Violent Order

Essays on the Nature of Police

David Correia, Tyler Wall

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642594874
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book 's radical theory of police argues that the police demand for order is a class order and a racialized and patriarchal order, by arguing that the police project, in order to fabricate and defend capitalist order, must patrol an imaginary line between society and nature, it must transform nature into inert matter made available for accumulation. Police don 't just patrol the ghetto or the Indian reservation, the thin blue line doesn 't just refer to a social order, rather police announce a general claim to domination--of labor and of nature. Police and police violence are modes of environment-making. This edited volume argues that any effort to understand racialized police violence is incomplete without a focus on the role of police in constituting and reinforcing patterns of environmental racism.

PART I

THE ORDER OF POLICE

CHAPTER ONE

INVENTING HUMANITY, OR THE THIN BLUE LINE AS “PATRONIZING SHIT”

Tyler Wall

The idea that life itself, or at least a life worth living, is impossible without police is a ruling idea of capitalist order. If it were not for police, it is commonly thought, savagery and predation would prevail. This idea is condensed in the thin blue line (TBL), a phrase conferring a sort of sacred, mystical character to the “men and women in uniform.” In the opening scene of the 2012 Hollywood police drama End of Watch, a white male cop played by actor Jake Gyllenhaal provides a concise articulation: “The thin blue line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.” Or consider how the idea was expressed in 1951 by the staunch anticommunist LAPD chief William Parker: “Between the law abiding elements of society and the criminals who prey upon them stands a thin blue line of defense, your police officers.”¹ If taken seriously, the TBL forces us to grapple with just how central police—as a specific typology of threat management via administrative violence—are to bourgeois conceptions of “civilized order.” If understood as a police conception of humanity, as I argue it should be, the TBL, it becomes clear, aims to rewrite the Brechtian aphorism “first bread, then morality” into a crudely seductive security logic: “first police, then humanity.”

TBL aesthetics are seemingly everywhere, whether it’s waiting in line for coffee, driving down the interstate, or sifting through social media. Over the last decade or so, there has emerged a fairly visible culture industry, represented by companies like Thin Blue Line USA and Blue Line Beasts that peddle in specialized clothing, flags, hats, bumper stickers, jewelry, coffee mugs, license plates, light bulbs, and home decor. These commodities, to say nothing of DIY memes, are often adorned with melodramatic messages, such as Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God,” or “And maybe remind the few, if ill of us they speak, that we are all that stands between the monsters and the weak.” I frequently see students on my university campus wearing TBL bracelets, hats, and T-shirts, and with TBL stickers decorating their laptops. During the Trump presidency, the “thin blue line” flag became closely associated with the administration and the Republican Party, including reactionary street forces like the Proud Boys. What assumptions about the police/society relation are being articulated in these public displays of cop love? How might this mass psychology locate a mythological war against beasts as the ideological lifeblood of police mythology? In what ways does this cult of cop naturalize police prerogative as patriarchal protection? How are racial fantasies and class struggles, if unintentionally forgotten or repressed or actively recalled and remembered, mobilized when a TBL sticker is slapped on the bumper of one’s vehicle?

By positioning police as chivalrous defenders of humankind itself, the TBL peddles in a gendered logic of prerogative power—namely, a “logic of masculinist protection” where the security of the nation, often conflated with civilization writ large, is said to be dependent on patriarchal authority.² At play here is the construction of a “sovereign manhood” or “national manhood,” where it is not, say, the president but the figure of the cop, often imagined as a white man but not reducible to a white man, who promises national security.³ Yet a nightmarish disfiguration of the body politic is perpetually envisioned, with workaday cops endlessly facing “near impossible odds.” Consider an aesthetic increasingly influential in contemporary cop-pop culture: “Old Glory” with one of the stripes colored bright blue, with the rest of the flag rendered in black tones or a black mass.

Endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) in October 2017 as a “symbol of solidarity” amid the reactionary Blue Lives Matter movement,⁴ this flag reflects police fantasy as national nightmare with dark, bestial forces threatening to devour the body of the nation, were it not for police “holding the line.” If a guiding narrative of the settler state is “white men built this nation, white men are this nation,” the TBL rewrites this colonial commonsense as “cops built this nation, cops are this nation.” In 1974, at the graduation ceremony for the FBI Academy, an NYPD inspector articulated this in eliminationist terms: “Woven through the fabric of this Nation is a strong, thin, blue thread,” which citizens must support in order “to eliminate from society those who seek to subvert the national peace.”⁵ Or as a cop in 2014 handwrote inside a leaked training manual: “You are the thin line of heroes preserving the fabric of America during these dark and desperate times.”⁶ To the extent that this political theology splits the world into good and evil while celebrating violence as regenerative, cleansing, and noble, the TBL belongs firmly within the “countersubversive tradition” and “political demonology” that have been fundamental to US settler culture.⁷ Just as colonial mythology imagines settlers as always under attack, this police fiction sees savages as launching a perpetual war against cops and the civilization they claim to defend. With this in mind, it is useful to think of the TBL as a fiction of legitimate violence, which Sonja Schillings refers to as a politico-cultural articulation designed to render state violence as always defensive in nature while marking unruly populations as not merely transgressors of positive law but as hostis humani generis: “enemies of all humankind.”⁸

The TBL, then, articulates the deep-seated belief that police are necessarily a first-order prerequisite for “civilization” to exist in the first place, let alone thrive and flourish. To speak in the name of the TBL is to specifically articulate police as the primary force that secures, or makes possible, all the things said to be at the core of “human” existence: liberty, security, property, accumulation, law, civility, and even happiness. Consider how, at a vigil for “fallen officers” in 1993, Bill Clinton referred to police as “sentinels of liberty,” a “thin blue line . . . nothing less than our buffer from chaos . . . a shield that Americans may not always think about, until it’s raised in their defense.” Taking time to praise the gun-control Brady Bill and “community policing,” Clinton mused that “the safety of our citizens in their homes, and where they work and where they play . . . it all rests on that line.”⁹ It is therefore the duty of individual citizens “to reinforce that line . . . to make it as strong as we can,” or in contemporary parlance: “Back the Blue.” In 1967, a journalist for the anticommunist John Birch Society expressed the idea in similar terms: “The Thin Blue Line must be supported and preserved—your life and the future of this nation may very well depend upon it.”¹⁰ In this sense, the TBL is perhaps the quintessential example of what Christopher Wilson calls “cop knowledge,” or a “knowledge economy that has the police—putatively agents of order—at its center.”¹¹ Of course, the issue isn’t whether the actual phrase is spoken verbatim or not but how this maxim abbreviates a more generalized police definition of reality: there is no civilization without police, because police is civilization and civilization is police.¹² And while it is true that police don’t always speak in a singular voice, as Stuart Schrader argues,¹³ the TBL rhetoric at least aims to speak for all police by naturalizing the idea that first there must be police, or there will be no human.

There is nothing innocent about this police melodrama. George Jackson rightly dismissed the TBL as “patronizing shit” for the ways it lays bare the ideological arrogance of police power.¹⁴ To accept the “thin blue line” on its own terms, and I think this was Jackson’s point, is to naturalize the violence of racial capitalist order as the necessary and inevitable violence of cops and cages. “The location of the ‘thin blue line,’” write Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, on the always shifting yet enduring dynamics of the carceral state, “has moved but never disappeared as a prime organizing—or disorganizing—principle of everyday life.”¹⁵ To reduce the slogan to sensational catch phrase, then, would miss the vital ways political theater animates political power via melodramatic depictions of predatory evil. The TBL is an exemplar of the broader melodramatization of (in)security that structures the liberal imagination, the point of which is to mark enemies of the state as deserving of violence by rendering them evil incarnate.¹⁶ More than a catch phrase, the TBL marks policing as melodrama of the highest order, a “mythological warfare” between civilization and savagery, good and evil, predator and prey.¹⁷ The effect of this predator/prey formula is a naturalization of police power that renders the police relation a natural relation, as if police prerogative is to “nature” what a wolf’s predation is to the untamed wilderness. In this formulation, even the most minor transgressions or unruliness circulate as bestial threats to social order, with police tasked with identifying, containing, and eradicating these threats in ways that reverse the predator/prey relation: police must become predators themselves.¹⁸

In this chapter, I unpack the TBL as a theoretical object that narrates a story about the police invention of the human through a civilizing and exterminating war against beasts. The project is less a history of the TBL slogan than a conceptually grounded sketch and abolitionist critique of its most basic premises. The idea at the heart of TBL is that the most routine mode of violent state prerogative—the police power—is imagined as always a defense of civilization, which at once means the “human species.”¹⁹ TBL, to use a formulation from Sylvia Wynter, is best understood as a defense of a particular genre of the human, or “Man,” that “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.”²⁰ As I show in this chapter, however, TBL articulates this police project as always incomplete, insecure, and unstable. Of course, it must always be incomplete, because it is through its inability to fully eradicate the bestial trace that police claim a license to endless war in the name of humanity. As a discourse of perpetual crisis, the TBL brings into stark view the failure of civilizational police power to actually secure what Diren Valayden calls the “species-unity” grounding Western bourgeois notions of humanity. At its heart, then, TBL is an expression of what Valayden outlines as “racial feralization,” by which he means a strategy of governance that endlessly conjures “the ever present potential that humanity will slip back into and blend with nature.”²¹ If the historical trajectory of the concept of race has been to determine what it means to be human, feralization encourages a consideration of how fantasies and failures of becoming human animate all things police. And if the project of abolition geography is to imagine and eventually materialize an anticapitalist, antiracist world without cops, cages, and capitalism, TBL mythology works to materialize a capitalist, racist world without abolitionists, anarchists, and communists.²² It is for exactly this reason that a consideration of TBL mythology is a compelling site to take seriously the insidious ways police—understood as a particular type of political power for fabricating racialized exploitation and expropriation—become synonymous with a violently narrow conception of humanity.²³

A POLITICAL BESTIARY

The entire civilizational drama of TBL—that is, of police power writ large—is a zoological performance, a sort of political bestiary where animal imagery helps to justify an exterminating violence against racialized subjects.²⁴ Frantz Fanon famously noted how “the colonist always refers constantly to the bestiary,”²⁵ and from this we can highlight the bestiary as a key technology of police. It is no secret that police are especially fond of likening people to animals by calling them beasts, savages, animals, mutts, dogs, and so on. There is a preponderance of evidence of this. TBL is nothing less than a political bestiary as predators (part human, part beast) lurk in the shadows, readying to attack and devour humanity at any given moment. It is almost as if Fanon had a critique of TBL in mind when he wrote of the “colonized world” as a “world divided in two . . . inhabited by different species,” where “the dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations.”²⁶ This is not merely an argument about how police dehumanize marginalized populations via racist language. Rather, the point is to take stock of how the police power is animated by the figure of the beast, or the feral subject; it is to specify that what is at stake in even the most mundane police practice, according to TBL, is the securing of humanity from those animalized subjects that still exist within the violence of nature. TBL imagines police as the central battle line of all the wars raging within capitalist civilization: property lines, color lines, gender lines, welfare lines, bottom lines, picket lines, and bright yellow “Do Not Cross” lines. But what TBL reveals in such a powerful way is how bourgeois ideology comes to valorize police as the dividing line that necessarily splits humanity into two warring species, with police as the arbiters for deciding who is human or not, whose lives matter and whose lives don’t matter.

The TBL fiction isn’t merely that cops police the line dividing civilization from savagery as if cops are somehow separate from the line. Rather, police power is imagined as the actual line.²⁷ Police are the front lines, the barricades, the ramparts that hold back an invasion of savage hordes threatening to devour civilization. Chief Parker again provides a classic articulation when he describes the police as “a thin blue line of defense . . . upon which we must depend to defend the invasion from within” because, as he stated elsewhere in 1954, there exists a “lawless criminal army warring against society itself, and the police comprise that part of society which has been given the task of being the first line, and sometimes the only line, of defense.”²⁸ As this suggests, police logic can never really decide whether cops are the “first” or the “last,” or even the “only line of defense.” This isn’t confusion or contradiction so much as it suggests that from the police perspective everything and anything begins, continues, and ends with the police as power of life and death. Barry Ryan suggests that TBL “makes apparent that police have something to do with lines, divisions, connections, and flows” while at once marking “the capacity of the police to move back and forth with ease across the cartography of norm and exception.”²⁹ But the TBL is always thin, perpetually on the brink of being broken or obliterated by bestial hordes, if it were not for the valiant “boys in blue” keeping darkness at bay. TBL marks less the back-and-forth patrolling between norm and exception than it marks the police as always in constant crisis, under threat, inevitably insecure if ultimately triumphant.

The implication is that the “thinness” of the line marks not a temporary crisis,...