#1 On Policing
I recently got a call from a Black police officer I’ve known for years who calls me every so often to point out ways that policing is fucked up. He puts me up on their game. Let’s call him Officer Jack. In this call Jack explained to me some of the ways that police officers are incentivized not to create public safety, but to make arrests. These are not at all the same thing. Here’s three of the ways officers are encouraged to make as many arrests as they can.
(1) When a cop makes an arrest or writes a citation that means they must go to court. And every time a cop goes to court they get overtime pay. The amount varies from area to area—Officer Jack said the moment he steps inside a courtroom he’s guaranteed three hours of overtime. In some places it’s more than that. This means cops are paid extra for every arrest or citation. Officer Jack said that if a cop needs a few hundred extra dollars he can just make a few more arrests and he’s good. Even if all his cases are dismissed, he still gets paid extra just for going to court.
(2) There are still quotas, according to Officer Jack and other officers I’ve spoken to. The union would frown on a commanding officer giving cops a specific number of arrests and citations they have to make but there’s an expectation that you should have a similar number of arrests as the other officers around you. If you have a significantly lower number, you may be demoted and you’ll definitely have a problem.
(3) If you want to get promoted and thus make more money and have more responsibility, then when it comes time to be reviewed you have to be able to show that you’ve made a lot of arrests, more than the other cops around you.
Cops who are hungry to make arrests are not creating public safety—in the long run lots of arrests create communities that are not safer, they’re full of people who are traumatized and criminalized. People who may struggle to stay in the aboveground economy because they have a record and are qualified to join the underground economy because they’ve been to prison—and thus they’re nudged toward committing serious crime, often out of desperation and a lack of options. This is how policing is often criminogenic—it creates crime. And that’s a big part of why I’m not scared of a world without police and you shouldn’t be either. Police create a lot of societal problems. In many ways they make the world worse. And much of the time they’re not protecting and serving citizens, they’re protecting the economic interests of the state.
As another cop told me once, “Cops aren’t here to keep people safe, they’re here to bring in money for the city.” For example, why was it such a big deal to those cops that Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes? Who really cares if someone’s on the street selling cigarettes for a dollar apiece? Who loses out in that exchange? The local government would say, we do. See, citizens always want to pay less in taxes and politicians are happy to promise that, but cutting government cutting because of it isn’t welcomed, so government sends the police out to claw money from citizens by writing lots of small tickets—aka For-Profit Policing—and by civil asset forfeiture. They may also be ordered to protect government property.
When Eric Garner sold cigarettes on the block, he was allowing citizens to subvert the hefty (and regressive) tax on cigarettes that Staten Island was using to balance out their tax cuts. In the government’s eyes, Garner was costing them tax money. That’s why the officers were repeatedly demanding he stop which is why he was so frustrated that last day and pushed back against them. But the cops were in a position where the economic needs of the city were above the human needs of the citizens, so Garner had to be stopped at all cost even though he was just trying to take care of his family. Stopping him would not have kept citizens safer and killing certainly did not—it traumatized millions of Black people. So little of what cops do helps keep citizens safer. It’s rare for cops to confront active violent situations. The idea that the cops are what’s keeping us from The Purge is inaccurate and it’s racist as it’s built on the idea that Black and poor people are violent animals waiting to attack you as soon as the cops turn their head. And that irrational fear doesn’t take this into account: the current world, with cops, is dangerous, precisely because of cops. Who are not here to create public safety. They’re here to make arrests. When we talk about abolishing the police people often say B-but what will you replace them with??? The first question is how are we supposed to continue living in this world with cops because for Black people, this is hellish. If you’re not currently for abolition, how many more George Floyd traumas do you need to go through before you say it’s enough, policing cannot be reformed, we need to start all over? Because whatever that number is, we will get there.
But, ok, in a future issue I’ll lay out a detailed plan for a new vision of public safety.
For now, don’t miss this incredible Medium essay by an anonymous officer called “Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop” that takes what I’ve been saying even further. The anonymous cop says “American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.”
#2 On Looting
If you want to see white supremacy in action look no further than the rampant pearl-clutching by white liberals and conservatives alike that the looting that arose in the initial days of the George Floyd/Breonna Taylor protests was “the real problem” and that we could not discuss the actual issue—police violence against Black bodies—until the looting stopped. That was like a parent telling a small child that we will not talk about your need for food until you stop your temper tantrum even though the child’s meltdown was brought on entirely by a lack of food in the child’s body. Looting happens because of a lack of political and economic resources. It happens because people feel so disconnected from their world and so mistreated by it that attacking businesses around them no longer feels unjust.
But if you care more about the manner in which we say “stop killing us” than about us saying “stop killing us” then you prove that you do not care about Black bodies. And we should not take your voice seriously. In some ways much of America has responded to the protests the same way that the ridiculously hysterical St. Louis personal injury lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey did—by grabbing their guns and showing off their fear of us and their lack of concern for our political imperative and their power as white people.
You cannot care about Black people and hear the demand “stop killing us” and say yes but let’s not hurt the corporations. All Buildings Matter! If you think rioting or looting damages the moral standing of people who are protesting against decades of police murder then you are part of the problem. It’s not that I want people to loot, it’s that people who focus on looting instead of police murder are willfully derailing the conversation and disrespecting Black bodies. People who insist that we protest peacefully are demanding a sort of respectability politics—if you ask for justice nicely then we might give it to you. But protest is supposed to be disruptive, it’s supposed to be messy, it’s supposed to be aggressive and frightening to the system. Power concedes nothing without a demand. I don’t want peace if it means I have to accept homicide and injustice and oppression. As long as it’s common for Black people to fear the cops and feel the trauma of seeing them murder Black body after body after body, then why are we not tearing shit up? Also this: as Hannah Black wrote on Twitter years ago, “Cops exist so people can’t loot ie have nice things for free so idk why it’s so confusing that people loot when they protest against cops.” People who are angry at the cops and the system may lash out against the system by pointing out the ineffectiveness of the cops—when there’s too many of us, you are powerless. A recent Atlantic.com piece Why People Loot says some people, “See looting as a form of empowerment—a way to reclaim dignity after decades of abuse at the hands of police and other authorities… Vandalism during protests often focuses on objects and buildings that are “symbolic of other values.” For example, people are more likely to attack symbols of authority—such as the CNN building or police cars—than apartment buildings.” In this way, some of the looting is a lashing-out against capitalism, the police, and other forces that are seen as perpetuating racism.”
Those who scream about looting are irrelevant because looting is politically relevant. It matters. It’s a part of protest. Fuck that corporation and fuck your attempt to distract the conversation away from police murder and fuck your refusal to value Black bodies more than branded stuff in a store. Read an important 2013 essay called In Defense Of Looting that DeRay McKesson gave me the second time we hung out:
“Modern American police forces evolved out of fugitive slave patrols, working to literally keep property from escaping its owners… When, in the midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren’t acting non-politically, they aren’t distracting from the issue of police violence and domination… They are getting straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.”
#3 Final question
Why isn’t a white person saying “I don’t believe in systemic racism” as offensive and enraging as a white person saying nigger? The N-word is a painful epithet, no question, but why would we not respond with the same fury at someone doubting the existence of systemic racism? Nigger speaks past stereotypes and atrocities but systemic racism speaks to the matrix that currently locks us down. To doubt its existence means you’re saying we’re liars and no one need worry about racism because it’s a fantasy Blacks invented to trick people and the reason why straight white men are collectively so much more successful than Black people is because they work hard and Blacks… are everything symbolized by the word nigger. For a public person to say “I don’t believe in systemic racism” should be career-ending just as a white person saying “nigger” in public would be. It’s just as powerful an offense.
when more niggers are jailed, crime goes down, coincidence? the stereotype of niggers committing more crimes than other races comes from the reality of the fact that niggers commit more crimes than other races...
You’re exactly right; well said. Number of arrests as a metric for police is corrosive and has little to do with public safety. Police will target the people who have the least ability to challenge the violent and invasive tactics implemented in the course of racking up arrests.