Abolitionist infrastructures: Coalition Against Police Abuse, state violence, and the horizon of struggle

Reviewed by: Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies ed. by Michelle D. Bonner, et al. J. Patrice McSherry Bonner, Michelle D., Guillermina Seri, Mary Rose Kubal, and Michael Kempa. Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. The ambitious theoretical goal of this book is to deepen and complicate narrow, procedural political science concepts of democracy by incorporating the phenomenon of police abuse. Analysis of such abuse, the editors argue, is absent in most of the discipline's literature on democracy. But police abuse can corrode democratic regimes and enforce exclusionary concepts of citizenship, impoverishing the nature of democracy. Police and police abuse are a form of governance, the book shows: they define and delimit the rule of law at the ground level and impact the lived experience of democracy for large populations. Moreover, the editors contend, police abuse is not solely a legacy of authoritarian states. It is present in democratic regimes and is not simply an "aberration" that can [End Page 443] be overcome through better training or technical fixes. The book locates policing at the center of processes "through which the state imposes order and governs the population's access to rights" (11). The editors introduce three major categories that are identified with democracy but are profoundly affected by policing and police abuse: citizenship, accountability, and socioeconomic (in) equality. The editors point out that "police officers make discretionary decisions by distinguishing between citizens deserving protection and others perceived as suspect and as a threat to the former" (14). Populations made up of the marginalized or the poor, ethnic or racial minorities, immigrants, or anti-government protesters may find themselves "dismissed, criminalized, or subjected to violence" (14). The book's linkage of socioeconomic stratification and structural analysis with the function of policing is a particularly welcome contribution. As author M. M. Müller puts it, "Even in 'consolidated' democracies, the main function of the police has always been the (re)production of order—including its underlying divisions along class and ethnic lines" (224). Several other chapters add solid case studies that substantiate this theoretical link, analyzing police violence against "the dangerous classes" as a means of preserving and advancing the political and economic interests of the state and the upper classes. The authors analyze a range of case studies in France, the United States, South Africa, Canada, India, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Some scholars point to colonial legacies and others to police use of counterinsurgency-style methods to exercise social control. I mention here, for reasons of space, only a few chapters. Comparing India and Argentina, G. Seri and J. Lokaneeta emphasize the unique prerogatives of police, including the power of life and death. Deadly abuse exposes the role of the police "in reinforcing societal inequalities and inscribing citizenship's boundaries" (58). R. Squillacote and L. Feldman analyze citizen-based forms of vigilance over the police, such as Cop Watch in the United States. They argue that "citizen participation in government accountability is at the heart of Cop Watch's democratic nature … [and] its adversarial nature" (153). They believe that earlier forms of citizen involvement, such as community control and civilian review boards, did not succeed because of their limited input into policy and significant resistance by police departments (148). In their chapter, C. Davenport, R. McDermott, and D. Armstrong find that the race of US police, protesters, and observers is a key variable affecting attitudes toward dissent, policing, and responsibility. Race—long a central [End Page 444] fissure in U.S. history and politics—shapes the opinions and perceptions of those who observe police-protester confrontations. M. Clarke shows that in post-apartheid South Africa, police violence continues to be disproportionally aimed at poor black communities. Extreme poverty and inequality persist there and aggressive police crime-fighting methods target those who protest these conditions, participate in strikes, or challenge the neoliberal project. Thus, the police "reinforce the continued socioeconomic exclusion of a large percentage of society" (197). Müller's chapter on Brazil demonstrates that police adapted new counterinsurgency-style methods learned in Colombia and Haiti to conduct armed "pacification" in Rio de Janeiro. Selective application of the law resulted in heavy police intervention in the favelas...

Authoritative and insightful, this wide-ranging overview of police abuse and violence in American society offers a one-stop primer for understanding the forces driving abusive and violent police misconduct. In addition to chronicling specific notorious and controversial examples of police violence and abuse, this work delves into the root causes of police misconduct, details the varied responsibilities and culture of law enforcement in American communities, and examines the arguments for and against efforts and proposals to reform and improve police departments. In the process, Police Abuse and Reform in America gives readers a clear and unbiased understanding of the issue by carefully examining claims about the root causes and extent of police violence and abuse in the USA, as well as the efficacy of efforts to reform and improve law enforcement performance. For example, featured essays tackle such questions as whether policing has become more dangerous over time, whether police abuse is more prevalent in communities of color, and whether reforms to address and curb incidents of police abuse are effective or counterproductive. In addition, the book examines events such as the Rodney King beating of 1992, the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 as pivot points in American police history and the social movement landscape.

Police abuses have been brought into the limelight recently due to the killing of George Floyd and many other African Americans in the United States. This has led to various protests in other countries, recalling decades of police brutality and abuses. The police exist to serve the community's good, ensure law and order, foster the protection of human lives and properties, and help prevent crime. When police officers deviate from the purpose for which they are set up, abuses arise. In spite of the noble aims for which the police exist, there are police officers that have engaged in abusive practices, thus impeding their services. Police history seems to be rooted in a systematic culture of dehumanization and abuse. Police training and formation have privileged tactics and strategic training to the near negligence of moral character formation in police officers. This paper problematises this issue and argues through critical analytic and hermeneutic methods for the imperative of ethics in curbing police abuses. The paper finds that police abuses are global, and there is police impunity everywhere. It concludes, among other recommendations that police abuses can be restrained through ethical formation of police officers to respect the human dignity and rights of the citizens.

This intervention considers uneven development and social reproduction within racial capitalism. Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce racial capitalism. Here, we examine the extraction of time, taking up theorizations across carceral geographies, postcolonial theory and Caribbean studies to demonstrate how coercive relations of social reproduction contribute to uneven development. In particular, we look at the role of the state in racial capital’s capture of reproductive activities across our work on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation, we re-affirm the need to study uneven development by understanding how the circulation and accumulation of capital is imbricated with the production of hierarchies of all kinds of difference. We show how a conjunctural countertopography can reveal how state practices advance accumulation under conditions of widespread surplus lives, as capital wagers on captive life and premature death.

This article explores the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the resistance to police abuse in Los Angeles during the 1970s. It argues that the use of force directed at social movements by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) after the 1965 Watts uprising did not destroy resistance but rather provided the foundation for a new phase in the struggle against police violence. Evolving out of the repression of Black Power and Chicano movements, CAPA rejected the idea that the LAPD could be reformed from within. In order to fundamentally alter the relationship between residents and local criminal justice systems, CAPA demanded community control of the police. Activists worked to build a broad-based coalition to channel anger at police violence into an organized movement based on nonviolent protest, documentation of police abuse, redress through lawsuits, and political pressure in public hearings. By the 1980s, CAPA’s movement gained popular support from political officials, middle-class residents, church leaders, and civil rights organizations. This coalition, however, sought only minor changes at the margins of the criminal justice system that did not meaningfully alter the balance of power between the community and the police. Opposition to police abuse was consistent over time, but its ideological and political grounding narrowed as demands for accountability and justice were routed into established processes and institutions. Although the anti-police- abuse coalition challenged law-and- order politics, its achievements were moderate compared to CAPA’s initial vision of community control of the police.

Despite a wealth of literature covering police abuse of power and excessive use of force in the developed West, a major challenge in socio-legal literature is the paucity of empirical research that accurately assess the same constructs in post-colonial African society. The few existing studies have shown that the police in developing countries are more likely to abuse their powers and are largely not accountable to the public. The current study presents an important attempt to empirically assess what is known and what needs to be learned to better understand and prevent police abuse and the use of excessive force; and how the use of force variables influence trust in the police. Since there is no single, universally agreed-upon definition of police use of force, in this current study a context-specific constructs that are peculiar to police-citizen relations in Nigeria were adopted for the data analysis. The result confirmed that police abuse and the use of excessive force have negative effect on trust in the police. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Divergent public responses to police brutality incidents demonstrate that for some, police violence is an injustice that demands remediation, while for others state violence is justice served. We develop a novel survey experiment in which we randomize the race and gender of a victim of police violence, and then provide respondents with an opportunity to establish justice via compensation. We uncover small but consistent effects that financial restitution is most supported for a White female detainee and least supported for a Black female detainee, and this is largely driven by White respondents. Beyond the treatment effects, we show that Black respondents are much more likely to perceive detainees as deserving of restitution; across all treatments, Black respondents are 58 percent more likely than Whites to support a financial settlement. We further show that White respondents’ perceptions of deservingness are highly related to their perceptions of who is at fault for the beating—the detainee or the police—and whether the detainee was involved in crime. Black respondents remain likely to award a settlement even if they think the detainee was at fault and involved in crime. Our results provide further evidence that perceptions of who deserves restorative justice for state violence are entangled with race in targeted ways.

This chapter examines the relations between the city, social movements, and the commons through a case study of the anti-authoritarian/ anarchist commons in Athens, in order to illustrate how the affective and collective labour of resistance by groups within these movements contributes to the city's social reproduction. It draws from the work of both Greek and other feminist scholars on the impact of the neoliberal governance of austerity in Greece and on the gender dynamics of social protest and resistance. The chapter argues that the affective labour of social reproduction and other practices of collective care and well-being within activist communities are gendered and vital to the social reproduction of resistance in a neoliberalizing city during austerity, creating safe spaces against dispossession, state violence, and police brutality as well as against a patriarchal oppression rooted in Greek society.

This article attempts to think through the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and caste capitalism. It conceptualizes homocapitalism as immanent within the assemblage of homonationalism but also as becoming partially disembedded from it as a result of the shift in conjuncture from the “war on terror” to the “global financial crisis.” Having made a case for the partial autonomy of homocapitalism from homonationalism, the article explores the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and the emergent theoretical conceptualization of caste capitalism. The author demonstrates how the central analytical insight of racial and caste capitalism—namely, that capitalism mobilizes precapitalist social hierarchies as a means of furthering accumulation—throws open the field for a range of ideological approaches that seek emancipation from racial and caste oppression through varying relationships with capitalism. This allows the author to make a crucial distinction between analytics and ideologies, a distinction that has been unhelpfully blurred in discussions of homocapitalism. As ideology, homocapitalism intensifies and derives some of its purchase from its affinities with discourses of liberatory capitalism such as Black capitalism and Dalit capitalism. As analytic, homocapitalism illuminates the fractioning of queerness in terms of its potential (ability, willingness) to contribute to production and social reproduction. Central to the comparison around which this article is structured is the illumination of racialization as a technology for the extraction and attribution of value that operates across racial capitalism, caste capitalism, and homocapitalism.

This essay examines how the operation of background rules and institutions provided by law leads to the expulsion of individuals under racial capitalism based upon gender. Aligning itself with anti-capitalist work by critical theorists of social reproduction and intersectionality, it contributes to perspectives on racial capitalism that regard gender, in the way it creates subjects and differentiates between workers, as a co-constituting force with race under racial capitalism. Women and transgender persons, because of gender, are precariously situated on the edge of exile from the economic order. It makes this argument by weaving feminist insights – particularly those articulated in scholarship on social reproduction and intersectionality – with perspectives on racial capitalism.

This article explores humanitarian-development responses to displacement as postcolonial modes of security within actually existing racial capitalism. Focusing on Greece's “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” program, it provides insight into “make-live” interventions that temporarily subsidize stranded migrants’ social reproduction at Europe's frontiers. The article argues that development-led refugee-hosting strategies, marketed as win–win solutions for both “hosted” and “hosting” communities, actually serve a twofold function: containing racially subordinate outsiders and compensating so-called transit countries for taking up the task of “keeping out by keeping alive.” By minimally supporting migrants’ social reproductive needs within designated territories, the racial biopolitics of the humanitarian-development nexus brings surplus populations into the fold of local capital accumulation while sustaining the global color line. Analyzing the refugee humanitarian-development nexus as a spatioracial fix that harnesses the vital capacities of surplus populations, the article seeks to: invite discussion on the social reproduction of populations violently cast out of the wage relation; theorize racial capitalism beyond metropolitan centers and their (post)colonial borderlands, highlighting the role of intermediary spaces as crucial nodes of georacial and capitalist stabilization; and demonstrate how the dialectic between humanitarianism and rentier economies embeds new racialized hierarchies between crisis-affected local “hosts” and surplused migrant “guests.”

Blue Notes 2.0: The Diachronic Resonance of Langston Hughes During the George Floyd Protests: A Foreword

Both Supreme Court doctrine and the scholarly literature on the constitutional constraints on policing generally begin and end with the Fourth Amendment, ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment's transformative guarantees designed to curtail police abuses and safeguard liberty, personal security, and equality for all, regardless of race. This Article corrects this omission by providing a comprehensive account of the text, history, and original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment's limitations on policing. It establishes how the Fourteenth Amendment revitalized the constitutional guarantee of the right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, struck out at centuries of history that led Black people to be subjected to indiscriminate searches and seizures, and sought to prohibit racialized policing practices. In these ways, the Fourteenth Amendment puts race at the center of our constitutional story of policing. The Article demonstrates that addressing police abuse, including indiscriminate searches and seizures, arbitrary arrests, police violence and killing, is at the core of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantees and history. Our understanding of the constitutional law of policing—and the Supreme Court's responses to police abuses—will remain inadequate unless we recover this history.

POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the use of spit guards by police forces in the UK and to make recommendations regarding an evidence-based approach to decisions related to the use of such equipment.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based upon an examination of a range of primary source material, secondary sources and grey literature.FindingsAlthough the use of spit guards can be justified by factors that include the need to protect police officers from contracting serious infectious diseases, there are a number of problems that concern ethical policing and human rights. Concerns arise when spit guards are deployed against vulnerable individuals, are used offensively rather than defensively and when such equipment is deployed disproportionately against persons from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities. Additionally, the image of the police may suffer if spit guards are accompanied by the use of excessive force which may be perceived as an abuse of police power.Practical implicationsThe paper makes recommendations that a comprehensive evidence base is required to assist practitioners to make informed decisions regarding the deployment of spit guards. This evidence base should include the extent to which officers are spat at, medical evidence relating to spitting and the transmission of serious diseases, the views of the public concerning the deployment of spit guards and estimations as to whether such equipment will deter spitting by suspects of crime.Originality/valueThis paper provides an original academic contribution to the ongoing debate on the use of spit guards within policing. In particular, it brings together a wide range of material that relates to this topic and presents it as a coherent set of arguments located in a single source.