Lansing, Minneapolis, and Why "Reform" Ain't Gonna Cut It

Which group of demonstrators do you wager was heavily armed?

Just last week I turned in the final manuscript for a book I'm writing which will be published by the University of California Press in the Spring of 2021 (title TBD because even though I came up with what I thought was a super clever and thoughtful title, it has roundly been deemed terrible by everyone involved in the process and no, I'm not bitter about this in the slightest). The book is about my on-going research i the Kurdish region of Iraq, specifically focusing on the reconstruction of the police force. The central argument fo the book is that how the police are designed to function tells us a great deal about how that state operates.

To make this argument, one I've made throughout my decade or so of published research, I've had to spend a lot of time researching not only ideas about policing and police organization, but about political theory and democratic governance. The vast majority of my research and publications sit at the nexus of these two -- basically, what does a state need to continue existing and how are the police central to those needs?

Not surprisingly, there are a wide variety of arguments regarding the proper answer to this question (to get a great rundown of them, read Chapter 2 of my book!). They run the gamut from the pollyanna-ish of "the state exist to provide sunshine and joy and the police are what it uses to keep everyone safe" to the critical variety of "the state exists to enshrine exploitation and the police are what it uses to keep everyone from rising up and challenging it" and all sorts of other positions that fall somewhere between these two poles. I stick with the most critical view, which is that police exist as a barrier between those within power and those without, and that their actual material purpose is to enforce boundaries of race, class, and other significant social hierarchies. In other words, they exist to protect power, and everything else they do is subsidiary to that function. I reject not only the official pronouncements of police departments themselves as to what their duties are, but also more mainstream variants of sociological and criminological thought which posit the police as filling as meaningful public function.

Yet as is the beauty of Marxist science, you don't actually have to simply accept my argument, you need only compare the arguments of police forces and mainstream academics to the actual behaviors of police officers and departments (reality, of course, having a well-known Marxian bias). Because one central factor every police department and mainstream definition of police have in common is that police exist to prevent and/or react to challenges to the law and the existing order. Witness how the rallying cry of those who "Support the Police" has long been "Law and Order." This is meant both in the narrow sense of the term, as enforcing the written legal code and providing "order maintenance" have been official duties of the police basically since the founding of police as we think of them, as well as in the larger political sense of upholding the Constitution and preventing direct challenges to the state, such as allowing the duly-elected legislature to take up its duties without harassment.

This makes the police response to armed rightwing demonstrators shutting down the Michigan state legislature a few weeks back so telling. Because while I don't have the space or time to summarize every major theoretical view on policing here (buy my book!), every one of them would hold that a group of armed rebels seizing the legislature in an attempt to shut down legitimate government functioning is exactly the kind of thing police are supposed to A) prevent and/or B) end as quickly as possible. By every possible definition of what police are and why they exist, preventing armed insurrection against the legitimately-elected government is right in their wheelhouse. And yet, as so many have pointed out, not only did police neither prevent nor shut down this armed insurrection, they more-or-less just hung out and watched it happen.

If you were to rely on official police pronouncements of their roles and duties or the theories of most mainstream sociologists and criminologists, such a response is impossible to explain. These demonstrators, without masks or maintaining social distancing in the midst of a pandemic, are putting lives in danger and breaking the law. Even without the threat of a global pandemic coloring things, they are a group of people with extremely-dangerous weapons who are either directly breaking the law or threatening to do so, directly threatening both the public and the legislature, and of course, were directly preventing a legitimately-elected government from convening. Again, if you listen to mainstream academics or the police themselves, this is the platonic ideal of a situation that police should be shutting down.

It only becomes possible to understand the police response to the Michigan state house demonstrators if you understand the role of power in policing. In the case of American police, this means understanding the role of white supremacy. Put simply, the police in America don't exist to serve and protect the public, they exist to maintain capitalism and white supremacy. Sure, occasionally this necessitates serving the public, as hegemony is only born of material concession delivered through the state. But the purpose, the function, is and always has been, to ensure capitalistic white supremacy.

This has historically been quite obvious; witness how many early police forces in America were simply slave patrols (here's those notoriously far-left radicals at the National Law Enforcement Museum talking about it) or google any picture from the civil rights movement. But it also shows up in the much more subtle way of continually harassing Black people for things which are either not illegal or which are routinely ignored if they are done by white people.

But here's where I depart from where this post was originally going to go. You see, I had begun drafting this awhile back but shelved it to get to other things. I've dusted it off because it's only become much more relevant following yesterdays murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. More specifically, following the extremely heavy-handed violent response of the Minneapolis PD to the demonstrators who showed up to the site of the murder to demand justice (as shown in the picture above and the millions other available online).

There's really nothing I could have written in my original post that would drive the point home more than reality has (again, reality seems hellbent on proving Marxism correct at every possible juncture). There's no existing mainstream idea or theory of why police exist and what functions they serve that possibly explains their disparate reactions to armed demonstrators taking over a capitol building and forcing the legislature to not convene against unarmed demonstrators gathering on a street corner to protest a murder. I mean this quite genuinely -- using any official pronouncement of what police are or what they do, or any mainstream theoretical account of what police are or what they do, it is very much impossible to explain these two responses. The only possible idea these theories have to offer is that these are isolated incidents of the police failing to do what they theoretically usually do. Yet these theories have exactly zero explanations as to why these isolated events keep happening and the police keep failing what they theoretically usually do. This is important not just to score points for the theoretical school I inhibit, but because if we are to ever move past the current state of affairs, we have to actually understand what is happening.

Because if one accepts the Marxian account of police as existing to preserve and defend enshrined power relations, it suddenly becomes quite easy to explain the differing responses. In the American context, enshrined power relations has always meant white supremacy. So if you understand that the role of the police is to preserve and defend white supremacy, suddenly the differing responses in Lansing and Minneapolis are so obvious as to be banal. The demonstrators in Lansing didn't threaten white supremacy, they were in fact upset that social-distancing regulations still applied to them even though they're white. If anything, their central message was that white supremacy wasn't being defended well enough. Demonstrators in Minneapolis, despite being unarmed, were met with tear gas and rubber bullets because their argument was that white supremacy is bad. It genuinely is that simple.

Understanding the role of police in protecting entrenched power and white supremacy is important not just for understanding why the Lansing protests were met with shrugs and the Minneapolis protests were met with extreme force, but for understanding where we need to go from here. Because in the next few weeks, we'll hear lots of calls for reforms, for more training, for implicit bias awareness, for cultural sensitivity, and all of the many other calls we hear every time this disgustingly common occurrence happens. The fundamental problem with these well-meaning calls for reform is that they are based upon the theories I reject above; that is, calls for reform are based on the idea that the police are a public service organization that exist to serve the citizenry. Their underlying premise is that each of these incidents is an isolated event and it is simply a coincidence that so many keep happening and that the victims (and non-victims) all sharing obvious similarities is another astounding coincidence. But given that such ideas are demonstratively false, they make for an extremely poor basis for future action.

Indeed, with a proper understanding of the police as a force principally concerned with defending white supremacy, it quickly becomes clear why any amount of reform and new kinds of training are bound to fail (and why all such previous efforts have produced minimal changes so far). If an institution is specifically and intentionally designed to defend white supremacy, what kind of reform is going to make it no longer a white supremacist organization?

The unfortunate answer is: none. There are no reforms for this. It's past time for abolition, and any answer short of that is what has me churning out variations of this post with disturbing regularity.

RIP George Floyd.