The dilemma of ‘racial profiling’: an abolitionist police history.
While the conquest of the world by the concept of 'racial profiling' was a major victory for activists, real victory for racial justice at the hands of the police was foreclosed, for the notion is a Trojan Horse. Snuck inside this term developed for radical purposes are distinctly conservative propositions. This paper analyzes the ways the individualizing implications of the concept of racial profiling mask the depth and reach of the state's commitment to containing resistance and eliciting consent by deploying technologies of race. Against 'racial profiling's' suggestion of incidental, improper police practice, this essay offers a history of the U.S. police that shows their deep and abiding commitment to reproducing race and racism. Tracing police history in relation to colonialism and slavery, the essay argues that the history of this fundamental instantiation of state racism leaves no hope for successful reform, but rather demands a practical and thoughtful commitment to police abolition.
Keywords: Abolition; police racism; police reform; police history; racial profiling
The dilemma of 'racial profiling'
If you grew up in the world in which 'racial profiling' is a thing, you may not know that its popular usage is recent. Yet the term is barely old enough to drink. We begin with a very modern history.
In the winter of 1994–1995, a lawsuit in New Jersey's Superior Court charged state troopers with racist practices at police checkpoints on the New Jersey turnpike. Troopers stopped motorists based on race, the Gloucester County public defender charged, and used questionable strong-arm tactics to elicit consent for searches. After a long hearing, heavy with statistical research and expert testimony, Judge Robert E. Francis agreed with the public defender that troopers were targeting African American and Latino drivers. The Court dismissed nineteen drug-possession cases based on incriminating evidence collected through these biased stops, charging violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal treatment clause (McFadden, [84]; Nordheimer, [96]).
The shooting by New Jersey state troopers of a van driver and passengers on the Turnpike in May of 1998 (Attorney General Agrees to Discuss Police Action, [ 7], May 13; Kifner, [74], May 10; Kifner, [73], May 12; Kifner & Herszenhorn, [75]; Sarlat, [114]) touched off the issue again, bringing high-profile activists including lawyer Johnnie Cochran and the Reverend Al Sharpton into the conversation (Rahman, [106], May 14; Sharpton & Sherman, [120]).[ 1] New Jersey's importance as a transportation corridor made its turnpike a location particularly vulnerable to vehicle stops, while the state's proximity to New York City's concentrated population of activists and organizers gave injustices there a better chance of coming to widespread public attention. Perhaps its location in the northeast, supposedly a region of the country less susceptible to naked white supremacy, also helped in magnifying outrage over the undeniably unfair practice. Whatever the enabling factors, activists succeeded in moving the issue further into the public eye, launching complaints, investigations, and lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, Indiana, and California, among other states, by summer (F.B.I. Looks for Evidence of Racial Bias by Police: Connecticut, [34], August 1; Indiana Black Legislative Caucus, [63], June 26; James, [65], July 14; Racial Profiling Protested in Connecticut, [105], July 7; State Senate Committee Approves 'DWB' Bill, [127], July 9). That fall, President Bill Clinton's advisory board on race relations called on federal agencies and local police to restrict racial profiling, a move protested as anemic by critics but still a noteworthy federal-level acknowledgment (Holmes, [61], September 18).
Another high-profile case underlined the problem in February 1999: the killing of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo. Plain-clothed members of the NYPD fired over 100 shots, hitting Diallo 41 times as he stood, unarmed, in the entryway to his Bronx apartment building. One month later and unconnected, or rather only indirectly connected to Diallo's murder, New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman conceded that her troopers singled out Black and Hispanic drivers (Peterson, [102], April 21). During the presidential campaign the following year, candidate George Bush promised to address the problem, and later as president proclaimed his intention to combat it, in his first state of the union address in February, 2001 (Bush Moves against Racial Profiling, [17], p. 2; Sharpton & Sherman, [120], p. 70) (Ironically, Bush himself would soon face accusations of racial profiling as the U.S. began to target Muslim and Arab travelers in the wake of 9/11). Press coverage marked the passage of the term into the public sphere, where it was printed without explanation as if obvious and familiar to all. The public question shifted from whether racial profiling happened or not to whether it was justified and how to end it.
The term had come of age, and began to make its way around the globe. In Canada, Europe, and Australia, where shared colonial histories have left social structures fairly close to those in the US, people used 'racial profiling' readily (AFP: Former Intelligence Officer Warns of Terror Cells in Australia, [ 1], August 3; Danish Police Urged to Document Absence of Racial Profiling in Body Searches, [26], February 20; German Airport Chief Urges Racial Profiling of Passengers, [42], December 28; Jobard & Lévy, [67]; Pakistan Editorial Disapproves UK's Plan to Introduce Passenger Profiling's, [100], August 19; Pakistan: Editorial Says European Governments' Measures are 'Racial Profiling of Muslims', [101], August 11; Wortley & Owusu-Bempah, [151]; Wortley & Tanner, [152]). In places with distinct patterns of racial formation, critics of racism gingerly explore the possibility of using it there, setting up the attempt via comparison to the US or UK (Botelho, [12]; Thailand: Editorial Stresses Need to Overcome Challenge of Racial Prejudice, [130]; August 1). The term is projected by international observers such as Amnesty International or the UN as a way to denounce various forms of racism in places where such a notion may not be in local circulation (Amnesty International Worried by Rising Discrimination in Ukraine, [ 4]; July 10; UN Tells Hungary to Tackle 'Virulent' Anti-Roma Sentiment, [135], October 28), and North American observers detect it, appropriately or not, characterizing conditions in foreign places (Briggs & Mantini-Briggs, [14]; Fleener, [37]; Group Slams Swine Flu Racial Profiling in HK, [47]).
In many ways, the conquest of the world by the concept of racial profiling was a major victory for activists. The recognition that racial profiling did indeed exist confirmed a decades-old popular understanding that drivers of color were targeted – 'Driving While Black,' in popular critique (Noel, [95]; Price, [104], September 10; State Senate Committee Approves 'DWB' Bill, [127], July 9). It had been a long route to this win, dating back not only to the Superior Court trial begun in 1994 but to the consolidation of its drug-possession cases in 1990, and careful legal preparation long before that.
Yet real victory was foreclosed, for the notion of racial profiling is a Trojan Horse. Snuck inside this term developed for oppositional purposes were some distinctly conservative propositions. The individualizing implications of the concept can help to mask the depth and reach of the state's commitment to containing resistance and eliciting consent by deploying technologies of race. It can suggest an incidental, improper police practice that could be reformed, leaving policing intact, failing to extend any critique to this fundamental instantiation of state racism.
This is the dilemma of the concept of 'racial profiling.' Part of its power lies in its immediately obvious meaning. It is a perfect coinage, a full explanation of the complex phenomenon it names in five catchy syllables. Equally important, however, is its ambivalent utility: it contains both critique and accommodation. On the one hand, it can convey a powerful expression of protest against racist policing. Certainly it has fueled energetic and effective activism. On the other, it retains faith in the value of policing overall, targeting racist policing as if racism could be removed from policing as process. Like 'police brutality,' the term 'racial profiling' suggests that policing is a defensible democratic practice, good in theory and in general, but poisoned by a few rogue individuals or by vestiges of racism that can be purged from an otherwise benevolent institution.
The view of police racism as a problem of racist cops misconstrues the nature of racism. It allows the analysis to rest at the individual level, where police chiefs and commissioners defending their troops tend to focus, and where the solution appears to lie in diversity or tolerance trainings for offending men – and now women – in blue (e.g. Toby, [132], March 11). This view assumes the psyche is characterized by a high degree of self-knowledge, as if people knew where racism lay coiled in the crenulations of the brain and could delicately excise it. There is essentially no unconscious in this conceptualization; it suggests people not only know their prejudices, assumptions, desires, and fears, but even more unrealistically, can be relied on to provide accurate information about them. Amidst the post-Nazi, post-civil rights celebration of 'diversity,' in which the equation 'racism = evil' has become common sense, it is near-impossible for people to peer that carefully into the darkest recesses of their minds, and even more rare (outside small subcultural pockets) openly to identify as racist.
Focusing at the individual level also obscures the workings of institutional or structural racism and violence (Bonilla-Silva, [11]; Galtung, [40]; Høivik, [60]). As Pierre Bourdieu has taught us, to see structured behavior as individual pathology is a consequential 'misrecognition' (Bourdieu, [13]). We need, as Bryan Wagner agrees, an angle of approach that does not just 'imagine the relationship between policing and blackness through on-the-street practices like racial profiling,' for 'this is not the level at which their fundamental association becomes available to analysis' (Wagner, [138], pp. 7–8). That level requires that we understand the relationships between race and police, and race and the state, that has guided this history. We turn a bit further to the past, therefore, to trace a longer arc of police history.
An abolitionist police history
Liberal histories of the US police neglect the role played by race in the everyday process of state formation and extend little attention to state power. They tell, instead, a pretty simple tale. Police in the US, this story goes, followed a model offered by a Brit named Sir Robert Peel in 1829. Peel created the London Metropolitan Police, typified in the benevolent figure of the 'Bobby,' drawn from the people, beholden to their needs. North American cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York created these London-style police departments amidst immigration, urbanization, and surges in crime and disorder, hiring working-class officers and emphasizing social service provision. After this establishing gesture, the tale unfolds like a fortunately/unfortunately bedtime story: unfortunately, the newly created police forces fell short of their noble model due to corrupt machine-era urban politics and a focus on control of the 'dangerous classes' rather than crime prevention. Fortunately, Progressive-era reforms shifted police work away from social control or social service to its proper object (crime). Unfortunately, police had too much discretion and could exercise prejudice in the carrying out of their duties. Fortunately, a second wave of reform after the mid-twentieth century then introduced professionalism and managerial operations, with another happy turn towards the 'community policing' of the 1990s (Carte & Carte, [22]; Fogelson, [38]; Johnson, [68]; Kelling & Moore, [71]; Lane, [82]; Miller, [85]; Monkkonen, [86]; Richardson, [110], [109]; Rubenstein, [113]; Walker, [139], [141]).
This pleasant story of progress focuses on northern cities and the nineteenth century, treating race prior to the 1960s largely in relation to the urban immigrant and ethnic populations who constituted the rank and file or were policed by them. It is the work of a group of scholars dismayed by the urban upheavals and harsh police reprisals of the 1960s, and despite the best efforts of Marxist and anti-racist dissenters (Center for Research on Criminal Justice et al., [23]; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, [50]; Harring, [53], [54]), the prevailing consensus was and remains deeply hopeful about liberal prospects for progress. There has not been another wave of broad policing history since this period; instead the fields of sociology and criminal justice have been prolific in considering the question. Historians have sliced thinner pieces of the puzzle, producing more modest studies on individual cities (Agee, [ 2]; Escobar, [33]; Johnson, [69]; Watts, [143]; Woods, [149]) or subgroups of police (Appier, [ 5]; Bolton & Feagin, [10]; Dulaney, [32]; Kitaeff, [76]; Moore, [88]).
The story is partial at best, as critics in police history have detailed (Strecher, [128]; Uchida, [134]; Williams & Murphy, [146]). Yet few histories of the police sketch the full panorama required to understand how police have come to take the shape they inhabit today. This section of this essay challenges observers to recognize the Bobby's colonial predecessors and to see him against the political and ideological backdrops of British colonialism, doing the same, then, for the US police who supposedly followed in his footsteps.
If we are to understand democratic institutions such as criminal justice systems that claim to serve ideals of equality, justice, fairness, and so on, the deep backstory we must tell involves the political philosophies of liberal humanism and universal rights invoked at the founding of the US, as of so many other North Atlantic nation-states. Even though it is not part of police history proper, it is its ground-level philosophical context. Thinkers from critical ethnic studies fields such as Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, or Nikhil Pal Singh have shown how far these vaunted epistemologies are from race-neutrality. Their work reveals the human-nonhuman divisions underlying white supremacy that guided the development of the Enlightenment's noblest notions. The normalizing claims to whiteness that always preceded claims to the transcendence of difference were necessary psychic moves given the slave-society context within which these ideas were elaborated and applied to North America. The racial neutrality on the surface of these ideas conceals the problem of black status that 'lurks' within Enlightenment conceptions of freedom (Okoye, [97]; Silva, [121]; Singh, [124]; 'lurks' on p. 22; Wynter, [153]; also Buck-Morss, [16]; Cacho, [18]; Hua, [62]; Paik, [99]).
The figure of the British Bobby emerged within this ideological context, and carries water for it. He is not only famously disciplined and professional, civilian as distinct from the paramilitary forces of France's Gendarmerie, Italy's Carabinieri, etc., but equally famously a good-hearted, congenial chap, policing his own community with its full consent.[ 2] These mythic notions are key to the way the Bobby functions ideologically, rooting police history in the progression to 'modernity,' the division between civilian and military spheres, and the ideal of the consent of the governed, and carefully obscuring his own colonial past. For the Bobby was never the foundational incarnation of British police. That honor goes to police in the subject territories of British empire, where the Bobby was never even an ideal. Peel was fresh out of Ireland when he landed his London engagement. He had been the principal administrator there for six years, and had had to use the British army to keep order at a moment when it was difficult to enlist troops because of the war with Napoleon. He created the Irish Constabulary, later renamed 'Royal' out of the gratitude of the queen, 'to ensure security of the imperial elements and the colonial interests,' spawning kindred forces throughout Britannia's rule (Das & Verma, [27], p. 354). Developed in Ireland, colonial policing was perfected in India and dispersed to the far reaches of empire. Only then did it come to the core.
Understanding this sequence of events in the development of the British police – colonies first, metropole later – empties out any moral high ground the British might occupy in the annals of police history, for it's hard to pretend colonial police are anything but brutal. Colonies develop particularly vicious strategies of policing their subjugated people. Outside of their 'home' contexts, police are free of the constraints of constitutional or other legal frameworks designed to safeguard citizens. They work to contain people not legally positioned as citizens, and are spurred to greater brutality by the perception of subject otherness. Nor do colonial policing tactics stay safely abroad, but return to the metropole to be used against the nation or the empire's internal others (Arendt, [ 6]; Césaire, [24]).
British colonial police had military origins and worked for the maintenance of order, not the prevention of crime. They were centralized, coercive forces guided not by the interests of the governed but the commercial interests of expanding capitalism and the maintenance of British hegemony (Das & Verma, [27], [28]). Peel's London Metropolitan Police grew directly from the need to maintain imperial order, not the cheery London communities imagined as happily policed by their avuncular own. Its colonial antecedents were inseparable from the metropolitan force developed in coordinated conversation and in contrast. Police history is a reminder of the myriad ways in which the metropolitan sites of a colonial state are marked by the labors of conquest and discipline they impose abroad.
This corrected history of the model on which US policing is based gives a much sharper picture of the forces shaping early North American police history. As an outpost of British empire itself for 150 years, the US had the pre-Peel bone structure of British policing, filled out with its own imperial engagements and the domestic pressures of slavery, inextricably intertwined. The colonial and then US national state were both engaged in imperial projects, and grew expansionist and ambitious precisely in relation to the products of slave labor. The labor arrangements of servitude and slavery stretched and contracted as the US destroyed Native American lifeways in order to expand to the Midwest and then the Pacific coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It shifted in relation to the seizure of a large portion of Mexican territory in 1848, and post-slavery racial hierarchies were critical to the calculus of invasions and occupations of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico in 1898 as well as the neo- and economic colonies of the Cold War. Slavery and empire were utterly interdependent (Kramer, [79]), and both were key to the shape domestic policing in this country would take.
It is hard to see how this matters to the history of policing when that narrative remains the traditional tale of northern cities and immigrant crowds. Although that history requires denying the abundant evidence of southern, slave-oriented precedents, it is still the dominant one. Police historians in the main 'have tended to concentrate on happenings in the urban north,' Philip Reichel complained, despite occasional recognition that eighteenth-century Southern cities had 'elaborate police patrol systems' to control slaves, very clearly 'precursors to the police' (Reichel, [107]; p. 51, citing Walker, [140]; p. 59; see also Harring, [53]; p. 57). In the earliest years, these patrols were operated out of colonial militias. When Black slaves became majorities in their populations, state militias such as South Carolina's 'essentially became a "local anti-slave police force"' (Simmons, [122]). After independence, dedicated slave patrols 'came to be viewed as "rural police"' (Henry, [56]). Scholars of slave patrols confirm that the police belong in their legacy (Hadden, [48]; Williams, [145]; Wintersmith, [148]).[ 3] The primacy of the south in police history reflects both the great need for African and African American labor and Black subjects' constant disruptions of labor relations through revolt, sabotage, and evasion.
Slowly, slavery's relevance to histories of the US police is emerging. Historians are coming to recognize the priority of the south in this ignominious tradition. In his 1996 monograph on the police in New Orleans, Dennis Rousey still had to redirect the general understanding of police origins from 'big northeastern cities in the mid-1800s' to 'cities of the Deep South in a much earlier period.' Rousey pointed out that Charleston had a 'paramilitary municipal police force primarily to control the city's large concentration of slaves' as early as the mid-1780s, and other southern cities, soon after. Rousey showed that southern cities' 'military-style police forces' were the first major instances of American urban policing (Rousey, [112], p. 3). 'Southern police outfits began earlier and evolved faster than their northern counterparts,' Bryan Wagner agrees, finding that Southern police patrolled as early as the 1780s. Wagner's particularly powerful analysis describes the direct links between slavery and policing. Proponents of armed police forces justified their proposals with terrible tales of superhuman fugitive slaves or, after abolition, savage vagrants invading the city and disrupting its orderly modernization. In New Orleans in the 1830s, police advocates 'predicated the necessity of police upon the existence of slavery,' Wagner documents, and in postbellum Atlanta, aggressively kicked up fear of freed black migrants. This fear – not of European immigrants in northern urban sites – is the sources of the national police doctrine that emerged after the Civil War (Wagner, [138], pp. 59, 60, 68, 72). As labor and social relations shifted and threats to racial hierarchies emerged in that moment, police would help to define new anti-black social arrangements and naturalize them via the categories of crime and the criminal.
If the field of US police history is beginning to acknowledge the role of slavery in provoking the formation of police, it still overwhelmingly neglects empire, despite the conjoined context of slavery and empire within which the US state (like its British model) developed. Yet the importance of empire to the development of US police is relevant in every chapter of US imperial history, from the east-coast native encounter to westward expansion, 1848, 1898–1930, the Cold War, and today in the age of the War on Terror. Conquest and policing have co-evolved through a constant exchange of disciplinary tactics, when young soldiers become career police or when police are sent abroad to 'pacify' defeated peoples. Just as British imperial policing 'returned' to the metropole to contain the industrial revolution's dangerous classes, containment strategies developed in the outposts of US empire returned to the expanding nation-state to intertwine with ideas about the US's own internal others. So measures developed in war were used to contain rebellion back 'home,' and vice versa.
The United States' occupation of the Philippines after 1898, for example, developed a dossier of tactics which eventually repatriated, shaping US policing at home. United States officials in the Philippines, both police and military, developed counterinsurgency, surveillance, and disciplinary strategies to fight the formal and guerrilla resistance. Tracing the paths of specific personnel, technology, and military philosophy from the Philippines back to the US, historian Alfred W. McCoy documents the ways policing in the US came to resemble that which developed in its empire. Specifically, policing in the colonies exacerbated US domestic police racism: 'After years of pacifying an overseas empire where race was the frame for perception and action, colonial veterans came home to turn the same lens on America, seeing its ethnic communities not as fellow citizens but as internal colonies requiring coercive controls' (McCoy, [83], p. 294; Kramer, [78]). Tactics developed in the Philippines, McCoy confirms, would offer a blueprint for US state power at a key moment of transition.
Another period of particularly intense exchange between imperial and domestic strategies for US police was the Cold War. After World War II, police tactics and weapons developed for counterinsurgency flooded US police work (Schrader, [116]; Tullis, [133]). Some of these had actually originated in domestic police work before becoming military technology, such as tear gas (Feigenbaum, [35]), reminding us that 'militarization' is a misnomer for what is actually constant exchange (Seigel, [118], [117]). Scandal occasionally brought the transit to view, as in the cop at the heart of the racist police torture scandal in Chicago in the 1970s and '80s, for example, who had been a Military Police Sergeant in the Vietnam War. Mentalities borrowed from foreign engagements came home along with the helicopters and intelligence tactics. During the Vietnam War, then-chief of the LAPD William Parker compared policing LA to 'fighting the Viet Cong;' his successor Daryl Gates felt that 'the streets of America had become a foreign territory' (Kohler-Hausmann, [77], p 48).[ 4] The racist practices of the LAPD revealed in the scandals over the Rampart Division anti-gang unit in the late 1990s or detective Mark Fuhrman's remarks during O.J. Simpson's 1995 murder trial are direct evolutionary products of these legacies.
No wonder a 1960s' survey found (long before the period most people think of as the era of 'militarized' police) that in Black areas, police 'view each person on the streets as a potential criminal or enemy' (Skolnick & Fyfe, [125], p. 77).[ 5] If US police refuse Black subjects' humanity, this historical context helps explain why; these forces of order grew from colonial models and were formed structurally in relation to a Black 'Other.'
If we step back to the widest angle this historical perspective can offer, a larger, tragic trajectory emerges in that the order-maintenance priorities guiding the Royal Irish Constabulary in the early 1800s are now the stated goals of most US municipal PD's. This is most explicit for those that embrace the 'Broken Windows' model of policing, which attacks small elements of disorder such as broken windows in an abandoned building on the theory that they contribute to an environment conducive to crime (Kelling & Wilson, [72]).[ 6] Modern-day order-maintenance policing focuses on 'quality-of-life' crimes such as illegally washing car windshields at red lights (the infamous 'squeegee men') or turnstile jumping in the subway, and it justifies the intense 'stop and frisk' policy of the NYPD and others, today the target of much critique as a form of ... racial profiling.
Race, the state, and police: a radical conclusion
What does this history mean? Why is it an abolitionist history? The answers have to do with the place of race in policing and in its product, state power. Recognizing the centrality of slavery and imperialism to the history of US policing helps convey the bedrock role of race in that history and in policing as practice.
For modern states, race is a fundamental technic of statecraft, racism 'the basic mechanism of power' (Foucault, [39], pp. 254–55). This is evident in the ways slavery and the law grew up together; the earliest slave codes were written 'week by week and line by line as the idea of blackness was being constructed to justify slavery as an indefinite and heritable condition' (Fields, [36]; Wagner, [138], p. 3). Police power after the critical turning-point of Plessy v. Ferguson 'was little more than the benevolent articulation of state racism in the name of the public good' (Hartman, [55], p. 199).[ 7] Racialization served the antebellum state as a critical technology of governance, helping to sort populations, distribute resources, and elicit mass consent. The state and race were coeval material ideas, emerging together, shaping each other. The slave patrol emerged in this matrix and expressed its most basic precepts. The state born through this process was (is) not merely a racist state, incidentally. It developed and acted and acts precisely via racial formation (Bonilla-Silva, [11]; Gotham, [46]; Omi & Winant, [98]; Winant, [147]). Thus does a 'fatal unfreedom' lie at the heart of US state structure, constituting the 'grammar and materiality of American society' (Rodriguez, [111], pp. 1, 14). The police charged with keeping this social and political order are not incidentally racist, but formed and functioned – and continue to function – precisely via the technologies of race.
Modern states, after all, are capitalist entities, or if nominally something else, exist in the era in which capitalism is the reigning economic paradigm. Capitalism itself relies on race: race is capitalism's 'epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power' (Jung, [70]; citing Robinson). There is, as Chris Chen ([25]) notes, a 'constitutive relation between "race" and capitalism,' as capitalism generates inequality and superfluity which then require justification and containment. If one takes race as a pre-existing set of differences among people, this essential dynamic is obscured. Seeing race in a constructionist vein, as a relation of domination involved in capitalism's economic dictates 'directs our attention to the entanglement of race and superfluity, as well as the racialising impact of violence, imprisonment, and warfare.'
Sadly, critics of police racism today can be wary of discussing capitalism. The avoidance has less to do with incurring accusations of impractical idealism or anti-American radicalism, I think, than with the resonant implication that even to think of capitalism in relation to policing is to prioritize class over race. This bromide, a little victory of counterinsurgent reaction, blinds us, makes us too liable to place undue hopes in the state or the market. We must, as Chen urges, reject 'an understanding of capitalism as an increasingly inclusive engine of racial uplift, and the state as an ultimate guarantor of civic equality,' seeking instead 'an abolitionist anti-racism' that would 'aim to dismantle the machinery of "race" at the heart of a fantasy of formal freedom.'
This fantasy is magnetically seductive. The notion that the state provides for its citizens' freedom underpins the hope, held even by observers who admit that US police were fundamentally racist in the nineteenth century, that police have by now improved. Amidst widespread disavowals of racism and the removal of explicitly racist legislation from the books, police racism as revealed in cellphone-camera videos of police murders of Black men can seem exceptional. People who were involved in the US civil rights movement can be especially committed to the idea of progress, particularly those who exhausted themselves and their communities in efforts to force the state to live up to its claims of democracy and equality.[ 8] Civil-rights era activists who denounced police abuse of Black people achieved significant success in drawing attention to the troubled relations between communities of color and the police forces assigned to 'protect' them. After all, it was conflicts between police and African-American communities that sparked many of the urban rebellions of the 1960s: Watts, Detroit, Chicago, Newark, and on. People protesting police actions had powerful arguments at their disposal, and wielded them skillfully. Yet the victories were pyrrhic: in response to movement successes, racism shifted and camouflaged itself anew.
As scholars from the popular Michelle Alexander to the deeply insightful Naomi Murakawa have now documented, in response to social movement victories, politicians (on the right and left) were able to reanimate the conceptual structures of race and crime to launch a criminal justice agenda that successfully diverted momentum away from radical change, building the legislative, institutional, and ideological structures of mass incarceration (Alexander, [ 3]; Berger, [8]; Brown, [15]; Cacho, [18]; Camp, [20]; Garland, [41]; Gilmore, [43]; Hinton, [59]; Muhammad, [89]; Murakawa, [90]; Rodriguez, [111]; Schept, [115]; Schrader, [116]; Simon, [123]; Tilton, [131]; Vargas, [136]; Weaver, [144]). Federal investigations into police murders in the 1970s, for example, motivated by outrage over racist policing, were diverted and evacuated, 'transformed into technocratic concerns about organizational structure and administrative policies' (Takagi, [129], p. 58). As John Hope Franklin observed, 1960s challenges sparked change, but not exactly the change their agents hoped. Instead they 'led to a major attempt to redevelop the police into a vastly improved repressive class control apparatus' (cited in Smith, [126], p. 38; see also Platt, [103], February 28).
Those who yearn to see history as progress err in thinking that racism might end while the state that relies upon it survives. However much we might wish it, racism is not waning. What looks like improvement is actually racial categories changing over time and place as the state works actively with them. Like highways or telecommunications, 'racist ideological and material practices are infrastructure that needs to be updated, upgraded, and modernized periodically' (Gilmore & Gilmore, [44], p. 144; see also Hall, [49]). Police have adapted – 'updated, upgraded, and modernized' – particularly well.
Indeed, with the demise of formal racial segregation, police have become probably the most important buttress of Black unfreedom, because police is the institution charged to engage with the categories of crime and the criminal. Those key categories emerged after the abolition of chattel slavery and helped found the US's national police doctrine, as Bryan Wagner showed and we observed above. While they have shifted over time, they have survived not only as salient to our racial order but as foundational in structuring Black hyperincarceration (Muhammad, [89]).
Somehow, still, people look upon police history and find in it, reason to support modest change and to congratulate police for their progress. Even in the face of the profoundly racist War on Terror and the current rash of visible police killings, they insist that racist police lethality is exceptional, that reform can stem the constancy of violence visited upon the racialized hyperpoliced. How shall we argue for progress to people from those communities in which 'more than 95 percent of African American men have been in prison in their lifetimes' (Drucker, [30], p. 45; see also Camp & Heatherton, [21], pp. 216–217)? The hope that the contemporary carceral state is gentler than its earlier incarnations during Jim Crow or slavery is a desperate fantasy clung to at great cost for the poor Black and brown communities most affected by state violence across the gamut of policing, incarceration, and military service.[ 9]
Too many people, outraged over police murders, are once again simply calling for reform, just as civil rights protestors denouncing police brutality did in the 1960s and activists against racial profiling echoed in the 1990s. When will we be willing to see that race is not incidental to the modern state, not a secondary characteristic that it is gradually, progressively expunging? When will we cease denying that relationship though the redundant compound terms 'racial profiling,' 'police brutality,' 'police militarization,' 'police state,' and other concepts that work to mask the depth and reach of the state's commitment to containing resistance and eliciting consent by deploying technologies of race? These terms distract us from the root-focused work at hand. All are misnomers, for regardless of its weaponry, technology, or practices, policing is not and never can be neutral in relation to race. Even if it were theoretically possible to sensitize or reform the police, their role in reproducing race and racism would remain fundamental to their mission.
To idle the 'machinery of "race,"' though it functions throughout state institutions, we might as well start with the police. They are the lowest-hanging fruit, the simplest place to begin dismantling the racist capitalist state, as the piece that today generates the most wrath. It isn't hard to begin imagining a series of practical, stepwise actions that we could take without preamble, for the first step towards abolition is simply to shrink the police. 'Plans for change,' Rachel Herzing of Critical Resistance has written ([58]), 'must include taking incremental steps with an eye toward making the cops obsolete.' We could immediately cut police budgets, decriminalize and otherwise change laws so that there is less for the police to do, while fortifying the social programs and human networks that keep people from needing to risk illegal activity in order to survive. As Critical Resistance has argued, reclaiming the language of 'safety' from law enforcement, we could fund those things that genuinely make us safe: health care, high-quality housing, real and good food assistance, excellent public education, green space, unpolluted neighborhoods, and other measures people need in order to thrive.
Universities could begin by abolishing campus police. Smaller cities could begin by disarming their patrols. The federal government could repossess the military hand-me-downs transferred from Iraq and Afghanistan and states could prohibit their acquisition in the future. Larger municipalities whose PDs have 'outreach police,' 'homeless police,' 'service police' and other euphemistically-named service-focused units could transfer those funds to agencies that perform the same functions using social workers not trained in violence and free of coercive power. After all, as Herzing continues, '[t]aking incremental steps toward the abolition of policing is even more about what must be built than what must be eliminated.' Lawmakers could decriminalize poverty so that police were never called out to confront the poor or people without homes. City budgets could diminish the size of their police departments to the point that they could be fully funded, eliminating fee-seeking arrest quotas.
Inspired by a wealth of activism against oppressive state power from Tahrir Square to Occupy and #Black Lives Matter, a watershed of wonderful work is pulling against the legitimacy of state violence, suggesting that the moment is ripe for this new angle of approach (Berger, [ 8]; Blue, [ 9]; Cacho, [18]; Davis, [29]; Gilmore, [43]; Hames-Garcia, [51]; Hernandez, [57]; James, [64], [66]; Kramer, [79]; Kunzel, [81]; McCoy, [83]; Murakawa, [90]; Neocleous, [[91]]; Rhodes, [108]; Rodriguez, [111]; Schept, [115]; Schrader, [116]; Sentas, [119]; Tilton, [131]; Wagner, [138]; Wall, [142]; Woods, [150]; Zilberg, [155]). Abolition of the police must take place, of course, in the context of an overall move towards the abolition of prisons, for otherwise police will simply be replaced by another mechanism of control. Abolitionists must remain 'mindful not to build something today that will need to be torn down later on the path toward the long-term goal' (Herzing, [58]).
In working for justice at the hands of police, then, let us not invest any hope in the reform of racist police, in fixing specific practices such as 'racial profiling.' Individual police may or may not be racist people, but police is racial in essence, the animation of state power. There lies a target worthy of critique: the racial nature of the modern capitalist state, violent at its core.
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