The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

By opening the doors to capital and goods but not people, we have created tremendous pressure to migrate.

Ultimately, we must work toward developing a more internationalist ethos and analysis. The reality is that people in Central America and Mexico are poor partially because of US economic policies. By consistently subverting democracy, we have helped create the dreadful poverty in those places.

The roots of political policing lie deep in the desire of kings and queens to maintain power in the face of the shifting allegiances and interests of nobles and foreign powers. Today, states portray their police forces as value-neutral protectors of public safety, but in reality, states continue to monitor and disrupt all kinds of political activity through surveillance, infiltration, criminal entrapment, and repressing protest.

The origins of this kind of policing run deep in the colonial centers that bred it. We can see this clearly in the context of the transition from autocratic to more modern liberal policing in the nineteenth century. The imperial powers of Europe each had secret police that spied on, interrogated, imprisoned, and at times tortured political opponents and infiltrated and subverted the movements of workers, ethnic minorities, and even liberal reformers.

In the absence of any evidence or even allegation of criminal activity, the police routinely collect information on political activists whose philosophy runs counter to existing political arrangements.

The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality. While on a few occasions this has included actions against the far right, it has overwhelmingly focused on the left, especially those movements tied to workers and racial minorities and those challenging American foreign policy. More recently, focus has shifted to surveillance of Muslims as part of the War on Terror.

While the avowed focus was on preventing armed revolution, the real target was the disruption of the burgeoning labor movement. In addition, Palmer singled out groups that supported equal rights for African Americans for public attack, such as the Communist Party, which, to his horror told “Negros” that they had the right to strike.

As immigration and industrialization transformed the economic and social landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local police were increasingly involved in suppressing workers’ movements.

In most places, local police played a major role in suppressing strikes. Often this was done through a process of political corruption in which police were beholden to local elected officials who did much of the hiring and firing of police, especially at the top ranks. In many places in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, police were directly appointed by local politicians on the basis of political services and substantial bribes. These local officials were often beholden to large employers through bribery and political favors. When these employers were faced with labor unrest, they need only call on local police to suppress the strike, break up meetings, and intimidate and brutalize alleged “ring leaders.”

In many cases, detectives who helped to break up strikes were given large unreported cash bonuses from employers, just one of the many forms of corruption to emerge from this system of secretive political policing. Employers also often provided cash to pay for informants and infiltrators. This system blurred the line between public and private interests and undermined the core ideals of an independent police under the control of elected civilian governments.

In 1956, a new independent agency, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, was created to share files among police agencies concerning organized crime and political activity. Though funded in part by federal grants, they maintained that they were a private entity and thus not subject to any kind of government oversight or accountability. This agency still exists.

These reforms, while important in exposing and limiting the extent of political policing, were temporary and incomplete. Part of the problem is that any criminal activity is sufficient to trigger an investigation. Since civil disobedience actions have become a mainstay of social movement activity, almost all social movements participate in some form of technically illegal activity. Intelligence units continue to view monitoring political activity as part of their mandate.

One of the major formations of political policing is Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF). Created in the 1980s, these units combine federal and local law enforcement to look for terrorist threats. Since such threats are rare, they appear to have shifted their role to monitoring political activity.

Despite having evidence that turned out to be linked to actual violent attacks, JTTFs have played a limited role in preventing attacks or prosecuting terrorists.

Most real information about extremist violence is obtained by community members reporting on people they fear are up to no good. However, when whole communities feel discriminated against, abused, and mistrusted, they are less likely to come forward for fear that their role will be misunderstood or that well-meaning but mistaken tips will hurt the innocent rather than sparking an honest investigation. In the words of the ACLU, this type of policing makes us both less safe and less free.

Today, however, two major forms of protest policing predominate; both severely restrict the right to protest. The police in New York City and some other jurisdictions insist on ‘‘command and control’’ techniques, in which they micromanage all-important aspects of demonstrations in an attempt to eliminate any disorderly or illegal activity.48 This approach sets clear and strict guidelines on acceptable behavior, based on very little negotiation with demonstration organizers. It is inflexible and frequently relies on high levels of confrontation and force in relation to even minor violations of the rules. This does not represent a return to escalated force because it attempts to avoid the use of force through planning and careful management of the protest. When this fails force is used, but only in the service of reestablishing control over the demonstration.

Another form of protest policing, the “Miami model,” emerged nationally in response to the disruptive protests at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999. It is named for the Miami Police Department’s handling of protests at the Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings in 2003. This style is characterized by the creation of no-protest zones, heavy use of less lethal weaponry, surveillance of protest organizations, negative advance publicity about protest groups, preemptive arrests, preventative detentions, and extensive restrictions on protest timing and locations.49 This set of tactics is reserved for groups that the police believe cannot be controlled through micromanagement, such as those who do not apply for permits and threaten direct action or civil disobedience not coordinated with the police. Such groups are arrested while lawfully gathering and held in detention for long periods while awaiting arraignment, often in poor conditions. They are also likely to be the subjects of extensive police surveillance and to be accused of planning violence. They are often met with high levels of force in the form of “less lethal” weaponry such as pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets. The Miami model has also been driven in part by the broad militarization of civilian policing, as described in previous chapters.

People have the right to protest despite the presence of violence or property destruction nearby.

Collectively punishing protestors because they are protesting while others are setting fires is an abridgement of fundamental rights.

Local politicians knew that a criminal indictment was highly unlikely but took no steps to reduce the rage they knew would result.

Protests are by their nature disruptive and disorderly. The attitude of police in Saint Louis County has been to treat that as a fundamental threat to the social order.

Even when the weapons are not used, they contribute to police viewing the public as a constant threat and conceiving of the world as divided between evildoers and the good guys. Human nature is profoundly more complicated than that, and a police force that lacks a nuanced understanding of this will invariably slide into intolerance, aggression, and violence.

Instead, we need to reduce the political conflicts that generate disruptive protest movements. American democracy has been continually undermined by concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of wealthy donors and corporate interests; contentious protest activity will increase as long as there is the freedom for it to do so. When normal political channels are closed off, street politics become more common. This can be seen in the rise of the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, all of which expressed profound alienation from existing political arrangements and took to the streets as an alternative.

Widespread surveillance, intelligence gathering, and the use of paid informants and undercover officers should be forbidden unless there is specific evidence of serious criminal activity; even then, investigations should be severely limited in scope and overseen by civilians. Without oversight, abuses always emerge.

We need to rethink our relationship to Gulf oil countries that practice despotic rule and provide ideological and financial support to terrorists. We must also rethink our largely uncritical relationship with Israel, whose actions in the region have been incredibly destabilizing and whose behavior in Gaza and the West Bank have inspired widespread revulsion, some of which blows back on the United States in the form of both international and domestic terrorism.

The best way to avoid political violence is to enhance justice at home and abroad.

The culture of the police must be changed so that it is no longer obsessed with the use of threats and violence to control the poor and socially marginal. That said, there is a larger truth that must be confronted. As long as the basic mission of police remains unchanged, none of these reforms will be achievable.

Powerful political forces benefit from abusive, aggressive, and invasive policing, and they are not going to be won over or driven from power by technical arguments or heartfelt appeals to do the right thing. They may adopt a language of reform and fund a few pilot programs, but mostly they will continue to reproduce their political power by fanning fear of the poor, nonwhite, disabled, and dispossessed and empowering police to be the “thin blue line” between the haves and the have-nots. This does not mean that no one should articulate or fight for reforms. However, those reforms must be part of a larger vision that questions the basic role of police in society and asks whether coercive government action will bring more justice or less.