PART I
THE ORDER OF POLICE
CHAPTER ONE
INVENTING HUMANITY, OR THE THIN BLUE LINE AS âPATRONIZING SHITâ
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 âmen and women in uniform.â 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: âThe thin blue line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.â Or consider how the idea was expressed in 1951 by the staunch anticommunist LAPD chief William Parker: âBetween the law abiding elements of society and the criminals who prey upon them stands a thin blue line of defense, your police officers.â1 If taken seriously, the TBL forces us to grapple with just how central policeâas a specific typology of threat management via administrative violenceâare to bourgeois conceptions of âcivilized order.â 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 âfirst bread, then moralityâ into a crudely seductive security logic: âfirst police, then humanity.â
TBL aesthetics are seemingly everywhere, whether itâs 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, âBlessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God,â or âAnd maybe remind the few, if ill of us they speak, that we are all that stands between the monsters and the weak.â 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 âthin blue lineâ 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 oneâs vehicle?
By positioning police as chivalrous defenders of humankind itself, the TBL peddles in a gendered logic of prerogative powerânamely, a âlogic of masculinist protectionâ 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 âsovereign manhoodâ or ânational manhood,â 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 ânear impossible odds.â Consider an aesthetic increasingly influential in contemporary cop-pop culture: âOld Gloryâ 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 âsymbol of solidarityâ 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 âholding the line.â If a guiding narrative of the settler state is âwhite men built this nation, white men are this nation,â the TBL rewrites this colonial commonsense as âcops built this nation, cops are this nation.â In 1974, at the graduation ceremony for the FBI Academy, an NYPD inspector articulated this in eliminationist terms: âWoven through the fabric of this Nation is a strong, thin, blue thread,â which citizens must support in order âto eliminate from society those who seek to subvert the national peace.â5 Or as a cop in 2014 handwrote inside a leaked training manual: âYou are the thin line of heroes preserving the fabric of America during these dark and desperate times.â6 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 âcountersubversive traditionâ and âpolitical demonologyâ 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: âenemies of all humankind.â8
The TBL, then, articulates the deep-seated belief that police are necessarily a first-order prerequisite for âcivilizationâ 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 âhumanâ existence: liberty, security, property, accumulation, law, civility, and even happiness. Consider how, at a vigil for âfallen officersâ in 1993, Bill Clinton referred to police as âsentinels of liberty,â a âthin blue line . . . nothing less than our buffer from chaos . . . a shield that Americans may not always think about, until itâs raised in their defense.â Taking time to praise the gun-control Brady Bill and âcommunity policing,â Clinton mused that âthe safety of our citizens in their homes, and where they work and where they play . . . it all rests on that line.â9 It is therefore the duty of individual citizens âto reinforce that line . . . to make it as strong as we can,â or in contemporary parlance: âBack the Blue.â In 1967, a journalist for the anticommunist John Birch Society expressed the idea in similar terms: âThe Thin Blue Line must be supported and preservedâyour life and the future of this nation may very well depend upon it.â10 In this sense, the TBL is perhaps the quintessential example of what Christopher Wilson calls âcop knowledge,â or a âknowledge economy that has the policeâputatively agents of orderâat its center.â11 Of course, the issue isnât 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 donât 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 âpatronizing shitâ for the ways it lays bare the ideological arrogance of police power.14 To accept the âthin blue lineâ on its own terms, and I think this was Jacksonâs point, is to naturalize the violence of racial capitalist order as the necessary and inevitable violence of cops and cages. âThe location of the âthin blue line,ââ write Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, on the always shifting yet enduring dynamics of the carceral state, âhas moved but never disappeared as a prime organizingâor disorganizingâprinciple of everyday life.â15 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 âmythological warfareâ 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 ânatureâ what a wolfâs 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 prerogativeâthe police powerâis imagined as always a defense of civilization, which at once means the âhuman species.â19 TBL, to use a formulation from Sylvia Wynter, is best understood as a defense of a particular genre of the human, or âMan,â that âoverrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.â20 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 âspecies-unityâ grounding Western bourgeois notions of humanity. At its heart, then, TBL is an expression of what Valayden outlines as âracial feralization,â by which he means a strategy of governance that endlessly conjures âthe ever present potential that humanity will slip back into and blend with nature.â21 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 policeâunderstood as a particular type of political power for fabricating racialized exploitation and expropriationâbecome synonymous with a violently narrow conception of humanity.23
A POLITICAL BESTIARY
The entire civilizational drama of TBLâthat is, of police power writ largeâis 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 âthe colonist always refers constantly to the bestiary,â25 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 âcolonized worldâ as a âworld divided in two . . . inhabited by different species,â where âthe dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations.â26 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 âDo Not Crossâ 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 donât matter.
The TBL fiction isnât 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 âa thin blue line of defense . . . upon which we must depend to defend the invasion from withinâ because, as he stated elsewhere in 1954, there exists a âlawless 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.â28 As this suggests, police logic can never really decide whether cops are the âfirstâ or the âlast,â or even the âonly line of defense.â This isnât 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 âmakes apparent that police have something to do with lines, divisions, connections, and flowsâ while at once marking âthe capacity of the police to move back and forth with ease across the cartography of norm and exception.â29 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 âboys in blueâ 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 âthinnessâ of the line marks not a temporary crisis,...