In fact, at its core, policing is about manufacturing—and then promising to assuage—fear to preserve the social order scripted by myths of white supremacy: fear of Indigenous people resisting land theft and genocide, of enslaved Africans rebelling, of an invasion of “foreigners,” of workers organizing, of the have-nots coming for the haves, of murder and mayhem, of people taking what’s not “theirs” to take. Cops fuel the problem and then offer themselves as the only viable solution.
