Policing the Planet

Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

Christina Heatherton, Jordan T. Camp

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784783181
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Corruzione politica e cattiva condotta

Combining firsthand accounts from activists with the research of scholars and reflections from artists, Policing the Planet traces the global spread of the broken-windows policing strategy, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner William Bratton. It's a doctrine that has vastly broadened police power the world over-to deadly effect.With contributions from #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and Law Professor Justin Hansford, Director of New York-based Communities United for Police Reform Joo-Hyun Kang, poet Martn Espada, and journalist Anjali Kamat, as well as articles from leading scholars Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D. G. Kelley, Naomi Murakawa, Vijay Prashad, and more, Policing the Planet describes ongoing struggles from New York to Baltimore to Los Angeles, London, San Juan, San Salvador, and beyond.

I. THE PLANETARY CRISIS OF POLICING

1. THUG NATION: ON STATE
VIOLENCE AND DISPOSABILITY

Robin D. G. Kelley

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Racism is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior. And the ultimate logic of racism is genocide … The first thing that must be on the agenda of our nation is to get rid of racism.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., March 14, 1968.

Policing the Crisis

On May 15, 2010, as sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder and a friend headed home from a party in the Bronx, a small fleet of police cruisers surrounded them. A man had just been robbed of his backpack, an officer told them, and they were suspects. Browder and his friend maintained their innocence and willingly consented to a search. When no contraband was found, the officer retreated to confer with the alleged victim, a Mexican immigrant named Robert Bautista, who was sitting in a squad car. A few minutes later, the officer returned with a different story: the alleged robbery had occurred two weeks earlier and Bautista had just identified Browder and his friend as the culprits. They were then arrested and charged with robbery, grand larceny, and assault. After seventeen hours behind bars, the judge released Browder’s friend pending trial but held Browder on bail—Browder was on probation for watching his friends bang up a delivery truck they had stolen as a prank. Browder’s family could not afford the bail, so eventually, Browder was sent to Rikers Island—all for a crime he had not committed.¹

Browder’s story up to this point is not exceptional. He was assigned a public defender whose main objective was to convince his client to cop a plea in order to reduce the charges or mitigate the sentence and avoid trial—a standard strategy for defendants both innocent and guilty. But Browder refused, choosing to maintain his innocence and wait for a trial. He waited three years, during which he was beaten by guards and inmates, was deprived of food, endured seventeen months in solitary confinement, suffered several psychiatric breakdowns and suicide attempts, braved deeply unhygienic environments, and was denied decent protection and his constitutional right to a speedy trial. There were no eyewitnesses to the crime and no physical or forensic evidence—only Bautista’s testimony. Eventually, Bautista returned to Mexico, leaving the prosecution with no material witness. Every time a judge tried to get Browder to plead guilty, even for a lesser crime, he refused. The state had no choice but to drop the charges. He was released in June 2013.²

On Saturday, June 6, 2015, a little over five years from the day his ordeal began, Kalief Browder hanged himself.³ He had just turned twenty-two.

Browder ended his own life, but the state bears responsibility for his death. He was caged as a sixteen-year-old child, mostly in solitary confinement, and freed at the age of twenty. He lost weight. He lost part of his childhood. He lost part of his mind. But he did not lose his dignity or his sense of justice, which were all he had left. “Before I went to jail,” he told journalist Jennifer Gonnerman, “I didn’t know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I’m aware, I’m paranoid … I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.”⁴

His ordeal was not merely the result of an administrative glitch, “bad” policing, poor legal defense, or an unanticipated backlog of cases. Mass arrests, obscene numbers of young Black and Brown people corralled into jails and prisons, habeas corpus suspended through plea bargains, and the maintenance of a racial political economy that keeps the poor in a precarious state are all tactics to which the current system is well suited. “Zero tolerance” policing turns select neighborhoods into open-air prisons and strips vulnerable residents of habeas corpus, freedom of movement, and even protection from torture. The police are trained to observe, contain, constrain, and arrest bodies they deem suspicious or engaged in acts of law-breaking. Constitutional guarantees of “equal protection” notwithstanding, Black and Brown bodies carry from birth the mark of “suspicion.”

Even if he had stolen Bautista’s backpack, would Browder’s punishment, under accusations of grand larceny, have fit the crime, a reported loss of $700, an iPod Touch, and a digital camera? Is this the value of Browder’s life? According to the logic of broken windows theory, which insists that infractions of any scale be punished swiftly and mercilessly, the loot’s monetary value is irrelevant. Browder was a Black kid with a “criminal” record walking freely in a high crime neighborhood. The cops and the prosecution likely assumed that he was guilty of something even if he’d had no part in the Bautista crime, thereby justifying Browder’s arrest on such flimsy evidence, his detention for so long without a trial, and the ferocious physical abuse of his still-developing teenaged body. Much like the Obama administration’s policy of signature strikes—lethal drone attacks on young men who might be terrorists or may one day commit acts of terrorism—the presumption of guilt based on racial profiling is an essential component of broken windows policing.⁵

So what is Kalief’s life worth? Apparently nothing. The state has long treated Black life as disposable, as is clear in our expanding prison population and the shockingly high rate of Black casualties caused by police, private security guards, and vigilantes. The list of unarmed Black people killed by police in just the four months after eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri by officer Darren Wilson reveals that Black people are not only devalued in the United States but treated as enemy combatants.⁶ It is not simply that our lives don’t matter. We are a threat, an enemy, which largely explains why the police employ lethal force as a first resort. None of the victims during these four months were engaged in violent crimes at the time they were killed, and most had committed no crime at all. Michael Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped for walking in the middle of the street, a violation commonly overlooked or in rare instances minimally fined. As is taught in Broken Windows 101: disrespect for authority and non-compliance by the criminal element can lead to the breakdown of civilization. Wilson regarded Brown’s non-compliance as a challenge to his authority, a dynamic that escalated into a verbal and physical confrontation between the armed officer and the unarmed teenager. We’ll never know exactly what transpired, but we do know that Brown had his hands up in a gesture of surrender when he died.

Looking back one year later, neither the killing nor the protests have let up. In what some activists have dubbed “Black Spring” of 2015, the people of Baltimore rose up to protest the death of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray, who was arrested on April 12, 2015, merely for making eye contact with a police officer and running away. He was apprehended, shackled, tossed on to the floor of a police van without a safety belt, and likely beaten. By the time the van arrived at central booking, Gray was unresponsive, his spine 80 percent severed at the neck, and his voice box crushed.⁷

None of this brutality is new. In my fifty-three years on this planet, I’ve witnessed not a wave but a continuous stream of police violence that has never let up. I came of age when Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Eula Mae Love, and Arthur McDuffie were the war’s iconic victims, to be followed by Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, Malice Green, Tyisha Miller, and Sean Bell. And I’m only speaking of the dead —not the harassed, the beaten, the humiliated, the stopped and frisked.

Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents experienced “no tolerance” policing long before that term was in vogue. My late father-in-law lost his hearing in one ear after a cop in Bessemer, Alabama, took a nightstick to his head for being insufficiently deferential. Many African Americans were arrested for not yielding the sidewalk to whites, for lacking a job (vagrancy), using profanity in public, spitting, loitering, violating segregation ordinances, “reckless eyeballing,” and other absurdities intended to turn human beings into the caricatures with which white people were familiar through coon shows, soapbox sermons, darky films, and mass advertising.

The law never protected Black women from sexual violence, treating all sexual encounters between them and white men as not only consensual but initiated by the women. Criminalized as presumptive sex workers, all Black women were vigilantly policed while remaining vulnerable to the sexual predations of those wearing the badge. We can trace the all-too-common brutalization and criminalization of Black women’s bodies to slavery, during which routine violence—flogging, torture, slaps and punches, assaults with household and agricultural tools, and, of course, rape—was their most common cause of flight. Masters, overseers, and drivers were not the only source of violence; Black women were vulnerable to partner violence, especially around harvest time when both white and Black men consumed large amounts of alcohol. As the late historian Stephanie Camp revealed, enslaved women experienced violence more frequently than men resulting from their presence in the big house completing secondary work, their perceived vulnerability as women, and perceptions of them as sexual property and as objects of sexual jealousy.⁸ In the Jim Crow era, law enforcement officials operated on the presumption that every unescorted Black woman was a sex worker soliciting employment. The New York race riot of 1900 began when a Black man came to the defense of a Black woman falsely arrested for solicitation, who had been merely waiting for her husband. In Atlanta, the police enforced a so-called sundown law under which any Black woman seen alone at a restaurant or club was vulnerable to arrest.⁹

A century later, the surveillance, criminalization, and presumed disposability of Black women continues. Broken windows policing has done nothing to ensure Black women’s safety or reduce the alarming incidents of femicide that plague Black communities. Instead, Black women—especially poor women—continue to be monitored, harassed, and subject to reproductive control on the pretext that they possess illicit or diseased bodies. Their presumptive criminality allows murders and disappearances to go undetected and uninvestigated. A string of unsolved murders of Black women in the Boston area, in fact, led to the formation of the renowned Combahee River Collective, known for drafting one of the most radical and visionary manifestos of the twentieth century. Less known, however, is their searing critique of sexual violence and the inaction—if not complicity—of the state in ensuring that these murder cases went unsolved.¹⁰ It addressed the incidents of Black femicide since the late 1970s that had engulfed cities such as Detroit, Charlotte, Peoria, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and that had been met in nearly every case with complete indifference from the police. Many of the victims were labeled sex workers or described as homeless, thus rendered doubly invisible and doubly disposable.

Is Bratton-era broken windows policing so different from the long and persistent tradition of “broken bodies” policing originating with slave patrols and military campaigns intended to “pacify” indigenous people? One difference, ironically, is the triumph of racial liberalism. Although the rise of mass incarceration and the deepening criminalization of urban space after World War II is generally assumed to be the product of a sharp right-wing turn, we know from the work of Naomi Murakawa, Heather Ann Thompson, Jordan T. Camp, and Elizabeth Hinton that liberals also backed an expanding criminal justice system—ostensibly to protect African Americans from mob violence, to quell urban rebellions, and to address what were perceived as rising crime rates following the triumph of desegregation.¹¹ How the unintended consequences of such policies ultimately bequeathed to the nation a criminal justice architecture that fueled mass incarceration has been addressed by other scholars and activists. What I’d like to address here, however, is the shifting political landscape created by triumphalism on the part of racial liberalism—that is to say, the birth of the “post–Civil Rights” era and the myth of color blindness.

Color-Blind Violence

The legitimacy of broken windows policing as a “race neutral” practice rests on the common fiction that we are now living in the “post–Civil Rights” era—a time “after” the victory of the Civil Rights Movement, whose achievements, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, are tangible and indisputable. Most proponents of color blindness do not claim that racism has been completely eradicated, but rather that racist incidents are isolated and rare, resulting from anachronistic behaviors by “bad” actors. In this post–Civil Rights age of color blindness, we are told the story of an active federal government—its conscience pricked by the war against fascism abroad and the principled struggle for inclusion by Black activists at home—that took bold steps to eliminate legal segregation completely and promote equal opportunity. (Even this formulation has undergone revision, with the movement playing a smaller and smaller role, and politicians increasingly elevated as the real heroes in the struggle.)

What this sanitized national narrative occludes are the chief issues that gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement in the first place: the violent subjugation of Black people by the state and its vigilante allies; taxation without representation and the denial of the franchise through terror and administrative means; and a government-dominated racial economy that suppressed Black wages, dispossessed Black people of land and property, excluded them from equal public accommodations, and subsidized white privilege by way of taxation. Violence held this precarious system together, and violence proved a stronger catalyst for Black activism than abstract desires for integration, with the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till a particularly galvanizing event for the Civil Rights generation. But even before Till’s brutal lynching in 1955, police brutality was a major issue for Black communities across the country. During World War II, confrontations between Black residents and white policemen sparked full-scale riots in almost a dozen cities.¹²

As civil rights protests escalated throughout the South and across the country, however, the problem of police violence worsened. A study conducted by the Department of Justice found that in the eighteen-month period between January 1958 and June 1960, 34 percent of all reported victims of police brutality were Black.¹³ Within four years, relations between Black people and the police had escalated to a state of war. Between 1964 and 1972, incidents of police violence ignited rebellions in some 300 cities. Altogether, the urban uprisings involved close to half a million African Americans, resulted in millions of dollars in property damage, and left 250 people dead, 10,000 seriously injured, and countless without a home. The casualties were ...