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Title: Learning From Ferguson
Author: Peter Gelderloos
Date: December 2014
Language: en
Topics: police, repression, the state, violence
Source: Retrieved on December 11th/28th, 2014 from http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/09/the-nature-of-police-the-role-of-the-left/ & http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/19/learning-from-ferguson/ & http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/a-world-without-police/
Notes: Peter Gelderloos is a former prisoner who has participated in Copwatch and other initiatives to surveille the police or push them out of our neighborhoods. He is the author of several books, including The Failure of Nonviolence.

Peter Gelderloos

Learning From Ferguson

The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left

A young black person was killed, many people brave enough to take to the

streets in the aftermath were injured and arrested, and the only real

consequences the police will face will be changes designed to increase

their efficiency at spinning the news or handling the crowds, the next

time they kill someone. Because amidst all the inane controversies, that

is one fact that no one can dispute: the police will kill again, and

again, and again. A disproportionate number of their targets will be

young people of color and transgender people, but they have also killed

older people, like John T. Williams, Bernard Monroe, and John Adams, and

white people too. The Right has seized on a couple cases of white youth

being killed by cops, like Dillon Taylor or Joseph Jennings, throwing

questions of proportion out the window in a crass attempt to claim the

police are not racist.

Essentially, the point being made by right-wing pundits is that the cops

are killing everybody, so it’s not a problem. The fact that they can

make this argument and still retain credibility with a large sector of

the population shows how normalized the role of the police is in our

society. The true meaning of the evidence used manipulatively by the

Right is that the police are a danger to anyone not wearing a business

suit.

In a serious debate, however, it would be hard to deny that the police

are a racist institution par excellence. They kill young black, latino,

and Native people at a disproportionately higher rate than white youth,

and the institution itself descended from the patrols created to capture

fugitive slaves in the South and police urban immigrants in the North,

as masterfully documented in Kristian Williams‘ landmark book, Our

Enemies in Blue. What’s more, the criminal justice system that the

police play an integral role in, both feeding and defending the

prison-industrial complex, grew directly out of the 13th Amendment’s

approval of slavery in the case of imprisonment, illuminating the path

by which the United States’ advancing economy could leave plantation

slavery behind, first with the pairing of sharecropping and chain gangs,

and more recently with the pairing of a precarious labor market on the

outside and booming prison industries on the inside.

However, though the police do not affect everyone equally, they do

affect all of us. Everyone who is not wealthy can be a target for police

violence, and anyone who fights for a freer, fairer world puts

themselves directly into the cops’ crosshairs. During the Oscar Grant

riots in Oakland or the John T. Williams protests in Seattle, many

journalists, closely echoed by progressive spokespersons, denounced the

white people who took to the streets angered by police killings. With an

underhanded racism, they cast “white anarchists” as the ringleaders of

the mayhem, silencing the anarchists of color as well as the many young

people of color without any visible ideology who were often the most

active at taking over the streets or fighting back against the police.

If they really cared about racism and police violence, wouldn’t they

have portrayed the young people of color as protagonists, rather than

mindless stooges of “white anarchists,” or simply erasing their

participation entirely? Instead of discrediting the relatively few white

people who did take to the streets, shouldn’t the criticisms have been

directed at all the white people who stayed home?

However, with the protests after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson,

certain entrenched dynamics have started to change. True, the response

to the killing of Oscar Grant did spread to other parts of the West

Coast, and it was not successfully spun as an issue only affecting black

people; but to a far greater degree, the response to the official

announcement that the government approved of Michael Brown’s murder

spread across the country and included people of all races.

This is a good thing: more people are taking the problem of the police

seriously, realizing they need to react, and exploring actions that they

can take that will make a difference. The circumstances that forced this

necessary step forward are tragic, but they are hardly a surprise to

anyone with the slightest sense of history. Police killings and

unwavering government support for the cops are an integral part of our

society. They are not going away any time soon.

Logically, people would debate: what is to be done? However, this is a

debate that mainstream journalists, progressive journalists, protest

organizations, and left-wing figureheads have all studiously avoided,

maintaining not so much a conspiracy of silence as one of vitriol and

marginalization against anyone who challenges their unspoken tenets.

Those tenets are simple: all responses must be peaceful; and the only

conceivable goal is piecemeal reform. Within this artificially fixed

arena, we are allowed to squabble over all the details we want, from

cop-cameras to citizen review boards, but we are never allowed to

entertain opinions that transgress those limits. Those who use a wider

lens to understand where police violence comes from and what role it

plays in our society are ignored. If they are employed as journalists or

academics, they have just made a poor career move, and they will quickly

be drowned out by the ladder-climbing, cynical hacks who cover up this

ongoing tragedy with banal and myopic observations. Those who actually

attempt to explore other paths of action and change will be denounced as

“thugs,” “criminals,” and “agitators,” FOX and NPR will speak about them

in the same terms, police and protest leaders will unite to suppress

them.

That is how free speech works in a democracy. Fix the terms of the

debate, distract the masses with fierce polemics between two acceptable

“opposites” that are so close they are almost touching, encourage them

to take part, and either ignore or criminalize anyone who stakes an

independent position, especially one that throws into question the

fundamental tenets that are naturalized and reinforced by both sides in

the official debate. Noam Chomsky was one of several dissidents to

reveal this dynamic during the Vietnam War and demonstrate the unanimity

of hawk and dove positions in media debates. The media follow the same

rules today. In that earlier crisis, the fundamental tenet was that the

US government has the right to project its power, militarily or

otherwise, across the entire planet. In the current crisis, the

unquestionable dogma is that the police have a right to exist, that the

police as an institution are an apt instrument to protect us and serve

us, and therefore they are a legitimate presence on our streets and in

our neighborhoods.

In this debate, the Right claim that the police are working just fine,

while the Left claim that changes are needed to get them working better.

Both of them are united in preserving the role of police and keeping

real people—neighborhoods, communities, and all the individuals affected

by police—from becoming the protagonists in the conflicts that affect

us. Similarly, we frequently hear leftists claim that “the prisons

aren’t working,” exhibiting a willful ignorance as to the actual purpose

of prisons. Sadly, for all their distortions and manipulations, the

Right is being more honest. The police and the prisons both are working

just fine. As per their design, they are working against us.

On the Left, we find a tragic mixture of the unconscionably cynical with

the hopelessly naïve. No serious person can claim that any of their

proposed reforms will make a real difference; and in fact most have

already been tried. Racial sensitivity training only makes the cops

better at hiding their racism. It certainly doesn’t touch the underlying

hierarchies that police serve to protect. Civilian oversight, at the

very best, can lead to a few “bad apples” being forced to resign, and

they have rarely even reached that level of potency. No matter;

bureaucracies have always know how to make individual personnel

expendable so as to protect the greater power structure, and no

government in the world has given oversight boards more power than the

institutions they are supposed to monitor, not when those institutions

are vital to the smooth functioning of authority.

As for cameras, they would only increase the power of police by

augmenting the intrusion of government surveillance into our lives. The

murders of Eric Garner and Oscar Grant were caught on tape, and nothing

changed. The fact of the matter is, the vast majority of murders carried

out by cops are perfectly legal. How can this come as a surprise? The

same people who benefit from police violence are the ones writing the

laws or getting the lawmakers elected. The only real victim of

cop-cameras would be people who choose to defend themselves against

cops, an action that, no matter how justified, is never legal. If the

cops wore cameras, anyone who raised their hand against them would be

caught on tape. But the reformers aren’t thinking about self-defense,

are they?

And this is the crux of the issue. The question of self-defense against

the police is one that we are not allowed to consider, yet it is the

only one that makes sense. The police do not exist to protect society

from generalized cannibalism and mayhem, as in some paranoid Batman

fantasy. They exist to protect the haves from the have-nots, to maintain

the State’s monopoly on violence, and to make up for our atrophied

capacity for conflict resolution, another of the many prerogatives the

State has stolen from us (whether it’s a lack of the ability to knock on

our neighbor’s door when they play their music too loud or to draw on a

wider network of family and community ties to deal with an abusive

relationship).

We can ignore the antagonistic relationship that the police have with

anyone who is not trying or not able to make it to the highest tiers of

society, but what we cannot do is reform that relationship away. This is

why it is necessary to talk about self-defense against the police.

But we are not dealing with a open debate between two equal positions,

reform or fight back. First of all, this is because the reformers

consistently join in with all the dominant institutions, including the

bloody-handed cops they claim to oppose, to silence, marginalize,

criminalize, or demonize anyone who chooses to fight back against the

police. They do not engage in debate because they could only lose;

instead they make use of all the lies, distortions, and the generalized

amnesia perpetuated by the media specifically to avoid a debate.

Secondly, the reformers are parasites. They would not exist without

those who fight back. No one outside their respective communities would

ever have heard about Oscar Grant or Michael Brown were it not for the

rioters. The recent nationwide protests were only possible because folks

in Ferguson were setting fires, looting, throwing rocks and molotovs,

and shooting at cops for ten days in August.

If the reformers were sincere, they would thank those who took to the

streets for bringing the problem to the country’s attention, then

respectfully differ on the chosen tactics and goals, laying out a

historical case for why peaceful tactics and reformist goals are better

suited for achieving a real change. But this couldn’t be further from

their actual M.O. From parasitic celebrities like Jesse Jackson to an

alphabet soup of NGOs, the leftists fly in, put themselves at the head

of something they did not start, and work hand in hand with the police

to try and calm things down. These professional activists don’t have a

program of their own; they are just professional fire extinguishers. And

in the case of Ferguson, they are the government’s most valuable tool.

Because it wasn’t the police or even the National Guard who succeeded in

putting an end to the rioting, but these professional activists.

Their cynicism goes beyond the parasitical, backstabbing relationship

they have with those who actually risk themselves fighting to eject

police from their neighborhoods, and beyond their racist portrayal of

local people of color who are at the frontlines of the fight as either

“thugs” or the unwitting pawns of outside agitators. They will even go

so far as to use the families of those murdered by police; in fact at

this point it seems to be part of their playbook.

If the family calls for peaceful protest, as did the families of John T.

Williams or Michael Brown, they lay it down like the law, and

marginalize anyone who tries to respond in a more combative manner,

maligning them as being disrespectful to the victim, heartless agitators

who are taking advantage of tragedy in order to sow chaos. Yet families

are not the only ones with a right to respond to police murders. How

many of us would want our parents to write our epitaph? How many of us

would trust our friends more than our families to know what we would

have wanted, if we were killed? Though friendship is not a relationship

recognized by law, the friends of a victim have also been directly

affected, and they should have a say in what’s the appropriate response.

In fact, friends and peers have played an important role in many of the

anti-police riots in the last few years, though their participation has

been largely hidden by the media and the pacifists alike.

It doesn’t end there. Neighbors and witnesses are also traumatized by a

police murder; they also have an undeniable need to respond to outrage

and reassert control over their environment, a control that walking in a

peaceful protest flanked by cops cannot give. And if we are not dealing

with an isolated murder but a systematic problem, as is the case with

police killings, then everyone is affected and everyone has a need to

respond.

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that this affects all of us. But

the pacifying, paralyzing discourse of the reformers specifically breaks

down solidarity. Instead of encouraging us all to feel harm done to

another as harm done to ourselves, we are all supposed to take a

backseat to “what the family wants.” The level of hypocrisy is

infuriating when you realize that the peace-preaching professional

activists don’t give a shit for the family of Michael Brown or anyone

else murdered by the cops. Family members are just pawns in their

agendas.

When Durham teenager, Jesus “Chuy” Huerta was shot to death in the back

of a police car one year ago, his family rebuffed the police

department’s hollow gestures of reconciliation, and they did not

denounce the people who fought with cops in anger over the killing. It’s

not a coincidence that local leftists were suddenly silent about what

the family wanted. And after the non-indictment, when Michael Brown’s

stepfather Louis Head urged a crowd to “burn this motherfucker down!”,

how many reformers decided to actually follow his lead? Instead, they

have all scrambled over themselves to prove he did not mean it,

broadcasting an apology he issued about a week later, a reconciliation

that might have been aided by the fact that Head was facing a criminal

investigation and had already been demonized in the media for a reaction

that, in Ferguson at least, was common sense for thousands of people.

This is a fine example of opinions we are not allowed to hold, and how

the legal system, the media, and the Left all work together to punish

and erase such opinions. It was a triumph for this triumvirate of social

control that most of the protests around the country were tame, legal

affairs that successfully quenched people’s anger, but fires, riots, and

highway blockades from Oakland to Boston indicate that that control is

finally starting to slip. For it to fully fall away, we need to

understand the true role of the legal system and the media, and realize

the full hypocrisy of the Left.

It is an alarming but historical moment when the Right speaks more

truthfully than the Left. While the reformers were talking about bad

apples and sensitivity training, cops in Missouri hit the nail on the

head when they began distributing and wearing bracelets that said, “We

Are All Darren Wilson.”

Even leftists who did not openly condemn the rioting fell into a tried

and true holding pattern. The only way they could make the rioting

palatable was to talk about police brutality against protesters. In

fact, for much of the riots, police in Ferguson were remarkably

restrained. It became commonplace for protesters to shoot at police with

handguns, and in November, assault rifles even made an appearance, yet

the cops did not shoot back.

This is an important step forward. In the face of a police institution

that has carte blanche to kill, people are beginning to value their own

lives over the laws of the elite. Yet for the reformers who cannot

conceive of fully opposing any of the existing institutions, this

narrative makes no sense. Normal people can only be victims, never

protagonists. And criticizing the police means not talking about those

moments when cops are actually scared for their lives and do not act

with total impunity. The lack of strategic thinking is startling.

As far as governments go, the US is infamous for being particularly

heavy handed and unrestrained in obliterating resistance. It militarizes

its cops, it metes out sentences far longer than what would be

considered just in most other countries, and it does not deign to engage

in the balances of compromise and social peace like the social

democracies do. To surpass the brutality with which the US government

liquidated the black and Native liberation movements in the ’60s and

’70s, you’d have to look to Iran or China. Yet now, in Ferguson, and in

many other cities this past November, the cops and their masters were

scared enough that when people began rioting, looting, taking guns to

protests, and shutting down highways, the authorities did not respond

with a police riot or a military clampdown. To a great extent, their

hands were tied.

Why? What were they afraid of?

It certainly wasn’t a peaceful protest or a little bad media coverage.

Answering this question more fully, and putting the answers into

practice, is the second step towards ending police violence once and for

all.

December 09, 2014

What's Worked in the Past

The announcement of the non-indictment of Darren Wilson caught me on the

road, traveling to visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday. The next

day I found myself in a protest, one of over a hundred occurring across

the country. There I witnessed a scene that has played out many times

before, and was probably being repeated at that exact moment in other

cities.

A few protesters had just vandalized a yuppie restaurant on a strip

targeted for heavy gentrification in that particular city. The windows

were spraypainted with a slogan related to the murder of Michael Brown,

and the restaurant’s sandwich board was stolen and pulled into the

streets.

“What are you doing?” a young white person complained, looking on with a

combination of shock and disgust. “We’re here to protest for Michael

Brown!”

One of the offenders, identity obscured by a black mask, looked over at

their interlocutor and laughed sardonically, “Oh yeah, gentrification

and police violence have nothing to do with each other!”

“We have to do this peacefully!” the other marcher persisted.

“When has that ever worked?” the black clad anarchist scoffed.

“Um, hello? Martin Luther King!” She rolled her eyes as though she were

stating the most obvious, self-evident fact in the world.

“Martin Luther King had armed bodyguards at his events, learn history!”

the would-be rioter shot back.

The crowd was racially diverse. I wasn’t counting, and the makeup of the

protest was constantly shifting, but at times a majority were people of

color. Yet the three times that I saw people object to “violence” (the

use of fireworks, the vandalizing of the restaurant, and the dragging of

a reflective barrier into the road as the march took to a highway,

rather a safety oriented action if you ask me, given that it was dark

and the protesters needed to warn off the oncoming traffic), the peace

police were white. Meanwhile, the people who could be seen shooting

fireworks at cops, dragging obstacles into the streets, insulting the

cops, and yelling things like “burn it all down,” or applauding any of

these actions, were black, latino, and white.

While I did not see any white people lecture any people of color that

they should be peaceful because “Martin Luther King,” it is something I

have seen happen elsewhere, and it is a message that constantly gets

reinforced subtextually.

There is a very real debate to be had about tactics and strategies when

we take to the streets in response to police killings. As I argued in

Part I of this essay, that debate is largely shut down by those who seek

to regenerate the police by reforming, rather than talking about

abolishing the police; such reformers have the habit of vituperatively

attacking others who raise that question.

It was dealt with more honestly in the streets of Ferguson, though.

According to one participant’s account:

“anytime I heard someone say we shouldn’t throw things at the police

(not because it was wrong, but out of fear they’d shoot us) I was able

to have good conversations—saying it’s a way we take power from them and

give it to ourselves. Even when people were super upset, by the end of

the conversation even if we still didn’t agree it was clear we respected

each other.”

Wherever order reigns, however, the non-debate plays out as I have

described above. There is a widely held belief, among white people

anyways, that history has already spoken, and that the only effective

and ethical response to systemic injustice, and especially racism, is

meek nonviolence, because, well, you know, “Martin Luther King.”

Beyond this discursive chokehold lies a very complex history that has

been, in large part, falsified, and a problematic relationship between

white people and people of color that seems to be repeating itself,

revealing tragic parallels between white people’s involvement in the

Civil Rights struggle and white people’s involvement in the unfolding

movement against police violence today, even as many of those same white

people cite a distorted version of the earlier struggle’s history,

stripped down to exclude all the failings and all the lessons that might

be learned.

I could start by pointing out how the form of nonviolence that is

pedaled by the mostly white progressive Left today is a pathetically

watered-down, superficial, meek comfort-zone politics compared to what

was being used during the Civil Rights movement, but I will leave that

to the pacifists. It’s not my responsibility to get nonviolence back

into fighting shape, since I don’t believe in it anyways, given that it

has always been complicit with state power, it has always been

parasitical and authoritarian towards other currents in the social

movements it joins, and it has always tended to water itself down over

time.

Instead I will start with the argument made by the protester in black,

that “Martin Luther King had armed bodyguards at his events.” Such a

comment will be perplexing to most white people, but in fact it is

historically accurate. Coincidentally, it has only been in the past year

that a certain fact has been rescued from the memory hole: that the

Civil Rights movement was an armed movement and that nonviolence was a

minoritarian exception—some might say aberration—within that movement,

as well as in the lineage of movements against slavery and white

supremacy going back centuries. Previously, only radical historians,

ex-Panthers, anarchists, and followers of C.L.R. James dealt with those

forgotten episodes of history, but recently the memo has even gotten to

NPR with the publication of books like This Nonviolence Stuff’ll Get You

Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, by Charles E.

Cobb, Jr. or the forthcoming Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection

in the American South.

In a summary of the former, we can read: “Visiting Martin Luther King

Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist

William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,”

King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a

purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery,

Alabama home as “an arsenal.” ”

For a long time these have been forbidden histories, and I believe they

were intentionally silenced, and largely by white people. Not only those

working for the same power structures that have been trying to disarm

people of color for centuries, but also those who hold power in social

movements, who since the repression and the defeats of the ’60s have

preferred a progressively more comfortable vision of “change”. It is

unfortunate for the authorities that these forbidden histories are being

resuscitated now, just in time for a post-Ferguson society, but we still

face an uphill battle to return this historical memory to the collective

consciousness. (Most protesters in the streets, for example, are still

unaware). And one of the chief obstacles—perhaps executioner would be a

more accurate term, since they hardly play a passive role—to the

dissemination of this knowledge are the same progressive whites who are

always ready to whip out a pithy “Martin Luther King!” faster than a cop

can draw his handgun.

So far, the histories that have hit the mainstream still maintain the

myth of the dominant character of nonviolence in the movements of

yesteryear. In Cobb’s book, valuable as it is, armed self-defense is

still auxiliary to a movement of civil disobedience. And while

proponents of nonviolence should know that civil disobedience has never

worked against a murderous enemy—like the Klan or the cops—without

making recourse to armed self-defense or falling into a symbiotic

relationship with a combative wing of the same movement, that is

ultimately their problem. I would not be worried about nonviolence

having fallen to such an absurd level of patent ineffectiveness if they

didn’t try to extinguish the struggles of people who actually believe in

fighting back against oppression, rather than negotiating with it. Or

staging ritualistic die-ins in front of it, or better yet, working for

it (see the relationship between Gene Sharp‘s protégé Otpor and global

intelligence company Stratfor).

There was an underlying tension throughout the Civil Rights movement

between nonviolence (albeit an armed nonviolence) and paths of struggle

that foregrounded self-defense and did not seek compromise with the

existing power structures. After all, the nonviolent practice that

emerged in the movement at the end of the 50s and early 60s was largely

imposed by the SCLC, the SNCC (in its first incarnation), and the white

New England liberals who provided most of their funding.

Beyond the Deacons of Defense, who organized armed protection to many

desegregation campaigns throughout the South in the 1960s, there is the

example of Robert F. Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina,

chapter of the NAACP, one of the few chapters of the national

organization that was predominantly working class. Having fought in

World War II, Williams led his local chapter in advocating armed

self-defense after a nonviolent campaign for local desegregation failed.

In his book, Negroes With Guns, he describes one occasion when he had to

protect himself from a lynch mob.

As the mob is shouting for gasoline to be poured on Williams and his

friends, and begins to throw stones, Williams steps out of the car with

an Italian carbine in hand.

“All this time three policemen had been standing about fifty feet away

from us while we kept waiting in the car for them to come and rescue us.

Then when they saw that we were armed and the mob couldn’t take us, two

of the policemen started running. One ran straight to me, grabbed me on

the shoulder, and said, ‘Surrender your weapon! Surrender your weapon!’

I struck him in the face and knocked him back away from the car and put

my carbine in his face, and told him that we didn’t intend to be

lynched. The other policeman who had run around the side of the car

started to draw his revolver out of the holster. He was hoping to shoot

me in the back. They didn’t know that we had more than one gun. One of

the students (who was seventeen years old) put a .45 in the policeman’s

face and told him that if he pulled out his pistol he would kill him.

The policeman started putting his gun back in the holster and backing

away from the car, and he fell into the ditch.

“There was a very old man, an old white man out in the crowd, and he

started screaming and crying like a baby, and he kept crying, and he

said, ‘God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that

the n*****s have got guns, the n*****s are armed and the police can’t

even arrest them!’ He kept crying and somebody led him away through the

crowd.”

When Williams was expelled from the NAACP for his militant views, the

local chapter simply elected Mabel Williams as their new president, and

continued their practice of armed self-defense. Highlighting the

importance of economic injustice, both Williams developed a socialist

politics and lived in exile in Cuba after fleeing the country to evade

trumped up kidnapping charges.

The Black Panther Party, which was demonized in the media at the time of

its existence, is obviously well known, for it plays a different

function within the process of historical amnesia. The BPP has become a

symbol for all forms of black militancy in the ’60s, even though there

were hundreds of different strains and currents of revolutionary thought

and practice in the movement. And what is remembered about the Panthers

is little more than their style. Their program, their splits and

conflicts, their relations with other groups and movements at the time,

their eventual evolution into the Black Liberation Army, and all the

lessons that can be gleaned from this knowledge, has been consigned to

the memory hole. They were merely the ones with the afros, the berets,

and the rifles, who met with a tragic end, reconfirming the pacifist

contention about the futility of violence.

The Panthers are either romanticized or vilified. To me, they were an

authoritarian and macho organization (though no more authoritarian and

macho than King’s SCLC) composed of many intelligent, brave, radical

individuals trying to take an important step forward in the struggle,

achieving some accomplishments and committing some errors.

More interesting to me are the nameless ones, the people who did not

participate in any formal organization, yet who played a critical role

in the few gains the Civil Rights movement achieved. More disparaged

even than the BPP, these individuals have been consigned by the dominant

historiography to the mob. Just like the rioters of Ferguson, whom we

all have to thank for keeping Michael Brown’s memory alive, without whom

this conversation would not even be possible, those who were assigned

mob-status in what are portrayed as the darker moments of the Civil

Rights movement are presented as cruel, unthinking, self-destructive,

and demonic.

In fact, the mob member is nothing more and nothing less than the

archetype for a person of color, in the white supremacist imagination.

It was this same archetype that was drawn on to create the concept of

race, primarily in the Virginia colony, as transplanted aristocrats had

to divide and conquer an unruly labor force of exiled Irish, kidnapped

poor from the English cities, Africans stolen from their homes, and

enslaved Natives. In the early years, these enslaved underclasses often

ran away together to the mountains or the swamps, and from time to time

they rebelled together, killing their masters and breaking their chains.

It is this image that is preserved in the figure of the mob, and this

elite fear that we reproduce when we also spurn, disparage, or avoid

such a formation.

I do not believe that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, but I do believe

that my enemy’s nightmare can serve as a figure of hope or beauty.

Colonial society’s obsession with law and order, its fear of the dark

Other, which coalesce in its absolute condemnation of the mob,

illuminate another way forward.

In the Civil Rights movement, the story of Birmingham provides a perfect

example of the intelligence and effectiveness of this acephalous,

decentralized formation of resistance, a true hydra, to refer to the

writings of ex-Panther and prisoner Russell “Maroon” Shoatz or

historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker.

Most people only know half the story. In 1963, a civil disobedience

campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, the bastion of segregation in the

South, forced the desegregation of the city and paved the way for the

Civil Rights Act, which was the major victory of the Civil Rights

movement, as far as legislation is concerned.

What fewer people know is that the Birmingham campaign was a repeat of

SCLC’s 1961 campaign in Albany, Georgia, which turned out a complete

failure. King was banking on being able to fill up the jails and still

have recruits willing to engage in civil disobedience, shutting the

system down, but the authorities simply made their jails “bottomless” by

shipping detainees elsewhere. A couple years later, black residents of

Albany rioted, suggesting what they thought about their experience with

nonviolence (these riots are not mentioned in most chronologies of the

movement).

In Birmingham, the 1963 campaign was unfolding the same way, and King

was running out of recruits willing to offer themselves up for arrest.

Then the riots started. Thousands of locals fought with police, injuring

many of them, burned the very white businesses that were refusing to

desegregate, and took over a large part of downtown, holding it for

days. By fighting back directly, they instantly made a desegregated,

cop-free zone in the center of their city. Anxious to keep other people

from learning the same lesson, Birmingham business leaders and

politicians immediately agreed to legislate the desegregation that

rioters had already accomplished (in fact they had won something even

more potent: not only could blacks enter white businesses, but they

didn’t have to pay for anything). President Kennedy finally started

paying attention and urged Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act. It was

the rioters who won civil rights.

Some veterans of the SNCC write about the decreasing effectiveness of

civil disobedience in those years:

“The philosophy of nonviolence hit shakier ground when SNCC began its

period of community organization in the South, having to face continual

threats of perhaps deadly violence from whites. [… ]As a result, once

strict guidelines of nonviolence were relaxed and members were

unofficially permitted to carry guns for self defense. [...] Eventually

whites began to understand the tactic, and nonviolence became less

powerful. […] If there was no more public violence for SNCC to rise

above, SNCC’s message would be weakened. Thus, protesters were no longer

beaten publicly. Instead they were attacked and beaten behind closed

doors where newspaper reporters and television cameras could not reach.

As southern whites intended, discrete violent oppression began to

destroy the image of martyr that SNCC had carefully constructed through

nonviolent protest. […] Soon after, the Harlem Riots took place. It was

the first urban race riot, and brought the topic of black-initiated

violence into public debate. Such actions were no longer assumed to be

counter productive. This event, and eventually the rise of black power,

led to the fall of nonviolence in SNCC.”

So whenever somebody says “Martin Luther King,” the message should be,

“We know, we know, nonviolence doesn’t work.” Even King was moving away

from a strict attachment to nonviolence, speaking in favor of rioters

and the armed Vietnamese, before they killed him. This was after 1963,

years in which he doesn’t appear in the official histories, when he was

doing things and saying things that white progressives never refer to.

For example, King told Alex Haley in 1965: “Over the past several years,

I must say, I have been gravely disappointed with such white “moderates”

[those who consider themselves “enlightened” and “sympathize with our

goals but cannot condone our methods of direct action”]. I am often

inclined to think that they are more of a stumbling block to the Negro’s

progress than the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner.”

This quote raises an interesting question. What was the role of white

people in the Civil Rights movement? They seem to be absent from the

stories above, as well as the best known episodes of the movement. The

only real exceptions are Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white

New Yorkers killed in Mississippi alongside James Chaney.

In fact, a large number of white people participated in the movement,

working alongside King in the SCLC, taking part in other organizations

like CORE, going on Freedom Rides, and above all, helping fund the

movement and putting pressure on media and politicians. There were also

mostly white organizations like SDS and Weatherman that formed a part of

the larger constellation of social struggles that were influenced by the

Civil Rights movement and fed back into the continuing battle against

racial oppression. Weatherman, for example, maintained ties with the

Black Panthers.

And though many white people did go to prison, only a few faced the

level of repression the FBI brought down on the black liberation

movement (and usually it was white people who had engaged in armed

struggle, like David Gilbert or Harold Thompson). In other words, many

more white people survived the struggle intact; what’s more, they were

able to become influential academics, politicians, or business leaders.

The implication is that they are the ones, above all, who have written

the official history of that era, a history that has been amputated,

distorted, and falsified. And while they may have been radicals in their

youth, they and the generations they have influenced have become

increasingly like the “enlightened” moderates King warned about.

Mumia abu-Jamal writes about how Dr. King was “calming” for the white

pysche, whereas the Panthers were frightening. And in many ways, the

white middle class was the audience that a large part of the movement

was performing for. They constituted, and they still constitute today, a

virtual public, mobilized by the media, that lays down the norms for

acceptable civic behavior. They determine whether a dissident social

group is granted some legitimacy, or whether the police will be

justified in annihilating them.

The same dynamic is reproduced today as white progressives essentially

audit the rebellions that are sparked by the inevitable casualties of

heavyhanded policing in poor neighborhoods primarily inhabited by people

of color. They can refuse to see those rebellions as acts of resistance,

instead fearfully dismissing them as senseless race riots, as was

generally the case with the L.A. Riots of 1992. Or they can participate,

in order to tame them, to make them more comfortable for the typical

white person who does not have to put up with daily police violence.

I am absolutely not saying that nonviolence is a white thing and

violence is what people of color use. I don’t believe that race

predetermines people’s opinions or experiences, though it does generate

patterns in terms of what people are subjected to by a racialized

society. I know that within black communities of resistance, to name one

example, there are still debates on what lessons to draw from the Civil

Rights and black liberation movement. I personally take inspiration from

the thinking of certain ex-Panthers, like Ashanti Alston, Russell

“Maroon” Shoatz, and Lorenzo Komboa Ervin. There are also veterans of

the more militant wing of the struggle who still believe in a

hierarchical, Maoist-inspired method, and there are still those who

believe in nonviolence.

While I do think that an honest reading of history disproves the

commonplace that “nonviolence worked,” which is basically what white

people mean when they exclaim, “Martin Luther King!”, I don’t think that

history is univocal, that it leads to any single, correct answers

regarding how to create a better world. What’s more, how could there be

one answer? Every individual and every community has different needs,

and everyone faces different consequences when they go up against this

system.

A person of color is going to face a higher risk of injury or

imprisonment if they fight back than I would. This means that I cannot

make tactical decisions for anyone else. But in the hands of many white

progressives, this fact turns into the argument that fighting back is

“privileged,” something only white people can do. This assertion is as

patronizing as it is inaccurate. While the “Black Bloc” method of

rioting is still carried out mostly by white people—after all, it was

imported from Germany—this is only one of many ways that people choose

to fight back. In fact, a politics of comfort, the ability to dissent

without being punished, is one of the defining privileges of whiteness,

though white people have to play by certain rules to enjoy it. And

peacefulness is chief among those rules.

When something like Ferguson happens, people of color will suddenly

appear in the media in greater quantity, urging nonviolence. White

progressives take this as confirmation that their stance is not

inflected by race, and in fact their comfort politics is just a way for

them to be good allies following the leadership of people of color. But

that is exactly how they are supposed to react. The legitimization of

nonviolence is nothing but a spectacle, and they are the intended

audience.

I don’t know if the activists, ministers, and scholars cast in the role

of “community leaders” by the media engage in fair debates within their

communities, if they’re making good tactical decisions in their

circumstances, or if they even believe what they are saying. It isn’t my

place to say. Regardless, they are used as figureheads by white media to

deliver a reassuring message to a white audience. The same activists,

with the same credentials, would not be given any air time by the big

media corporations or the big NGOs and protest organizations, mostly

reliant on white philanthropy, if they questioned the validity of

nonviolence. Like consumers with a big budget, white progressives are

determining the kind of products that are being sold to them without

ever being aware of the marketing. Whether it’s designer shoes or

protest strategies, the dynamics are the same, and above all they

reinforce the worldview where buying and selling are normal activities

and the market is understood as a natural force.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to view these opinions as products,

at least when they are being packaged by the media. At every level of

the spectacular treatment of this conflict, property relations are

asserting themselves over and against human life. When kids are getting

shot down in the streets, some vigilantes are taking up arms not against

the police but against the looters, to defend “property rights”. By

other means, proponents of nonviolence are doing the same thing, since a

condemnation of the riots is above all support for the sanctity of

property over life.

I think it can be a good thing that more white people are finally

reacting to police violence and taking to the streets, but not if they

participate in the unfolding movement in the same way as they

participated in the Civil Rights movement.

After all, the current movement is in many ways a continuation of Civil

Rights. And the latter was just one manifestation of the centuries-old

fight against oppression and domination, which in this country has

largely been about race, due to the way North America was colonized.

There is a strong argument for the assertion that the Civil Rights

movement neither won nor ended. If the shared goal of the movement was

to end racial inequality and oppression, it was principally the

legal-minded, college-educated portions of the movement who were

asserting that the focus of that goal should be change at an

institutional, legislative level. Their assertions have proven false.

Perhaps the only concrete victories of the movement were to end Jim Crow

segregation, institute a legal basis for racial equality, and

substantially increase the percentage of registered black voters. At

least as far as statistical evidence is concerned, these changes have

not been accompanied by an increase in the quality of life for black

people and other people of color, nor a substantial decrease in the

disproportions between white people and people of color in any

significant criterion from income to incarceration and police killings.

Jim Crow segregation is over, but a subtler form of segregation that had

already been developed in northern cities from New York to Chicago by

the time of the Civil Rights movement is the law of the land. As city

administrators smelled the changing winds in the ’50s and ’60s, they

applied for federal “urban renewal” grants and demolished thriving black

neighborhoods across the South, from places like small, rural

Harrisonburg, where I used to live, to southern Harlems, cultural

centers like Richmond and Miami. In their places they built highways and

incinerators, or they constructed new buildings for white businesses,

and located new housing projects for the displaced black residents in

less desirable neighborhoods. Housing and Urban Development proved to be

a much more potent weapon than the Ku Klux Klan for the maintenance of a

white supremacist system. And who needs the Ku Klux Klan when you have

Google? Even more efficient than a powerful government bureaucracy, tech

companies like Google or Microsoft are rapidly gentrifying historically

black and latino neighborhoods from San Francisco to Seattle.

If you consider that the outer boundary of San Francisco’s

gentrification is Oakland, these two beachheads of the new style of

gentrification line up with sites of some of the fiercer and more

innovative battles against police killings in the last five years: the

cases of Oscar Grant and John T. Williams.

This is not a coincidence. Policing is crucial to the gentrification of

a neighborhood, as well as to the maintenance of slum status in poor

neighborhoods like Ferguson that the system intentionally neglects. And

while many aspects of police strategies in these two kinds of

neighborhoods differ—“broken windows” theory and hyperaggressive

policing against quality of life offenses in the former, military-style

operations, denial of services, and even complicity in the drug trade in

the latter—both strategies result in the killings of people of color.

Though the media and the other institutions that educate us have cut us

off from our histories and achieved a widespread social amnesia, we are

affected by the past, and we continue to play out dynamics that began a

long time ago. Whether we reference dominant histories or subversive

histories—people’s histories—determines whether we learn from past

mistakes or repeat them.

Nonviolence has the dubious honor of narrating people’s histories that

are almost identical to the official history. Nonviolence worked, the

Civil Rights movement won, and so on. In the Ferguson solidarity protest

I attended, a young black person, before urging us to “burn everything,”

said “this has been going on since Emmett Till.” He was referencing a

much different history than the white person who tried to stop a few

vandals by spouting “Martin Luther King!”

Many people in Ferguson and greater St. Louis have decided to take up

arms against the police, first in August after Michael Brown was killed,

and again in November after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson was

announced. Both the proponents of nonviolence and the media have been

downplaying the use of weapons by protesters, but the gunfire, aimed in

the air or directly at police, has been a transformative characteristic,

setting Ferguson apart from previous responses to police killings, and

presenting a real danger, and therefore a limit, for the cops, as well

as a danger for the protesters (several of whom were injured by friendly

fire). Rather than shy away from the danger, shouldn’t we at least be

talking about whether it is preferable to the one-sided war that police,

in times of social peace, are continously waging against some of us?

Leave it to Fox News to denounce those who take up weapons as mindless

thugs or demons. I think people who live on the frontline of the war

being waged by police know exactly what they’re about. I also think we

should grant them the respect of placing them in the same tradition as

Robert Williams and the Monroe NAACP, the Panthers, and militias of

freed slaves a century before that.

There are also plenty of black people in Ferguson or beyond who have

chosen to respond peacefully. Some have the very real fear of being shot

by police. Others are careerists, or belong to vanguardist organizations

like the New Black Panther Party (pretty uniformly denounced by members

of the original Panthers). Some want to make a nonviolent strategy work

in the present circumstances. Others wanted to give the courts a chance

to right the wrong of Michael Brown’s murder, and have since given up on

a peaceful response.

As a white person, I have to ask myself how to relate to this struggle.

White proponents of nonviolence will typically try to cast other whites

who engage in riskier and more combative tactics as privileged and

racist, while they cast themselves as “allies” following the lead of

people of color. However, those they tokenistically claim to follow are

the ones the media have given the loudest voice, and those who are

preaching the exact form of peaceful protest they already have a

preference for, that won’t require them to go out of their comfort zone

or face a level of confrontation with police that their privilege

usually protects them from.

Clearly, people on the ground in Ferguson have responded with a variety

of forms of resistance. It turns my stomach when outsiders basically go

shopping and choose the form that fits their preconceived preferences

and notions of resistance, and then claim they’re in solidarity with

“Ferguson,” as though that were some homogenous body.

I think true solidarity can only exist between people or groups that

have their own autonomous struggles. And while white people will never

know what it is like for people of color in this society, I don’t think

I can trust a white person who does not have their own reasons for

hating police. If they make all the right choices that white people are

taught to make—go to university, get a high-paying job, be a good

citizen, and if you must protest, do it peacefully, if you must riot, do

it at a sports match—they may not have had any experience with a cop

worse than an argument over a speeding ticket (although I think a

certain dogmatic view of white privilege erases the experiences of poor

whites or whites with mental health problems, who often have demeaning

run-ins with cops, and who are frequently attracted by right-wing

discourses, perhaps because only the Right will grant them victim

status).

But if they do not make the normalized choices, if they do not accept

the limits of what is supposed to pass for freedom under democratic

capitalism, they will learn firsthand, either in their own bodies or

watching it happen to loved ones, about prison, police torture and

beatings, surveillance, repression, and the presumption of guilt. In

other words, they will learn the nature of police.

Once I understand the nature of the police, it makes sense to me to

respond every time the cops kill someone. Solidarity means that I seek

out others who are facing the same problem, albeit inevitably from a

different perspective. Naturally, those who prefer peaceful methods will

link up with others with the same preferences, just as those who prefer

combative methods will find each other. It makes for a more robust

struggle if people with different methods also form relationships and

learn how to complement rather than denounce one another; however the

historical lesson that reformists and those who seek institutional

dialogue and advancement will inevitably sell out the grassroots and the

more radical currents, could help avoid major betrayals during the

process of forming relationships across difference.

At a minimum, solidarity in this current struggle dictates that we do

not constrain the choices of those who are most affected by police

killings (though I think the label of “most affected” in this case

excludes not only whites but also economically mobile activists of color

who fly in from across the country). One way that white people might

fail at that is by starting a riot every time locals were trying to

organize a vigil. That didn’t happen in Ferguson. What did happen was

that progressive whites, together with professional activists of various

races, tried to criminalize and prevent non-peaceful responses. They

faced an uphill battle in Ferguson, but they succeeded in pacifying

solidarity events around the country, preventing protesters from taking

the lead of folks in Ferguson, experiencing rage at the same level, or

engaging in the same bold process of taking over space and learning how

to fight back.

It’s a shame that this happened, because a multiracial crowd can

accomplish things that other crowds cannot. I have mentioned how police

in Ferguson and St. Louis were uncharacteristically restrained, and did

not open fire on rioters and looters the way they did in L.A. in ’92 or

New Orleans in ’05. Perhaps they held back this time because there were

more white people in the streets, or because they feared a wider

insurrection, or both. In any case, if more white people took part in

fierce, combative responses to police killings rather than constraining

those responses, the State would either have to step back as crowds

pushed cops out of entire neighborhoods, allowing communities to

experiment with police-free zones and other forms of autonomy, or they

would have to start shooting more white people, which would drastically

undermine one of the most important hierarchies for upholding State

power in this country.

An honest conversation about tactics and strategies in the streets is

sorely needed, and at a broader scale than has happened in the past. A

long list of manipulations and clichés makes that conversation

impossible, aided by the fact that many people still trust the media as

a forum for a social conversation, or they don’t notice when discourses

crafted in and for the media (often by academics and NGO activists who

are seduced by the power of a sound byte) infiltrate their own thinking.

The media weigh in heavily on the side of nonviolence, finding purchase

in the common misconception that nonviolence has worked in the past.

If we can resurrect subversive, or even just factually vigorous,

histories of the Civil Rights movement and other struggles, and

rediscover the thread of continuity from those times to the ones we

currently inhabit, we can lay the groundwork for a much more intelligent

discussion of how to move forward.

But moving forward requires us to think about where we are going, and

the artificial consensus on nonviolence pales in comparison to the

consensus that has been manufactured around the police; good or bad,

they are necessary, and at the very most they must be reformed.

The rocks on which the present movement will founder and break apart, or

which it will climb to finally leave behind the cesspool of problems

that have cycled and recycled for centuries, is the question of a world

without police.

If we can effectively engage with this question, we might be able to

surpass the miseries of reformism that devoured the Civil Rights

movement and left us with the problem of police killings that haunts us

today.

December 19, 2014

A World Without Police

In two previous essay, I discussed the role of the Left in protecting

the police through cautious reformism, and the effectiveness of a

pacified, falsified—in a word disarmed—history of the Civil Rights

movement to prevent us from learning from previous struggles and

achieving a meaningful change in society.

The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to

protect the powerful in an unequal system. Past and present efforts to

reform them have demonstrated that reformism can’t solve the problem,

though it does serve to squander popular protests and advance the

careers of professional activists. Faced with this situation, in which

Left and Right unwittingly collude to prolong the problem, the

extralegal path of rioting, seizing space, and fighting back against the

police makes perfect sense. In fact, this phenomenon, denounced as

“violence” by the media, the police, and many activists in unison, was

not only the most significant feature of the Ferguson rebellion and the

solidarity protests organized in hundreds of other cities, it was also

the vital element that made everything else possible, that distinguished

the killing of Michael Brown from a hundred other police murders. What’s

more, self-defense against state violence (whether excercized by police

or by tolerated paramilitaries like the Klan) is not an exceptional

occurrence in a long historical perspective, but a tried and true form

of resistance, and one of the only that has brought results, in the

Civil Rights movement and earlier.

What remains is to speak about possibilities that are radically external

to the self-regulating cycle of tragedy and reform. What remains is to

speak loudly and clearly about a world without police.

We don’t want better police. We don’t want to fix the police. On the

contrary, we understand that the police work quite well; they simply do

not work for us and they never have. We want to get rid of the police

entirely, and we want to live in a world where police are not necessary.

Far from being a naïve position, I believe it is the only one that can

withstand serious scrutiny, whether in the form of a comprehensive

historical analysis of the role and evolution of police and the

effectiveness of reform movements, or of an examination of the breadth

of possibility that human societies have already demonstrated.

No one can effectively argue that the police are necessary in an

absolute sense. They are a relatively recent invention, as far as

institutions go. The only question is what kind of society needs police,

and whether that kind of society makes the systematic murders, torture,

beatings, and surveillance worth it.

Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft have compiled a great deal of

information on societies that use various forms of conflict resolution

in which an organization such as the police has no place. From the Diné

(Navajo) to the Semai, there are dozens of societies—all of them

impacted to varying degrees by Western colonialism—that have practiced

restorative or transformative justice, dealing with cases of conflict or

social harm without ever having to be so brutal as to lock people up in

cages or create an elite body designed to surveille people or mobilize

organized violence against those who transgress set laws. They compare

neighboring societies that face similar socio-economic conditions but

use different strategies for dealing with harm, as well as Western

societies that make minimal usage of policing and judicial apparatuses.

A pattern that becomes immediately evident is that police and prisons

are only necessary in societies that are based on exploitation and

inequality. The police are not an instrument fit to protect a society;

on the contrary they are an instrument fit to protect an elite,

parasitical class from society. Any society with a minimal practice of

cooperation and solidarity can protect itself from individuals who would

harm others. A hierarchical, militarized force such as the police, or an

institution like the prison designed to remove conflict and

transgression from the social sphere, only makes sense where there is a

parasitical social class that exists in antagonism with the rest of

society, and needs to manage social norms of right and wrong and

monopolize violent force in order to preserve its power. Such a class

also needs a justice mechanism, such as courts and a legislative body,

to formalize its conception of right and wrong, and a propaganda

mechanism, whether a state religion or mass media, to ensure that the

exploited majority identify with their masters and reproduce the norms

of the elite. When a normal person speaks out against throwing rocks at

the police or destroying businesses, they are expressing values that

originate at the top of the social pyramid.

Of course it gets more complicated when you realize that interests are

always subjective, and people often get more out of identifying with a

larger community, no matter how fictitious, than they do out of having

food to eat or a roof over their heads. In the end, everyone from the

CEO to the news anchor to the taxi driver or homebum with conventional

ideas all participate in reproducing the same system, and they probably

all sincerely believe in the positions they espouse, but some clearly

have more influence than others, and can be identified as originators of

certain aspects of the present system.

Therefore, we are not speaking for the masses when we assert that the

police and the prisons exist to control them, but we should also not shy

away from espousing a radical position just because it will be

unpopular. We need to have faith that a great many people might

eventually come to support radical positions regarding the police. Many

people already support parts of these positions intuitively or

implicitly, and the reason that more people don’t, at least not

expressly, is that so few people currently dare to declare the police an

intractable enemy of freedom or to openly advocate a world without

police. At this juncture, the last thing that we need is for more people

to espouse tepid, inane suggestions for reform that are completely

untenable and unrealistic. But as long as proposals for meager reform

are taken seriously, that’s what we’ll get.

We can’t get rid of police brutality without getting rid of the police,

and we can’t get rid of the police without getting rid of an entire

system based on exploitation, oppression, and hierarchy. There is no

easy, band-aid solution to this problem, and bandying them about only

perpetuates the problem. Foregrounding difficult, far-reaching changes

does not mean, however, fixating an abstract gaze on a pre-designed

future and blinding ourselves to immediate problems. On the contrary, we

need to focus on how we fight now for a better world, and part of that

means avoiding forms of action that make real changes even more

improbable.

As I argued in Part II, most of what was achieved in the Civil Rights

movement in terms of short-term changes was achieved when people armed

themselves, took over their streets, and fought back without worrying

about ruling class taboos against lower class violence. If we fight for

total social transformation without proposing naïve reforms, those in

power will trip over themselves trying to buy us off with quick fixes

and opportunities to participate in the system.

This in fact is how most social movements in history have gone down.

Whatever improvements have been won were actually won by those who

fought for radical positions, using uncompromising methods and

aggressive tactics, though the victories were claimed by the reformers,

who tend to be a combination of dissident members of the ruling

structures, opportunists who wish to climb the social ladder, and

sincere people who have been duped by a discourse of pragmatism. Their

own methods are too sedate to shake things up and force a change, in

fact their timidity demonstrates to authority that they are ultimately a

loyal opposition undeserving of repression. They must ride the coattails

of the radicals in order to be in position when the rulers realize that

some change is necessary in order to avoid an actual revolution. The

reason that these movements always stop after an incomplete reform, and

that the most ineffective sectors of these movements tend to get the

credit, is because the reformers have a tendency to throw the radicals

under the bus, helping the State eliminate them in exchange for access

to power in its newly reformed configuration. After all, who better to

discern what reform will best fool the people on bottom than someone who

has recently come up from the bottom?

I previously mentioned that a police apparatus cannot exist without a

hierarchical society, a prison system, a justice system, and some kind

of culture industry, whether religious or mediatic. All of these

institutions defend a ruling structure against the conflicts generated

by its antagonistic position towards society. Modern democracies go a

step further, however; if conflict with society is inevitable, why not

manage it rather than trying to suppress it?

In Ferguson, the managers of social conflict were in large part those

activists who preached nonviolence and denounced the rioters, as I

mentioned in Part I. But there is an important kind of management I

neglected to mention.

Those of us who are critical of the mass media may have a hard time

explaining the sympathetic position that Time Magazine or Rolling Stone

occasionally took with the rioters. Of course, a couple articles hardly

make up for thousands of syndicated columns objectively refering to

rioters as some kind of pathological parasite, radio hosts calling

looters “idiots” and worse, TV spots spreading fear about savage hordes

of demons and outside agitators, days long NPR marathons urging peaceful

protest, and so on. Nonetheless, the phenomenon is curious as well as

significant. In the case of Rolling Stone, we could suppose that this

old establishment rag is afraid of all the ground it has lost in the

risqué news niche to dynamic newcomers like Vice; however the

explanation would be insufficient.

The seemingly subversive behavior of a few outliers is hardly

unprecedented. In the recent insurrection in Greece, a large part of the

media expressed sympathy with the rioters, albeit in a very formulaic

way. In the media lens, young students were justifiably protesting in

the streets after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos,

anarchists were hijacking the event to burn police stations, and

immigrants were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores. None

of these characterizations are based on fact. Millions of young people

and old, Greeks and immigrants, participated in the uprising, in a

variety of ways. Many students looted, many immigrants walked along with

protests. A frequently expressed sentiment was that participation in the

insurrection blurred all of these pre-established identities, in which

case the media operation clearly intended to reassert them. With all

three subjects, the media caricature refers to a prefabricated figure

that the entire population was already familiar with—the socially

concerned student, the pyromaniac anarchist, the criminal immigrant—that

only ever existed on the glowing screen, because it was the media

themselves that created it. That’s the brilliance of the media: they

rarely have to verify their claims, because they operate within a

virtual universe that they themselves have created.

In the Greek example, it is obvious why the media would sympathize with

student rioting: to discourage non-students from participating or

identifying with the uprising; and to establish a limit of acceptable

tactics, implicitly criminalizing the looting and the attacks on police

stations. After all, the intensity of street fighting over three

uninterrupted weeks was forcing the government to consider calling in

the military. They were willing to tolerate burning barricades and

illegal protests if things didn’t go further.

Likewise, when people start to bring guns to protests as in Ferguson,

there will be those among the forces of law and order who begin to see

the wisdom in tolerating the smashing of banks. It’s noteworthy that the

media only begin to stomach property destruction when talk of shooting

back begins to resonate throughout society. And though within the

confines of American dialogue, it feels like a breath of fresh air that

Time Magazine would sympathize with rioters, it is a more or less

calculated move that functions to limit the growth of resistance. Even

if the editors of a magazine are not scheming consciously and explicitly

about how to maintain social control, they are still individuals with a

vested interest in the current system. People fighting fiercely for

their freedom, unlike those who compulsively walk in circles or stage

die-ins, often force a recognition of their humanity and win a limited

sympathy from their enemies. They also make the existence of a social

conflict undeniable. In such a case, people in power may come to accept

tactics that they had previously condemned, to acknowledge errors they

had previously denied, but their condemnation of forms of rebellion that

are irreversibly destabilizing will only crystalize. People can be

permitted to blow off steam, even in illegal ways, but they cannot be

permitted to blunt or sabotage the instruments of the State. And when

the police confront an armed population, they are suddenly much less

effective.

Another way that exceptional dissent might manifest is in the realm of

discourse and research. I am by no means the first person to express the

idea that the police should be abolished, nor is this idea entirely

strange in acceptable discourse among people who are much better dressed

than I am. However the elaboration of these discourses must be couched

in certain ways to signal their usefulness to the State, and their

separation from communities in struggle.

If we assert that it is not permitted to speak of a world without

police, this is only true if we understand the police as one function in

an interlocking system of domination, and the abolition of the police

means the abolition of that entire system. Otherwise, there is a great

deal of research and debate that maps out the possibilities of prison

abolition or an end to policing as we know it. But what is the actual

meaning and effect of this discourse?

I would start by arguing that the vast majority of those who conduct

this theoretical labor have good intentions. But we also know what they

say about good intentions, and the paving stones on the road to hell are

not nearly as substantial as the ones being thrown at cops in Ferguson

and elsewhere. With this facile figure of speech, I actually mean to

suggest a different criterion for evaluating our actions.

I gladly admit that the information produced by academics or activists

who theorize about prison abolition or a world without police is

thought-provoking and useful. I have cited a few examples of it in this

essay. But just as we must ask why Time Magazine would sympathize with

rioters, we should ask why there exist paid positions for people to

study prison abolition. Either capitalism isn’t a totality, or the

prisons and the police are not an integral part of power, or power

benefits somehow by studying its own abolition.

I believe the answer lies between the second and the third

possibilities. Even though the abolition of prisons is not a likely

future, from the present vantage, democratic capitalism increases its

chances for survival by exploring contingency plans for extreme cases,

and by giving opponents employment opportunities. The advantage is

increased if “prisons” or “police” can be discursively transformed from

an integral element of a whole system into a particular appendage that

can be discarded or modified. And there are few methods of discourse

more suited to carrying out this transformation than the academic—which

favors specificity and an analysis of parts over wholes—and the

activist—which tends towards single-issue messaging that favors the

myopic over the radical.

Someone in the academy or in the world of professional activism can

study the police for all the right reasons, personally holding a global

analysis of the integral role of police within a greater whole, but the

institutional formulae of applying for grants, publishing articles, and

claiming concrete improvements all modulate those individuals’ activity

to favor a piecemeal worldview and to direct discourse at other

power-holders.

It may sound like a platitude but I believe experience in struggle bears

it out: you cannot abolish that with which you dialogue. State authority

above all thrives on being present in every social conversation. A

conversation with employers, legislators, grant-writers, or experts

about the abolition of the police necessarily assumes the replacement of

one form of policing with another.

The modern prison was born out of the abolition of the scaffold.

Community policing was a survival mechanism after the defeats and the

unpopularity of the police caused by the struggles of the ’60s. The

danger is real.

Even without a far-reaching reform that allows the powerful to

regenerate their methods for accumulating power, radical discourses in

professional channels present other problems. One I have already hinted

at can be thought of as misdirection.

Let’s imagine an organization that focuses on prison abolition. Their

employees are sincere, dedicated activists, some of them proven veterans

of past struggles. Nearly all of them are college graduates, and some

might be academics; otherwise they stay in close contact with the

experts who produce facts that make it easier to argue for prison

abolition in polite circles. They produce many valuable materials that

can be useful for supporting prisoners or changing people’s opinions

about the prison system, and they may even have a pilot project on a

couple blocks in a specific neighborhood, designed to decrease reliance

on the prison industrial complex.

Taken individually, all of these things are great. We need more people

who are talking about a world without prisons. But the ideas that this

hypothetical organization spreads, how do they direct people’s

attentions, particularly in a moment of social rebellion?

When such an organization, with paid staff, non-profit status, cred, but

also rules to play by and bills to pay, proclaims that “We need to

abolish the police and the prisons,” what is the practical implication?

“Therefore this organization should receive more grants and this law

should not be passed,” or “therefore these people who took up arms

against the police deserve our support”? Clearly, it’s not the latter.

A professional approach to tackling the social problems underscored by

Ferguson rarely returns people’s energies and attentions to the streets,

where real change is created. True, most of the time, we don’t have

something like Ferguson going on, so a patient, gradualist method seems

to make sense. However, the conservatism of the professional approach

often leads activists to play a pacifying role when a moment of intense

struggle arises, as we abundantly witnessed this August and again in

November. All across the country, even where they refrained from

denouncing rioters, activist organizations called for vigils and

speak-outs, when it was clear that the time for mere words had passed.

Directly or indirectly, these mobilizations allowed a middle-class

constituency to monopolize the social response and prevent rioting, at a

time when an unprecedented number of people were ready to fight back.

What’s more, the assumptions are all wrong. Ferguson is only exceptional

in its extension, not in its spirit. Not a month goes by when someone

does not shoot back at the police in America. Most of the time, however,

they are a lone shooter, they often kill themselves or die in the act,

and the media always publish unsavory details about their personal

lives, true or invented. They also portray the cops as heroes, no matter

what kind of people they actually were, and they never entertain the

possibility that the shooters were justified, as they always do when

it’s cops doing the murdering (actually, this is too charitable a

description; many media outlets assert from the beginning that the

killing was justified, not even allowing a debate). The recent shooting

of the two cops in NYC fits the pattern perfectly, but earlier cases

like that of Christopher Monfort in Seattle, Eric Frein in Pennsylvania,

or Christopher Dorner in LA also apply. None of this should be

surprising. There is a certain schizophrenia in a society that glorifies

the police and suppresses or distorts any honest conversation about what

people actually experience at the hands of police and what sort of

countermeasures are adequate or justified. If large numbers of alienated

people feel entirely alone in their brutalization and dehumanization by

police, collective resistance becomes impossible. The only people to

express an active negation of the police will be individuals who reach a

certain limit and then snap. By the very nature of the problem they are

not going to be the stable ones, especially if mental health is defined

as an infinite capacity to accomodate misery.

In Ferguson, rioters spraypainted the QT with the phrase, “free Kevin

Johnson”, referring to a black man from an aggressively gentrifying St.

Louis suburb who is on death row since 2008. Johnson shot to death an

infamous bully of a cop who refused to help his kid brother as he lay

dying from a heart condition. There is a direct connection between what

are portrayed as isolated outbursts of senseless violence, and the

massive rebellions that force society to at least stop and pay

attention. I don’t, however, see the professionals making this

connection. Typically they are either silent or help pathologize the

lone wolves. The tragedy is, such incidents are only isolated as long as

people in power AND people in social movements continue to actively

isolate them.

Recognizing the basic legitimacy of these acts isn’t to glorify the

shooters as heroes. There is something sad in any death, no matter who

the victim is, and we’re in dire straits when the only available means

of resistance that people think they have are directly suicidal. The

point is, there is a direct connection between the systematic brutality

of police and the appearance of people who shoot back. Denying it only

maintains the schizophrenic condition that forces us to pathologize a

sensible human response to systematic abuse, preserves our psychological

loyalty to a system that treats us like fodder, and prevents the

development of collective measures.

There have been attempts in the US to develop and spread methods of

resistance to police that are collective, that brook no compromise, and

that are less dangerous, less suicidal, than the method of the lone

gunmen. The best known is probably the “black bloc.” And though it is

clearly an imperfect tool, the bloc typically faces blanket

denunciations by people who make no attempts to propose alternatives. In

NGO-land, the trope that has been circulated is that the black bloc is

the domain of young white men. Never mind that there are many

testimonials by women, queer, and trans people attempting to counter

this lie (and at great personal risk, since it requires speaking about

personal involvement in an illegal activity); never mind that American

anarchists have learned about the tactic not only in Europe but also in

Latin America, where it is widely popular. The denunciations cannot be

taken seriously as criticisms because they do not rely on realistic

portrayals of the black bloc, they are formulated to silence rather than

to engage, and they do not propose any alternatives for seizing space or

collectively fighting back against police.

The extent to which this trope has been circulated by the corporate

media reveals just how liberatory the thinking behind it truly is.

But the black bloc is just one possibility among many, and while it

helps demonstrators protect themselves in rowdy street confrontations,

it does not suggest to most people the vision of another world. Talking

about a world without police in the here and now, without paving the way

for our own co-optation is a big order to fill. Fortunately, the

conversation is already ongoing.

We have the examples of societies that thrived without police, which I

mentioned towards the beginning of the essay. Those stories belong to

other cultures. I don’t think Westerners should use them as models or as

ideological capital, but I think we should recognize their existence, to

break the stranglehold that Western civilization has over definitions of

human nature and human possibility, and we should also recognize that

those other forms of being were violently interrupted by processes of

colonization that are still ongoing. They are not marginal, idyllic

stories of “primitive” societies with no bearing on modern reality, they

are histories of peoples who are still struggling for survival. If, in

the worlds we dream of, there is no room for them to reassert themselves

independent of our designs, then whatever we create will only be a

continuation of the thing we are fighting against.

More appropriate as inspiration for our own action are a number of

stories of struggle in Western or westernized countries in which people

created police-free zones on the ground. After all, a holistic critique

of the police means that by the very nature of the problem, we cannot

ask government to institute the needed changes. Real steps towards a

world without police can be found in the riots in Ferguson and other

cities around the country where people surpassed their self-appointed

leaders and actually fought back, rather than just manufacturing yet

another spectacle of symbolic dissent. The riots in Ferguson were not

only important in an instrumental way, forcing all of society to

consider the problem; they also suggested the beginnings of a solution

as neighbors came together in solidarity, building new relations amongst

themselves, and forcefully ejecting police from the neighborhoods they

patrol.

Christiania is an autonomous neighborhood of Copenhagen that has been

squatted since 1971. The area, with nearly a thousand inhabitants,

organizes itself in assemblies, maintains its own economy and

infrastructure, cleans up its trash, produces bicycles and other items

in collective workshops, and runs a number of communal spaces. They also

resolve their own conflicts, and with the exception of some aggressive

incursions and raids, Christiania has been a police-free zone for most

of its existence. Initially, the Danish government opted for a soft

strategy, hoping that Christiania would eventually fall apart on its

own. In the same era, the autonomous movement in the Netherlands and

Germany was fighting major battles to defend their squatted spaces,

sometimes defeating the police in the streets or burning down shopping

malls in retribution for evictions. In context, the Danish approach made

sense. However, Christiania thrived. Some suspect that the government

was behind the crisis that threatened the autonomous neighborhood’s

existence in 1984 when a motorcycle gang moved into the police-free zone

to begin selling hard drugs (soft drugs have always been widely used in

Christinia, while addictive drugs are vehemently discouraged).

Earlier in Christiania’s history, there had been a fierce debate about

how to deal with the problem of drugs. Over intense opposition, a part

of the neighborhood decided to request police assistance, but they soon

found that the cops were arresting the users of non-addictive drugs and

ignoring or even protecting the proliferation of hard drugs. After that,

Christiania decided to keep the police out, and their autonomy was well

established by the time the motorcycle gang moved in. The gangsters

thought they had picked an easy target: a neighborhood of hippies who

not only disavowed making use of the police, they actively kept the

police out. These drug-pushers, however, had fallen for capitalist

mythology, which presents us all as isolated individuals, vulnerable to

organized delinquents, and therefore in need of the greatest protection

racket of them all, the State. Christiania residents banded together,

exercising the same principle of solidarity that was at work in all the

other aspects of their lives, fought back, and kicked the motorcycle

gang out, using a combination of sabotage, public meetings, pressure,

and direct confrontation.

It is no coincidence that the same tools and capacities that allow us to

fight back and free ourselves from policing are also the ones we need to

protect ourselves from the forms of harm that capitalist democracies

prosecute under the rubric of “crime”. Crime and police are two sides of

the same coin. They perpetuate each other, and they each rely on a

vulnerable, atomized society. A healthy society would have no need for

police, no more than it would lock people in cages and hide its problems

out of sight rather than deal with the conflicts and deficiencies that

led to an act of harm being committed in the first place.

The mutual relationship between police and crime was exquisitely

revealed during the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006. In June of that

year, police viciously attacked the massive encampment staged annually

by striking teachers. But the teachers fought back tooth and nail,

quickly joined by many neighbors. They pushed police out of Oaxaca City,

which remained autonomous for five months along with large parts of the

countryside. People built barricades, which became an important space

for socialization as well as self-defense, and they organized topiles,

an indigenous tradition that provided volunteers to fight back against

police and paramilitaries as well as to look out for fires, acts of

robbery, or assault.

The defenders of Oaxaca soon learned that the police were releasing

people from their prisons on the condition that they go into the city to

commit crimes. In protecting their neighborhoods against these acts, the

topiles did not function like Western police forces. They patrolled

unarmed, they were volunteers, and they did not have a prerogative to

arrest people or impose their will, the way cops do. Upon coming across

a robbery, arson, or assault, their function was not only that of first

responders, but also to call on the neighbors so everyone could respond

collectively. With such a structure, it would be impossible to enforce a

legal code against an activity with popular participation. In other

words, the topiles could stop a stranger who was robbing the store of a

local, working class person (as were many of the neighborhood stores in

Oaxaca), but they couldn’t have stopped the neighbors themselves from

looting a store they already had an antagonistic, classist relationship

with, as was the case in Ferguson.

People in Oaxaca also had to defend themselves from police and

paramilitaries, and they did so for five months. The topiles and many

others were unarmed. They had to fight back with rocks, fireworks, and

molotov cocktails, many of them getting shot in the process. Their

bravery allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live in freedom for

five months, in a police-free, government-free zone, experimenting with

the self-organization of their lives on social, economic, and cultural

levels. All the beautiful aspects of the Oaxaca commune are inseperable

from their violent struggle against police, involving barricades,

slingshots, molotov cocktails, and thousands of people who faced down

armed opponents, over a dozen of them giving their lives in the process.

In the end, the Mexican state had to send in the military as the only

way to crush this flourishing pocket of autonomy.

If we learn from examples like Christiania, Oaxaca, and Ferguson itself,

we can fight for a world without police and everything they represent,

beginning here and now by creating blocks, neighborhoods, or even entire

cities that are at least temporarily police-free zones. Within these

spaces we can finally experiment and practice with solutions to all the

other interrelated forms of oppression that plague us.

There is something beautiful about people finding the courage to fight

back against a more powerful enemy, and people also flourish in

surprising ways when they liberate space and take the power to organize

their own lives. Neither of these things can be overemphasized. But

neither should we romanticize. In the streets of Ferguson and other

liberated spaces, much of the ugliness that infuses our society rears

its head. But dealing with what had previously been invisible or

normalized is an inevitable part of any healing process, and our society

is nothing if not sick. Calamities like uprisings and riots can be

important catalysts in processes of social healing, and liberated

spaces, by forcefully casting aside the previous regime’s norms and

relationships, that only functioned to reproduce and invisibilize all

the ongoing forms of harm, can give us the opportunity to create new,

healthier patterns, and engage in conversations that previously had been

impossible. Empowering ourselves to fight back against those who have

traumatized us, like the police, can be an important step in upsetting

oppressive relations, healing from trauma, and restoring healthy social

relations.

This is, however, a dangerous proposition. Fighting back against the

police, especially shooting back at them, as was happening in Ferguson,

is not a safe activity. Change is never safe. And if we can successfully

overcome the police to create a liberated zone, the State will

eventually send in the military. Are the soldiers still loyal enough,

after these last wars, to open fire on us? Has enough been done to

encourage dissension in the ranks, or is the government firmly in

control? There is only one way to find out.

It is understandable that many people would not want to face the extreme

risks involved with uprooting the oppressions that grip our society.

There is nothing wrong with being afraid, so long as you have the

courage to admit it. Some people, however, do a great disservice by

muddying the waters with myopic proposals that have no hope of making an

actual difference.

In the streets, we need to learn how to seize space, to make sure that

those who fight back are never isolated, to make collective responses

possible so no one has to react in an individual, suicidal way again,

and to build a struggle that has room for young and old, for the

peaceful and the bellicose, for those who know how to fight and those

who know how to heal. It will be a long process, and in the meantime,

there is a great need to speak loud and clear about a world without

police, so everyone will know there is another way, beyond the false

alternatives of obedience or ineffectual reform.

December 29, 2014