Our enemies in blue
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Datenspuren 201912 / 22
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Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
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Hi, thank you all for coming. I'm Christian Williams. I'm the author of Our Enemies in Blue and Fire of the Cops along with a few other titles. For about
00:22
the last 25 years I've been involved in organizing against the police, against political repression, and in the labor movement. Today I've been asked to talk about the sort of current state of American policing, how it arrived at the state. So I'm probably going to be giving a skeletal version of the argument of
00:44
Our Enemies in Blue. In that book my approach to understanding the police de-emphasizes the rhetoric surrounding them and looks instead at the social consequences of what they do and the interests that they serve. So
01:07
what I argue is that if we want to understand the institution of policing we need to think about them not in terms of law enforcement or crime fighting or public safety, but instead look at the existing distribution of
01:21
power in the society. And in general the police behave in ways that tend to preserve existing inequalities, especially hierarchies based on race and class. That core function has been true throughout the institution, throughout the various levels from the cop on the beat using his discretion to decide
01:43
who to stop, who to arrest, all the way to police commanders, police boards, police chiefs, setting policy for their organizations, allocating resources and determining discipline. So to make this case in this lecture I'm
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going to do three things. I'm going to take a quick look at the current state of American policing, especially in terms of violence and racial discrimination. Then we're going to go back in history to the origin of policing in the United States and look at the core
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characteristics that set apart the modern institution and the social needs that it was fulfilling in order to develop those characteristics. And then we're going to jump ahead to the period since the 1960s and look at how the police have reinvented themselves during that time to arrive
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at precisely the place that we are now. One very important caveat is that the police in the United States, which has its own peculiar history and own strange system of government. So for example, there's no single institution
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responsible for setting police policy or governing policing in the US. Instead there's a patchwork system of local, federal, state jurisdictions and sometimes these overlap and sometimes they leave strange gaps. And all told there are 17,985 police agencies in the US and that allows for quite a lot of
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variation between them, but it also makes it more striking the degree to which they're converging on a single type. I'll leave it to you to decide how much of my argument here tonight applies in the societies in which you live.
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So starting with police violence. Police in the United States kill approximately a thousand people each year. That's 994 in 2015, 962 in 2016,
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986 in 2017, 996 in 2018, and 637 so far in 2019, which puts us on pace to exceed 900 again this year. Ranked in terms of deaths by
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police per population, that ranks the US as eighth in the world with 30 deaths per 10 million population. By way of comparison, Canada right next door has a third of the rate, 10 deaths per 10 million population. In France it's 4, in
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Germany it is 1.3, in Poland it is 0.5, and in the UK it is 0.2, which means that American police kill as many people in a month as British police kill in 25 years. In terms of other violence, approximately 1.8% of police civilian
05:02
contact results in the use of force or the threat of force, all told that's 985,300 incidents of violence per year. As you might expect, that violence is not
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1.3% of whites who come in contact with police will experience the use of force, compared to 3% of Hispanics and 3.3% of blacks. In contacts that the police initiate, meaning that the police approach the citizen rather than the other way, 1.8% of whites who experience the use of force, compared to
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2.5% of Hispanics and an astonishing 4.9% of blacks, meaning if you're a black person in the United States and the police approach you, you have a 1 in 20 chance of suffering violence in that encounter. Tech support.
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Similar racial discrepancies exist at every stage of the police encounter. A study by Frank Baumgartner reviewed data from 20 million traffic stops and found that blacks were twice as likely as whites to be pulled over while driving, four times as likely to be searched, and less likely to be found
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carrying contraband. The Boston University Law Review found that nationally blacks were arrested for minor crimes like disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and vandalism at twice the rate of whites. Public health statistics suggests that blacks are about 12.5% of drug users, which is roughly in line
07:03
with our portion of the population. However, they are 29% of drug arrests and 33% of those imprisoned for drug crimes. This discrepancy is neither explained nor justified by any considerations related to crime. The evidence absolutely contradicts the idea that racial profiling is useful in
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getting drugs or guns or criminals off the street. Remember, police were more likely to find contraband by searching whites. So if we insist on viewing police as crime fighters, profiling can only be seen as a persistent mistake. But if we suspend the noble view of police work and look instead at the
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actual consequences of what the cops do, profiling does make a certain kind of sense. Racial profiling is not about crime at all, it's about controlling people of color. Now, of course, the racial politics of policing are not
08:03
simply black and white. Over the last two decades, immigration, like crime, has increasingly served as a coded proxy for race, a way of talking about it without saying it. Immigration enforcement has operated as an ostensibly colorblind means of maintaining white supremacy, which has
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directed police attention toward those groups with the sizable proportion of immigrants, the Latino population most of all. This is relatively new. Until the mid-1990s, immigration was strictly a federal matter. Police involvement was first authorized by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
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Responsibility Act of 1996, but the relevant provision, section 287G, wasn't enforced until 2002. At that point, Florida entered into an agreement with the federal government, under which local cops were deputized as immigration officers. By 2013, 35 agencies in 18 states had some similar arrangement. At
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the same time, other federally driven programs with names like the Criminal Alien Program and Secure Communities have greatly increased the flow of information between agencies. Now, when local police make an arrest, they
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run the suspect's fingerprints through a federal immigration database. In the first year of this program in California, it resulted in 19,109 deportations, 25% of which occurred without a conviction. These new police duties came as a result of several major shifts occurring simultaneously or
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in quick succession. Border enforcement has increasingly militarized, incorporating the use of helicopters and drones and sometimes involving Marines and Army Special Forces. At the same time, many immigration violations, which had previously been treated as administrative or civil matters, have now been criminalized, and the remaining administrative elements have become
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increasingly punitive. Enforcement has also come to focus more and more on farm communities and cities far from any, on the interior of the country, and cities and farm towns far from any border. All of that has meant a great deal more scrutiny on the Latino community, including checkpoints, neighborhood sweeps,
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and workplace raids. The result is that immigrants are increasingly isolated, fearful, and powerless. That is likely the point. American capitalism needs a steady supply of immigrant labor, but it needs it cheap. By criminalizing the
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workers, the state helps to keep them uncertain, uneasy, disorganized, and docile. So that's roughly the present state of affairs. Routine violence, ubiquitous racial discrimination, all traveling under color of law. To see how we arrived at this place, it's
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useful to consider the characteristics defining policing and how the modern institution acquired the characteristics that it has. Relevant here are two sets of characteristics. The first are those that define police as police. So any
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institution which is involved in policing will exhibit all three of these traits, and if you have all three of these traits, you're definitely involved in policing. So this is a set of strict criteria defining police per se. The three criteria are the authority to use force, a public character and accountability to
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some central government authority, and third, general law enforcement duties as opposed to limited specific duties like parking enforcement or animal control. The second set of criteria set aside the modern institution from previous instantiations of law enforcement like sheriffs or constables or beetles or church
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wardens. Together they form an ideal type, meaning no one institution is likely to perfectly represent all six of these characteristics, but to the reason that it has them, it will more or less resemble an ideal type of modern
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policing. These six characteristics are the investment of responsibility for law enforcement in a single organization, citywide jurisdiction and centralization, an intended continuity in office and procedure, meaning more or less the same people do more or less the same things day after day, a
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specialized police function, meaning that the organization is only or mainly responsible for policing, not for keeping the streets clean, putting out fires, that sort of thing. 24-hour service and personnel paid by salary rather than fee. Now to a large degree those are just characteristics that we take for
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granted as coming with a government police agency, but in fact they're relatively new and American policing acquired these characteristics slowly by a process of trial and error beginning in the colonial period and specifically
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driven by the needs of the institution of slavery. South Carolina was really at the front of the pack on this, so I'm mostly going to talk about South Carolina and what follows. In South Carolina slave owners
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initially used professional slave catchers and militias to capture runaways, while paid overseers were responsible for maintaining order on plantations. The weaknesses of the system led to the creation of slave codes, which were laws directed specifically toward the governing of
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slave behavior. Beginning in 1661 the slave codes shifted responsibility for enforcing them from the overseers to the entire white male population. Shortly thereafter in the 1680s the militia began making regular patrols to catch runaways, prevent slave gatherings, and search slave quarters. In 1704 fears
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of a Spanish invasion combined with an ever-present threat of a slave revolt led the state of South Carolina to form its first official slave patrols. The colony faced two types of danger and therefore divided military capacity accordingly. Henceforth the militia would guard against outside attack and
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the patrol would be left behind to protect against insurrection. The patrol system established in 1704 survived in rural areas virtually unaltered until the American Civil War in the 1860s. Once South
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Carolina established this model other colonies quickly copied it including Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. In some places the patrols were supervised by the militia and in others they were supervised by the courts. Some of them were chiefly concerned with escapes and others were
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concerned in preventing revolts. Some of them were paid and some of them were conscripted. Some were staffed by slave owners and others were staffed by poor white people. But despite the variation all of them engaged in roughly the same activity and served the same function. They patrolled together in beat companies on horseback and usually at night. Along the roads they
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would stop any black person they encountered, demand his pass, beat him if he was without one, and return him to the plantation or hold him in jail. For this work they carried guns, whips, and binding ropes. In general the slave control, the state control of slave behavior advanced through three stages.
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First legislation was passed restricting the activity of slaves. Second this legislation was supplemented with requirements that every white person enforced its demands. Third over time the system of enforcement gradually came to
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be regulated either by the militias or by the courts. The transition between these second and third stages was a slow one. Each colony tried to cope with the unreliable nature of private enforcement first by applying rewards and penalties and later by appointing particular individuals to take on the duty. Volunteerism was eventually replaced with community sanctioned
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authority in the form of the slave patrols. Among the factors determining the rate of this transition and the eventual shape of the patrols were the date of settlement, the size of the slave population, the size of the white population, the past history of revolt, the local geography, and population
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density. As this fact suggests slave patrols developed differently in cities than in the countryside. Urban patrols and the laws they enforced were
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initially modeled on the system developed for the plantations but cities with developing industries had different needs than the surrounding rural areas with plantation economies. For one thing the large numbers of black people present in the city often lived in one part of town away from their
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sort of intimate knowledge of the slaves comings and goings on which the plantation system relied. Furthermore rigid restrictions on daily travel were not even desirable proving inconvenient for budding industries. As manufacturers sought out cheap sources of labor the practice of
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hiring out slaves became increasingly common. Regulations on travel then had to be more flexible for the slaves to do their work. Economic changes related to industrialization relaxed the master's personal control over the slaves and additional responsibilities fell to the state. Charleston, South Carolina being
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subject to pressures of maintaining a slave system in urban areas with an industrializing economy underwent an early and intense period of innovation just around the time of the American Revolution. Its efforts to control the black population put it in the lead in development of modern policing. In 1783
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Charleston formed a city guard. It wore uniforms, carried muskets and swords and maintained a substantial mounted division. Two years later by 1785 these patrols were incorporated into the Charleston Guard and Watch. This body was responsible for arresting vagrants and other suspicious persons, preventing
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felonies and disturbances and warning of fires, but slave control was the aspect of their work most emphasized by public officials and given the highest priority by the Guard itself. The organization of the Charleston Guard and Watch represented a significant advance in the development of policing.
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The force contained a developed hierarchy in chain of command consisting of a captain, a lieutenant, three corporals, 58 privates and a drummer. Each was given a gun, bayonet, a rattle for use as a signal and a uniform coat. Some acted as a standing guard and the rest were divided into patrols. The captain issued daily reports and all the men were paid. The
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same group patrolled every night and disciplined morale received a level of attention unique at the time. By our earlier criteria there can be no question that the Charleston Guard and Watch were involved in policing. They were authorized to use force, had general enforcement responsibilities and were
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publicly controlled. By our second set of criteria they were also exceptionally modern. The Guard was the principal law enforcement agency in Charleston, enjoyed a jurisdiction covering the entire city and served a specialized police function. It also established organizational continuity and
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paid his personnel by salary. In fact, lacking only 24-hour service the Charleston Guard and Watch may count as the first modern police department predating the London Metropolitan Police by more than 30 years. Once Charleston set the type it was replicated in other southern cities including Savannah,
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Georgia, Mobile, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia. More notably the same police model was also adopted in the north where industrialization and its accompanying social changes led to a breakdown of informal means of control that had proved mostly sufficient to that point. With the creation of the
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new police public safety was no longer in the hands of amateur night watchmen but had been transferred to full-time professional body directed by and accountable to city authorities. The enforcement of the law no longer relied on the complaints of aggrieved citizens but on the initiative of
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officers whose mission was to prevent offenses. Hence crimes without victims need not be ignored and potential offenders need not be given the opportunity to act. The police provided a mechanism by which the power of the state and eventually that of the emerging ruling class could be brought to
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bear on the lives and habits of individual members of society. The aims and means of social control always approximately reflect the anxieties of elites. So criminal behavior was understood as a threat to the social order not merely to its real or potential victims. Theft challenged the
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sanctity of private property but more to the point drunkenness and vagrancy seemed to challenge the standards of diligence and self-control central to Protestant morality and crucial to an economic system dependent on regularity. Crime and criminality were thus constructed to reflect the
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ideological needs of elites. Criminality was less a matter of what people did than of what they represented and the idea of the dangerous classes was formed. The dangerous classes were not merely poor. They represented an alien presence a group with different values whose
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behavior was therefore suspicious as if by definition. In the northern United States it was the immigrant lower class and in Boston the term was especially applied to Irish Catholics. So we see from this history that present from the beginning the police have used force against suspect populations to preserve hierarchies especially those of race and
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class. But that's not to say that nothing has changed in the past 200 years. To understand our current form of policing we need to look at the ways that the institution reinvented itself after the 1960s. That decade saw a wave
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upon wave of unrest. The civil rights movement most notably but also the anti-war movement and then other social groups rising to demand respect in their rights including Chicanos, Native Americans, women, gays and lesbians and students. The police were ill-prepared and often responded with naked repression
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which had the effect of winning sympathy for the dissident groups and undercutting public support for the cops. In the period following the 60s the authorities responded by increasing the police funding, upgrading their equipment and reorganizing departments among military
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lines. To this end the National Institute of Justice was founded in 1968 and immediately set about transferring defense department technology to the police. It outfitted police with military wonders like night vision goggles, soft body armor, forensic and computer equipment,
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surveillance devices and retired army helicopters. Police planning also turned in a more martial direction. In 1969 the New York Police Department began construction of its command and control center modeled on military installations like the Pentagon and Strategic Air Command headquarters.
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Mayor John Lindsay described the new center frankly as a war room. Meanwhile in Los Angeles an ambitious commander named Daryl Gates, later police chief, was reinventing the Metro Division of the Los Angeles Police Department reorganizing it into squad and platoon structures.
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Military tactics were soon adopted as well most famously with the creation of the SWAT team. The Los Angeles Police Department special weapons and tactics team became the first of many similar units generically referred to as police paramilitary units.
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SWAT was developed in secret during the late 1960s training with Marines in Camp Pendleton. Though ostensibly designed to handle snipers, the team's first mission was a 1969 raid on the headquarters of the Black Panther Party. Since then paramilitary police units have become a nationwide phenomena
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and the rate of use has sharply increased. In 1970 there was exactly one SWAT team in the United States, then in Los Angeles. By 1975 there were close to 500. By 1995 89 percent of cities with a population over 50,000 had a
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paramilitary unit and half of cities with a population between 25,000 and 50,000 did as well. The main use of paramilitary units has been drug raids, especially no-knock or dynamic entries, meaning that they avoid announcing their presence until they've knocked down the door and are entering the house. Such raids are extremely dangerous for
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everyone involved, cops, suspects, and bystanders. They usually occur before dawn and sleepy residents often don't understand that the people kicking down their door are the cops. At the same time police procedures allow for terribly little room for error.
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So predictably these raids sometimes end in disaster. For instance, in the course of a May 2014 raid in Cornelia, Georgia, a flashbang grenade landed in the crib of a 19-month-old infant blowing a hole in the baby's face and chest, covering his body with third degree burns, and exposing part of his rib cage. No
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guns or drugs were found in the house and no arrests were made. Sometimes these raids go wrong before they even begin. Walter and Rose Martin, a perfectly innocent couple both in their 80s, had their home raided by the New York Police more than 50 times between 2002 and 2010. It turned out that their address had
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been entered as the default in the police database, meaning that if police mistakenly left the address slot blank when applying for a warrant, their address showed up automatically. That's the extreme case but not an isolated problem.
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New York Police Chief Raymond Kelly, while defending the department's tactics, estimated that in 2003 the police conducted 450 no-knock raids every month and that approximately 10 percent were warrants served to the wrong address. That's 45 people each month at a minimum,
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540 New Yorkers every year who will be woken up without warning, their doors broken down, their homes invaded, their lives threatened, and their loved ones menaced by heavily armed men, all because of a clerical error and a society-wide campaign to use military force against victimless crimes. Perhaps more troubling than the
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expansion is the expansion of the SWAT mission. In 1994, Fresno, California began using its paramilitary unit to patrol its southwest ghettos. Wearing black fatigues, combat boots, and body armor, the officers routinely patrolled with MP-54 submachine guns,
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helicopters, and dogs. Misdemeanor arrests increased 48.3 percent and the unit averaged one shooting every three months. By 1999, there were 94 departments across the country similarly deploying their SWAT teams. So if the aggressive armored paramilitary
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unit represents one face of community of contemporary policing, the other is that of the smiley, chatty cop on the beat. The first is the image of militarization, the second is that of community policing.
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Like militarization, community policing largely developed as departments across the United States struggled to recover from the defeats of the 1960s. Emphasizing a need to adapt police strategies to local conditions, community policing has produced a wide array of programs, but they generally share some common features.
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Philosophically, community policing is characterized by the solicitation of citizen input, the broadening of the police function, and the attempt to find solutions based on the values of the local residents. Organizationally, community policing requires the departments be restructured so as to decentralize command,
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flatten hierarchies, reduce specialization, civilianize staff positions, and encourage teamwork. Strategically, community policing efforts reorient operations away from random patrols and responding to 911 calls toward more directed, proactive, and preventive approaches.
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This reorientation in turn requires a geographic focus and encourages the cops to pay attention to the source of disorder as well as to the crimes themselves. Tactics to sustain community police efforts are those that encourage positive citizen interactions, partnerships, and problem solving. But the primary task of any
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community policing effort is to make police authority legitimate in the eyes of the community. The means by which this legitimacy is established are sometimes subtle. Even mechanisms through which the community is expected to voice its concerns about the police
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often become forums for the police to promote their own agenda. The most common of these is the citizen survey. Under the guise of collecting information about neighborhood problems and community attitudes, the surveys carefully frame questions to reinforce the fear of crime and present police as problem solvers.
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They function twice in this regard, first in the framing of the questions and then when the results are available in the presentation of the results as well. Community meetings work much the same way, turning an atmosphere of inclusiveness and participation to propagandistic ends. Other features of community policing like foot patrol
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and storefront offices serve to increase friendly contacts between police and residents. In all of these practices, it's hoped, can reduce friction, encourage communication, build trust, and humanize individual officers in the eyes of neighborhood residents. Moreover, police are encouraged to draw existing civic groups into their
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efforts and, where necessary, set up organizations that provide the support they need. Thus, the newfound trust would give the police access to and influence over community resources that may have otherwise had their law enforcement potential overlooked or which may have served as centers for resistance.
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For example, responding to a wave of gang shootings in the mid-1990s, the Boston police formed a broad-based working group including social workers, academics, and members of the black clergy. Many of them had been
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vocal critics of the police previously, but the clergy's role in this operation was twofold. First, they served an intelligence function, providing police information about neighborhood life, trouble spots, and even identifying individual gang members. Second, the involvement of black ministers, especially those who had been
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critical of the police, served in the eyes and in the words of advisors to the program, I'm quoting here, to shelter the police from broad public criticism. The overall result of such efforts is to increase the police role in the community,
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meaning the coercive apparatus that the state will be more involved in day-to-day life. The state and the police in particular will have more opportunities for surveillance and can exercise control in a variety of ways besides arrests, citation, and physical force. This shift can be made to sound like
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liberalization or democratization, but it is instead just a smarter approach to repression. Negotiation and co-optation provide the
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means for the state to extend its influence. Thus, potential sources of resistance can be neutralized or even turned to the government's advantage. It makes a little difference whether the
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client group here is a social service agency, a church, a school, another government body, or a neighborhood watch group. By organizing on a sufficient scale, the police can greatly enhance their own power not only over these other agencies, but also through them. The goal of community policing is to reduce resistance
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before force is required. In effect, community policing turns the citizenry into the eyes and ears of the state, and by the same means, creates a demand for more aggressive tactics by mobilizing conservative elements of the community, especially business owners and property owners.
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This then legitimizes the military tactics, including street sweeps, roadblocks, saturation patrol, zero tolerance campaigns, and paramilitary units. So rather than viewing there as being a bad option of militarization and a good option of community policing, we're
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better off viewing the two together as forming a strategic whole. In the in economies in blue, I offer the formula the community policing plus militarization equals counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is an approach to counter-revolutionary warfare developed by imperial powers
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during the period of decolonization. It stresses the need to prevent disorder rather than simply repressing it where it occurs. This aim requires that the authorities gain when the trust of the local population and create in the community a sense that the rule is stable and legitimate. But it also requires intense
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intelligence about the condition of the community, the sources of conflict, grievances, prevalent attitudes, and the efforts of troublemakers. To these end, counterinsurgency theorists encourage the authorities to actively penetrate the local community, allowing for ready access to intelligence and the state presenting itself as a
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problem-solver. More suddenly, it gives the government the means to co-opt community institutions that might otherwise provide a base for resistance. All of these elements, of course, can be recognized in the community policing agenda.
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In the 21st century, as the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan renewed the military's interest in counterinsurgency and the connection between domestic policing and counterinsurgency operations became increasingly explicit in the literature as a result. In fact, one Rand Corporation report
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explains counterinsurgency, and I'm quoting here, as a massively enhanced version of the community policing technique that emerged in the 1970s. It may not be surprising then to see America's military planners drawing from domestic police practices, Marines embedding with the LAPD's gang
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unit before deploying to Afghanistan, for one example. At the same time, advisors from the Naval Postgraduate School were helping the Salinas Police Department use counterinsurgency theory in their counter-gang strategy. Their approach included a demographic analysis, networking with social service agencies, and the use of community groups to, as the advisors put it,
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establish a sense of trust and ultimately receive more information about community activity. As part of the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace, the Salinas Police Department took control of a community center in Hebron Heights neighborhood and stationed two officers there, assigned to perform foot patrols and focus on
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minor quality of life issues. More important than the direct police presence, however, was the coordination and intelligence sharing between various nonprofits, government agencies, and the police. The 34 members of the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace met
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regularly to share information, discuss emerging problems, and plan a coordinated response. At about the same time, on April 22, 2010, the Salinas Police Department, along with more than 200 officers from other local, state, and federal agencies, conducted a series of raids intended to disrupt targeted gangs and send a
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message to others. The immediate results were impressive. Police seized a dozen guns, 14 pounds of marijuana, 40 pounds of cocaine, and made a hundred arrests. This led the Naval Postgraduate Provost Leonard Ferrari to brag that the Salinas example could well become a
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national model. So to review, I've argued that the core function of policing is to preserve inequality,
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especially inequalities based on race and class. I've suggested that this function is evident in the historical development of the institution, that it's apparent in the day-to-day routine of the police, that it's there in the militarized SWAT raids, and in community policing programs. I realize that as a thesis, the claim that
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the police, that policing has more to do with inequality than with crime may sound outlandish, but I want to invite you to consider the thesis from the other end, not as a claim about policing, but as a claim about power.
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I believe that one would expect that people with power would see their interests protected by the coercive institutions of the society. That is almost analytically true. That's what power is. So it's interesting that to advance the logically equivalent claim
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as an observation about one of those coercive institutions somehow becomes controversial. I believe the reason for that is that in order to serve the interests of power well, coercive institutions like the police need to preserve a sense of legitimacy, which is based in part on a claim to impartiality.
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My hope for my own work is that it undermines that pretense of impartiality, which then helps undercut the source of legitimacy and hopefully makes it more difficult for the cops to serve the interests of white supremacy and capitalism. I'll stop there and I believe we have a few minutes for questions.
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I'm supposed to have a moderator, but I don't know where he went. Okay, let me know when I'm running out of time.
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15 minutes. Okay. I was extremely intrigued with what you said about the early history of policing and the three criteria that you said define police. Just want to run over them again. You said it was that they have to get paid a salary, they have to answer to a state, and they
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have to enforce laws. Well, you're conflating items from two sets. There's a set of criteria that are the criteria of police per se, or policing per se. And so those earlier instantiations, institutions like the Constable, the Frank Pledge, the
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Sheriff, like pre-modern versions would also match those criteria. And then the second criteria set aside the specifically modern version of policing, which we more or less take for granted. Like when we think of police, we're thinking of
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these things, but though maybe not quite articulated that way. Hold on a second, I'll remind you of the first set. Yeah, so the the defining characteristics of policing per se are the authority to use force, a public character, an accountability to
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some government, and general law enforcement duties. This goes right to my question, and what you said I think specifically about sheriffs and bailiffs I think goes precisely to what I wanted to ask. I think in a European context, I know it's true in Britain, it might also be true in Germany,
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that you have those forms of medieval or early modern enforcement that come after the court and which enforce the decision of the court. I wonder if you have any thoughts about what might have changed in the state in the transition from post-judicial to pre-judicial enforcement,
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and any thoughts you might have about the effect of the invention of the police on the state? Um, okay, in terms of the post-judicial to pre-judicial enforcement, I mean in in the literature on American policing, this often gets described as a shift from
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private enforcement to public enforcement, which is a little bit misleading, but what it's getting at is sort of the the point at which a complaint is initiated, and before the modern institution really took hold, or the process of forming the modern institution
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was really the the process of shifting this from a period where the aggrieved party was the person who would initiate a complaint, and usually through the court, and then the court would issue an order that one of those earlier policing bodies would enforce, and then
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as the modernization process occurred, the complaints became more instead police-initiated, right? So they didn't have to rely on an aggrieved party, they didn't have to rely on there being a victim for a crime at all. They also weren't as mediated through
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the courts or through, you know, way back, like, like a lord or whatever. They were, the police on their own initiative were exercising the authority of the state in the day-to-day lives of the citizenry, which had the effect
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of making the state less response, like less responsive to the direct demands of the population. I mean, the period of private enforcement gets faulted for being inefficient and like
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uneven in its application and that sort of thing, but it also meant that things, even if illegal, that didn't particularly bother some identifiable person who was willing to go to court and swear on a warrant over it, largely weren't enforced. So the state became much more
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engaged in the day-to-day life of the community with the development of the police, and this had ramifications far outside of law enforcement, that once that started happening, there was a sort of cascading effect of governments inventing other kinds of regulatory bodies modeled on the
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police, but with different sort of focuses. Can I ask one other little side question after that? Sure. Okay. This is very interesting. If it's true, what you say, let's take an example like, the queen is the complainant, the complaint is that the citizen didn't pay taxes,
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the bailiff goes to shake the citizen down for taxes. Is an ancillary to what you're saying that the pre-police form of enforcement was juster or that it was less about enforcing inequality? Unfortunately, no. There's not a blissful past that we can hearken back to.
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Whose complaints got taken seriously? The nature of the law in the first place? All of those biases still sort of came into effect. The thing that really shifted wasn't,
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it was not necessarily juster, but it was sort of lazier. It was less proactive, it was more responsive, and therefore it gave more latitude for people to cut corners
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and evade detection and evade compliance. Once you had an assertive arm of the state
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in the community with the job of really, and this translates directly from the experience of slavery, where the job was to prevent escapes and revolts. Once that preventative notion took hold, the relationship between, it wasn't just a matter of somebody does something wrong and
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then the authorities go and catch them. There was an aggressive presence in the community to prevent deviance. I think in the long term, it ended up fundamentally changing the relationship between everyday people and the government. Maybe the word deviance is the new one that
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comes in there. Thank you very much. That was very, very interesting. Thank you. Who's next? Do you see any alternative models emerging in the US? Because I know like, I think
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Spokane talked about giving authority of the city, authority of the police to the sheriff. Is there any drive to give sheriff more power? Let me say a couple things about this. One is
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the, so the police emerged and some of those other sort of pre-modern institutions like sheriffs, like bailiffs, in some places even constables, didn't necessarily go extinct. In some places they're still around. What's interesting is that law enforcement has become, even those
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pre-modern versions, once the model of modern policing was developed, they tended to become more police-like. So in large cities now, like I'm thinking Cook County, which surrounds Chicago,
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or LA County, which surrounds LA, the sheriff's office and the police department are often hard to tell apart. One on the surface sort of promising difference is that most places sheriffs are elected, which suggests that they may be somewhat more sensitive to public pressure.
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However, it's relatively rare that that public pressure has more of an effect on a sheriff's office than it does on the police who also generally answer to a police commissioner or mayor
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who, you know, those officials are elected. I think rather than look to other existing institutions to take on some of the duties of policing, which I think will often just end up replicating the logic of policing, even if in a different home, we're better off trying to create
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new bodies that can be directly controlled by the community that will take care of the parts of policing that people actually care about, like responding to crime, mediating disputes, interrupting violence, that sort of thing, but that don't have the connection to the states and
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don't rely on the ubiquitous surveillance, routine violence, and inherent racism that the police do. In the last chapter of Armies in Blue, I rather than just sort of project my anarchist fantasy about what these things would look like, I look at historical cases where social movements
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have become powerful enough and have legitimate enough and have done a good enough job of undermining the legitimacy of the state that the community as a whole stops looking to the government to fulfill this function and instead starts looking to the social movements
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and different arrangements that social movements have had to come up with in order to sort of meet this new obligation, some of which are, I think, very promising, but none of which are perfect. I could go on about that for hours, but I don't have hours, so I'll just stop there.
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Other questions? What do you think, how do you get people to become cops? Because I ask myself that a lot, like, what's the motivation of people to, yeah.
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Okay, so let me say, again, a couple things about that, and I'm not sure exactly how they fit together. One is that it's hard, that even when unemployment in the United States was
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a problem, like, structurally for the economy, not just for people who were out of work, most police departments were having trouble recruiting and most police departments were having trouble retaining staff. It seems to be a job that people don't just inherently want to do.
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Those who do take it, I think some of it is that there are just people who need work and that is work that is available, you know, as with basically any other
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job. Some of it I think is also a very naive sense that it is a way that they can sort of serve their community, and I think a lot of people go into policing with the best intentions of the world, but the institution has a way of perverting those good intentions and
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directing it toward the norms inherent to the institution, not the norms, not the values that the individual brings with them. Maybe the best sort of case study that I know of this is a memoir called Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper, who was a former police chief in Seattle, and he tells the story of taking the civil service exam in San Diego, where he was
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living at the time, and the job that came available for him after taking the civil service exam was to become a police officer, and he was like a liberal fresh out of college, like it was the late 60s, and he was like no way, I'm not going to do that, and then he sort of talked himself
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into it, thinking like well I could be the cop who would like take civil rights seriously, I could be the cop who like does this fairly, basically like I could be the good cop, and then, you know, fast forward 30 years and he is the chief of police
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tear-gassing protesters at the WTO demonstrations in 99, which led to his resignation, which then led to a period of soul searching, hence the memoir, and looking back on it, he realized that it was really only a few weeks between when he was like, hated the cops and didn't want to
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become part of them, and then talked himself into like being the good cop, and when he was doing things like throwing people in jail for no reason, using force without needing to, lying on the stand, and doing like all of the terrible things that led him to hate the police in the first place, and that transition happened very quickly, and was apparently completely
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invisible to him at the time, until decades later when he had to stop and wonder how his life went so wrong. Okay, I don't know if we have one more question, I think we would have
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time for one more, and then we have to stop more or less. Don't be shy. Okay, well, I will be probably around in the back for a little bit. If there are questions that you didn't want
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to ask in front of the whole class, feel free to come up and talk to me. Meanwhile, thank you for coming.