police state

My brother edits a zine, their latest issue focuses on the creeping American police state. This is what I wrote, I'm not really satisfied with it, I didn't give myself enough time. I'll probably come back to it, and dig more into the social bifurcation that occurs due to the tiny privileges that are doled out via gender, ethnicity, race, etc. Also the slow ratcheting of repression, that quite literally started with immigrants continued to activists and now teachers.

I’d define a police state as one where police act with impunity. That means we live in one. Occasionally there is something like the Riders case in Oakland, the Ramparts case in LA, or the Bari vs. FBI judgment; meanwhile everyday people are gunned down essentially for their skin color and class position. There is broad acceptance of the idea that the streets of America are seconds away from open cannibalistic barbarism with only a thin blue line tethering us on this side of savagery. This vision is built on a foundation of white supremacy, a fractured community that divides in every possible way (gender, culture, national origin, class, and geographic region), male dominance and a mystification of power.

If we use a linear model of oppression (which I think is grossly inaccurate and devalues actual human experience, but does make big ideas easier to understand and communicate) with Black and Brown urban poor at the “bottom” and white men in positions of economic, military and political power at the top, we get a grossly simple view of social life in America. It is easy to understand that the people in the middle will spend most of their time looking up at the positions they are told to desire, positions that narrow self interest make desirable, people want a secure future, they want a home, healthcare, food, leisure time; people will envy and emulate those they see with what they want. People will rarely check to see who they are standing on. Only when the foundation gets shaky will they check. So the people in the middle won’t look at the abuse suffered at the bottom unless a big ruckus is made, or that abuse starts to creep up the ladder.

Police in America act with impunity because what they do is seen as legitimate by society at large. The job of revolutionaries is to point out illegitimate power. Cops that taser someone for raising their voice or walking away or walking toward them are using power illegitimately, shooting anti-war protesters with wooden dowels is an illegitimate use of power, the daily harassment and intimidation of people of color is an illegitimate use of power; the war on drugs, the war on immigrants, the war on dissent are all illegitimate. It is the job of revolutionaries to tell these stories. We need to point out that the police are not neutral, they have a job, and they work for one section of society against another section of society. We need to guard against the traps of individualism; “one time this cop caught me drinking and let me go,” great I suppose that is an adequate answer to the problem of capitalism too; some people get rich so the system must work. People concerned with the advancing police state should find out how to report for their community radio stations and weekly tabloids, the bigger the audience the better. Oppressed people organically use secrecy and subterfuge to organize, but breaking out into the broad public consciousness is when substantive change can happen.

The best way I know to increase awareness of the police state is to organize around it. Copwatch is a good model of year round activity, October 22nd is a good special event, The Stolen Lives Project needs new researchers desperately, and the Ella Baker Center has a project called Bay Area Police Watch that does great work. Doing this work it is easy to get bogged down in negativity, I did Stolen Lives research for about a month, it required reading newspaper archives of every killing in the country on whatever day was being researched, definitely a downer; but I also met families who where fearless in the face a state murder, a huge inspiration. Any positivity needs to be cherished, any small victory, even if it is demonstration with 10 people, needs to be accented. It is this constant resistance that will build a movement.

What the police get away with today is analogous to lynching in the Jim Crow south. We need to talk about it that way. It is a method of violent social control aimed largely at people of color and the working class.

Way back at the beginning of this I talked about the mystification of power, by that I meant a lack of popular understanding of the power of individual people. No one can argue the power of an individual cop; he can kill you and get away with it. No one can argue the power of COINTELPRO it still has folks on the left biting each other on the back 20 years after it’s last suspected operation. Everyone argues their ability to make change, all of us have whined that we can’t possibly change anything; there is too much apathy, too much affluence, too much state power, too little consciousness, too much TV, too much stupidity, too little initiative. It’s all bullshit. We can do this, and what is better, we have to do this. Most of us have had some kind of time travel fantasy where we assassinated Hitler, or bring a crate of Uzis to escaped slaves, or burn Columbus’ boats; we live in a time like those, we are on the cusp of historical change we need to act.