By Ashton Condel
“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No…Vertigo is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” –Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“The ballot or the bullet, some freedom or some bullshit//Will we ever do it big, or keep just settling for little shit//We brag on having bread, but none of us are bakers//We all talk having greens, but none of us own acres//If none of us own acres, and none of us grow wheat//Then who will feed our people when our people need to eat?” –Killer Mike, Reagan
Part I: The Armed Bureaucrats
As I type these words, with the yawning white noise of CNN droning in the background, the state of my soul is dire. CNN has gone into full police apologist mode, proving that whatever spine they once had was severed like that of Freddy Gray, the murdered Baltimore man who was brutalized and thrown into a police van from which he emerged in a coma. The headline on the screen reads “Police Departments Struggle to Find Recruits.” They are talking about the same police that comprise an army of nearly 1 million people authorized to kill by departments that are armed with assault rifles, armored tanks, flash grenades, water cannons, and surveillance drones. Such an arsenal would be the envy of any army; but who is the enemy?
This comes the day after White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest fielded a question regarding FBI Director James Comey’s public peddling of the mythical “Ferguson effect.” Comey argues that police are shirking their law enforcement duties because they feel like they’re “under siege” in the era of viral videos, and that this is leading to a rise in violent crime. Earnest maintained the White House and Justice Department’s stance that the evidence for such a claim has yet to be discovered.
“In fact, you hear law enforcement leaders across the country indicating that that’s not what’s taking place,” Earnest said, a hint of annoyance in his voice.
It stands to reason that Comey is looking to set a new talking point for those who believe that the business of “protect and serve” should be conducted in the shadows. After all, the pool of arguments is fast drying for opponents of the movement to hold the armed wing of government accountable for their own actions.
A favorite refrain of Fox News earlier in the year was that anti-police violence was skyrocketing—a claim that has been categorically proven not only wrong, but the opposite of true, as assaults against police are on the decline. And of course, communities on the receiving end of the state violence routinely dished out in neighborhoods of color neither respect nor hate the police; they fear them. Now they are tired of being afraid.
But even as Comey experiments with this new assertion, his public fabrications fail to pass the test of causation and correlation—some cities may be facing an increase in violent crime, but that’s not evidence that police accountability is to blame for it. On Monday, Comey told a room full of police chiefs that he gets the “strong sense” that police feel “under siege,” and are changing their behavior for fear of being caught on camera “in today’s YouTube world.”
Perhaps the FBI Director and his gathering of police chiefs would do well to remember that the videos only go viral when someone dies. If the cops are afraid of being caught on tape killing yet another unarmed black person, any sane individual with a beating heart would call that progress. But not James Comey, who cautions of an uptick in violent crime but doesn’t bat an eye at the violent criminals carrying badges and guns who are taking the lives of unarmed black people at the rate of one a day.
It is therefore no surprise that the network incapable of dealing in such nuance is also utterly inept at practicing common sense. Twitter was ablaze with outrage over comments made by CNN anchor Don Lemon, whose vanilla brand of impotent, boring, and frankly stupid journalism has made him no stranger to the pitchforks of trending hashtags. In an interview with legal analyst Sunny Hostin about another viral video that shows South Carolina “resource” officer Ben Fields violently body slam a black female sitting at her desk at Spring Valley High School, Lemon gently defends the officer.
“We need to know more,” Lemon said, suggesting that it could be legally justifiable for a large armed man to assault a small young girl as she sits at her desk in a classroom. “We need to know more.”
Indeed. We do need to know more, but the corporate owned billionaire news media and their breaking news coverage of events that aren’t breaking or new won’t teach us a damn thing. We do need to know more so that a white man empowered by the State attacking a defenseless black woman can be put into its full context. But that knowledge won’t come from stammering eyewitnesses or gruff-voiced spin-doctors with badges or polished talking heads with their bag full of clichés and affected emotion. That knowledge can only come from history and what history has to tell us about power.
“There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery,” Angela Davis said in an interview with the Guardian last year. Davis, a long-time activist, feminist, and writer was once called a “terrorist” by Richard Nixon. Mr. Nixon, who sabotaged a peace deal between North and South Vietnam in 1968 to get elected and ended the war five years later with millions more dead, had little room to talk. To be called a “terrorist” by Richard Nixon is a badge of honor, and Davis wears it well.
She was referring to how the origins of modern day policing can be traced back to the slave patrols and Night Watches, who sought to control black and brown bodies even before our nation’s founding by returning runaway slaves and “defending” colonial settlements against Native Americans who were defending themselves.
Of course, communities have always had guardians tasked with protecting the community and investigating crimes, but they were not agents of the State and they did not patrol areas searching for potential crimes or possible future crimes. They were militias of the well-regulated variety that so many of the most vocal second amendment advocates seem to be so unaware. As M. David succinctly put it in Counter Current News, “they were the communities standing guard over themselves.”
It was Sir Robert Peel, twice British Prime Minister, who first conceptualized of the modern police force in 1812, where armed government agents would patrol neighborhoods around the clock. It would take another 17 years to implement it when in 1829 the Metropolitan Police Force was established in London. Any police department claiming to be established before 1829 simply isn’t telling the truth, they’re referring to the militias that preceded them that weren’t recognized by the State.
The state-based approach to community policing spread like a virus, and infected the American south. To wealthy southern aristocrats, it seemed like the perfect response to the slave rebellions embodied by figures like Nat Turner and John Brown, as well as to the problem of “lost property” that resulted in slaves fleeing the inhumane persecution of the plantation.
“The literature clearly establishes that a legally sanctioned law enforcement system existed in America before the Civil War for the express purpose of controlling the slave population and protecting the interests of slave owners. The similarities between the slave patrols and modern American policing are too salient to dismiss or ignore. Hence, the slave patrol should be considered a forerunner of modern American law enforcement,” write K.B. Turner, David Giacopassi and Margaret Vandiver in their article Ignoring the Past: Coverage of Slavery and Slave Patrols in Criminal Justice Texts.
As James Baldwin wrote in The Nation in 1966, “The police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.”
This leads us to wonder; if the institution of modern policing in America is steeped in the toxic stew of chattel slavery, then is the very existence of a police force justified? David Graeber of the London School of Economics has cited police sociologists which record that 90% of an officer’s time is spent dealing with minor infractions of administrative codes, loitering for example.
“The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes,” he wrote in Gawker, invoking the memory of Eric Garner who was choked to death by the NYPD for selling untaxed cigarettes, despite his repeated cries that he couldn’t breathe.
Given the fact that the police as we know them today are an invention of the last 200 years, were founded on notions of white supremacy which is still reflected in the viral videos and testimony by so many people of color of their lived experience, and spend most of their time enforcing laws we’d all rather not have, it now becomes possible to entertain the notion of abolishing the police altogether.
Such an option couldn’t even be considered if your sole source of information is CNN, who dutifully play the role of the corporate media and attack our very ability to imagine alternatives to an intolerable status quo. As FBI Director James Comey worries that more cameras will keep the police from doing their jobs, communities of color might breathe a collective sigh of relief. But the breath might be cut short, because the more we know about history the more we know that cops and white supremacy go hand in hand.
What, then, do we do about crime? Clearly, to thoroughly handle any problem you must first pinpoint its source. The areas with the highest crime rate also happen to be the poorest, not to mention overwhelmingly black and brown. As it is a well established fact that people of color are indeed people, then the cause for this level of crime must in fact be poverty. The poverty they were placed in centuries ago and not once allowed to escape.
There are also models for security that don’t involve police. For example: all of human history up until the last 200 years. Also, in northern Syria in the Kurdish region of Rojava, every community member has police training and therefore there is no need for the police, nor as it turns out the need for a state.
The key is to imagine alternatives to a status quo that we’re all miserable living with. History is critical nutrition for the imagination.
“History is important. If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it,” wrote the radical historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States.
As Don Lemon would say, “We need to know more.”
NEXT: Staring down the apocalypse with the war on drugs, mass incarceration, gentrification, poverty, patriarchy, and the American Empire.
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