Tag Archives: police

Occupy Wall Street And The Police: Why So Estranged?

Last year, as OWS kicked off, and as New York’s Finest (and later California’s) began their usual heavy-handed crackdown on any dissent that might threaten the ruling classes, I was struck by the absurdity of it all. Once again, the plutocratic class had found a sub-class of workers–underpaid and overworked–who ostensibly should have been in sympathy with protesters of those economic and political realities that conspired to keep them in a state of perpetual economic and political subjugation, and had them do the dirty work of repressing them. Once again, a comfortable protective barrier had been built around the privileged enclaves of the rich and fatuous, manned and patrolled by those whose best interests lay in dismantling it. The best and most enduring political parlor trick was on display again, and it didn’t seem to have lost its effectiveness over the years.

No matter how long one theorizes about it, to see the game in action, to see its visceral absurdity on display is something else. There they are, the working class sons and daughters of working class men and women, clubbing, gassing, and shooting (rubber bullets at UC-Riverside, anyone?) those that have taken up cudgels on their behalf, those whose struggles, if successful, would ensure the clubbers, shooters, and gassers would be politically and economically empowered, and perhaps be able to ensure a better life for their future generations. Five months after OWS kicked off, five months after discourse about economic inequality has bubbled up in possibly more prominent spaces and forums than ever before, there is no sign America’s currently serving police have shown any inclination to hear, pay attention, and possibly join, a political struggle in their best interests.

Tragedy, farce, or some combination thereof, I think.

Last October, when I joined several thousand others in marching through Wall Street and its surrounding confines, I would often yell out to the wary and skeptical New York City policemen that stood close by, “What was your last contract like?” or “You should be marching with us” or “Wall Street won’t stand up for you” and so on. I’m not sure if any policemen heard me or cared. But that’s no way to be heard, of course. The need for communication with the police, for outreach directed at them, for the discourse surrounding OWS to be funneled directly at the police, written somehow, in a form that makes it relevant to their lived realities is greater than ever.

In a recent interview with 3AM, Brian Leiter said,

An important strategic question for the Occupy movement concerns the police. The police are, themselves, members of the 99%, indeed the 99.9%. Police labor unions remain strong, despite a three-decade long campaign against labor unions in the United States. As unionized workers, the interests of police lie with the Occupy Movement, not the plutocrats. On the day the police refuse to clear “Occupy” protesters from their sites, that will be the day the game is up for the plutocracy in America. It would behoove the Occupy activists, indeed any opponents of the plutocracy, to remember this.

This is close to being as absolutely and totally correct as any contemporary political statement could be.

Police Militarization – Contd.

Reader Dan Newberry, in the course of offering a thoughtful response to my recent post on the militarization of police says:

[T]hese names [like "interceptor"] are made up by the people who make and market the items…It is no surprise to anyone that companies which market to police forces routinely do so with names that suggest offense, attack, and so one….it is hard to reason that an Interceptor-logo emblazoned trike, rolling past a player at the golf course, would make that player… take a more aggressive swing when that logo rolls past. It is equally unlikely that riding in the Interceptor all day is going to make a good police suddenly want to wield the baton to solve a problem….Police forces…are by their very nature…paramilitary organizations. They recruit, they are organized by rank, they patrol, they arrest and detain, go on offensive missions to disrupt other organizations, on so on. They use and employ a language system that has been commensurate with that type of organizational structure….If one could prove that if the trike was called the “Sunflower” the police riding in it would adopt a brighter disposition toward their duties, or that calling it the Community Patrol Cart would make its occupants somewhat more blase about ticketing we would be all for renaming almost everything. Unfortunately it is difficult to follow…that the name of a vehicle will change the disposition of its routine occupant (and by extension, eventually the culture of policing).

The reason it is not a “surprise” that this nomenclature is part of a marketing strategy directed at the police is that, as is pointed out by Dan, police view themselves as a “paramilitary organization.” And it is that self-view that I suggest is problematic.

Importing such militarized language, has had, in my opinion, a reconfiguration of how police view their work and the community they service. I would suggest that thinking of the police as a paramilitary organization breeds an adversarial attitude that is conducive to the kind of aggressive behavior, which all too sadly is associated with policing (paramilitaries, for what it is worth, have a horrific human rights record when it comes to patrolling and controlling domestic populations). When viewed as a paramilitary force, police resemble nothing so much as an occupying force, perhaps a counter-insurgency force, dealing with a hostile population in a hostile territory. And we all know how beloved those forces are in the territories they seek to “control.” The problem isn’t that this language has a simple, direct, causal relationship with police behavior; the problem is that this sort of language is part of a certain packaging of police activity that causes police to reconceive themselves in a manner bound to create the problems I was complaining about.

In hostile territory: one kills or is killed; everyone is to be suspected; it is us-against-them. There is no community here, no fellow-citizens. That is the problem. The folks that make the trikes and market them to police in the manner they do, do so because they are directing their efforts to a particular culture, one bred in the academy and reinforced by daily operations and modes of interaction. (This culture then seeps down into security guards on campuses as well, who love pulling out their wireless radios and acting like a trench-bound sergeant calling in an airstrike when all they are asking for is a spare set of keys to open a chemistry lab.) A police “force” that thinks it is a basically a paramilitary organization is off to a bad start; as it continues to deploy the language associated with the military it is setting itself further down the road to an essentially adversarial, hostile relationship with its community. Thus, witness: the “thin blue line”; “it’s a jungle out there”; and so on. Buildings in which people live cease to be “homes;” they become “territory” to be controlled. It makes a difference to how the police approach a task, how they gear themselves up for it.

Words and descriptions find their applicability in networks of meanings that trigger particular associations. So, self-conception by the choice of language we use to describe ourselves does make a difference to our eventual activity. That is why we choose to tell particular stories about ourselves and that is why we insist people describe us in certain ways and not others. (Remember the old joke about the kid who worked at a gas station and told everyone he was a “petroleum transfer engineer”?)

There is plenty more to be said here, of course, and I thank Dan for having triggered this chain of thought.

Traffic “Interceptors” and the Militarization of Police

Yesterday, as I strolled down my neighborhood’s main street, I noticed two rather portly New York City police checking parked cars for traffic violations. I deliberately use the word “portly” to describe their appearance because I never cease to be amazed by how patently unfit for their duties our local guardians of law and order appear to be. (This unfitness, given the unceasing litany of corruption scandals associated with New York’s ‘Finest,’ clearly extends to more dimensions than just the physical.)

But of more immediate interest to me was what lay just ahead: the ubiquitous traffic police three-wheeled automobile in blue and white, marked with NYPD regalia, parked on the street, waiting to transport its riders to the next scene of parking misdemeanor. On its back it proudly and aggressively sported the title “Interceptor.”

“Interceptors” in military parlance can be used to refer to any vehicle that is used to, well, intercept, disrupt, and destroy enemy vehicles and forces making attacks on defended territory. It is most commonly used in military aviation to designate aircraft that attack other aircraft carrying out offensive bombing or raids on high-value targets. Those Spitfires shooting down German bombers during the Battle of Britain? They were interceptors. Aerial encounters in the old days took place between interceptors and aircraft designated to defend the bombers; that is why Spitfires and Me-109s tangled in the skies above England during that same battle. Interceptors versus Escorts, you see.

So, of course, it would make perfect sense to designate a traffic police automobile an “interceptor.” Because, in keeping with the constant militarization of everything associated with policing, we should think of the brave police as defending us against hostiles armed to the teeth, coming to hurt us. The police are operating in hostile territory, in an area where the slightest wrong move could cost them their lives. It’s kill or be killed in a war zone and an aggressive posture needs to be adopted, right down to the nomenclature associated with the vehicles they use.

Calling police vehicles “interceptors” would be amusingly juvenile and self-indulgent of the schoolboy fantasies that clearly still seem to animate the police, were it not for the fact that this sort of militarized language puts the police in precisely the wrong frame of mind, one that has cost the lives of many innocents over the years (especially in this great city of ours). The police are supposed to be policing “communities,” not war zones; the people they police are supposed to be their fellow community members, not armed hostiles.