US Army
Visual Signals Guide, except that the hand is held open and extended
forward at a 45 degree angle (yes, like a Nazi salute)
Raise the fist to the shoulder; thrust the fist upward to the full
extent of the arm and back to shoulder level; do this rapidly several
times.
Figure 2â33. INCREASE SPEED, DOUBLE TIME, or RUSH
Two other non-verbal signals are worth noting here.
An extraction team is a team from the support element that moves into
the crowd and makes a targeted arrest. Sometimes this is done as a way
to disperse a crowd or to eliminate instigators. When an extraction team
is forming you will notice police gathering behind the front line. This
is often followed by the pointing out of targets for extraction. The
squad leader of the extraction team, once the squad is organized, will
stick his hands between the arms of two police and say âOpenâ. The
police that were tapped will open like a double door and the extraction
team will run out into the crowd. An extraction team looks like this:
Figure 6â5. Extraction Team Formation
Police also have a signal for firing a what they call a less-than-lethal
weapon. The officer properly equipped to fire a specific type of
weaponry will walk up behind two front line cops and tap them on their
inside shoulder. After they are tapped they go to one knee and put their
shields up. The weapons operator then fires the weapon over their
shoulder. If people in the crowd see weapons being prepared, they should
leave the area.
In crowd control there are two ways that the police will address
concentration of conflict, each its own limits and tactical
opportunities. Firstly, as has been seen throughout the past decade, the
police will concentrate incredible amounts of force to maintain an
advantage. It is not that they are ready for total deployment, or a
scenario in which all units are engaged simultaneously; the situation is
verging on the disastrous for them if total deployment becomes
necessary. Rather, the forces mobilized is an attempt to cope with
contingencies, and to maintain (regardless of the concentration of
conflict at any point) the ability to move forces as necessary. This
concentration involves a sacrifice of the ability to maximize the amount
of space covered however, because conflict has to stay contained in
order to be able to adjust operations to the dynamics of action.
We see this in the shift of US military operational strategy into, and
recently out of, counterinsurgency operations. Counterinsurgency (like
crowd control) implies the ability to totally occupy space, covering
every moment and space necessary to decelerate conflict. However,
counterinsurgency approaches require that more police are concentrated
in certain spaces, usually inhabited spaces, to maintain operational
coherence and a force mobilization advantage. But this limits the space
that can be occupied, which allows fringe spaces to escape police
operations. In the recent shift into counterterrorism operations
(characterized by decreasing physical occupations of space and
increasing targeted raids and drone strike operations) the amount of
space that can be covered is maximized, but the consistency of this
coverage and the ability to concentrate force in space is almost
entirely eliminated. This clearly points to some of the tactical
problems raised by the assumption of mass street action, (when we
concentrate numbers the police can easily identify and concentrate force
at that point), and also reinforces the importance of movement and speed
when one does not have an advantage on the level of force (often the
case in insurgency).
Secondly, the approaches used in crowd-control situations require a
containment of the terrain of conflict. While concentrating force allows
police to concentrate numbers at a specific point, as the manual
discusses in relation to dispersal, this exists in a paradoxical
relationship with the attempt to decelerate conflict. If conflict
disperses through space, if the terrain of action expands faster than it
can be contained, then concentrating force at a point becomes
detrimental to the attempt to decelerate conflict on the street. Action
will simply spread to where the police are not. Therefore, while they
attempt to disperse conflict and decelerate it through the fragmentation
of the dynamic, losing control over the lines of flight and avenues of
movement prevents them from being able to contain this conflict to
certain zones. So, they have to balance the tendency toward
confrontation and dispersal against the need to contain and limit
movement. Unfortunately, we often contain and limit ourselves. Our
tendency to move in large groups in confined spaces, let alone to
announce actions before hand (or even to rely on coordinated actions),
makes us more legible, spatially limited, and containable.
The ability to concentrate force and contain conflict in space requires
topsight: a comprehensive view of the total terrain of conflict. There
are all sorts of means to generate and maintain topsight, different ways
to scout: helicopters, surveillance cameras, informants, and so on. We
can see the importance of intelligence in the crowd assessment
questions, which all are attempting to organize and categorize
information gathered about potential actions. Without the ability to
delineate potential zones of action, people who may take action, and the
actions that these people tend to take, the police have no way to
understand where to concentrate force. This is one of the aspects of
asymmetric warfare that is emphasized in almost all literature on
insurgency, insurgencies function to the degree that they can maintain a
certain form of invisibility, only appearing in situations where
tactical advantage can be generated, such as in the ambush. Similar
dynamics play themselves out here, or in any dynamic between insurgency
and policing; without the ability to âseeâ insurgency, without the
public manifestations of insurgency, the announced actions, identifiable
groups, normative tactics and targets and so on, police deployment
occurs with a certain blindness.
Now, we must be careful not to reduce this into some sort of âlaw of
warâ; such laws are paradoxical and impossible, one cannot formalize
forms of action within tactical dynamics which are all particular and
dynamic. Rather, what becomes clear is that there is an inverse
relationship between visibility/ identifiability and the ability to
operate outside of police containment. The failure in taking this
dynamic into account can be seen in both mass movement mentalities and
in the form of the underground urban guerrilla. In the mass movement the
tendency toward maximum visibility, created in an ill-conceived attempt
to generate maximum âsupport,â which is understood as an end in itself,
the mass movement becomes easily containable, easily monitored and, as a
result, easily predictable. At the other extreme is the underground
group, in the mold of the Red Army Faction, which removes itself from
the dynamics of conflict on the street entirely, and ends up fighting a
contained frontal struggle between the organization and the police. In
the definition of the organization as the privileged site of struggle,
as the vanguardist force, conflict becomes contained within the
organization, and only deployed by the organization, generating a
certain visibility merely in its definability as an organization that
maintains some material presence, in the form of supply chains, safe
houses and modes of operation.
The ability to act and disappear, to move through space silently and to
manifest when the advantage presents itself does not mean that public
actions are to be completely ignored. The use of crowd cover, or the use
of the crowd as a form of concealment, as we can see with actions in
Chile, where anarchists will conceal themselves in a wider crowd and
wait for the time to attack, can offer certain opportunities for action.
But, this form of action functions to the degree that the framework of
the action itself can be broken out of, or that the actions taken
generate a trajectory of conflict that multiplies spatially and can
mobilize enough force to cause conflict, perpetuated through the
reactions of the police, to amplify. However, this is also not to say
that we have to default into the framework of mass action, as is often
the case in radical circles. The mass action is public, identifiable and
easily contained, with large numbers gathered in finite spaces. Often,
the ability to maintain concealment provides the ability to act in
situations where we can take advantage of surprise or a lack of
concentrated police force, but at the risk of isolating the action and
limiting the potential amplification of conflict. Increasingly it is
clear that the same dynamics play themselves out in virtual acts of
disruption, hacking, Distributed Denial Of Service attacks and so on, as
well.
There are numerous ways that topsight can be disrupted and police
operations lose their offensive or pro-active posture, an effect of an
opacity of terrains of struggle. When police movement through space is
limited their ability to maintain confrontational pressure, or to
intervene in the dynamics of conflict, becomes greatly limited. In the
multiplication of movement through space, the proliferation of actions,
acceleration in the speed of action, and the multiplication of terrains
of action inhibit their sense of what is going on, fragments their
ability to plan and deploy strategic operations within their hierarchy.
This means that they have to constantly reassess, which generates crisis
for their force coherence, communications, supply, and strategy.
However, there is no universal formula that we can offer here, only
frameworks that we can develop to make sense of the actions that we take
and the effectiveness of these actions.
We cannot work through this calculus in isolation. As much as we can
learn from reading crowd- control literature, this only provides a
framework through which to understand wider dynamics of policing and
insurgency. Any number of other aspects of a situation have to be
accounted for, including local police structure and tactics, the actual
moment of action and the dynamics that may surround this moment, the
possible effects of acting against specific targets, and the potential
reaction by the police, as well as innumerable variables that construct
the local terrain of action. Without these specifics we are reduced to
calculating actions that may be taken based on other, non-tactical,
concerns, which are generally irrelevant to the material effects of
action. For example, if we think of an event through the lens of
âputting our ideas into actionâ the possibilities of action become
limited by the definitions of âour ideas,â and effectiveness is
calculated in reference to the degree that we think that these ideas
were manifested in particular moments. This is, in itself impossible,
and is a completely separate question from that of effectiveness. By
measuring actions in this way the actual discussion of tactical
effectiveness, or the calculation of whether material objectives were
met, is entirely obscured, and action is reduced to a Quixotic attempt
to âchange the world,â without actually engaging in a material dynamic
at all. We wonder why tactical discourse is almost absent from radical
circles, we wonder why the same frameworks of action are repeated over
and over again, with different results expected; this all centers around
the hesitancy, or outright resistance to any discussion of the material
effectiveness of action, outside of the lofty reasons that many have to
fight.
Assessing tactical dynamics is how we make sense of specific actions and
possibilities, but the attempt to make sense and the actual actions can
never be fused into a singular narrative, unless someone out there knows
some form of absolute truth. So, we cannot discuss something like
ethicsâthe primary category at the center of the absurdly false
dichotomy between violence and nonviolenceâas determinate of material
tactical deployments, without limiting the kinds of actions we can
imagine. Tactical dynamics are amoral, arational, particular dynamics of
conflict, and effectiveness is the accomplishment of objectives within
this dynamic of profound uncertainty and resistance. Fusing ideas and
action together is always already impossible: analysis generates a space
that becomes inert while tactical dynamics are always in flux in all
moments, making both strategy and tactics impossible to think in direct
and total ways. The most that we can do is try to make sense of these
dynamics in increasingly effective ways, ways that facilitate the
achievement of material objectives. This requires an approach referred
to as operational theory. Neither strategyâ impossible to project
through time, nor tactical the- oryâthe attempt to think particular
tactical dynamics in generalized conceptual forms, operational theory is
the attempt to think action in conflict through an analysis centered on
the dynamics of action, rather than through the lens of conceptual
qualitative categories, So, it creates an analytic space between the
conceptualization of strategy and the immediacy of tactics. The ways
that we make sense of these dynamics is part of understanding how we can
think of action within that dynamic. But at the point where these ways
of making sense become plans, grand strategies, theoretical definitions,
and rigid understandings of tactics, the deployment of action within
that dynamic becomes limited, actions become easily defined and
containable, and topsight by the police becomes that much easier to
generate and maintain. Insurgency is always a material dynamic, and we
will only be able to get beyond the current tactical impasse that many
of us feel to the degree that we embrace the materiality of struggle and
focus on acting based on careful attention to the actual dynamics of
conflict in a particular terrain in a particular moment.
All politics is against the police â Jacques Ranciere
There have been some remarkably disruptive actions of property
destruction in the last series of years. This is a welcome shift away
from the aimless people dressed in black marching in circles, away from
crowds that rely on numerical concentration in a specific space, away
from the island effect (where a group at the front becomes isolated and
boxed in because the rest of the crowd has dispersed due to some minor
police threat). The streets of Athens, London, Pittsburgh, Santa Cruz,
Asheville, Oakland, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Toronto (among othersâthe
list grows daily) have been littered with broken glass and barricaded
with burning dumpsters (or cop cars). But beyond the immediate
appropriation by the media spectacle and the payday for plate glass
companies, something remains lacking. From the obsession with âriot
pornâ to the images produced to explain or call for actions, this
reliance on property destruction, both as a tactic and indicator of
success, has moved from being a tactic, to a fetish, a trap that we have
not yet been able to move away from. Maybe it is the militant rejection
of nonviolence coupled with instances of overwhelming police force,
leaving property destruction as the simplest direct yet low risk
alternative to actual conflict. But regardless, we need to move away
from this tactic, this concept of a certain tactical necessity, and
beyond property destruction.
Property destruction can be remarkably disruptive, especially when
thereâs lots of it, but it has come to exist as some sort of abstract
anarchist threat in a reactionary politics of consequences. Every time a
city announces a summit, out go the calls to action, the grandstanding
starts, the hype builds, and the security apparatus is put in place to
âmaintain order.â The script has played itself out, without apparent end
or even acknowledgement that we have been down this path before. So,
this discussion of where to go tends to fall into a series of ridiculous
dichotomies: direct action, community organizing (as if there is a
separation), or the endless violence or nonviolence debate (as if
concepts can ever speak of particular tactical terrains). In this
collapse into dichotomy we have lost the purpose of the discussion: what
we are doing and how it is, or is not, effective. In other words, in the
swirling conversations about concepts and definitions what gets lost are
tactics, action, material tactical situations. It is not as simple as
saying that property destruction is the logical surpassing of
nonviolence. We need to look at tactics and to remove them from the
conceptualizations of politics that we have all become so fond of.
This is far from a call for a return to mass movements or the
large-scale parades of the antiwar movement (as well attended as they
were ineffective). It is about seeing beyond this dead end of mass
actions and the shattered windows that sometimes result. In other words,
these tactics are exactly that; tactical deployments into space,
deployments with effects that change tactical terrains. It is not a
question of the affectivity of property destruction or how riots
constitute our subjectivity, or something like that; this is merely a
question of the material dynamics of conflict. When we look at these
instances of concentrated property destruction, or even the isolated
attack in the middle of the night, we must see not the action itself but
rather the tactical medium that it exists in and as a part of. This
focus on property destruction has tended to come from two mutually
reinforcing perspectives. On the one hand, property destruction is
spoken of affectively, as something that feels appropriate to those who
carry out the actions. On the other hand, property destruction and its
fetishization tend to focus attention on the act itself, as if any
action has some inherent meaning outside of the terrain and medium that
it exists within.
This focus on affectivity, the idea that an action is carried out for
the affective results, exists as an attempt to isolate actions, to speak
of the action in itself, while marginalizing the action in some attempt
to proliferate subjectivities. In order for this sort of analysis to
carry through, the action has to be first isolated as a space that
generates results separate from the dynamics that the actions exists
within, and then analyzed in relation to this affective result (and
apart from any other material results). This occurs in all attempts to
generate essentialist concepts of certain sorts of actions, whether in
the form of nonviolence or of fetishized property destruction. This
conceptualization of tactical actions begins with the generation of some
transcendental imperative, a concept held as true, in which the action
in itself becomes an expression. As in all concepts of ethics, the
action is reduced to a conceptual object, a sort of constancy that can
be applied between moments, and is then analyzed as such, in isolation
from the particularity of the dynamics that the action occurs within and
the terrain that the action generates in its effects. In other words,
what occurs, at the point of treating actions as something with a
specified, legible, result, is that the action becomes isolated from
history (from the dynamics of conflict that construct its possibility),
and then judged through some transcendental lens, in this case the lens
of abstracted affective profit. But this isolation, in order to obtain
some profit or gain in the amount of possible subjective manifestations,
is just another form of isolating action from the context that it is a
result of and that it produces. It seems odd how much some of this
rhetoric surrounding affectivity (especially among the more
hipsterly-inclined among us), begins to resemble early capitalist
arguments about the importance of material profit: the action is
isolated as carrying transcendental value, which benefits an isolated
producer. Now, this does not mean that we should reject any analysis of
affec- tivity, rather we need to understand the co-immanence[1], the
necessary relation between the affective and the effective. In other
words, there are no actions that in themselves exist purely affectively,
there is always an effect, and with that effect a consequent
construction of other particular moments.
Action exists as a manifestation of one of various possibilities present
at any moment and has effects; that is, it participates in the
construction of other possibilities. Put another way, there is no action
that is not necessarily external, that does not project a certain
existence into the world, and on that level there is no way to separate
the affective from the effective; affective results from effects. In the
fundamental shift in the dynamics of terrain, new, inconceivable,
unpredictable dynamics will result, new possibilities will become
apparent, and the entire terrain is constructed in a particular way in
each moment. This occurs with any action; the effects of any action will
fundamentally rupture the dynamics that existed before the action
occurred. In other words, due to the inherent connection between the
affective and the effective, predicting the affectivity of an action,
planning affective actions, is impossi- bile. There is just no way to
sit in a room and determine the possible effects, the shifts in the
terrain of action that we call a world, before an action is taken. All
that we can do is conceptualize possibilities, but always in necessarily
inaccurate ways. And, because no action exists completely internally, no
action is completely affective, all action implies effect and thus a
reconstruction of the entirety of the terrain of existence in the very
truth of its occurrence as something that had not occurred before.
Nothing can exist as more or less affective, all moments are singular as
what they are, they are all moments that have never occurred before and
will never occur again, and as such we cannot understand the affective
as a quantity that produces subjectivities (especially because the act
of production also necessarily has an effect, but that is a minor point
here). The affective is not a quantity; comparisons of quantity imply
the ability to compare moments which in themselves are fundamentally
particular, and its co-immanence with the effective, or the tactical,
necessarily means first, that all action exists as one trajectory of
affect/effect within a innumerable series of actions (or everything that
has ever occurred) and trajectories that come into conflict in the
tactical medium. Also, this very conflict, this collision of
trajectories, makes the future indeterminable and that the conflict
itself, the unfulfilled trajectory of affect/effect, is what constructs
what we call the world. To go back to something Patton said, following
Clausewitz, âno battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.â In
other words, theoretical attempts to isolate affectivity, to predict
affective consequences, may not be wrong in the absolute conceptual
sense, but it is impossible. We project the theoretical within this
smooth context devoid of actions and affect/effect, devoid of conflict,
devoid of the unfulfilled; but the moment any action occurs the very
context that was theorized is already obsolete, the theoretical and the
material necessarily exist at a division across a wide gap, an infinite
distance between concept and moment, as Blanchot would argue.
Now I do not want to reject the affective consequences of direct action.
Going on missions, smashing bank windows, taking out surveillance
cameras, building barricades, running through streets, has a large
affective result for a lot of people. For some of us who grew up in
places that elevated property to the status of the sacred, destroying
property is a way to break free from that culturally imposed limit. For
those of us who grew up in places where there was very little property
to fetishize, destroying banks and fighting cops exists as an outlet for
the rage that we had always felt about the positions that we had been
relegated to from birth. It was a way to get over the fear that the
police had instilled in us from a very young age when they rolled up on
us, searched us, walked into our classrooms to pull people out for
questioning, beat us for minor infractions and then dropped us off
without being arrested (because arrest would entail explanation), the
killings in cold blood, the criminalization of our youth, the friends
locked in the dungeons of America; for us it was about finding a
catharsis, a way to fight, a way to feel powerful in a world that
constantly beat us down. But often this discourse of affectivity tends
to focus on only the âpositiveâ or âempoweringâ aspects of property
destruction and fails to deal with the trauma, the mental affects that
this has had on a lot of us who have been in serious situations. (This
has a lot to do with the inattention that trauma gets in our community,
but that is a topic for another essay.)
This focus on affectivity is a result of and reinforces a certain theory
of isolation. To focus on the affective in action to the exclusion of
the coimmanence with the effective, is only possible through a dual
isolation, the isolation of agents and the isolation of actions. The
focus on the affective exists within a focus on subjectivity. We all
love the Situationists, but they made this same error. While recognizing
that our actions can cause wider destabilizations, the purpose of these
destabilizations became about the manifestation of some subjective
desires. Now, I am not rejecting the existence of a certain sense of the
subjective, rather I argue that we need to reject the separation of this
so-called subjectivity from some form of objectivity. In other words, we
need to reject the basic error of the Enlightenment, which is the
separation of the subjective from the objective, the individual from the
totality of our existences, the self from history. It is an error that
permeates Kant and Hegel and that has crept in to this discourse of
affectivity. To focus on the subjective to the exclusion of effects, or
of the external and tactical, is to isolate our existence into the
perpetuation of some form of the individual, to isolate ourselves from
the very conditions and possibilities of our existences. Not only is
that the same move replicated in all capitalist discourse (the isolated
producer who owns property, implying exclusion as well as use), it is
also the generation of a subject who cannot speak, who has no context
for words, no way to make sense of things, no way to actually experience
phenomenon, all of which imply an externality.
In this isolation of agents there is also a co- immanent isolation of
actions. We tend to see single smashed windows, or even instances of
large scale property destruction, as actions in themselves, as if they
have meaning in themselves. Theory only exists as a way to make sense of
the world, it cannot actually describe moments that always exist as
singular, unrepeatable, unreplicatable. In other words, all actions are
possible due to the dynamics of everything that has ever occurred, yet
that totality of actions is inaccessible in a moment and particular to
that moment, while the attempt to construct conceptual understandings of
moments implies some sort of constancy across moments. Theory is the
impossible attempt to chain moments together, to generate concepts from
some notion of a constancy of actions. It forgets that describing a
moment, all the dynamics that led to the manifestation of a certain
possibility, all the possible meanings, all the moments that have ever
occurred, is impossible from the positionality of theory as something
that occurs at a particular time and place; the theoretical requires
transcendence that in itself is impossibile. To put it another way, acts
of property destruction in themselves are meaningless, all actions are
materially meaningless. Not that they do not have effects, but rather
that there is no way to theorize about the affect/effect of an action or
moment isolated from the totality of history that led to that moment and
there is no way to make sense of history in any way that is not just
more or less persuasive speculation.
Yet, this fetishization of property destruction as an action in itself
is the attempt to do just that. When we isolate actions from the
totality of history that led to the possibility of that action itself in
order to make sense of the action itself, we ignore the relevence of the
context that the action exists within, the terrain of conflict that
constructs possibility, the effects that action has in the construction
of history, or the dynamics of the the tactical medium itself. This is
just a really long way to say that we need to see beyond single actions,
beyond single windows, beyond single streets isolated by the tactical
medium that made these moments possible. In all instances of property
destruction another phenomenon is presenting itself, one that we need to
be able to see and analyze, if only speculatively. Rather than seeing
single actions outside of the dynamics that they exist within, we need
to look at tactical mediums as a dynamic, as a conflict and collision.
When we look at the burning of cop cars in Toronto, the smashing of
shopping districts in Santa Cruz and Asheville, the riots that broke out
in Pittsburgh, the property destruction around Oakland after the verdict
in the Oscar Grant case, we see one commonality. In each of these
instances, and in innumerable other sites of unrest globally, beyond the
property destruction, beyond the taking of streets, beyond the
barricades, these events were possibile because of the disruption of
police coverage, the disruption of the ability of police to suppress
conflict, to close gaps in coverage and projection, to police as a
material totality. What we are witnessing is not the result of any one
action, any one window, but the result of a disorganization of the
ability of the cops to define territory and situations, a break down
that is always possible if we only take a moment to analyze police
tactics through a certain lens, a lens of immediacy, of the immediate
material operations of policing itself.
Again, this is not a rejection of the legitimacy of property destruction
nor is this an attempt to discourage property destructionâwhatever
choices people make in actions are the choices they make. Rather, this
is a rejection of the attempt to systematize property destruction by
only focusing on this one gap in police coverage, to only see the gap as
an opportunity to break stuff, rather than as a disruption of the very
logistical capacity of police to project through space, a disruption
that can be expanded and amplified. In other words, when we separate the
gap from the dynamics that create these gaps we lose the resonance
amplified by conflict and destabilization (an amplification that
implicates the stateâs functioning on larger levels as well) and instead
we take actions as isolated opportunities. What many seem to have been
forgotten is that insurrection is not a fulfillment of some conceptual
conditions, but an immediate and material rupture in the attempt of
police to maintain operational coherence.
There has been a lot of discussion about a Plan B: abandoning instances
of conflict with the police to go elsewhere to exploit gaps in coverage
to engage in property destruction. The concept underlying Plan B, that
attacks and actions should be occurring outside of concentrations of
conflict, is sound. It is based in the necessity of the crisis in
policing, the impossibility of a totality of policing. But, rather than
seeing the gaps in police coverageâthe impossibility of total
policingâas something that can be amplified, Plan B takes these gaps as
âthe best we can do,â as something to be exploited by single actions
that can be easily mediated and repaired. It begins from the assumption
that we are already defeated, that no new possibilities are able to be
generated, that the situation is totally defined, and then entrenches
this notion of defeat in our actions and the way we imagine our tactical
possibilities. Because, really, what is the importance of broken glass,
how much existential weight does a smashed ATM screen carry? What we
need to see is that even isolated attacks, when frequent, are important
to the degree that they stretch police logistics to the breaking point,
to the point of rupture. They are not imperatives in themselves, or do
they carry some essential conceptual weight on their own. We need to
look beyond the isolation of moments imposed by the thinking underlying
Plan B. This rejection of Plan B is not in favor of some âPlan A,â but
an attempt to take the thing that Plan B recog- nizesâwhich is that
there is always a necessary gap in police coverage, that policing exists
as a dynamic in crisisâand amplify this crisis rather than accepting it
as static, something outside of our engagement, that only opens the way
for isolated actions. Until we analyze policing as an operation in
constant crisis we are doomed to minor attacks (that leave almost no
marks mere hours later), locked within a strategy of defeat.
War is the province of chance.
In no other sphere of human activity must such margin be left for this
intruder.
âKarl von Clausewitz
When we look at police it is all too easy to see the riot shields, the
armored personnel carriers, the tear gas, and the lock-step formations
and forget that the police operate within a certain paradox, a certain
impossibility. When we are on the streets it is easy to see the cops as
some mechanistic force, marching to orders, and we forget that they
themselves move, that these actions exist within a dynamic terrain of
conflict. To move outside of the context of viewing policing in
mechanistic forms is not an attempt to âhumanizeâ police, to make them
into people with feelings. The very basic reality of policing itself is
that the police exist as a logistical form of organization that attempts
to accomplish the impossible.
Like our friends that demand that theory can speak of the world itself,
that it is directly applicable, the cops exist in the vain attempt to
organize space and to channel possibility to manifest some abstract
theoretical principle, the construction of their own materially
impossible coherence as well as the unity of time and space in the very
operations of policing. In the construction of police logistics a
certain coherence is relied upon, in which moments can find some
connectionâeven though this implied connection rejects the particularity
of these moments, how they exist in particular ways, with particular
dynamics, in particular times and spaces. Authorities have constructed
all sorts of mechanisms to force some sort of coherence into police
logistics, but cannot overcome the material particularity of actions,
which always demonstrates this coherence as mythological and logistical,
at best.
The state itself exists as a theoretical principleâ the idea of the
nation as a unit, the idea that law can express some truth or operate
with immanence, the idea that those who construct laws could possibly
represent others. The state is something that is created partially
through paper, in constitutions, in theory books. There have been a lot
of really fascist theory books written, there have been a lot of
attempts to generate some all-knowing theoretical principle that defines
life itself; these are problematic enough. But what we need to
understand is that the state, though formed around certain notions of
the world, does not exist on paper. Rather the state is the logistical
attempt to make concepts manifest materially, to manipulate the concept
of unity in a materially total way, as an immediate and material form.
In other words, the state itself does not exist without the attempt to
structure the material possibilities of our lives, to construct
immanence in the moments that are our existence; it cannot exist without
conceptualizing all change, all life, all contingency, within certain
defined limits that attempt to transcend the theoretical and become
material. Not only must the state project theoretical principles
(whether these are laws or ârevolutionary principlesâ does not matter)
into the future and across all space, particular momentary existences,
and all moments from the moment of construction, butâ barring the state
leaving the material world suddenly and becoming the âkingdom of godââit
must do so at every moment, moments that are increasingly divergent from
the moment of conception. Put another way, the state is a constant
operation, a constant attempt to channel the dynamics of everyday life
into the models generated by politicians, to make some constancy of
moments operate in spite of the singularity and particularity of moments
themselves. Theory is just not enough to accomplish this task.
Regardless of how bought-off the average American may be, they still
interpret this form of agreement through a particular series of
circumstances and experiences, in a particular way that changes
momentarily.
To cross this gap, to make the theoretical operate, requires a
logistical form of organization: the police. To put this another way, it
is not that the state is not at base a conceptual construction, itâs
just not one that can be grouped into the categories that we have
generated to understand political history. It is not that that the
United States is a liberal democracy, it is that the United States is a
conceptual construction based on a unitary concept of time and space, in
that it constructs its own reality, which exists in wildly divergent
ways in different spaces and at different times. The United States
exists as what it is now, a conceptual coherence existing at a distance
from the attempt at coherent operation, not as some expression of a
certain reality constructed in times gone by by rich white men. Rather,
it is that the ideological allegiance claimed by the state itself,
though it can serve to set a series of abstract limits to the stateâs
operation (we have elections periodically, for example, and courts), is
in itself largely inconsequential. To put this another way, the question
is not the âwhat,â the attempt to conceptually define the state
conceptually (which implies a materially impossible coherence and
differentiation); rather, the question is âhow,â a question of tactical
operation in the impossible attempt to overcome the infinite distance
between transcendental concept and materially particular moments.
When we think of the state we must not think of a political operation,
an operation borne of an absence of conflict. It is, instead, the
attempt to operate as a totality in a constantly shifting tactical
medium constructed through conflict and a collision of many dynamics of
action projected into space. It is the mobilization of politics, the
dynamics of conflict in space, to end politics, to construct a unity of
time and space that can only exist in a terrain devoid of conflict. In
this the state is always utopian, and utopia always implies the
construction of absolute unity and the end of all conflict. To say this
another way, the state is not, at its most basic, a political reality.
Rather it is a logistical policing operation that attempts to avert
conflict, that attempts to be the end of politics itself. For many of us
this is clear in the post-Cold War age (hell, Francis Fukuyama wrote The
End of History and the Last Man about this end of politics). But we need
to see beyond the historical moment of the manifestation, or increasing
apparent success, of this attempt to end politics and understand that
the very possibility of this move lies in the basis of the state itself.
This may all seem like so much hot theoretical air, but the point is
that when we speak of the state it makes no sense to talk of policies.
Rather we need to see policies (and politicians) as nothing but certain
appropriations of an attempt to operate a conceptual âunity,â
materially, in a constantly shifting tactical medium, through constant
policing. Concepts of law, citizenship, and so on attempt to define
existence, regardless of the particularities of time and space in
moments, as a singular unityâwhich in itself is impossible. Policing is
the attempt to operate a logistics of force to construct this unity, but
this requires a total operation in all moments simultaneously. A
constant operation is waged every day to operate a coherence of the
operations of the State in a moment. This, by the very fact that it is
constructed by actions that are constantly generating different
possibilities, is in itself necessarily particular in each moment.
Regardless of the structure of unity that policing is an attempt to
construct, this can only function in different, particular ways in each
and every action taken by each and every cop in each and every moment,
and never, even in itself, as a unity. The state is a logistical
phenomenon, one that exists in a state of constant crisis. It is
impossible to transcribe the theoretical, the legal, the ideological,
onto the material. This material attempt to construct the state in a
momentâto at once define existence in the theoretical-legal while at the
same time encompassing and defining innumerable constantly shifting
particular manifestationsâthe attempt to logistically operate this
definition materially, is at once both occurring (police function in
time and space), while at the same time impossible. For all the attempts
to construct the unity of time and space, moments can never be defined
in their totality; for all the attempts to construct the coherence of
police logistics, these logistics fails to operate in a unified way; for
all the attempts to project policing into every moment, they can only
cover so much ground.
What this all points to is a certain impossibility of the state, an
impossibility that shows itself in the constant crisis of its logistical
operations, and the tactical possibilities (and lack of them) that this
crisis generates. Policing, the attempt to make the state material, is
also a vision of a logistics in constant crisis, one that is dealing
with a dual impossibility. On the one hand, there is no possibility of
total policing spatially and mathematically. If policing were total,
then the very differentiation of âpoliceâ would be an impossibility; the
state would always already be an actual material immanence, and our
existences would collapse into irrelevancy. To the degree that the
police manifest through a separation, between police and non-police,
this totality remains always already impossible. So, if we take the many
thousands of cops that were brought out in Pittsburgh for the G20âor the
50,000 that they are mobilizing for the G20 in Seoul, South Koreaâand
stick them side by side, they cover very little space. If we add all the
fancy toys and vehicles that they use, they cover a little more space,
but not much. And these mobilizations include much larger numbers than
in normal days when summits are not in town. If we space these numbers
out across a major city their coverage begins to look rather weak. This
all indicates that the police need to operate through projection. They
need to project themselves across space in order to amplify the
effectiveness of these numbers. To help with this they use, among other
things, communications and vehicular transportation. In other words, the
police are a logistical operation in constant movement, in constant
motion, and they rely on the ability to move through space, either
materially or virtually, in order to construct operational coherence.
This projection is also amplified through the use of snitches, stings,
undercovers, and informants, to destroy our ability to trust our space
and those around us. They stick cameras up at intersections and in what
they call âtroubled neighborhoods,â with big flashing lights on top, to
give off the impression that we are being watched. When we see it this
way, we begin to see the police not as an institution but as a
logistical operation in constant motion that is attempting to construct
the territory that we live in, the tactical medium of conflict and
resistance. As we see in the 21^(st) Century metropolis, criss-crossed
by its overlapping networks of surveillance, the structure of space
impacts police operations as much as police operations shape the
dynamics of space. If they were relying on force and physical presence
in itself, they would quickly lose control; instead they attempt to
project themselves through space to operate a certain, conceptual,
tactical terrain. What this means is that, regardless of the fear that
cops strike into the hearts of many, there are always gaps, there is
always crisis.
The second impossibility of policing is all the more glaring in light of
the first. It is not that we can just look at the problems with this
logistical operation numerically, it is that this numerical limitation
implies the inability to project across all space simultaneously, all
the time, and therefore requires movement, action, which in itself
generates conflict and modifies the dynamics of terrain, and thus the
dynamics of operation. The police have developed all sorts of ways to
amplify their projection through preparing the ground, so to speak. So
much time and resources are spent by police departments every year on
DARE programs, Neighborhood Watch, and auxiliary programs, all to
amplify this projection; and this does not even mention the more sublime
weapons: the tear gas, helicopters, and now sound weapons that are meant
to be projections of force over vast areas in the literal sense rather
than just potentially or metaphorically. The attempt to operate a
material unity, which assumes an elimination of conflict in space (a
total peace), comes to operate through organizing conflict. In order for
the police to operate they must mobilize the very dynamic that they are
trying to operate coherently and without internal conflict, action
itself. As already mentioned, the very necessity of all action, all
moments, is that through action contingency and possibility are
generated affectively/effectively. New possibilities are generated, new
things occur that have never occurred before. The totality of history,
the entirety of the collisions of everything that has ever occurred in
any one moment is now a different totality, even in something as simple
as a breath.
So the tactical medium in which action is carried out is a constantly
shifting phenomenon. For the police to function with any coherence, they
attempt to âunify,â operate, and define these moments; to chain them to
other moments, to construct some form of coherent and constant discourse
of moments that functions materially. It is not in the theoretical that
the issue arisesâall theory takes on this transcendent mode, and
constructs a sort of consistent totality. Rather, it arises in the
attempt to bridge this gap from the theoretical to the material, from a
notion of sense to manifesting materially and totally. At the moment of
operation the very actions that are mobilized to bridge this gap from
the theoretical to the material (or from the strategic to the tactical),
end up generating contingencies, shifting the tactical medium, and
generating the very destabilization that the police are organized to
prevent. In other words, the point here is not our value judgements, not
our individual opinions of the actions of the police, the way they
violate our humanity, their use of force. Rather, what is at issue is
that the very attempt to logistically operate policing is in itself
paradoxical, impossible; the very operation itself is one that always
attempts to mediate the very internal crisis that it generates in its
own operation. In other words, rather than seeing police as a static
form of military organization, we need to see the magnitude of the
paradox. To function as pure policing, a policing that realizes some
form of âpure policingâ (in which the state through policing applies
totally and defines all moments), circumstance could never change, all
moments would be defined by the operation of policing, and policing
itself would be some inert total form of existence. In order for them to
maintain order they could never act because all action unleashes
conflict into the tactical terrain that the organization of policing is
mobilized to prevent. In the very fact that policing does act, in the
very fact that action occurs to the degree that it does, in infinite
ways at all moments, the very operation of policing must be one that
always is in motion and thus an operation that is always causing a
crisis in its own mobilization. It is this impossibility that leads to
the material impossibilities of policing (the mathematical gaps that
always must persist, combined with the paradoxical attempt to use action
to cease action) that really makes politics possible. If politics itself
is a conflict (a collision between innumerable desires and the
possibilities of action), then the very operation of policing can only
operate cryogenically, in the impossible attempt to cease this motion
while at the same time amplifying it, through its very operation. The
impossibility of pure policing is the impossibility of the philosophical
becoming material, of moments becoming defined within a total unity of
time and space. It is not that they donât try to realize the âpromises
of philosophy,â it is that the very attempt implies a fascist attempt to
define life itself. This attempt to materialize the philosophical found
expression in the Terror and the gulag, one organized around concepts of
virtue and the other around concepts of the revolutionary. This is the
mistake of radical movements that always exists on the horizon. We see
this ambition in all the great tyrants, from Robespierre to Lenin, from
your local police captain to the president, the goal is always the same:
âto fulfill the intentions of nature and the destiny of man, realize the
promises of philosophyâ (Robespierre).
Because the police exist as a logistical organization always in crisis,
the basic categories of analysis that we have been using, those of
victory and defeat, are outmoded. The very category of victory (how many
hours have been devoted to talking about âwhat victory looks likeâ) is
an impossibility. To claim victory implies that at some moment all
action has ceased, that there is a static situation in place that can be
termed victorious. But just as for the police, victory is impossible.
Rather than victory we need to be thinking of movement, of speed, of the
multiplication of possibilities. In other words, the logistical
organization of the police is not an object to be defeated, rather it is
an operation that, in the very constancy of crisis, can be disorganized
and rendered increasingly inoperable. Defeat would mean the end of all
options, the complete total end of action itself. But as we have
mentioned at length, the very operation of the police generates
possibilities in its attempt to eliminate possibility; it creates
contingency in the constant security operation meant to define
situations.
This means that there is never a tactical dead end, there are always
other options, other possibilities, to the degree that we stop seeing
the police as an institution that can control single actions, to the
degree that we stop seeing our actions as singular and begin to think of
this conflict as a fluid tactical medium. The real fallacy of Plan B is
not even so much that it entrenches defeat (although it does), but that
it operates within the categories of victory and defeat. Plan B-based
tactical thinking entrenches the idea that we are already defeated in
our attempts to be âvictoriousâ over police and then comes around to
saying that our defeat can be mitigated by opening up other planes of
conflict only to the degree that the police are absent. In this
approach, in this form of tactical essentialism, in which all tactical
moments somehow become common and understandable through singular
conceptual frameworks, the terrain of action itself becomes some inert
totality, and we fail to identify the tactical points of convergence and
possibility as they manifest in particular moments. We need to see
beyond these categories of victory and defeat and see the proliferation
of possibilities in front of us all the time. Until we do this we are
doomed to thinking the police are stronger than we are, and to
entrenching this defeat in approaches that further construct our
position as being defeated.
Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with
insecurity is the only security.
-John Allen Paulos
As we mentioned earlier, the impossibility of policing numerically and
tactically means that the police must operate through projection. This
means not just that they need to operate and move quickly, both in
communication and logistics, but also that, as a movement, they require
absence of interference to function. Every person on the street who
calls the cops, everyone who gives them information, all the snitches
and informants, all the cameras, are minor compared to the effect of
organizing space through âself-controlâ. Not only do police project
themselves spatially in a material way but the crux of their ability to
construct space, their ability to operate in non-resistant spaces, is a
product of their projection: not where they are, but their ability to
project anywhere. In the most concrete terms possible, it is not that
people do not shoplift because there is a cop in every store but that
the notion of being able to shoplift is made difficult by the
possibility of arrest, by the possible projection of police into a space
where they are not within or apparent. However, as much as this
deterrent effect, this ability to project through space, may seem total,
it is not. Otherwise the police would not need to function, let alone be
armed. All spaces, all times, all terrains present their own particular
resistances, from the potholes in the streets to the tendency of many to
have a deep hatred and resentment toward the policeâlet alone when
certain terrains present much more concentrated resistance. And all of
these resistances to police movement disrupt their ability to project.
This conflict in space, combined with the conflict from the effects of
police action, generates a crisis for the coherence of police
operations.
To think of crisis as something that occurs only episodically is to
think that at some moment there is a condition in which a catastrophic
collapse is not possible, in which moments are actually determined and
defined existentially, in which policing functions totally; this can
never be the case unless we assume that policing has structured some
metaphysical truth of some sort or another. As such, we cannot just look
at crisis as something that can occur, or consequently goes through
periods where it does not occur. The mistake that works like Nihilist
Communism makes is assuming that because a situation does not seem to be
in crisis, that it is stabilized in a complete and metaphysical way,
that there are no other possibilities. In other words, and to use an
argument from Capital (Volume 1), it is not that abstract value actually
functions, rather it must be inscribed over moments constantly; in
itself it is an impossibility. To say that crisis is ever eliminated,
that there are periods of crisis and periods of non-crisis, is to make
the assumption that concepts actually come to be joined with and define
moments and objects. It is not that crisis exists or does not exist.
Rather it is that crisis is perpetual in the attempt to actualize the
philosophical, to operate any unity of moments across time and space.
Instead of seeing crisis as only existing in some moments and not
others, we need to embrace the impossibility of philosophy becoming
actualized and treat crisis as something with magnitude, as generating
more or less resistant mediums of operation, or tactical mediums that
become disruptive to the point of disorganizing policingâs attempt to
logistically materialize definitions.
Policing develops logistical structures around the capacity to contain
this crisis, to prevent it from taking on such power that the semblance
of coherence ruptures, due to either internal or external factors.
Policing therefore cannot be understood as something to defeat, but
rather as a projection to disrupt and disorganize, a crisis that can be
amplified to the point where their capacity is exceeded. This capacity
is not just material (the number of vehicles and personnel that can be
mobilized) but the ability to mediate contingency, to operate
logistically, to define territory according to strategy. That capacity,
as the ability to logistically project across time and space, allows
them to deal with the crisis implicit in the operation of policing. When
that capacity is exceeded the police are reduced to nothing but a
physical force that operates in direct physical contact, responding to
situations without being able to either define the limits of movement or
space, unable to project coherent force, unable to maintain a coherence
of operations, reduced to nothing but isolated individual units
separated from their logistical network. This is what we call rupture;
it is the disorganization of the logistics of policing and the policing
of logistics. We should not understand rupture as some privileged
historical moment, yet another metaphor for Revolution. Rather rupture
exists fluidly and alongside space where projection can operate, as a
concentration of conflict in space, particular to a space and terrain.
But it is these ruptures, these gaps in coverage where projection ceases
to operate, that can be expanded and amplified.
What the act of property destruction recognizes is this gap in coverage,
this space, either through direct resistance, fluid movement through
space, or logistical incapacities that actions can deploy from or into.
But, in limiting our imagination to the exploitation of this gap for a
single action, rather than tactically amplifying these gaps, the real
importance of these gaps, of this crisis, is missed. It is not that we
are looking at an inert map, with some spaces covered and others not. We
want to exploit that to attempt to cover these gaps, police have to
engage in logistical shifts, stretching their resources even further,
creating more gaps that have to be covered. It is in this that policing
logistics become stretched, that their capacity is exhausted, that
crisis amplifies, and rupture occurs; it is this point of rupture that
is called insurrection. Each and every thing that occurs, each breathe,
each step, each person leaving a building or crossing a street, each
conversation, generates a new contingency and a series of possibilities
that police logistics have to compensate for in order to maintain their
projections, and this ability to cope with and mitigate the
possibilities generated through basic, banal, everyday actions is
limited. Each act of property destruction gives them something else to
respond to, each barricade disrupts their ability to project through
space, each action amplifies the crisis that is always present,
especially in spaces where pacified self-control does not operate
totally. The police are constantly disorganized, there is no actual
logistical coherence, only the occasional ability to contain crisis; it
is just a matter of whether this time they have the capacity to project
or reinscribe themselves into space. This is why they patrol constantly,
why they stand on sidewalks, why they use overwhelming brutality: all
attempts to amplify this projection, to operate in the face of their own
uncertainty.
In a story about the Greek insurrection in 2008 an anarchist said that
they knew the insurrectionary events had resonance when they realized
that old ladies were smoking cigarettes on the train and telling the
cops who came to stop them to âfuck off!â In other words, the
insurrection had resonance because, long after the windows were
replaced, long after the streets were cleared of the burned-out
carcasses of cars, the ability of the police to project themselves
through space, the ability of the state to operate logistically, was
still disrupted. And in this disruption people inhabited the space to
realize new possibilities, even if that only meant that people smoked
with impunity on the subway.
In every action that occurs there are effects, and in these effects the
terrain of action shifts, disrupting the ability of the police to
maintain a coherence of operation. This infinite distance between the
dynamics of action in space and the ability of police to gather
information, interpret this information, and generate operations becomes
even wider when action is accelerated, and when actions occur in
concentration. We can clearly see this in the riot, where the spatial
and conflictual amplification of action can quickly overwhelm police
logisticsânot because these logistics are attacked directly (although
this can contribute to rupture)âbut because the terrain of conflict can
get dense so quickly that there is no ability to mount a coordinated
response. Property destruction actions cause points in the constellation
of response, that the police can compensate for, that are easily
containable as single points in isolation; the police show up, the
window frame is boarded, and the window replaced in a short period of
time. In this containability these strikes fail to generate an
amplification of conflict which can overwhelm and disorganize police
logistics, but it does not have to be this way. The isolation of the act
of property destruction comes from the tendency to analyze the
action-in-itself, the isolated action. This analysis removes property
destruction from the dynamics of action and conflict that surround these
actions, preventing both the process of targeting actions for maximum
effectiveness, and understanding this effectiveness in reference to the
dynamics of policing and resistance in that space. As an action,
property destruction can be a form of amplification, but this means
moving beyond the tendency to think of the action-in-itself, or in terms
of affectivity (the tendency to explain away the lack of tactical
thought through claiming that the act of destruction is some act of
desire). We can do better, but only to the degree that we move away from
conceptual understandings of philosophical conflicts. This requires a
simple shift in the way that action is thought, away from the idea of
the isolated action taken for conceptual reasons, and into a sober,
material analysis of the dynamics of conflict and policing where they
occur, when they occur, and how they occur.
If we fail to do this, we will continue to be locked into this faulty
concept that actions become more and more radical or effective to the
degree that they become more materially destructive, a mentality that
pervades organizations like Deep Green Resistanceâreducing all terrain
to a collection of inert infrastructural points. In this approach the
action is isolated from its dynamics, and we fail to even engage in a
discussion of effective action. When effectiveness becomes obscured all
that we can do is engage in isolated actions, with the vain hope that
something will result from them. Actions are always external and
externalizing, moving into a space outside of the physical confines of a
particular existence and having effects in this external space; action
is not about the self, but rather about what exists outside, as a
dynamic between things. It is this dynamic between things that is the
plane of operation of the police, structured around attempting to
regulate the movement of people through space, the actions that can be
taken, and the dynamics that can form. But, insurgency is also a product
of this space, the point in the dynamics of space where this space
becomes so resistant that policing becomes impossible. This does not
occur by focusing discussions of actions on abstract threats and
personal affirmation. It is not a question of means, property
destruction, direct action, and so on, but of how these means are
thought, and on what level they are able to have a resonant effect in an
immediate material situation.
The movement of time is guaranteed by the birth of generation after
generation, a never-ending succession that fills the gods with fear
âMikhail Bakhtin
The fetishization of property destruction makes various serious errors,
but two are primary. First, it relegates action to isolated times and
spaces. When we focus on individual broken windows, or spaces of
concentrated destruction, we fail to see the tactical terrain that made
this space possible, the amplification of the constant crisis in
policing that generated this possibility. Instead, we relegate action to
isolated points in a vacuum, separated from the tactical medium. We need
to understand that property destruction has a space, but it is not in
riot porn videos on Youtube. Property destruction exists as one of many
means to amplify the crisis in policing, to generate space for more
actions to occur which further amplify this crisis to the point of
rupture, the point of disorganization. But we need to understand this
rupture, this disorganization, not as an end but as the possibility of
possibility itself, as a beginning. But, we must be clear,
disorganization is not some goal, something to be thought in itself as a
conceptual ideal, but rather is a constant movement that makes policing
impossible and severs the state from any possibility of manifestation.
Fetishization of property destruction has taken these gaps in coverage,
the crisis in policing, for granted. It has squandered them on actions
that only exist in isolated moments, that begin and end with the swing
of a crowbar rather than understanding the broken window as something
that amplifies, as something that disorganizes, or has resonance.
Property destruction can be used tactically, as a generation of another
point of response and as a a potential amplification of crisis, but only
to the degree that we can move beyond the fetishization of property
destruction, the focus on the action itself in a vacuum, and begin to
understand it as a potentially effective action that is taken in
reference to its effectiveness.
As was mentioned earlier, we must get beyond the notions of âvictoryâ
and âdefeat,â but this requires us to challenge another categorical
mythology handed down to us from the trajectory of traditional politics:
the myth that movements in themselves accomplish anything directly. We
have to dispel the notion that anarchists are the movement, that we
directly construct the new world. This trap has led us down the road of
traditional politics too often, into the trap of defining moments and
enacting theory. If we learn anything from the gulags, the massacres,
and the numerous other failures of the radical project, it should be
that once we go down this road of defining moments, the moment we go
beyond understanding our role as anything but being another disruption
to the functioning of the state, then we come to replicate the
impossibilities that have plagued all politics, the arrogance of
disregarding the basic fact that theory exists at a divide from the
material. Once we forget that we come to replicate the police. It is not
that we ourselves cannot have politics, it is not that we cannot take
positions (on one level all insurgency is an attempt to encourage a
density of positions and possibilities that can enter into conflict).
Rather, we should not be so arrogant as to assume that those are
something other than attempts to make sense of the world. It is not
about the operation of theory, which is really nothing but an opinion
from a particular point of view, but about generating the possibility of
possibility; of generating the possibility of politics itself through
the disorganization of the police.
Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the
aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization
of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for
legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of
distribution and legitiza- tion another name. I propose to call it the
police.
âJacques Ranciere, Dis-agreement
Insurgency, an intentional engagement in social war, is always an
immediate and material dynamic. It is a series of actions with effects
in immediate moments in time and space, within a particular convergence
of the dynamics of history, but we would never be able to grasp this by
listening to our activist friends and the ways that resistance is spoken
about in those circles. Listening to movement rhetoric, we are
transported to a world where metaproblems exist, where political
passions and concepts of true speech somehow mean something in
themselves, where the interests of the movement mean more than taking
materially effective action. A feedback loop builds: they talk to one
another about the reasons they resist, and the conceptual frameworks
that justify certain actions, but never about the actual dynamics of
resistance, or the terrain in which one fights. In this discourse two
questions are fused together: one involving the actual dynamics of
action and history and the other how we conceptually make sense of this
in more or less consistent, but still arbitrary, ways. Rather than this
odd sort of meta-analysis, which prevents us from engaging in a way to
understand and impact the operation of the state, we must start to ask
questions of operation, the inscription of concepts, or policies (which
are just conceptual), into time and space (rather than concepts like
ethics and political desire). It requires an approach to action that
starts from a sober reading of the dynamics of operation, the moments in
which operation occurs, and the structuring of space. To engage with the
dynamics of resistance, of fighting and thus of warfare, means to
separate these questions of events and the ways that we make sense of
events in a conceptual sense, to analyze action on the level of
immediacy, and to take action based on this concept of the immediate. In
this analysis there is no purpose in complaining about corporate
immorality; it is only necessary to understand the operation of land
enclosure, private property, the operations of economics and imposed
scarcityâin short, the administrative and material possibility of
capitalism itself, as a conceptual content that is then operated by the
state, through policing. This means fundamentally shifting the way we
understand what we fight against, the imposition of certain unities and
concepts of unity into everyday life through a material operation. Or,
in other words, the state.
The state always already only exists as a concept in a unitary sense,
and thus as an impossibility. In the concept of the state there is an
attempt to construct a constancy of particular moments, a permanence of
impermanence. This is not where the problem arises. On this level the
state is nothing but one of innumerable manifestations of the
impossibility of philosophy, the attempt to speak of particular
phenomena, and the moments these occur through transcendental and
qualitative concepts. The paradox is this: the state occurs, yet the
conceptual structure of the state prevents anything from occurring. The
conceptual framework defines time and space as a sameness, as inert
space in which all objects and actions are isolated and infused with
this conceptual content; people are citizens or not, actions are illegal
or not. The action becomes removed from itself, the possibilities of
existence become removed from themselves, but this means nothing if it
only exists in the realm of particular concepts that are constructed by
particular people. The question of the state is not a question of the
concept of the state, it is nothing but another manifestation of the
impossibility of speaking truth, and just as arbitrary as any other
conceptual apparatus. The question must shift; it must be a question,
not of the concept,[2] but of the attempt to take a particular conceptâ
thought in a particular way by a particular person in a particular
momentâand project this concept as a universal definition of existence
and the possibilities of existence totally and materially. For these
concepts to manifest entails a paradox. Particular actions have to be
taken in particular moments, yet with the intention of depriving moments
of this particularity and defining them through the framework of a
material conceptual totality; particular things must occur, even though
these things are impossible within the conceptual totality of the state.
This projection must be material, even though the conceptual framework
eschews all materiality; it must attempt to manifest this totality, even
though this operation only occurs through particular actions, each of
which have effects, and, therefore, fundamentally alter the dynamics of
time and space. We call this attemptâto manifest totality through the
dynamics of the particularâpolicing.
The state must occur, otherwise we are dealing with nothing but another
conceptual construct, but at this point the state becomes something
partial, historical, and based in the dynamics of conflict and moment.
As such, the state remains an impossibility: the attempt to construct
unity even though things are occurringâall moments are defined, but only
to the degree that policing functions in time and space, and only to the
degree that this operation is effective. For example, it is always
possible to move in to an abandoned building, or take something off of a
storeâs shelf. These actions only become âresistanceâ in relation to
policing. If the state were to function as a totality nothing could
occur, everything would be defined, and if things did occur they would
have to occur without cause, and arise randomly.
Schopenhauer explains this in his description of a nightmare in which
the possibility of truth means that all existence ceases, but concepts
continue to exist. For something to be true nothing could ever change,
all moments would have to be irrelevant, and could not have any effects:
events would just arise with no possible historical dynamics, if they
could arise at all. But, if the concept of the state is separated from
this concept of totality, of the definition of existence in a universal
way, then the state manifests as something that occurs, an arbitrary
deployment of organized force into momentsâor warfare. To put this
another way, if the state actually possessed some existential truth then
action would be irrelevant, this truth would just structure all actions;
but, to the degree that the state operates, exists as logistics, then
action is being taken, and that action cannot possibly cover the
totality of time and spaceâthere will always be gaps in coverage, crises
of logistics, and so on. This begins to construct the fundamental
paradox of the state, as recognized in Foucault:[3] the state always
operates as a mobilization of force and conflict in time and space in
the attempt to impose peace, or the end of all possible action. We see
this in Mussolini[4] when he discusses the state as both given and
practically tactile in a historical sense; implying a determinism that
is in- deterministic. He calls this the spiritual immanence of the
state, that things somehow occur, but they are premised by the state as
a material given.
Schmitt argues as much in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy,[5]
where he draws a fundamental division between the universalized
rationalism of the parliamentary structure and the irrationalism of the
operations of the state. Parliamentary, or conceptual, discourse exists
within a space that assumes the necessity of the conversation, and the
ability to come to some agreement through it. But this is lacking and
paradoxical on two different levels. Firstly, for this concept of the
unitary state to function we have to assume that, somehow, there can be
conflict, necessary for debate, within some ahistorical singularity, the
eternal necessity of the conversation, making the assumption of the
conversation the condition of possibility for all action. Secondly, this
assumes that, within the conversation itself, the solutions generated
are somehow universalized materially without any action. This leads to a
basic separation between this concept of the (political, conceptual)
conversation and the material attempts to operate this conceptual
content in materially universal ways through particular actions. As
such, what Schmitt terms âthe stateâ is a separate, immediate, material,
relationship of force, attempting to operate the content generated by
these conversations. This immediacy moves the state outside of the
framework of the total description, and moves its manifestation into the
immediate and materialâa space which cannot be theorized in any sort of
direct way, outside of attempts to make sense of it.
This means, however, that the state cannot be seen as a unitary entity,
or a static condition: its attempt at totality is always unfulfilled.
The attempt to construct the unity of time and space is disrupted by the
emergence of events and actions, including the very functioning of the
state, which has effects, constructs other possibilities and resistances
through these effects, and so on. We cannot see the state as a unitary
entity that makes things occur or imposes restrictions; rather these
restrictions, these definitions of existence, cannot function outside of
the particular actions taken, in the form of policing, which in
themselves are always partial and generate effects and conflict in
themselves by their very occurrence. In this partiality, in this
operation, in this constant flux of history and its convergence into
moments, the state (to the degree that it cannot impose total peace
through the cosmic catastrophe, the end of all action) must always exist
as nothing but the attempt to construct an impossible unity of time and
space, while deploying force into time and space. It can be nothing but
the more-or-less frantic attempt to impossibly operate transcendental
concepts in particular moments, in all moments, in all spaces
simultaneously. If this cannot actually function without causing a
cosmic catastrophe in which all existence ceases to be relevant or ends
all together, if it cannot freeze all dynamics and history, if actions
continue to have effects, then this paradox becomes operational. So, we
cannot think of the state as unifying its concept and its operation. The
concept asserts a unity of time and space that the operation itself
disrupts and makes impossible. The state only exists through this
mobilization of force, and attempts to construct unity in each and every
moment, as a form attempting to construct the operation of some
conceptual content in all moments.
Not only is this partiality of operation, the ability to maintain
operations in only some times and some spaces, but this also constructs
the state as a fundamentally different attempt from the construction of
meaning that motivates and directs this operation. The state exists as
an immediacy, rather than a unity, and can only be effectively
confronted on this level. The constant war waged on our streets every
day is potentially motivated by these concepts of the state, but the
concepts are irrelevant. Rather, the question of the state, and of
confrontation with the logistics of the state, is not a conceptual
question. It is not enough to understand the stateâthere is no singular
entity to understandânor to grasp the operations of the police in a
general senseâthis is only the attempt to make sense of phenomena.
Engagement, insurgency itself, is a material dynamic, completely outside
of the realm of nice, neat, rationality. On this level, it is not a
question of whether the state is right, or a desirable political
concept, the only aspect we must focus on is this: that the unity of
time and space is impossible to understand, and that the attempt to
operate such a theoretical unity entails an impossibility that leads to
a constant mobilization of force in everyday life.
Yet, as clear as it is that the state operates somewhere, at some time,
this is often obscured in the narratives of resistance to the state.
These narratives tend to attempt an inductive movement, to posit
qualitative content to the particular and material. This accomplishes
nothing but the reduction of policing to a singular conceptual object
(much the way that pacifists do with all conflict) and fail to develop a
framework of analysis for the actual dynamics that occur, preventing a
more or less effective thought of resistance and disruption from
emerging. In too much of the writings about police and policing, writers
fall back into distracting and more-or- less irrelevant moralistic
arguments about brutality and force. All too often, texts on the police
are attempts to construct some unitary narrative of policing as
institutional, as the manifestation of some static institution that
exists independent of history itself. We see this play out in all
discussions of the police racism. It is not that the police are not
racist, obviously. But stating it in this form, and limiting analysis to
this form, implies assumptions that limit the possibility of analysis on
an operational level. For this to be true we have to assume the unity of
the institution of The Police, as an entity that is somehow separate
from the particularities of its operation, of the internal conflicts
within this logistical structure, and as separate from changes in
historical dynamics that modify the manifestations of policing in time
and space. On this level, we ignore the most important aspect of
policing: it occurs somewhere, at some time, and is only existent on
this plane of immediacy.
We see similar analyses play themselves out in ethical arguments about
policing, whether policing is ârightâ or âwrong.â Just as in this
sociological- historical reading, we must first generate a universal
framework of qualitative analysis, then impart this into the analysis of
a single object. Whenever someone argues that the police are racist or
brutal, individual actions (taken in particular times and spaces) become
isolated from their immediate dynamics as a separate manifestation of a
specific qualitative characterization, and the action and the
characterization are fused into one, single, universal statement. This
is not a problem on the qualitative level of description; I think most
of us would agree that police tend to be racist and brutal. Rather, this
analysis is limited to the ways that we understand the concept that we
call police in an ethical or politically conceptual way. As an immediate
dynamic, policing operates with variance, in particular ways, in
particular times and spaces. In the attempt to impart universal ethical,
emotional, or conceptually political content into these particular
manifestations we obscure the immediacy of this deployment of force, the
ways it is organized materially, and the gaps and crises in that
operation.
This manifestation in a particular time and space is a material
question. Removing the discourse of policing from the discussion of its
immediate and material manifestations, its immediacy and the
implications of this, moves an irrational relationship of force
(mobilized in material moments) outside of its immediacy (attempting to
relate to it as rationally coherent). This sort of removal of immediate
dynamics from themselves is a common framework of tactical discussions,
specifically ones centered around the question of violence (which plague
so-called radical scenes). In this discussion, the action and its
dynamics are removed from their immediacy, frozen in time as some
specific moment to be analyzed, and then analyzed in reference to some
arbitrary classification of ethics, such as the imparting of concepts of
universal effectiveness of definitions of violence/ non-violence to
materially specific and immediate actions. This removal makes it
impossible to speak of the dynamics of the action itself, forcing us to
make sense of the action only in reference to universalized conceptual
totalities, again assuming some over-riding rationality. By conflating
the transcendental concept of policing as a conceptual object, and the
material operations of police logistics, we end up reducing policing to
a static concept in which no action occurs and we ignore the tactical
manifestation of policing as a logistical and totalizing organization of
cohesive force.
As a phenomenon, or series of phenomena grouped together under a single
term, policing must occur in some time and in some place, otherwise we
are speaking of phantasms. But for this to be the case, policing cannot
be reduced to an inert conceptual object: incapable of acting, being,
moving, and so on. We can never group together the concept and the
phenomena of policing into a single entity. Rather, we have to either
speak of the conceptual object of policing, at which point we cease to
analyze the phenomena of policing, or we have to form a different sort
of analysis, to understand policing as a phenomena particular to a time
and space, one that also shifts in form. This entails a fundamental
change, away from the ethical and conceptually political, and into a
grounding in tactical immediacy and logistical dynamics. We can see this
in the rebellions of the âArab Awakening.â In the initial phases
discourse may be focused on utopian dreams. But when struggle becomes
immediate, when it breaks out onto the streets, discourse grounds itself
in tactical expediency. However, focusing on tactics presents its own
theoretical difficulties. As Clausewitz[6] and Naveh[7] point out,
tactical thought is impossible; one cannot think a particular moment in
all ways without consequently positing that there is truth and that one
could know it, making the effects of material actions irrelevant within
some form of determinism. But strategic thought, or thought grounded in
meta-contexts, is irrelevant; it is merely the way that we think about
particular actions and dynamics, the immediate and material. As such,
Naveh points to a place between strategic and tactical thought:
operational theory. Operational theory is the attempt to think tactics,
while recognizing its impossibility: if tactics are immediate and
material dynamics, then there are no tactics to speak of, in a general
sense. This will be the framework that we start from: the focus on the
immediate and material, and on ways to make sense of thisâbut outside of
the question of whether these frameworks are true, in the transcendental
sense, or not. The attempt here, therefore, is not to develop some total
understanding of policing, but to develop a framework to evaluate the
materiality of police operations and logistics, as they deploy in time
and space (which will only be judged as to whether it is instrumentally
effective or not).
In this, we can begin to reconstruct our understandings of resistance,
fighting, insurgency, and warfare. There should be no question about
this: insurgency and insurgent movements entail warfare. They exist as
spaces, conceptual categorizations marking the space between friends and
enemies, and in this they are the basis of politics.[8] This designation
is an acknowledgement of both agonism and the immediacy of conflict. The
acknowledgement of agonism is the understanding that conflict structures
history, that everything that occurs does so in the midst of innumerable
other dynamics that have effects on the trajectory of action, making
outcomes impossible to determine, and infusing all operational theory
with a foundation of calculated probability, impermanence, and
uncertainty. Acknowledging immediacy separates the two formerly posed
questions, the immediate dynamics of a moment and the conceptual
meta-analysis of that moment, and focuses on immediacy as a point of
departure. For too long we have been fooling ourselves, convinced that
our politics, in the sense of theory, somehow lead to something called
praxis, an impossible fusion of theory and action. Rather, we have to
approach theory and analysis from a fundamentally different direction:
as something that occurs and thus has effectsâas something that is
always either more or less effective.[9]
To create architecture is to put in order.
Put what in order? Function and. objects.
âLe Corbusier
The police are an occupying force, but of an odd sort. When occupation
is thought of it is usually as a blanket, total, form, one infecting all
aspects of everyday life. But this is always an impossible totality. The
concepts of the occupation are total, a space is occupied and defined by
these operations, but occupation is never a total phenomena, it never
actually enters into the possibility of actions to frame and determine
actions. If it did, then resistance would be impossible. Rather,
policing functions as a logistics of action, held together conceptually
through logistical supply lines, uniforms, command structures,
communications, and so on. This logistics enters into everyday life in a
mythology of the unity of time and space as defined by the occupation,
but this unity never actually functions, possibility is never actually
defined. Policing is a deployment of force in a vain attempt to define
actions, and in the process it must be positioned. It is not some
ethereal force that exercises control over actions (although police
violence definitely acts as a deterrent). All they can do is inject more
or less organized action, which carries more or fewer consequences, in
the attempt to control action, an attempt that is never fulfilled.
As Clausewitz argues, occupation always comes with two
impossibilities.[10] The first is simply numerical. If policing ever
became total, if the constructs of the state ever came to frame and
determine existence, policing would be irrelevant, and all of existence
would be nothing but a drab, defined, playing out of a teleological
script. But, since this is not the case, since theft still occurs,
resistance still happens, people still get into confrontations with the
police, refuse to snitch, and so on, it is simple to see that this
totality does not exist. Therefore, we have to think of police, and the
logistics of policing, as a limited and defined deployment of bodies and
actions into space, and one that only covers a limited amount of space
with a limited number of bodies. For example, take the G20 in
Pittsburgh, which saw assembled the largest single police force in
American history. If we line all of these cops up to the point where
they could control all action in space in a direct way, without weapons,
transportation or movement, they control a very limited amount of space
in a city the size of Pittsburgh; add to this variances in terrain,
which limit movement, the movements of the city and the density of
actions that occur, and the security priorities that keep certain
numbers of police pinned to a location, and that space shrinks further.
In a more extreme exampleâ US military tactical shifts after the War in
Iraqâwe see this even more clearly. When the US invaded Afghanistan and
then Iraq, they did so under the fantasy that occupation was
unnecessary, that somehow their very presence would construct some total
capitulation. But, as was found quickly, a low concentration of troops
in resistant terrains allows for the conditions for insurgencies to
flourish, organize, and arm. As a result, they flooded these regions
with troops, stretching their capacity to the breaking point, and not
only still failed to cover the totality of the terrain, but also left
open other terrain, Northern Africa and the Yemen specifically. Their
concentration of troops prevented their projection through space. So
they shifted into low-concentration deployments, backed up by drone
strikes and Special Ops raids, to attempt to cover as much space as
possible, as consistently as possible, but this eliminated their ground
presence and prevents them from holding any space. Literally, unless
every square inch is covered, all the time, there is still the
possibility of resistance action against or outside of the logistics of
policing, making occupation not total. There are always gaps in
coverage.
Secondly, action always changes the conditions and dynamics of action, a
process that can never stop. Actions are within a time and space, a
particular convergence of the dynamics of history, that both forms the
conditions of that action, and also forms through action. Contrary to
Aristotelean concepts of production and action as creation, we never act
within or on some inert object, rather the object presents resistances
that fundamentally change the dynamics of that action. Within the
construction of history, all action generates resistances, shapes the
generated effects of actions coming into conflict with the dynamics of
other actions, in a process that fundamentally shapes the terrain of
action. The state, on the other hand, exists as a definition of
existence in a smooth, total, atemporal way. This means that it
functions only to the degree that it functions totally in every moment,
in all space, all the time, eliminating resistances and effects, and
constructing actions in a smooth, resistanceless environment. The
logistics of policing, the material manifestation of the attempt to
construct the unity of the state in time and space, as time and space,
only functions to the degree that it generates this total coverage
prevented by numerical limitation. If this totality functioned, if all
actions were defined, then we would be faced with a tragic, dystopian
world: the world of immanence. For that to exist we would have to assume
that every action was defined before being taken, the conceptual
definition of that action would have to be the actual condition of
possibility for all action. No actions could have any effects that were
undefined, everything would arise as if disconnected to anything that
occurred prior, if anything could occur at all. In other words, there
would be no possibility of possibility, no ability to modify
circumstance, only a total, metaphysically teleological definition of
the totality of all existence, of which each and every existing thing is
nothing but an expression. But, again, if this were the case then
occupation, the logistics of policing, would be irrelevant. Therefore,
we have to assume that the police act, and that these actions generate
effects. Even in their deployment, even if nothing else occurred, the
dynamics of action are changing, the terrain of action is being
modified, and this is happening in ways that can never be determined.
Conflict still occurs, even just in the relationship of bi-pedal
movement and hard ground, let alone in the collision and friction that
action itself generates. In their very deployment, police generate
friction, conflict, and open up other possibilities of action; history
does not cease in its dynamics. We see this every time a
counterinsurgency plan solicits an ambush, every time police crack down
on a neighborhood and something occurs in another neighborhood, away
from their concentration of force. Their movements change the terrain of
action, and collide with the movements and actions of all other things
that construct that terrain: the degradation of infrastructure, the
growing hatred and resistance to the police, basic âcrimeâ carried out
by the desperate to survive within capitalism, worker absenteeism,
strikes, and so on. Unless, magically, the deployment of the police
actually overcomes the effects of their own actions, and somehow comes
to freeze history in a defined moment, terrain will always shift, and
this shift makes total occupation impossible.
The impossibility of the totality of occupation constructs policing as
an attempt to project through ever greater volumes of space, in ever
more constant ways. The entirety of the history of police methodology
and operations centers around the development of the methods of
projection. From the use of the car to the use of the radio, from the
development of the surveillance matrix (ever more pervasive) to the
construction of task forces, from the move into paramilitary operations
to the development of so-called community policingâthese shifts are
undertaken in order to further project through space in more and more
consistent ways. But there are limits to this projection, as we see with
the transition from counterinsurgency to counter-terrorism methodologies
within the US military, where a strategic choice has been made to avoid
long occupations with large force footprints in favor of maximum
projection across space with minimal numbers. With limited numbers
choices must be made: allocation of force, structuring of logistics,
maintenance of supply lines and so on. This becomes more and more
difficult the more resistant the terrain becomes. For example, within
the team-policing structures in Pittsburgh, the police space themselves
throughout a sector, with numerous sectors per zone and six zones within
the city limits. Within a sector police within a team will space out as
far as possible, patrolling streets alone, with one cop per car, and
then converge on a site of response, for example a traffic stop. This
methodology tries for the best of both worlds: spreading out through a
limited amount of space while still being able to swarm a specific area.
Capacity is sacrificed in this operational methodology. As force spreads
throughout the city and is divided between sectors, whenever there is a
point of response (for example in sector a) the entire team converges,
leaving the rest of that sector open, unless force is pulled from sector
b to the empty spots in sector a.
Projection exists in two forms: visual and material. Visual projection
is the capacity to see space and things in space, to develop what in
modern military parlance is termed topsight. In the 19^(th) Century,
police had tended to march through streets in formation, largely so that
they could communicate with one another.[11] This is an often
misunderstood aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and the phenomena of
soldiers marching into lines of gunfire. These formations existed in the
absence of forms of communication that could cross distance. With the
noise of combat, the smoke generated by gunfire, and the lack of radios,
all commands were transmitted either through hand signal or some form of
audible command, and early police forces were no different.
This column formation began to space itself out with the use of whistles
or other noise-makers, but, even with this mild form of projection, the
area that could be projected through was limited. Vision was also
limited, and the ability to gather and transfer information. With the
advent of the radio, then the car, and finally the helicopter and
surveillance camera, policing was able to project through space at
greater speed and communicate over wider distances, allowing for greater
projection.[12] But, even with the total surveillance structure that
cities like New York, Chicago and Cleveland are building, where private
security cameras are linked into the police camera matrix and private,
semi-official police begin to act as support for city police, this
coverage is remarkably limited. Cameras, mechanical vision, cannot in
themselves analyze informationâyet. This means that, even with the most
sophisticated tools of surveillance, and the most sophisticated, highly
trained, human analysts, there is only a certain amount of information
that can be processedâ even though the amount of information generated
multiplies exponentially with the addition of each new surveillance
apparatus.
Even the most sophisticated surveillance agency, the National Security
Agency, which pulls terabytes of information every hour, only has around
35,000 analysts to look into all this information: millions of phone
calls, millions of emails, millions of web- searches, library records,
on the ground surveillance and so on. Analysis is the chokepoint, and
this gets infinitely more complicated with the anonymity methods that
are used by many of the internet generation. This gap between
information and analysis becomes all the more stark when there is an
attempt to analyze in realtime. At that point, to the degree that a
command structure functions, information is being compiled, sent up the
chain of command, analyzed, turned into orders, and communicated back to
the ground. If actions are quick, even if this analysis becomes absurdly
fast, there is still a gap, both temporal and interpretive, between
action and the analysis of information about action within the command
structure. Secondly, this is still limited to line of sight and
information that can be combined with this vision. This is a primary
difficulty when there is an attempt to crush any sort of insurgency; as
David Galula[13] argues, insurgencies must become the terrain, meaning
that they are incredibly difficult to differentiate from the
âpopulationâ (of course assuming that these are not the same thing).
Many experienced people know that it always helps to have a change of
clothes at actions, especially if they make you look like a hipster. A
quick change of clothes when dispersing means often the police will
drive right past youâthe simple change of clothes makes them blind.
Anonymity isnât what exists when our faces are covered, anonymity, as
Baudelaire argued, is the condition that we are relegated to in the
capitalist metropolis. The distance that vision can encompass can be
elongated with helicopters, drones, surveillance planes, cameras and
satellites, but every time this distance multiplies the ability to pick
out the micro-details of that space become more limited.
Material projection is the actual projection of force through space.
Again, this occurs within a balance of concentration and projection. As
policing began to spread out through space, and force concentration
became more and more diffuse, the means of deploying a magnitude of
force increased. Initially, police may have carried nothing more than
night-sticks and sometimes cuffs. Combined with movement on foot, force
could only be projected on a line of bodily movement, and only at the
speed of a quick run, along with the range of movement of the human arm.
As force spread out, through the use of the car and the radio, and then
the helicopter and the armored personnel carrier, this became combined
with the handgun and automatic weapon to increase that projection
dramatically. While the arm may only reach a couple feet from the body,
the gun can project a bullet on a straight line for hundreds of meters,
and with lethal force. This ability to project through the projectile
was again furthered by the grenade, and grenade launcher, pepper spray
and now the Taser, to project different levels of force out from the
body onto a target, with the LRAD[14] able to project concentrated and
targeted soundwaves over a quarter mile. These projections, along with
increasing scales of force, are all ways of project force into space, to
make the visibility achieved through topsight material and operative.
This reliance on the ground force is absolutely essential. Surveillance
can act as a deterrent but not an actual material deployment of force as
the US military found after the first phase of the invasion of
Afghanistan. At the beginning of the war Special Operations and CIA were
on the ground, acting as forward spotters. They would find a target,
send coordinates to a drone overhead, which would send them to a base in
Saudi Arabia, which would beam them to a satellite, and the satellite
would send these to a B-52 that would drop a guided bomb on the area.
This process would take 18 minutes.[15] However, for all the destruction
that can be caused within this structure, the ability to hit targets
evaporated when insurgents abandoned infrastructure and hid vehicles in
mountain passes, making them impossible to spot. This made the US
respond with the commitment of ground forces, which insurgents can
track, which have supply lines, etc, that must be supplied, and so on,
creating a plethora of targets. Even with huge numbers in an area, the
US ability to control the space by physical presence and the projection
of projectiles was incredibly limited. As is often witnessed within
insurgencies, the movement of main force concentrations into an area
meets little resistance, insurgents melting away only to reemerge after
the main force moves on. Material projection is not just a spatial
question regarding the amount of space covered, but also one of time, of
the constancy of that ability to move through space. As Clausewitz
argues, this ability to move through space becomes increasingly
difficult, and force projects less, the more uncertain and resistant the
terrain becomes.[16] Even a single attack can force an entire occupying
force to shift into increasingly dense, defensive, concentrations,
limiting their ability to project through space. The more they
concentrate force physically the less able they are to project
themselves across space as a seemingly constant presence.
Projection of force, visually and materially, is the attempt to
construct a terrain that is conducive to the movements and operations of
policing. We have seen numerous aspects of this within the tactical
terrains that we inhabit: the proliferation of surveillance cameras, the
networking of private cameras into the police surveillance matrix, the
proliferation of private security and semi-official police departments,
and the growth of neighborhood snitch networks, also known as
Neighborhood Watch, but also the leveling of vacant buildings, the
mowing of vacant lots, and so on. Most innovative in the methods of
projection is not a technology, but merely the construction of
metropolitan space itself. The street grid developed in the 19^(th)
Century and the freeway systems in the early and mid-20^(th) Century
made movement through space easier and more efficient. Projection does
not just involve the ability to latently hold space, even outside of
immediate presence,[17] but the ability to move through space. However,
like any technological innovation, the development of the road
structure, standardizing space within Cartesian models, may have made
movement easier, but also disperses concentrations of force and largely
confines police movements to the roads themselves. As in Paris where
Reclus suggested turning into gun turrets the row buildings lining the
newly-built wide boulevards (that now characterize that city), this
confinement to the road generates zones of elongated vision and
projectile movement,[18] but also limits the vision of what occurs off
these roads, in zones of indiscernability, whether Iraqâs open desert
plains, Afghanistanâs mountains, or the âunbuildableâ spaces on the
sides of wooded hills in the middle of Pittsburgh. These zones of
indiscernability, of invisibility and possibility, become wider the more
resistance is waged within a space, the less that people snitch each
other out, the more open space off the roads there may be within a
terrain, and the density of the dynamics and physical objects (whether
trees in a forest or barricades on streets) within the lines of flight
within that terrain.
One can easily trace this trajectory of containing land for policing
beginning with land enclosure and the standardization of naming and
surveillance structures in the 16^(th) and 17^(th) centuries, of
policing saturating space more and more thoroughly, as the dynamics of
this space come to shape policing. The co-immanent dynamic between
policing and space can be seen everywhere. In the suburbs we find the
proliferation of private security, on every corporate campus, on every
college campus, in every mall and shopping center, as well as the growth
of increasingly fortified gated communities. In the core of the
metropolis the street grid, the walls around the security buildings and
precinct stations, the proliferation of private and public cameras, the
deputization of pseudo-police forces at colleges and hospitals, the
proliferation of non-police and âtask forcesâ hired by development
organizations, the rise of the community watch group, and the growth of
the federal security apparatus have come to form spaces that are almost
entirely framed around the movements and operations of police. With the
enclosure of space, and the elimination of the commons, the âpublicâ has
become something to protect against. Surveillance saturates the
workplace and the park. Police roll down the street looking for someone
that looks suspicious; the streets in the poorest neighborhoods are
cordoned off and Baghdad-style armed checkpoints are set up on the
streets of LA. Paramilitary tactics are adopted by SWAT teams that
increasingly become aspects of everyday police operations and the
flip-side of the velvet glove of âcommunity policing.â Everywhere we
look the metropolis has become structured around the separation of
space, the separation of bodies, the dispersal of the street[19] and the
fortification of the private. This does not occur in a vacuum, or in the
absence of the attempt to amplify projection across space and time. As
space becomes increasingly striated, increasingly operated upon, space
itself begins to shift around a new series of imperatives. As static as
many of us may feel built space is, the solidity of terrain is largely
mythological. But just as space shifts in order to allow for the smooth
operation of policing (or prevent it),[20] policing has been modified to
operate in the post-WWII metropolis with the incorporation of ever
faster forms of communication, ever more sophisticated forms of
monitoring and surveillance, and ever heavier weapons and paramilitary
tactics.
What we are witnessing is nothing short of a constant security
operation, a constant attempt to eliminate these zones of
indiscernability, structured not only to respond to actions but also to
prevent actions from arising or becoming apparent. Every day this more
defines the spaces that we exist within; it is nothing short of the
expansion of the prison outside of the walls. As in the prison, a
terrain conducive to police movements and operations necessarily
involves an almost total vision, a complete ability to project across
space, the ability to justify unlimited uses of force. But, along with
this, we come into contact with the primary paradox of counterinsurgency
(policing is necessarily a form of occupation, and thus a form of
counterinsurgency). As policing becomes more and more all-pervasive, as
the police become more and more able to mobilize overwhelming
concentrations of force, their very movements generate resistance,
resentment, conflict. As they project through space they become visible,
and the methods of tracking their movements and avoiding their detection
are becoming more and more effective. Even with this growth of the
prison, to encompass all space to varying degrees, illegality[21] still
persists. Every day, acts of economic disruption, like theft and worker
absenteeism, are rampant. The state only functions in the space in which
policing functions, and to more or less of a degree. In these gaps in
coverage, generated by the sheer limitation of police spatial occupation
and the limits of the range of vision and weapons, the concentration of
state logistics is low, and the possibility of action proliferates; this
becomes even more pronounced within spaces where there is an ethic of
noncooperation or outright resistance.
Activity in War is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man
immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and. regularity the
most natural and. simplest movement, that of walking, so in War, with
extraordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity.
âClausewitz, On War
This projection through space is evident on each and every city street,
from the flashing blue lights of the cameras on the light poles to the
threat of the undercovers. The movements of the gang task force mirror
the movements of the SWAT team, which directly parallels the dynamics of
âcommunity policingâ and the designation of some as âundesirable.â In
some places this occupation is barely apparent, but in many it has very
much taken on the aesthetics of an occupation. But, for as much as this
occupation can increase the capacity of policing to contain crisis, and
the ability to project through space, it can never be total. The
impossibility of policing generates a mobilization of an armed
apparatus, in which all moments are assumed to be the terrain of action,
the tactical terrain. On this level, the aesthetic shape of the content
being projected through policing is completely irrelevant. We can sit
around and discuss politics in a conceptual sense, but this is
meaningless. The political is a direct relationship of force and a
dynamic of conflict, something that occurs within the immediate tactical
movements of moments, something that happens.[22] Policing occurs within
a tactical paradox: the attempt to mobilize politics (to differentiate
between friends and enemies), to end politics, or to generate peace.[23]
The concept of peace implies the end of conflict, and thus the complete
determination of actions, the end of friction, the end of the
possibility of mobilizing action, the impossibility of the historical:
total occupation.[24]
Policing always exists as this attempt to operate peace, but through the
mobilization of conflict. It is not that we could wish for more peaceful
police, peace is impossible unless all action ceases or everything
becomes determined, and as an action the logistics of policing are, like
all actions, an imposition of certain dynamics in space. As such,
policing is an impossible attempt, the attempt to mobilize conflict to
end conflict, the attempt to mobilize the effects of actions to prevent
actions from generating any possibility or effects. The impossibilities
of policing necessitate a fundamentally different framework to analyze
the logistics and movements of policing. Rather than the discussion of
some institution, or some singular linear history, policing must be
analyzed on the plane through which it occurs, the tactical, the
immediate, and the material. To function necessarily implies a
mobilization of force throughout space, as thoroughly as possible; or
warfare in every moment in the impossible attempt to operate some
conceptual totality in particular moments. The war of the state is a
paradoxical war (not in the sense of a war between states, but the
constant warfare waged on us in every moment, a war that structures the
space we live in, a total war, a perpetual war).
But, as much as we may be tempted to think this in a generalized, total,
conceptual way, we are missing the underlying structure of warfare
itself. A common fallacy in the analysis of tactics by radicals is the
structuring of a dualistic concept of warfare focused on micro-tactics,
fighting styles and so on; and the meta-structure of strategy, or
generalized histories of battles. This way of thinking misses the
dynamics of conflict. As Clausewitz argues, the war is a series of
engagements that led to some result; the engagement is constructed from
a series of combats, or immediate relationships of conflict, each of
which necessarily changes the dynamics of the terrain of conflict,
shaping future dynamics of conflict.[25] To think âthe policeâ is
neither to think the institution of the police, nor the immediate ways
that they fight on a particular level. It is to understand the
relationship between the conceptual methodologies of policing and the
immediate actions that they take, as well as the terrain that these
actions occur within, and the effects of these dynamics of conflict in
the construction of a tactical terrain. We have to think of the concept
of the police as a collection of particular people attempting to operate
their own particular way of understanding, through the framework of some
total conceptual content, and then taking particular actions that
generate effects. We cannot approach the police as singular[26], and
their logistics as unified, but rather, must begin to understand the
logistics of policing as the impossible attempt to not only construct
the unity of time and space external to their operations, but also the
attempt to construct their own coherence. There are numerous means
through which this attempt occurs (specifically command and control as
well as supply). But, as much as a force can be trained, as standardized
practices and uniforms can be, the immediacy of action and the
particularity of those who act in moments can never be eliminated. This
impossibility of internal definition, internal coherence, generates
crisisâthe possibility that this logistics could cease to function at
any momentâand forces the constant desperate attempt to construct its
own coherence as the condition of its functioning.
Projection occurs in relation to crisis, but in a complicated way. On
the one hand, the projection of police logistics is always already
deployed in the attempt to contain possible increases in crisis. Areas
that are seen as ungoverned, areas that are âhotbeds for crimeââthe
neighborhoods of the working class, the workplace, the government
buildingâthese spaces, whether a single target is being protected or the
general flow and dynamic of the street itself, always become the focus
of police initiatives. When crisis appears, or becomes possible in a
space, police logistics must stretch in order to address that gap in
projection, this gap in presence, visibility, and deterrence. But, as
this occurs, and the police enter more and more resistant ter-
rainsâareas where they are regarded as occupiers, where they are met
with a wall of silence, where people defend themselves against police
incursionâ the amount of force that must be mobilized to enter these
terrains multiplies, along with the uncertainty of their movement
through that terrain. As a terrain becomes more and more potentially
resistant the uncertainty of movement amplifies,[27] requiring more and
more force to be concentrated there, if only to move through the area.
This can escalate to a scale that pushes the police off the street
entirely, requiring outside forces to come in, usually in the form of
the National Guard and the Army. As the density and speed of action
increases, the conflict becomes increasingly difficult to contain; if
the terrain multiplies, further amplifying crisis, then it can become
impossible to contain. Even in the face of the minor crises of the
street on a normal day, a single point of response, a single point of
convergence, can severely limit the ability of police logistics to
project through space; as the police from one sector respond to a point
and concentrate force, others have to be drawn from other sectors,
potentially creating a cascading effect that rupture police logistics
entirely, as we saw for a period of time in Greece in December 2008.
There is this mythology, born out of linear military histories, written
by military scholars, mixed with a certain American machismo, that
generates the idea that all military conflict becomes linear and
frontal. Believing this myth is suicidal. Such a mentality is mirrored
in pacifist attempts to engage in tactical discussion. They claim that
âfighting the military on their level will never be successful,â of
course assuming that linear symmetric conflict is the only form of
fighting possible, and ignoring the military component of all
revolutionary moments. To look beyond this absurd assumption of linear
conflict means to engage on the level of crisis and its amplification.
With the advent of the Napoleonic military[28] (characterized by mass
numbers, intensive intelligence collecting, and fast movement) pursuit
became a primary aspect of military conflict; many engagements were
defined by pursuit of retreating defeated forces. As they retreated,
troops would get lost, defect, desert, and walk home or become isolated
from the main force. The opposing force broke down, not out of the
magnitude of the attack, but out of the multiplication of terrain and
the acceleration of action. As action accelerates, and as terrain
widens, there are more points to respond too, stretching the ability of
the opposing force to maintain organizational logistics and falling,
increasingly, into disorganization. This is the key to understanding all
guerrilla conflict, all insurgency; it is never a calculus based on
magnitude of attacking single points, but a multiplication of terrain,
acceleration of speed, and amplification of crisis. This process used to
take hold more quickly, with only minor modifications to the dynamics of
conflict throwing entire forces into disarray, but this was before the
advent of the radio. But even this history is not full proof. We only
need to look as far as Syria to see the gradual effects of long,
protracted, organizational crisis: regime soldiers relied on roads to
transport supplies, but these were attacked, and covered too much space
to defend, so they relied on helicopters âtil the airbases began to be
attacked. Now many are isolated, able to communicate through the radio
and cellular networks, but unable to move and now out of supplies. This
is a central principle and the basis for the doctrine of parallel
strike, a strategy used since the 1980s to strike multiple targets
simultaneously (preventing the reinforcement of certain sites or the
ability to cope with the rapid amplification of crisis). As troops have
to spread out, as conflict occurs in intentional forms in more and more
terrain, coverage becomes more and more difficult; troops have to either
pull back to safe areas or risk complete disorganization, complete
logistical rupture.
With the advent of the police cruiser, the radio, the helicopter, the
surveillance matrix, and the standardization of space through the
construction of private property, zoning laws, building codes, and the
imposition of the grid pattern of streets, space has been saturated by
the attempt to amplify the capacity to contain crisis. This is necessary
for policing to function. Not only is the structuring of space made
possible by the attempt to operate some sort of conceptual content as a
definition of space, which is also latent in urban planning, rural
regulations, and resource extraction, but this terrain becomes, to the
degree possible, an expression of the conceptual content being
developed, both shaping the operations of police logistics and the space
itself. But even with the structure of metropolitan terrain being shaped
by policing, this does not prevent the crisis in policing, or even to
keep it from increasing. This crisis is generated from two sites: the
movements and dynamics of history itself (infrastructural decay,
financial crisis... everything else that occurs), and the crisis latent
in the very operations of policing itself, born from the impossibility
of the coherence of police. In the very movements of policing, in the
expansion of the terrain of policing, in the maximization of projection,
the terrain in which this crisis occurs expands as well. Policing cannot
be considered separate from crisis, just as the tactical manifestation
of crisis cannot make sense outside of the attempt to generate unities
of time and space; the impossibility of the attempt to construct these
unities of time and space (crisis) cannot exist without the attempt to
construct unity (policing) to begin with. As action occurs, as police
logistics are deployed into space, these deployments generate effects.
These can be the predictable amplification of conflict that is often
generated by armed occupation, but could also be the more mundane
actions within everyday life; everything has the potential to cause
effects which are catastrophic to the attempt to define existence, and
everything that occurs outside of deterministic immanenceâwhich is
everythingâis necessarily a crisis for policing. This generates a crisis
in the very disjunction, the infinite distance, which necessarily exists
between conceptual totalities and the particularity of actions, and
without this crisis resistance would be impossible. Yet, this also
generates this more foundational crisis, the crisis of the impossibility
of the police as a coherence. Therefore, policing exists not as an
institution that can be argued against within the realm of the
philosophical, but rather is a logistics of the deployment of force in
the attempt to construct the impossible, an absolute and total
definition of the relations between things, people, space, and movement.
We cannot approach this question of the police as a static thing.
Rather, as a logistics, policing is constructed in space, as something
that occurs, complete with its own dynamics, sites of coordination and
command, communications, supply lines, and the organization of movement
within space. It is a deployment of organized content that attempts to
move through the totality of space, as a form of limitation and
definition of the dynamics between things, and can, therefore, only be
understood as warfare waged in the social.[29] But, as with any
logistical apparatus, the very mobilization of it also generates crisis
within it. The impossibility of covering all space and time necessarily
means that force is deployed unevenly, that it has to move to cover
space, and that this movement entails further crisis. As units deploy
through space they are met with resistances, equipment breakdowns and
glitches, a lack of coherence, and so on, forcing the operation to
remain in constant motion, generating constant crisis. As we have been
able to witness through the ability to track dynamics of conflict in
real time, through the help of live blogging and social media, the
impact of crisis can be widely known. Every time resistance is mounted
in a space, every time a logistical hub is cut off, every time a supply
line is cut or force is concentrated in space, effects cascade, actions
speed up. This speed of action, combined with the multiplication of the
terrain in which action occurs, disrupts logistics, amplifies crisis
internal to the attempt to construct the coherence of these logistics,
which can enable the crisis to become a point of rupture, a point in
which this logistical attempt to construct the unity of time and space,
as well as the coherence of logistics itself, ceases to function.
Crisis amplifies through the friction caused in action. As this
logistics deploys force through space, and crisis is generated in this
deployment, that crisis amplifies to the degree that friction is
generated in that very movement through space. Barricades are an
example, preventing police from moving through spaceâbut not all
examples are so geographically static. Friction is generated in the
deployment itself, but is amplified through intentional action, through
the intentional multiplication of the terrain and speed of action, the
multiplication of contingency and the construction of resistant
terrains, where the movement of police becomes increasingly uncertain.
As the speed and terrain of action multiplies capacity is stretched,
logistics are stretched, supply lines are stretched, and projection is
disrupted. Insurrection is the term denoting this rupture of policing
logistics, where the police are run off the streets and the
possibilities of action multiply. But this is not some conceptual
calculus, and there can be no concept of insurrection in itself. The
mentality that has become popular latelyâ social war as something that
we engage in and initiate, and insurrection as an ideal that can be
theorized aboutâmisses the point. When we discuss the dynamics of
conflict, social war as something that is initiated has to be separated
from any dynamics that were occurring before this magical point at which
resistance coalesces. Rather, social war occurs, it is the deployment of
policing in time and space, and insurrection is merely an amplification
of this continual conflict. As with the logistics of policing,
insurrection occurs, it is tactical, and is necessarily a dynamic
relationship. Our choice is not a conceptual oneâone endorses or doesnât
the thesis of policeâbut rather the positionality one takes in
relationship to the impossibility of policing, to social war itself. It
is not a question of whether social war occurs, it is only a question of
how we relate to its materiality, to policing itself.
To engage in a fight against police is necessarily to engage in a
material tactical struggle against the logistics of policing. No correct
theory, proper motivation, or perfect analysis guarantees anything in
material struggle. We must move beyond the idea that holds resistance to
be transcendental, abstract, conceptual, and begin to embrace it for
what it is, an intentional engagement in the immediacy of conflict, in
the dynamics of conflict itself. At this point, the only determination
we must make is how we conceptualize this war, who we choose to define
as friends and enemies (although this is a secondary concern and only
allows us to make sense of what is happening). The actual struggle is a
material question, and therefore one that exists as separate from the
conceptual question. It is not a question of why one chooses any
particular form of engagement in social war, it is merely about
conceptualizing the dynamics of social war itself, and whether this
conceptualization effectively disrupts the dynamics of policing.
Struggle or resistance is a material dynamic, something that occurs, and
something that, at the end of the day, only matters to the degree that
it is effective. The longer we persist in analyzing policing as
institutional, inert, and as a conceptual object that can be argued
against, the longer we will fail to consciously engage in a dynamic of
conflict, an intentional amplification of crisis, and the longer that we
will remain nothing but activists and fail to embrace the necessity of
our role as insurgents.
<biblio> Foucault, Michel, trans. Macey, David (2003). Society Must Be
Defended. Picador, New York
Mussolini, Benito, trans. Unknown (2006). The Doctrine of Fascism.
Howard Fertig, New York
Schmitt, Carl, trans. Kennedy, Ellen (1988). Crisis of Parliamentary
Democracy. MIT Press, Cambridge
Sorel, Georges, trans. Hulme, TE and Roth, J (2004). Reflections on
Violence. Dover Publications, Mineola
Clausewitz, Carl von, trans. Unknown (1968). On War. Penguin Classics,
London
Naveh, Shimon (1997). In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution
of Operational Theory. Frank Cass, New York
Schmitt, Carl, trans. Schwab, George (1996). The Concept of the
Political. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Williams, Kristian (2007). Our Enemies in Blue. South End Press. Boston
Delanda, Manuel (1991). War In The Age of Intelligent Machines. Zone
Books, New York
Galula, David (1964). Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.
Praeger Security International, London
Kaplan, Fred (2013). The Insurgents: David. Petraeus and. the Plot to
Change the American Way of War. Simon and Schuster, New York
US Army (2005). FM 3â19.15: Civil Disturbance Operations. Department of
the Army, Washington DC
Debord, Guy, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (1994). The Society of the
Spectacle. Zone Books, New York
Weizman, Eyal (2007). Hollowland. Verso Press. London
Ranciere, Jacques, trans. Rose, Julia (2004). Dis-agreement: Politics
and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
The primary critique of the summit hopping era, (one that applies to me
as well) is that we never expanded outside of the activist context,
never moved beyond complaining loudly around summits, never moved from
complaint to active engagement. But there was something in the summit
era that did hold promise; in the concentration of numbers in space
there was always this possibility of breaking out of the confinement of
the downtown area, the confinement of the frontal conflict between
police and anarchists, the confinement of pre-planned confrontation, and
the limitations of the dates of the summit itself. There was this sense
that activism could be transcended, that conflict could be amplified on
the streets with speed and magnitude, that conflict could multiply
territorially and break the logistical capacity of the police to contain
it. This is what many of us saw, if only briefly, during the Pittsburgh
G20, the finale of the summit era, and it was this that both generated
the current tactical impasse that we find ourselves in and that points
the way out. The multiplication of the terrains of conflict during the
first day of action creates a problem; it became clear that this form of
action was insufficient to break the forms of containment that typify
the summit demonstration (even if we raised the stakes dramatically).
This left many of us feeling as if the terrain of conflict in our own
spaces, in our own towns, began to be everything, and that seems to have
left us at a loss. But it was specifically this collapse of the attempts
to contain the Pittsburgh demonstrations into the traditional forms that
typified the summit demonstrations that points a way out of a dead-end
strategy based in complaint and activist tourism. To understand why this
was the case we must do more than just look at the context of the
actions, the recent tactical shifts that had occurred between 2007 and
that point, or even the actions themselves. As with all actions we have
to keep in mind that these occurred in a time and in a space, and it is
those, combined with the actions taken within those dynamics, that
shaped the trajectory of conflict during those two days in September of
2009.
To get a handle on what happened there we have to begin with the
political and historical terrain. The city of Pittsburgh has a long
history of struggle. It was the Pittsburgh Congress of 1883 that is
widely credited with beginning an organized anarchist movement in
America. This was the site of the Homestead strike in 1892, a huge steel
strike that involved shoot-outs between strikers and Pinkerton guards
and was where Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate Henry Clay
Frick (who now has a park named after him). This is one of those events
that is now immortalized on plaques in warehouse districts and so-called
historic areas. Pittsburgh is also where the United Steelworkers began
(and are still based), as well as the American Federation of Labor and
the Congress of Industrial Organizations and was the site of the AFL-CIO
merger agreement.
This history of struggle has shaped the dynamics of the city and its
structure of enforcement. During the Homestead strike, when the
Pittsburgh police refused to break the strike, bosses called in
Pinkerton guards and deputized them, beginning a practice in the
Rustbelt of deputization to deal with social ruptures, something that
has become a day-to- day part of life there. Homestead was also the
motivation for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to create the
Pennsylvania State Police, a large element of the enforcement structure
during the G-20.
Like all cities in the Rustbelt, Pittsburgh is a city that has been
completely fucked over by capitalist globalization. Starting in the
1970s and 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, privatization, and
globalization, production of steelâthe basis of the cityâs economyâbegan
to shift overseas. Today, despite being the home of the United Steel
Workerâs union, and commonly referred to as âSteel City,â Pittsburgh is
left with no functioning steel mills, aside from some part-time,
scrap-melting mills. Massive unemployment and political marginalization
was coupled with the market abandonment of these areas, leaving many
with no hope in the market to provide for their daily needs. In the
recent past Pittsburgh has seen a rising anarchist scene, with a series
of long-running and well-known direct action groups and campaigns
occurring through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, specifically the
anti-war and counter-recruitment campaigns between 2002 and 2008. These
often had actions turn into confrontations with the police.
Obama claimed to have chosen Pittsburgh for the G20 due to its economic
ârevivalâ through something called the Pittsburgh Model. This model of
development uses tax breaks and restructuring and colonization of poor
neighborhoods to provide âfavorable market conditions,â (cheap or free
land, cheap or free buildings, the lack of unions, tax breaks, etc) to
attract investment. In Pittsburgh this has primarily concentrated around
âgreen building,â military engineering research, the biomedical field,
and the building of large universities, as well as the demolition of a
poor neighborhood to build a baseball stadium on the north side of the
city. Development is also a major force in gentrifying parts of the
city, particularly Oakland (the university district), parts of Garfield,
and East Liberty among others. This has meant a few research and
university jobs are created while the majority of the city is left
working low wage and/or temporary jobs. In contrast, 40 years ago this
population had access to high paying union jobs in the steel mills. The
city looks like it is reviving on the physical level, but under the
facade the Rustbelt reality is the rising of the poverty rate and the
shrinking of the population (by almost half since 1950).
Pittsburgh has begun to undergo a series of profound changes, with the
abandonment of large parts of the city used as an excuse to restructure
its entire fabric. In the attempt to draw in outside investment the city
government has almost bankrupted itself pouring money into neighborhood
redevelopment projects, based on so-called green condo developments,
medical research facilities, university expansion, and massive expansion
of the policing and surveillance apparatuses, framed in a context of
community policing, also known as counter-insurgency. This has caused
the fragmentation of many neighborhoods, massive population
displacement, and the bulldozing of the cityâs history in favor of
housing for yuppies. It is this environment that has generated a
profound sense of tension on the streets in certain areas of the city,
and it is this environment that played a large role in shaping the
preparation and trajectory of conflict during the summit itself.
Police Preparation and General Operating Procedures
Analyzing the tactics of police in Pittsburgh is difficult for a couple
reasons. Firstly, there were so many actions going on in so many
different places that it was impossible to look at as a single strategic
body. Secondly, many people have reported long gaps between police
sightings, periods of time with little to no police coverage of their
movements. This attests to our ability to challenge their control of the
streets and to create zones where police had little to no physical
control, but also makes analysis difficult. However, from the Twitter
feeds, from news reports, and from personal experience we can begin to
cobble together some understanding of their thinking during the actions.
There are a few things to keep in mind here. Cops need to build cohesive
forces, to be able to generalize their needs for a certain situation,
and to build force to define a situation. This takes both time and
control, the time to build a cohesive force and the ability to use that
force to operate within a terrain, to contain actions with their planned
strategy. If the situation cannot be made to conform, then their force
ceases to be relevant and they have to improvise, or move to a posture
of response. This is what it means for the police to enforce definition.
The state sets the limits of allowable action and the police must
develop a way of enforcing those limits in a situation that is always
changing, even though their force is not. Their preparation time was
limited in the case of the G20, since they had only four months (as
opposed to the two years it took to prepare a comparable police force
for the RNC). In contrast, we can quickly do outreach, plan in our
affinity groups, and link up with other affinity groups, all in
non-linear structures that can adapt to changing circumstances. More
time to prepare can be a good thing, but it is not as important for us.
We do not need to create and enforce definitions, we are able to be
mobile.
Maybe to compensate for their lack of time to prepare, maybe as an
intentional tactic, the cops early on defined their approach to this
series of actions. Firstly they engaged in raids meant to accomplish the
two goals of disrupting organizing and intimidation. In other words,
they were meant to build the feeling that the cops were everywhere. They
kept catching the Seeds of Peace bus, as well as other cars, on the
street instead of at static spaces, trying to create the impression that
they could find us whenever they wanted to. They coupled this with very
public announcements whenever they seized equipment. This approach
backfired however, and led not just to lawsuits but also to
embarrassment. (Having very publically announced finding PVC pipe they
claimed was for âsleeping dragons,â they discovered later that the pipes
were being stored by a company for product testing.) This constant
presence also heightened the eerie feeling within the city of the coming
police state, to the dismay of many residents. This can partially
explain the intense public support that many reported while marching
through the streets. These disruptions, like the tactics used on
Thursday afternoon, were as much based on intimidating anarchists and
the general populace as they were on materially disrupting organizing
work.
This psychological tactic was increased by their tactic of posturing,
especially through the media. In past mobilizations the press work by
the cops beforehand was aimed at the general populace and meant to
generate a fear of anarchists coming to burn the city to the ground, and
so on. The G20 preaction press preparation was different; it was aimed
at us. There were the obligatory warnings from the mayor against the
people coming to âcause destruction,â but on top of that there was
endless coverage of the police build-up, tours of the security
perimeter, tours of their command center (something even the press was
confused about), as well as constant police harassment before the
actions. But without being able to carry out any raids of material
importance, this all came across as posturing and nothing more. They
were forced to backpedal from a lot of these statements in the days
before the action as lawsuits and complaints started coming in from
various groups, and business owners started boarding up stores. The
police were trying to strike a balance between inflating fears of an
anarchist horde to justify the massive police buildup, and reassuring
business owners that they were safe to remain open. They failed.
Ordinary Pittsburgh residents were angry at the government for turning
their city into a police state, leading many of them to side with the
protesters, and most downtown businesses shut down for duration of the
G20.
This press coverage was combined with the use of weapons of intimidation
and staged force during the actual actions. They had announced
beforehand that they âwould not be the sparkâ. It became obvious that
they were anticipating the possibility of disruption and that they
assumed it would happen downtown, or at least on the way to downtown.
Twin Cities Indymedia, as well as a lot of people traveling to Arsenal
Park on Thursday, reported seeing large columns of police behind the
initial skirmish line at 34^(th) and Liberty, between the residential
parts of the East End of Pittsburgh and Downtown in an area knows as the
Strip District. These police were there in case the initial lines broke
down. They used weapons that couldnât be carefully or accurately
targetted, so they could not pick and choose targets until they began to
bring out bean-bag rounds and rubber bullets on Thursday afternoon. The
indiscriminate weapons were used to keep people away from areas. But
dispersing a crowd into smaller groups makes the situation harder to
define, so this tactic of dispersal, combined with the air of a total
presence, was supposed to make us want to disperse ourselves. In other
words, like all the pre-action preparation, these weapons are meant to
have a psychological effect; they are used to demoralize crowds, to take
the fight out of us by making us feel that resistance is futile. But
these weapons backfired. Because a lot of people have seen them before,
the weapons didnât have the intimidating effect the police planned on.
Even the helicopters and gas (which became constants at a certain point)
did little to deter people who have been in situations like this, and at
this point that is a lot of us. When gassed we noticed a lot of people
calmly putting on goggles and helping others to do the same, then calmly
and quickly moving into more open space. Police also relied heavily on
the LRAD, which had such minimal effect that it became a joke on the
Daily Show, not to mention in our internal circles. (Note: many of us
have switched our ringtone to the sound of the LRAD.) Police approaches
generally are based in staging force, using increasing physical force
instead of psychological as the situation escapes their control, and
this is what they ended up doing. They brought out armored personnel
carriers on Thursday, but didnât really use them except to block roads,
and changed to indiscriminate use of force on Friday night.
Friday Actions)
To begin to attempt an analysis of the Peopleâs Uprising march is
difficult. There was such widely dispersed action after the first half
hour or so that we need to look at the dynamics of the actions instead
of the actions themselves. In other words, the actions built a dynamic
environment, and this is what to focus on. What we know now is that
outside the large police presence at Arsenal Park there was a much
larger and more concentrated presence of police between the initial
point of contact (34^(th) and Liberty St), and the perimeter downtown,
staggered in increasing concentrations the closer we got to the David L
Lawrence Convention Center.
The initial police contingent seemed willing to give the street to the
march. This is not surprising within a new, modified police tactic of
containment/ dispersal, or containment as dispersal, a tactic that we
have encountered in Washington, DC. If the police think the march will
be able to take the street, or is determined to do so, they will set up
a zone of control, an area of the street that they will give to the
march to avoid confrontation, while they try to contain everything
outside this space. So they may give the street but surround the march
on the sides, they may give a lane, etc. As this march moved out, some
noticed this and redirected the march through the park to another exit
point, which immediately frustrated the police attempt to contain the
march. This was evident as we were passing small contingents of riot
cops, spaced out on the corners of intersections, especially when we
encountered two riot cops in a car as we turned onto Liberty (ie, we
were seeing the backside of their tactic). At this point the march
split, some trying to head away from the massive police contingent in
downtown and go to any number of recently gentrifying commercial
districts. On reaching the corner of 34^(th) and Liberty we saw a line
of riot police, an armored personnel carrier (APC) equipped with an
LRAD, and a series of other vehicles. Unknown to many at this point was
that this was only an initial line; there was a much higher
concentration of cops further on. The cops gave a dispersal warning and
then sounded the LRAD for the first time.
The march diverted down an alley next to the Church Brew Works, where
the first dumpsters came out and barricades were built. This area of
Pittsburgh, in a neighborhood called Lawrenceville, is characterized by
narrow winding streets, often dead ending into one another, which only
require a single dumpster to completely block. As we rounded the corner
again, to get to Butler St at 37^(th) (and thus begin the move through
the Strip District towards downtown), we were met with another line.
That is when the cops first used high concentrations of gas. After they
failed to contain the march at the park, they switched to a blocking
tactic, one that is only meant to prevent access to certain areas. They
used a show of force and shifting blockades to prevent access to
downtown while also trying to convince us to disperse. This is
speculation, but it seems as if they made some mistakes in their
projections of our actions. Firstly, they seemed to assume that our goal
was to head into downtown, and they allocated force to prevent that
movement. This became clear as the march formed into smaller groups;
those who headed away from downtown saw almost no cops for a long period
of time. Secondly, police made a big deal before the actions about
training to defeat lockdowns, maybe expecting a repeat of the Republican
National Convention activist tactics, which centered around blockading
access to certain areas of downtown. For G20, few if any groups planned
on locking down, opting to remain more flexible instead of using a
tactic that immobilizes at the point of deployment.
As the march âdispersedâ into smaller groups, the situation became
really fluid and dynamic. The constant changes in the scenario kept cops
from accounting for numerous groups in the streets. We can separate
these trajectories of movement into two general movements. One group
engaged with the cops in their own territory by trying to head downtown.
This was a rather large section of the march; they got stopped in the
Strip district. It seems like many cops were diverted to stop this
group. Another set of groups started to head the opposite way towards
the gentrified shopping areas of the East End through Lawrenceville and
Bloomfield. These groups began to notice a series of things. The most
astonishing was that people from the neighborhoods, and these are
largely working class neighborhoods, began to come out onto the streets
to engage with the events, both in cheering anarchists on and in certain
instances helping to barricade off streets. These groups set up
barricades to create space. A PNC Bank got its ATMs smashed, pulling
more police into simple response actions, and away from the operation of
coherent strategy.
There are two fundamental aspects to these sets of movements. Firstly,
in multiplying the terrain of conflict, in the organized and intentional
dispersal across space, we were able to break the zone of containment
that the police attempted to set up, and to eventually break outside of
their ability to contain the terrain of conflict at all. This forced the
police to respond to a series of points of conflict, often too slowly to
actually catch anyone or to even engage, which constancy of movement
stretched their capacity to maintain logistical coherence or strategic
initiative. Secondly, the use of barricades and property destruction
occurred in a way that had not really been seen in American summit
demonstrations. Barricades proliferated on side streets as groups began
to move off main roads and into the twisted tangles that characterize
this part of Pittsburgh. Barricades limited police movement to major
roads. When combined with the loss of tactical initiative, which forced
them to respond to points of engagement in small groups, usually on city
buses, police lost the ability to project through space. As the terrain
became more resistant, as the movement of motorized units was
constrained, and as the terrain of conflict widened, the police were
forced to move through whatever space they could, as fast as possible,
in as many groups as possible, to as many points as possible, and lost
their ability to occupy, to move, or to maintain logistical coherence.
A call went out over Twitter to meet in Friendship Park, on the border
of the Bloomfield, Friendship, and Garfield neighborhoods. A trickle of
people ballooned to hundreds. The park became a space to rest, get
treated for injuries, and plan next moves. Cops began showing up in
droves, hoping to surround the park, but again the crowd was too large
for them to box in. That march began, and headed down Liberty Ave, away
from downtown, in the direction of the Oakland neighborhood, or the
university district. At the intersection of Liberty and Baum Ave the
march turned right and began to speed up, with many groups breaking off.
The police began to fire rubber bullets into the crowd, causing some
affinity groups to spread out, resulting in a trail of broken windows
all up Baum, including hits on Boston Market and various other chain
restaurants. During these confrontations police attempted to target
certain individuals (including the now famous footage of police in camo
fatigues jumping out of a car, grabbing someone and driving off with
them); these stopped after groups began to double back and pelt the
police with chunks of concrete. As people filtered into Oakland the
police presence increased dramatically, beginning the trajectory of
conflict that would result in large scale rioting a couple of hours
later.
This concentration of police was bolstered by contingents of cops tasked
with protecting a State Dinner at Phipps Conservatory (a building in
Schen- ley Park), which borders the University of Pittsburgh in the
heart of Oakland. Students began to be harassed by police who, in
response to events earlier in the day, were attempting to clear the
campus of any students not in their dorm rooms. This caused a conflict
between the students at Pitt and the police on their campus; a conflict
that would set the stage for what was about to occur.
As the cops were tear gassing the first groups of protesting students in
Schenley Plaza, the Bash Back! march began to gather at the corner of
Desoto and Fifth Ave, three blocks south-west of the Plaza. The march
rolled out around 10, only a half hour after the disturbances began on
Pittâs campus. The march began down Meyran Ave to Forbes and along the
way picked up six dumpsters. The first police vehicle arrived and was
stopped by four of the dumpsters being turned over in the intersection.
Corporate shops were attacked, with windows busted out of Subway,
McDonaldâs, and American Apparel, among others. While the cops were
still stopped at the first barricade, two more dumpsters were
overturned, one on fire, at the intersection of Forbes and Desoto, which
created even more space away from the cops. Students and bystanders
crowded the sidewalks as the police substation got its windows busted
out. The march then saw its first police line, a line of vehicles, about
a block ahead. Instead of engaging, the crowd began to move through
university property across the street from Schenley Plaza. The crowd
took a right and headed up past a university vivisection lab, which got
its windows smashed out, then a left, a right, ending up on a street
with three banks and a Quiznos, all of which got windows broken.
At this point you could begin to see the police cordon setting up at the
intersections: a couple of cops per intersection, a car, and usually
some form of wooden barricade with reinforcements of riot police down
the streets. We did not know at the time that there was a much larger
disturbance back at Pitt. In the wake of the crowd, students had swarmed
the streets, chanting âcops off campus,â âGo Pitt, Fuck the Policeâ and
âwe love Pittsburgh, fuck the G20.â Contrary to media reports, students
were not just swept up in the events but were actively participating.
The cops were split once again, trying to deal with dynamic situations
moving in two different directions. Vehicles had caught up with the
crowd again and were attempting to run it off the streets. Many small
groups started to disperse down alleys and work their way back toward
Schenley Plaza where cops had begun gassing students again. Around
midnight, around when they called âAll units to Oaklandâ over the police
scanner, they decided to cordon off the area. They set up skirmish lines
on Forbes and Fifth and pushed students away from the commercial
district and back onto campus. They began by pushing people down the
sidewalk but that quickly escalated into firing tear gas down the street
and even gassing students trying to enter their dorms. This escalated
the situation and brought more students out into the street. It took
till 2:30 for them to finally quell the unrest in Oakland. What few of
us knew was that when the march began, they were trying to get Obama out
of Schenley Park, the entrance to which is Schenley Plaza, ground zero
for the rioting, and at this point many units ran out of their gas
requisition, freezing them in place for a period of time. This even
further escalated the situation until they began to completely clear
streets, driving vehicles down residential streets in Oakland, repeating
the dispersal warning from loudspeakers.
The point when they ran out of gas is an important moment, the point
where their security plan broke down completely. In a single day we had
exceeded their projection of the worst possible scenario for the entire
weekend. When creating a summit security plan, police will requisition
supplies based on what they are consider to be the worst possible
scenario for the entire time of potential conflict (in this case, a
weekend). The fact that they ran out of gas makes it clear that in a
single day we exceeded the worst possible scenario projection for the
entire weekend. This wasnât because of the volume of property destroyed
or the magnitude of any individual action; it was a result of the speed
of movement through terrain, the ability to limit police projection, and
the multiplication of terrains of conflict that ruptured the coherence
of police logistics and eviscerated any concept of tactical initiative
on their part. As is often discussed in relation to asymmetric conflict,
when conflict spreads throughout a terrain, gaps in police coverage open
up, and these gaps are where conflict can proliferate; but in the
creation of these gaps conflict becomes a potential in all space and
police movement through space becomes uncertain and difficult. It was in
specifically breaking the containment of the summit demonstration,
breaking the planned demonstration zones, the containment of police
strategy, and the containment of political identity, that these actions
pushed police logistics to the breaking point. The only tragedy of that
day was that we did not push this further, through the night and into
the following days, and in failing to pursue, to continue to amplify
conflict. We allowed the police time to regroup, resupply, and call in
reinforcements.
The next morning the permitted march began to gather. At the gathering
point itself there were relatively few police, but just blocks away were
hundreds of riot cops, spaced out in groups of 30â50, surrounding
vehicles so they could be mobile, and accompanied by K-9 units. These
mobile units were to deal with anyone who diverged from the agreed-upon
plan for the day. As the march moved downtown we noticed more and more
cops, in higher concentrations, âtil we got downtown and then they lined
the streets, standing in front of barriers that held back crowds of
people who had gathered along the march route. When the march stopped in
front of the City County Building, the cops began to show a little of
what they had in store for later that night. The crowd stood in a
downtown street while 50â100 riot cops began to move off a side street,
one (backed up by one of the LRADs) even moving into the crowd. The bloc
assembled and moved towards the cops to form a buffer between the cops
and the rest of the crowd.
As the march moved the police presence thinned out. They moved squads of
riot cops into the positions that we had occupied minutes before and
drove Hummers with fences attached to their fronts to block off the
bridges to everything but foot traffic. As the gathering in the park
wore on, and as the time for the permit to expire approached, we noticed
lines of riot police beginning to surround the park and a large
contingent getting off a school bus and gearing up in the southwest
corner of the park. These shows of force were further foreshadowing of
the actions later that night.
That night a large group of Pitt students, along with assorted
anarchists and activists, gathered in Schenley Plaza to demonstrate
against the police brutality from the previous night. Hours before the
gathering, we could see large groups of riot cops gearing up in the
Oakland neighborhood and hiding down side streets, particularly around
Forbes between Meyran and Desoto. As people began to gather, the park
became completely surrounded. After 45 minutes the dispersal warning was
sounded and the LRAD blared, but there was nowhere for anyone to go. The
cops began to move in but not as a unit. They sent small tactical teams
into the crowd to secure an area, while the cops behind them gassed that
area, and pepper sprayed or attacked anyone in range. Those they caught
were cuffed and arrested. Larger lines would move in behind them to
secure the area and process the arrestees. Groups managed to break
through and head both out of the area and further into Pittâs campus.
Those groups that ended up on campus were chased down by riot cops and
beaten if caught. The cops beat and gassed people indiscriminately,
including at least one instance of launching tear gas canisters into
open dorm windows.
The gathering in itself was relatively innocuous, being largely people
playing drums and giving speeches, but that is not the point. The police
response was meant to send a message not only against causing
disturbances that night, but to make anyone present think twice about
stepping out of line again. The response was meant to psychologically
damage and generate fear, not just to stabilize a situation. And this is
a good lesson to learn. If we are going to be successful we have to be
ready for and expect this type of response in subsequent gatherings.
While difficult to deal with, it is inevitable. The police are trying to
stabilize a situation, and for them that means preserving control. That
means constructing us as subjects to be organized, to be positioned to
preserve the flows of the city, and if we canât be organized, to be
forced back into stability. The police actions on Friday night
accomplished their goal. There were few popular actions Friday night and
the energy of the actions dissipated quickly, but we doubt the resonance
of those actions will fade as easily.
There is little doubt that these were some of the most successful
actions that we have undertaken in recent memory. Not because anarchists
barricaded streets and created space, or because we fought back against
the cops and actually held our ground. Not because we forced the cops
into a stalemate by the middle of Thursday or the scale of the property
destruction. Rather it is that we were able to glimpse a form of action.
Unlike past summit demonstrations, isolated in downtown areas like the
summits themselves, these actions were both visible and invisible
simultaneously. They engaged on a plane of daily life that our actions
rarely touch (outside of our own lives). The actions were dispersed and
mobile, escaping the ability of the state to impose order on them.
During the Greek uprising a government minister complained most about
the inability to have an object or group to negotiate with, no demands
to mediate. Those actions existed on a different plane than the state.
Against the stateâs imposition of samenesses, people in the streets
created divergence and multiplicity. The streets became indefinable as
actions proliferated, changing the environment with the participants
themselves. It became a terrain impossible to define, impossible to
limit as the very structures of control had broken down. The inability
of the state to mediate these actions was precisely due to the existence
of the actions on a plane that could not be mediated. It was not for
anything specific but for the possibility of possibility, the very
energy that destroys limits. This is a strategy of disappearance, unable
to be defined, unable to be categorized, and therefore unable to be
policed. It was a fight over the possibility of control.
Not that the G20 was anywhere close to the intensity of Greece, but that
type of situation can only exist to the degree that it is invisible to
the state, that there are too many dynamics, too many actions to
stabilize. But this disappearance from the plane of the state, from the
stateâs gaze, is also an appearance on the level of daily life, a level
where life and action link up in ways that can only create dynamic
situations. Resistance struck a chord, it resonated, and that resonance
built itself into an energy that shook the city. It escaped the bounds
of the removed specialists of political action and broke out, it became
social war, or at least a glimpse of what that resonance may feel like.
It opened a window into something else. What that is, is up to us to
decide.
As we witnessed in the Fall/Winter of 2011, repression can seemingly
destroy the possibility of resistance. All around the country people
gathered in and occupied open spaces, and just as quickly they were run
out by the police. This was not only due to inexperience and an almost
total inability to confront repression (largely due to the obsessions
with pacifism that plague American social movements) but also to a lack
of pre-action research on the tactical terrain itself. As we saw in the
antiwar movement, and as was replicated in many factions of Occupy,
there was an obsession with politics, political theory, issues, the
ethics of certain actions... so much theory. But for all the discussion
of resistance, and for all the endless arguments about tactics, there
was no discussion of effectiveness, actual tactical dynamics, or the
terrain in which tactics play themselves out. There were endless
discussions of transcendental conceptual frameworks but absolutely no
discussion of the particular tactical dynamics that exist on the ground.
To focus on tactical terrain is not only to focus on the necessarily
tactical conflict that exists at the core of all resistance but also to
discuss the physical terrain itself, the tactical operations of the
police, the structure of the terrain itself, and the possibility for
tactical openings and amplifications.
Engaging in this sort of tactical mapping means recognizing the paradox
latent in the approach itself. Tactical terrain is a constantly shifting
phenomenon; it is the time and space in which action occurs. Yet, a
research- and mapping-based approach is necessarily static; it generates
static information. In other words, there is a certain obsolescence in
the information gathered the moment after the gathering ceases, or at
least the moment that the main body of information and the primary
framework of analysis is developed, because the situation itself always
keeps moving. This is compensated for, in military and police
operations, through a constant stream of real time information coming
into central command. In our case there have been experiments with using
Twitter and live Google Maps in order to map and distribute information
about police movements. Regardless of approach we must acknowledge two
things. First, for as comprehensive as this information may be, and for
as total as distribution may be, it is never enough and it is never
transmitted fast enough to actually encompass the changing dynamics of a
situation. Second, we still need a general framework of information in
order to put this information into context; without advanced research on
the space or the tactics of the police, disseminating information about
police movements is worthless. Tactical terrain research, therefore,
will never give a total view of the terrain; it is not something that
can be taken as true or as a hard logistical framework for the planning
of actions. Rather, we need to see these research studies both as
fundamental to the process of preparation for action as well as a
baseline from which we can make sense of changes on the ground.
We need to think of tactical terrain as a convergence. Far from being
confined to the physical terrain, the street is a place of coming
together; a convergence of actions, effects, ways of making sense. It is
a result of everything that has ever occurred, everything that has lead
to this point in time in this particular place. Now, it is impossible,
obviously, to be able to grasp the totality of this convergence; all we
can ever do is attempt to construct a way of making sense of this space
that is more or less effective in grasping that which occurs. In other
words, regardless of all the information that we can gather and process,
regardless of how deeply entrenched we may be in a space, it is
materially impossible to understand this totality of history. As such a
tactical terrain is always something that we can never entirely grasp.
Our ways of making sense of this space will always exist at a necessary
disjunction from the particularity of this space at this moment. This
does not mean that the attempt to make sense of space is irrelevant, it
can be a really effective exercise; it only means that we will never
come to understand tactical terrain in some direct and total way, in
some absolutely true way.
With this said, we are talking here about how to potentially make sense
of a particular space at a particular time, and ways to understand this
convergence. All too often, in this sort of analysis, we fall into one
of two traps. On the one hand, the tendency is to understand this space
only spatially, to read the terrain itself as a static space. This
prevents us from understanding the potentiality of tactical movement in
that space. On the other hand, there is a tendency to obscure the
terrain itself entirely, focusing, instead, on a history of tactical
successes and failures devoid of any discussion of the tactical
particularity of these moments. To avoid these traps we need to always
treat tactical terrain studies as a convergence of dynamics.
We need to recognize that all terrain is structural, expressed in the
research of maps, elevations, concealments, features, placement of
points, materials, and so on. In other words, terrain has a physical
dimension. We see this discussion in most of the great works of tactical
theory; in the Art of War this is expressed in the discussion of
concealment, elevation, and tactical advantage. Conflict occurs in a
place, and the characteristics of that terrain play an integral role in
how conflicts play themselves out. We see the difference in terrain even
in contemporary conflicts during large demonstrations. In St Paul we
were faced with a relatively isolated downtown area, separated from the
rest of the city by a freeway and the Mississippi River. This presented
advantages (the ability to section off and further isolate this space
from the rest of the city, particularly important in blockading
delegates to the convention) and disadvantages (most of the mass arrests
occurred either along the river, on isolated streets, or on bridges).
Compare this to Pittsburgh during the G20 where the use of barricades
combined with the irregular street patterns and dense urban structure of
the East End gave us a huge advantage in preventing police movement.
Secondly, terrain is mobile. Understanding this involves getting a grip
on the neighborhoods, the traffic patterns, how things shift, and the
way that the structural elements of the city facilitate this movement.
Again, as we mentioned, there is a tendency to treat tactical terrain as
only physical; as atemporal, ahistorical, inert. We reduce terrain to
only its physical elements at our own peril. If we think of a city
street, full of brick row-houses, we may see a static terrain; but even
if nothing occurs overtly, they degrade, the pavement degrades, the
space shifts and lives. Making sense of the particularity of any space
at any time is also to understand the animation of this space, the flows
of the space, the actions that occur, and why. This involves making
sense of where convergences of action occur, when and why. Only at this
point can we make sense of the effects that actions may have and the
dynamics that these actions will occur in.
Thirdly, tactics is a terrain of conflict. Understanding this means
researching the terrain as a combative space, the histories of
resistance and repression, the relationships with the police, police
tactics, and particular approaches in particular areas, features that
can help to facilitate actions, and so on. In other words, to the degree
that the state exists, we need to understand space as a conflict between
the historical possibilities of action and the attempt to construct a
condition of possibility for action through the operations of policing.
It is not that tactical terrain occurs in some bubble, nor that it is an
organic process; rather, we need to think through policing operations,
but also think these operations within the historical possibility of
that terrain. To put it another way, policing occurs somewhere and this
somewhere has dynamics. The actions taken by police have effects, and
these effects cause shifts in the tactical terrain which cause shifts in
policing and so on. We cannot think of conflict and tactics as static
phenomenon or the direct expression of theory. For years we have
attempted to grasp police tactics in a bubble, treating them as a whole
that exists in some singular way across time and space. But tactical
terrain research shows that these dynamics change over time, what the
operations of task forces look like, what levels of force are allocated
when and where, what common approaches to certain situations may look
like; this requires a consistency of research that we donât currently
have.
Tactical terrain research occurs on two levels. First is the abstract
and general level, when we look at space in the widest sense possible,
primarily on the level of the map itself. However, this transcends
simple map reading and assembly and is the process of assembling a
framework through which we can understand the space that we are
gathering information about. While each person or group should, and
probably will, develop their own process for constructing this
framework, I have found that the most effective ones include physical
space, mapping roads and other arteries of circulation, and also mapping
generalized social dynamics, the division between neighborhoods,
concentrations of wealth, social convergence points, and commercial
districts. Then we move from this general level onto the more specific.
Here we will be going down on the street to understand how people and
commodities circulate within this space, how dynamics occur on the
street; this also includes things like timed maps of police force
concentration, traffic concentrations, dissipation points, and the
dynamics around special events (among other things).
Points of convergence: spaces in which there is a concentration of a
collision of dynamics. These tend to be points where movement
concentrates, and often enters into a level of congestion that prevents
or slows movement. Points of convergence are also often the major
junctions in the function of the space itself. These include
intersections, freeway junctions, exits, entrances, choke points,
commercial districts, bridges, and other âpoints of interestâ (stadiums,
venues, hotels/resorts, college campuses, etc).
Points of deployment and surveillance: points where the police leave
from, gather, or project across space (things like cameras, neighborhood
watch groups, substations). Mapping spaces like this not only allows us
to understand where force is more likely concentrated but also where it
is most likely scattered, as well as the primary point of departure for
police operations. These points include police stations, possible
staging and holding areas, cameras, points of concentrated police
operations, substations, campus police stations, courts. and prisons.
Terrain variance and features: many radical groups conceptualize space
as a flat collection of points. If we take the time to read the history
of conflict, or even basic tactics theory, the features of the space
itself, in a three dimensional sense, are often the difference between
successful actions and crushing failure. Just as we use the basic layout
and social dynamics of a space to make sense of where effective actions
may be possible and where we hold tactical advantage, we can also
incorporate terrain variance into this framework. We look for things
like elevation shifts, spaces of concealment, alleys and other
cut-through paths, terrain depressions and other spaces of concealment,
convergence and dispersal points, parks and wooded areas, unpass- able
areas (water, ravines, etc), bridges...
To gather this information we either rely on resources that already
exist or ones that we develop. Keep in mind, this research is much
easier if you do it with your friends, your affinity group, people in
your neighborhood (if theyâre down). The more eyes on the ground, the
more people scouring the web and talking to others, the more information
we will gather and the easier it will be to organize and analyze it all.
This sort of analysis is not about just gathering specific information;
we have come to recognize that there is no such thing as too much
information, and no piece of information that we gather has ever been
irrelevant. The only limitation that we have is time and capacity, the
amount of time we have to gather info and the capacity we have to make
sense of it all.
Internet research is a great place to start. In simple Google searches
one can come across everything from maps of spaces, maps of camera
placement, police field manuals, operational after-reports, police
theory journals, and so on. All of these can be valuable. Just make sure
that people doing research practice good security; we highly recommend
downloading and using a secure browser, and storing your data on a True
Crypt partition on your hard- drive.
Google Maps allows us to see the street layouts, terrain variations,
building elevations, and so on. A simple Google Maps search gives us a
tool that was a pipedream for organizers and operators even five years
ago; it allows us access to a satellite surveillance network.
Increasingly, as the labeling of space becomes more comprehensive, we
can already see the locations of numerous points of interest, saving a
lot of time that would otherwise be spent doing address searches and
then mapping all of these points individually. However, while this can
be a useful tool (particularly when combined with smart phones) we
always need to keep in mind that these maps are often slightly outdated
(sometimes more than slightly). As static as much of human development
may seem, this space is constructed to facilitate certain forms of
movement and that it is in constant flux. For example, the maps of Tampa
used in the lead-up to a research project that occurred before the 2012
RNC did not incorporate a lot of changes in development in downtown;
there were buildings that had been torn down, buildings that had been
built, roads that had been rerouted, and so on.
We have been researching alternatives to Google Maps, and have found
Wikimapia to be an adequate replacement. Wikimapia not only allows one
to look at maps with similar layers (except for real time traffic
mapping and street view), but also provides certain advantages.
Wikimapia is an open-source project. This does not guarantee security,
but the site was used extensively by radicals in Syria and Libya without
having information turned over to the state, not something that we can
say about Google. Secondly, Wikimapia allows users to outline shapes and
objects on a map and label the entire object, which is useful for the
making of maps combining defined objects, but also terrain features and
things like avenues of movement.
Google Streets allows us a view of the street, landmarks and scale, in
places we have never been. The value of this cannot be over-estimated.
However, we need to keep a couple things in mind. Remember that these
street shots can be obsolete the second after they are taken; space
shifts constantly so this sort of visualization only goes so far. Also,
these images are taken with a certain distortion simply due to the
limitations of the cameras. In other words, scale will not be precise,
nor will the location of mobile terrain features (dumpsters, newspaper
boxes, planters, etc). You can take measurements of space on Google
Streets, and we recommend this, rather than relying on often distorted
lines of sight.
Internet searches The internet gave us access to absurd volumes of
information, and like I said before, there is no such thing as too much
information. However, to avoid an endless abyss of research, focus is
helpful. When I am researching space I tend to focus on a relatively few
sources, but ones that repeatedly give solid info. Look for news
articles about past actions, particularly actions that may have anything
in common with the tactics sets that may be used in future actions. If
we are engaging in this sort of research on a daily and local level then
this may mean researching articles about police initiatives, enforcement
priorities, methodologies, practices like âstop and friskâ and so on.
Along with this it helps to look at articles about general police
operations; often the police will have a public relations department,
and even a Twitter account, in order to openly talk about changes as
part of âcommunity policingâ (or counterinsurgency). Though many of the
sources that you
will find will give you really sanitized versions of these programs, it
allows us to understand what they are doing where and when, and that
gives us some focus when we move into on-the-ground research. We also
look at police annual reports; all departments need to make these
available, and many are on the internet. Annual reports usually talk
about the locations of facilities, the number of personnel at each
facility, force concentration by shift, arrest numbers by precinct or
even neighborhood, task forces, SWAT teams, and so on. They include a
wealth of basic information on force allocation and operations, some
even go into detailed discussions of methodologies and theories applied
in policing operations (Tampa Police do this extensively). From this
data we begin to piece together a rough estimate of total force
allocation at any one time; to do this take the number of police in a
precinct (if this information is not available take the total number of
personnel, subtract administrative and investigative personnel and
divide that number by the number of precincts) and divide this by the
number of shifts, which is usually three during normal operations and
two during heightened security. Also try to find pre-action security
briefs or articles about briefs. In the past decade the police have
often taken to intimidating us through exaggerated discussions of the
numbers they have or may be bringing in, their centcom capacity, the
numbers they are planning to arrest and so on. Even when these numbers
are exaggerated, they can give us a good look into their numbers and
mentality; the fact that they talked about finding PVC pipe down alleys
and their training to dismantle lockboxes before Pittsburghâs G20
definitely gave us a really solid idea of what they were expecting, and
thus what they were prepared for (which was very different than what
they saw, and a lot of us know how that turned out). Other good sources
of information are the writings of police think tanks or think tanks
that theorize about police operations (like RAND Corporation), and they
all have email lists that announce the release of new papers; the same
goes for police theory journals. There are also police conferences in
which command personnel gather and trade notes, often the notes of these
talks can be found online (this helps even more if your local police
commander tends to give talks at events like this).
The ambitious can take on mapping police operations on a regular basis,
which provides much more comprehensive information, especially when
combined with other forms of research. This level of research requires a
copy of the daily police blotter, a way to pull the information off the
blotter (and they are all structured differently, so one may need a
tech-savvy friend to data scrape the blotters into a database), and then
a mapping application (this can be done through Google Maps, but there
are really useful specialized programs and web-apps built to create real
time live maps). Then track this information over a period of time (at
least two months or more), looking into points of response, when and
where arrests tend to be made. When combined with police scanner data
the information will become even more illustrative. From these sorts of
maps, along with information gathered from other sources, we can piece
together a relatively comprehensive understanding of local police
operations.
Nothing can substitute for on the ground intel gathering. This means
going out on the street. It helps if there is more than one team on the
streets (you cover more space more comprehensively with more eyes on the
ground). These teams observe peopleâs movements, talk to people, maybe
do a little covert cop watching, and so on. Getting into the space
allows us to get a feel for it and also allows us to gather bits of
information that no amount of internet research or reading will ever get
us.
On the ground research can be broken into three general categories.
Metropolitan: This is intelligence relating to the flows of the
metropolis, the circulation of people and commodities, communications,
and infrastructure that comprises tactical terrain. This primarily
focuses on the shifts in the movements and patterns of the space; when
rush hour occurs, where traffic concentrates, where people gather and
when, where police allocate force and when, the economic divisions of
space, the divisions between neighborhoods and so on.
Point of Interest: This could include things like entering and
researching the floor plans of certain buildings, the transportation
infrastructure of a specific event, and so on.
Grassroots: This is the gathering of narrative information from the
people who populate the space. This may include us, if we live in this
space. Primarily this involves going to social events or engaging in the
dynamics of the space itself, talking to people and trying to get a read
on any number of aspects of the space. This is a great way to gather
information that is otherwise being withheld (for example the hotel
arrangements of delegates to a specific event).
This is only the basis of a research plan and a brief discussion of
methods. While there is no such thing as too much information, the
volume of information gathered relates to our ability to analyze it.
This implies a few things. The more people involved, the more
information can be gathered and analyzed. Secondly, organization is key;
the more organized gathering and processing is the more efficiently you
can work through it. Thirdly, there is never such a thing as having all
the information about a space; space shifts through time, conditions and
dynamics change on the ground. Research, therefore, can only provide a
basis for a framework to make sense of our information. From the point
of analysis there are many ways to spatialize this data. We prefer
layering of maps, usually beginning with an online mapping program
(Google Maps, Wikimapia) that has the general points of interest dotted
on the map. We overlay that with maps of things like neighborhood
dynamics, commercial districts, and traffic patterns to help break up
the map into easily digestible portions that we can research in a
reasonable amount of time. Everyday, as information comes in from
researchers we map the data, converge at the end of the day, and
restructure the plan for the next trip based on the data received. From
here we compile the raw data, look at the maps, construct a framework
for making sense of all the information collectively, then write a
narrative report.
There is a difference between doing research on a space over a few days
and existing in the space that one analyzes. The more time on the
ground, the more eyes watching and gathering information, the more
experience we have with the psychogeography of a space, the more deeply
the information gathered will make sense. From here the possibilities
are limitless. The more we know about the space that we fight in, the
more effective we can be, and effectiveness is what matters. Through
Occupy something was forgotten, again: revolution is an immediate and
material dynamic, something that happens in a time in a space. It is a
dynamic of material actions, tactics, and a calculation of
effectiveness. It is only in undertaking disciplined studies of tactical
terrain that we can come to begin to understand what effectiveness can
actually mean.
On War Carl Von Clausewitz
Cyberwar Is Coming! Arquilla and Ronfeldt
https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR880.html
Networks and Netwar (Chapters 1, 4, 6, 9 Arquilla and Ronfeldt)
https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382.html
âNomadology and the War-Machineâ Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari
From the Centre to the Periphery Alfredo Bonanno
Armed Joy Alfredo Bonanno
20 Thesis on the Subversion of the Metropolis anonymous
The Coming Insurrection The Invisible Committee
Intro to Civil War Tiqqun
War In The Age of Intelligent Machines Manuel Delanda
Speed and Politics Paul Virilio
Reflections on Violence Georges Sorel
In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Development of Operational Theory
Shimon Nahev
US Army Field Manual 3â19.15
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf
US Army Counterinsurgency Manual FM 3â24
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf
US Army Stability Operations Manual FM 3â07
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-07.pdf
Riot Control Rex Applegate
Counterinsurgency David Kilcullen
Learning To Eat Soup With A Knife John Nagel
Maneuver In War Colonel Charles Willoughby
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice David Galula
Enrages and Situationists in the May 68 Occupation Movement Rene Veinet
libcom.org/library/enrages-situationists-occupations-movement
Total Resistance Major H Von Dach
Guerrilla Warfare Che Guevara
Guerrilla Warfare Mao Zedong
Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla Abraham Guillen
Forward Into Battle Paddy Griffith
A Secret History of the IRA Ed Moloney
History of the Art of War Hans Delbruck
The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare Colonel Trevor Dupuy
The Makers of Modern Strategy Paret and Craig
Hollowland: Israelâs Architecture of Occupation Eyal Weizman
Lockdown America Christian Parenti
Our Enemies in Blue Kristian Williams
American Methods Kristian Williams
Tactical dynamics are amoral, arational, particular dynamics of
conflict, and effectiveness is the accomplishment of objectives within
this dynamic of profound uncertainty and resistance. Fusing ideas and
action together is always already impossible: analysis generates a space
that becomes inert while tactical dynamics are always in flux in all
moments, making both strategy and tactics impossible to think in direct
and total ways. The most we can do is try to make sense of these
dynamics in increasingly effective ways, ways that facilitate the
achievement of material objectives...
[1] occurring in parallel, effecting one another, but never fusing
together
[2] To be able to make the determination of an incorrect concept is to
also argue that one knows the correct concept, and thus truth.
[3] Foucault, 2003; Society Must Be Defended
[4] Mussolini, 1936; Mussolini discusses the state as an active
totality. All existence is framed through the state and oneâs value is
in their role in maintaining a unity that is materially impossible.
Hence the structure of the fasci, even before the March on Rome, the
attempt to construct unity through force, through the elimination of all
political contingency.
[5] Schmitt, 1988
[6] Clausewitz, 1968
[7] Naveh, 1997 142
[8] Schmitt, 1996: The Concept of the Political
[9] Sorel, 2004 144
[10] Clausewitz, 1968 146
[11] Williams, 2007
[12] Delanda, 1991
[13] Galula, 1964
[14] long range acoustic device
[15] Kaplan, 2013
[16] Clausewitz, 1968
[17] Many police tactics, including patrols, are meant to serve as a
deterrent, to project their perceived presence outside of immediate
presence. They may not be immediately present, but the altering of
patrol patterns and the use of swarming tactics always make their
presence possible.
[18] US Army FM 3â19.15: The development of the road grid was meant to
make movement more efficient, but also allowed for bullets to be
projected longer distances without hitting buildings, allowed vision to
project further down wide straight streets, and made streets more
difficult to barricade.
[19] âAnd he who becomes master of the city used to being free and does
not destroy her can expect to be destroyed by her, because always she
has as pretext in rebellion the name of liberty and her old customs,
which never through either length of time or benefits are forgotten, and
in spite of anything that can be done or foreseen, unless citizens are
disunited or dispersed, they do not forget that name and those
institutions...â; Machiavelli, The Prince, as quoted by Debord, Society
of the Spectacle.
[20] In Hollowland Weizman recounts the debate around the rebuilding of
Jenin after the invasion and destruction of the camp by the Israeli
Defense Forces. The UN wanted to use the rebuilding process as an
opportunity to rationalize the camp, by building permanent structures,
widening roads, and imposing a grid pattern to the streets. Palestinians
rejected the plan, arguing that permanence would sacrifice their claim
to return to their previous land while the rationalization of the
streets would make it easier for the IDF to invade in the future and
easier to monitor, defeating the intentional chaos of the original
development, built to resist invasion by structuring the space around
dense winding streets (difficult for armor to move through and troops to
maintain visual contact in).
[21] âIllegalityâ is a term that is only defined within the framework of
law and the ability of the police to arrest, but all illegality presents
a gap in police coverage.
[22] Schmitt, 1996
[23] Foucault, 2003: Society Must Be Defended
[24] Ranciere, 2004; âWhether the police are sweet and kind does not
make them any less the opposite of politicsâ (31).
[25] Clausewitz, 1968
[26] Whenever liberals argue that the âpolice are people tooâ they are
hitting on an important point, and then, as usual, completely
misunderstand the implications. If the police are just expressions of a
unit or definition then they are robotic and determined, but not
responsible for the implications of action, while if they are
peopleâparticular existences in particular momentsâthey only exist as
police to the degree that they attempt to mobilize force to operate
their particular understanding of existence as a total limitation on the
possibilities of existence, making them fascists.
[27] Clausewitz, 1968 170
[28] Delanda, 1991; Napoleonic military structures were characterized by
the breakdown of the aristocracy during the French Revolution and the
advent of mass conscription. Before the French Revolution, European
military tactics were based around largely mercenary armies led by
aristocrats (expensive to train and small) and around highly regimented
maneuver warfare, sieges, and negotiated battles, with neither side
willing to risk their forces in frontal clash. With the rise of Napoleon
the chain of command became meritocratic and the ranks of soldiers,
compelled by nationalism and conscription, swelled, now numbering into
the hundreds of thousands. This allowed battle fronts to stretch for
miles, multiple fronts to be formed, grand maneuvers, and greater speed
through charge and pursuit.
[29] The social here is not referring to some impossible, singular
âSociety,â but rather to what occurs between things.