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ACM: Considering Police as separate from the Landlords, though both think we’re less than [1]

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Date: 2024-12-08  

Many were disappointed in the election result; police so-called “unions” such as FOP weren’t.

GAMALDI: We are tired of all the chaos and disorder that we're seeing in our streets. We're tired of the defund-the-police talk. And basically, we're just tired of the crap.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) [source]

The quote is from a NPR article, and the quoted speaker (not guest) is the national vice president of the The Fraternal Order of Police, talking on Newsmax, where he also called Trump’s win a “mandate”. The NPR person said the “union” didn’t respond to NPR’s request for someone to be interviewed. FOP knows it’s not a union — it names itself an “Order”. Lots of political education needs to be done about “special bodies of armed men” and how they affect the rest of us. The short NPR article mentioned how Trump promised that cops would have “greater legal immunity”. Per a UCLA law professor:

JOANNA SCHWARTZ: It's hard to imagine how the federal government can constitutionally override local prosecutors' decisions to press criminal charges. On the other hand, the Supreme Court last term, by my view, created presidential immunity out of thin air. So it's certainly possible.

The NPR article had no photo, I got the photo above from this 2023 article, which included the following:

He [Gamaldi] said newly elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to take a holistic approach to criminal justice.

"What is a holistic approach to criminal justice? Those cops deserve better. Those community members deserve better. They deerve to be able to walk their kids safely to schools," the Houston officer said.

"But the pendulum will swing," said Gamaldi, 39. "It always does. We know how to fix it."

●Content warning. In this diary there will be some discussion of violence, including domestic violence. Also, there will be contradictions – because life is messy.●

Copaganda

I find cop culture scary. It’s more scary because there is so much copaganda on corporate media, which is owned by rich people who depend on police. To the extent that there is a lot of unexamined “common sense” about police, that helps them keep their status quo. It’s difficult to convince people of non-targeted communities to listen and understand how the system is warped. If a city official talks about the problem of people from certain communities who are not talking to police, or not reporting sexual assault, it’s usually presented as an issue with the community, not with how that community is policed.

The way things are spun and the legislation that is passed leads to actions such as the over-charging of Atlanta Cop City protestors with RICO. Maybe the elites are scared. Maybe they see opportunities for shock doctrine as we spiral into multiple crises. When things get really bad, the rich can move elsewhere, the rest of us are stuck. It’s a reason why rich people care less about climate: the worst problems are localized, and perceived, by them, as “escapeable”.

As I observe the political dynamics of police in my city I’ve been collecting descriptions of the cop world view. It’s instructive how they interact (or don’t interact) with city officials and public comment at city council meetings and local media. Usually it’s the mayor who says something, police wouldn’t deign to reply to the complaints. Maybe the county sheriff might say something. — that’s in my county. I think most police chiefs don’t? On the other hand, the sheriff in my county is elected (I think that’s the usual case), while the police chief and everyone else in the department is hired. The politicians are more likely to do press conferences.

The impression I get with these articles (and some of the law-and-order discussions in my own city) is that the police got upset with the Michael Brown and George Floyd protests, feeling they were being disrespected. So, same as the Bankers after the New Deal, they are engaged in a long-term game to get back what they think they are due.

The greediest rich need them to protect their property and to discipline labor. In a series of cases brought to the USSC, there’s an increasing police exception to the Bill of Rights: when cases that go against police at trial and appeal, they often get overturned at the Supreme Court level.

Police claim only they can define safety, which is something that should be resisted. Their view of safety is warped if they can look at peaceful (if loud) protest as being “violent”, while not seeing the reality of their own actions, when they show up in riot gear, etc.

I’m discussing this in a roundabout way, but that’s the way I’ve been approaching it. It was my jury duty experience that started me reading more about police and the court system. Since I’m not someone who is at risk I have to look carefully at calls for solidarity, that I’m not being mislead into making cops stronger and not held accountable.

During those two weeks, there was an acquaintance in the jury pool, so we would sit together at the start of the day before being assigned to a courtroom or let go until the afternoon session. After a month she told me she was picked for a murder trial, where they found not guilty. There were two defendants tried separately, and the other jury also found “not guilty”. My aquaintance said the witnesses changed their stories: I don’t know if she concluded that or it was something she was told. In any case, the community (in other words, the witnesses) decided putting either young man out of community into prison wasn’t appropriate, or wasn’t the least bad option. I don’t know if the prosecutor didn’t have good cases, or there were racism issues. Details didn’t get into local media and I didn’t know the acquaintance well enough to ask questions after she made her report. I admit I’m extrapolating a lot on a thirty second conversation ... but in the context of the rest of my “jury duty” experience and lots of articles read about experiences of others within USA courts and incarceration system, I see it as another example of the system not working.

The trial I was excused from was something about drugs. I know if was a murder trial I still would have said I would not treat police testimony same as other witnesses, because of the exceptions the Supreme Court has established for police, as well as lots of reports of police lying and corruption. However, I wasn’t able to say any of that. I was only allowed to say “yes” or “no”. I wasn’t asked to explain by the judge or an interview when I left the courtroom. (The first jury selection was for a civil case and I was released before any of the dicey questions because I knew one of the witnesses. The other trial they got enough jurors before I had to answer questions.)

If it was a case with no police evidence so the question about treating police testimony wasn’t asked, I’d probably be saying “no” to something else. Because I’d want to ask the prosecutor (not the Judge, not the witnesses) why this defendant was charged? I would want to know statistics about race and income/wealth and % of cases of this nature coming to trial in comparison to cases where charges aren’t brought.

I haven’t been called up again, and I hope I never will. There was a range of reactions to my complaining about my experience, from sympathy, to agreeing, to people who have had positive experiences, to someone shaming me that I should “do my duty”. If it happens again :-( I want to have my proofs ready to prove I can’t do what they need me to do. I’m not mentally able to actively cooperate with this broken system, though other people seem to have made their accommodations. [I have made accommodations with other tainted systems.]

But speaking of unfairness, one of the projects of the rich which the police support is criminalization of protest and activism. After 9-11, the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Muslim charity at the time – was criminalized and leaders put in prison. There has been some successes in reversals and payments for police brutality, so there is increasing targeting/criminalizing legal defense as well as activism. As I was describing above, law isn’t neutral, it’s politics.

A deflection: the "defund" so-called "error"

The amount of lecturing that powerful Conservatives aim at “the Left” about how “defund the police” has ruined the country is almost to the level of how they say immigrants have ruined the country. Though any so-called “reduction” has been, as far as I can tell, either creative accounting or short-lived.

Here are some quotes from a an article summarizing some of the scolding:

Democrats spent the last four years running away from police reform. “Funding the police” didn’t just help them lose the presidency—it handed a dangerous man an even stronger police and surveillance state. ... after an election last week in which voters all but screamed that the Democratic Party is moving in the wrong direction, centrist and conservative pundits have drawn the opposite conclusion: The Democrats are, somehow, still too soft on crime. ...many Democratic Party dead-enders are financially invested in not seeing reality. Police reform opens up the door to other questions about class, inequality, corporate power, and capitalism that the modern Democratic Party quite literally cannot afford to discuss.... “Funding the police” has done little other than tell those people to sit home—while funneling money and weapons to a police state happy to help Trump carry out a second term. [emphasis added] ‘Fund the Police’ Backfired—and Gave Trump More Power Than Ever

I think all this so-called “blowback” is more victim blaming than the left making a mistake. We’re in a context of lawfare lawsuits against universities and attacks on protest in general. To push the above point futher, here were a few asides about the issue in this article:

If we were honest, we would acknowledge that Joe Biden owes most of his victory to the uprisings against police violence that momentarily shifted public opinion toward greater awareness of racial injustice and delivered Democrats an unearned historic turnout. Even though the Biden campaign aggressively distanced itself from Black Lives Matter and demands to defund the police, it benefited from the sentiment that racial injustice ought to be addressed and liberals were best suited to address it. … If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” [emphasis added]

Solidarity, for police, is for each other

The rich depend on cops to keep their castles, but not on individual cops. A cultural thing that I think I’m seeing is that individual police don’t trust their local elites to protect them, which is why they have absolute solidarity with fellow police — in other words, the thin blue line. They know local elites will throw any local cop under the bus that has become inconvenient, if they can get away with it. Their protection is the amount of credible threat they can pose to anyone trying to do that. Electeds get lots of pressure. In my home town, I’ve witnessed several “2+2=5" type lame gaslighting by my mayor in the aftermath of police misconduct, because it’s more important the police are happy than the public stops complaining. Of course, in this model whistle-blowers are traitors, not “fellow officers.” They will sometimes describe themselves as “working class”, but they’re too involved with enforcing for the elites. Sometimes they claim to be “unions” in some police departments, but I don’t agree.

One of the ways police avoid accountability is they are taught, encouraged, to feel death threats. They are rewarded to be scared: “I feared for my life” is a “get out free” card. Whereas, self-defense is harder to claim for non-police or non-prison guards.

2nd deflection - the necessity of federal power

To be contradictory, consider these quotes from After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle, by Cedric Johnson. Verso 2023.

Calls to cut police budgets and implement restorative justice, however, are leftist in form but rightist in substance. Such demands follow the same arc of privatization that has defined the transformation of the public sector in other areas such as public housing, education, the postal service and infrastructure development for decades. The result is always the same – break the power of unionized public sector workers; weaken the capacity of the state to address broad social problems and diminish public expectations that the state should do so; and empower foundations, nonprofit organizations, entrepreneurs and for-profit corporations to provide boutique services that never meet the real demands of the public. The fact that right-wing lobby organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council have jumped on the defund/restorative justice bandwagon should give pause to left antipolicing forces who prioritize these demands without thinking carefully about the actual relation between police unions and violence, and the implications for public sector workers more broadly.13 [13. Bill Mieirling, “Speaking Up on Restorative Justice,” American Legislative Exchance Council, June 12, 2020.] [bold emphasis added]

A few paragraphs before the above is this defense of the necessity of state power:

Antislavery abolitionists did not seek to abolish the state but to abolish the institution of slavery, and to secure that good state force was essential. The ultimate abolition of African chattel slavery in the United States required the Union Army’s victory over Confederate troops and an end to the plantocracy of the Southern states. Likewise, during the Reconstruction period after the war, federal occupation proved the most integral thing standing between meaningful black freedom, understood as the right to property, the franchise and self-governance, and the reimposition of merchant-landlord class power. State force and coercion were instrumental as well during the Second Reconstruction, which commenced with the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision overturning the legal precedent of Jim Crow segregation. At critical junctures during the process of desegregation, the national guard, federal marshals and the army’s airborne infantry division were mobilized to secure concrete and basic citizenship rights for black southerners. The moral force of civil disobedience was essential in shifting public opinion and spurring legislative action, but it was also often part of a sequential strategy to bring the Department of Justice to town. State force, that is, was necessary to pry open both the “whites only” schoolhouse door and the polling station. ... What is needed is abolition of a different sort – not the dismantling of police departments and the complete closure of prisons, but the abolition of the conditions that police have been charged with managing over the last half century of welfare-state devolution and privatization. [emphasis aded]

I don’t know enough. I’m not Johnson’s intended audience. I think ALEC may have changed its tune. I am also dubious of Johnson referring to police “unions”. However, the examples of Civil War and Second Reconstruction are good points. Currently, where there are “good police departments”, it may be locally there isn’t massive inequity? Or they’ve managed to gentrify the “scary people” out.

There’s always a recruitment problem for USA military, police, and prison guards. I hope Tumpism doesn’t fill the ranks. The alternatives to policing are more often non-profits than government programs. I don’t know enough to judge Johnsn’s criticisms. I don’t know if it’s a danger or an instance of capital revolt, in that they refuse to accept any constraint on their agendas.

Plus I’m cynical about reformers-from-within PDs. It’s been proven wrong so often. Sort of like CEOs of polluting extractive industries: they may have had some “didn’t know” cover in the past, but now, with evident climate change, they can’t say it any more. More training always seems to come from increased public funding, not out of police retirement funds. [a reference to the frequent complaint that city taxpayers have to pay when victims of police brutality win cash payments when it would be more fair and productive to make a direct effect police pocketbooks.]

I take his point about federal power, but I don’t see the path out of this mess unless it’s ending capitalism. IMO, police are capitalism. They’re the capitalists’ method of enforcement. Is this a chicken and egg issue?

The recruitment problem extends to my county. Since it’s general, I think counter-recruitment should be one of our diversity of tactics. Johnson seems to be arguing both “need to end capitalism” and that police are public sector union people, and we shouldn’t be acting to reduce the amount of public sector workers. I don’t know which is his top priority because I keep putting the book down. He seems to prioritize Class over race.

William Anderson – another black author – has strong opinions and advice about being black in USA. Again, I am not his intended audience, but I can follow his arguments better than what I’ve read of Cedric Johnson. These quotes are from The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, AK Press, 2021:

Neither birth certificates nor the U.S. Constitution grant us anything that can’t be stripped away from us at any moment. This is just one reason the police are able to murder us regularly without any consequences. It’s also why the first Black president had to repeatedly defend his citizenship and reconfirm his legal status. It’s why we can have our voting rights and protections violated and why we’ve always been told to “go back to Africa” when we complain about injustices. [emphasis added]

Since the state never has lived up to its rhetoric and never will, Black people have always had to implement survival programs, which shows quite clearly that we are not supposed to reap even the standard benefits of citizenship. This was happening long before the Black Panthers created health care clinics, free breakfast programs, or ambulance services. However, the ideological line drawn by the Panthers here is important. They were not just meeting needs through charity or philanthropy, they were politicizing people and threatening the state itself by doing so. Black people are kept outside the categories that other people see as basic rights. Nations and societies declare us unfit, undeserving, and unaccepted. The violence historically levied against us extends to forcible displacement from our homes and our roots. Black people in the United States and throughout the world experience the extraordinary brutality of being people with no place on the map. And many of the paths people look to for liberation offer us nothing.

In the United States, being treated as a necessary sacrifice[*] for the sake of the nation-state complicates this further. The violence against us is made into something that’s immutable but also part of a narrative of national progress. Our struggles historically, from enslavement to Jim Crow to now, have been embraced by the state under banners of memorial and commemoration. Yet something more sinister happens here when museums, schools, and institutes dedicated to the preservation of Black history make that very history into something that the country needed to become what it is now. *I think this is in reference to a main theme of Project 1492, paraphrase, how results of Black struggles helped everyone (I couldn’t find the exact quote.) ; it could also be a critique of problematical aspects of elite-supported Black museums.

Anderson gives me a lot to think about, and I don’t want to be caught by any flashy proposals that cleverly hide harms to the vulnerable.

1 more deflection: abolition

This is a topic with a lot of strong opinions ... and automatic “common sense” knee-jerk reactions that I think should be examined. Which is why I put the content warning, because the idea & possible reactions.

I’m not inside the carceral abolition movement (I’m not at risk) but much that I have read is convincing. Many of these organizations are founded by domestic violence survivors - because their lived experience is that police don’t help. It is their experience that removing people from their communities both harms the community both when people are removed, and, again, when they exit incarceration and return to their communities more violent than before. Abolitionists keep pointing out, if something increases the harm done, why keep doing it? They may not have it right, but neither does the current system. More people would report if it worked often enough that they felt they could accept the risks.

DV survivors are often punished for surviving. Maya Schenwar, of Truthout, lost her sister Keeley to overdose after a long cycle of criminalization that made her chances of recovery much harder.

I know ugly stuff has to be dealt with, but the response shouldn’t be to do something that makes things worse. (That would kind of be like “shock doctrine for police” to accumulate more people under surveillance, with associated budget increases.) In the abolition movement, there’s a lot of lived experience that cops and prisons magnifying harm. So I don’t celebrate when someone gets locked up. Nor to I activate to get them out. The resources could have probably been better used making it harder for billionaires to become billionaires. The harm in celebrating such convictions of obvious criminals is how it validates the deliberate death-making against minories in the police/court/prison system, as well as the attack against others deemed outside the circle of those allowed to live.

When horrible prison condition stories get out, the reaction usually goes down the rabbithole of “police reform” ... which almost always winds up making the police more powerful. I don’t have a solution. Life is messy. I hope we can have solidarity and not let the copaganda manipulate to justify police defining “safety” for people they are policing. We can’t arrest our way out of an economic problem, especially when budget decisions choose more punishment rather than addressing needs.

This ACM is already long and this section is incomplete. I don’t have quotes because I’m mostly leaning on memories a few years old. I still think it’s a necessary example of a “cops defining safety” failure to highlight. “But what about the rapists?” is such a frequent silencing mechanism against those who agitate for alternatives to policing.

One of the strongest motivations of landlords is to be freed of any constraint of their accumulation. They want to kill any expectation of workers, unemployed, and non-workers that they have a right to a social contract, that everyone should be giving their fair share to the commons so no one is abandoned: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

The points of this essay are 1) that cops don’t have “unions”, even if they call them that and 2) cops have an agenda against ruling elites to try to grow their power that is not in solidarity with the working class. The latter is a wrinkle in description of how ruling class operates to to weaken working class struggle. In my own city I believe I’ve seen examples of cops, with the help of the city bureaucracy, acting like they are entitled to, in essence, “veto” any city council intent they don’t like. As if they own the city not the voters.

The landlords gotta landlord

One of the most effective discipline against labor is to threaten their means of shelter and rest. Capitalists want to harvest all that they can. This can backfire if the harvesting goes too far too fast, if there are different opportunists vying to grab what little there is before their rivals grab it. Often organizing happens in an existential context: they fight because they have no choice.

The ruling class, in their capture of govt and corporate media, can't afford any examination of capitalism. They [attempt to] control police as well as [attempt to] control workers. Therefore, there are think tanks and the programs they fund. The kind of police training they offer appear to be deliberate for specific outcomes, but with risks that the traning can backfire. I don’t know why Entitled Rich People keep making same actions that get strong rebelling reaction: they think they’re better/smarter than their marks? It also says something about the cops that go along with this. But look at the suicide rates for police > and soldiers, for that matter. I think that shows how both groups are being used and the system hurts them.

How do we keep ourselves safe?

I hope we can brainstorming for actions to add or increase in our diversity of tactics. We need to believe people’s lived experience. As Naomi Klein has proved, describing a thing (the Shock Doctrine) isn’t enough to stop that thing. (The pandemic was a huge frelling shock that became a huge wealth transfer event upwards.)

I’ve made various descriptions about why Cop Culture is a big bad thing but it’s also a call to not let your local police department define safety for you. A call for solidarity, to not let this pack-of-dogs vs leopards dynamic turn you away from listening when there’s a chance to help. In any case, we won’t be able to achieve change without a broad base of support. We will need to negotiate with people we disagree with. Voting tries for quick-fix solutions; sometimes this can make significant changes (such as certain ballot initiatives.) Usually we need more than voting, especially within a winner-takes-all system, within a context of legalized bribery.

To quote Kelly Hayes:

People who cannot self-regulate emotionally or engage in principled disagreement will not create stable, sustainable movements. You can’t organize people you hold in contempt.

and to quote one of podcast guests on an episode about dealing with trauma:

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