Police Terror and
Lawless Order
by Dr. Floyd W. Hayes, III
"Cops work in a largely autonomous institution that
sanctions, and even encourages, racialized injustice and terrorism."
When three Jamaica, Queens,
detectives murdered Sean Bell on November 25, 2006, they engaged in a rising
tide of police-state terrorism in growing numbers of urban communities
throughout the United States of America.
Shooting some 50 bullets at Bell, these cops not only cut short his life,
but they also precluded his wedding that day to his fiancée, Nicole
Paultre. Exactly five months later, a
judge declared the police perpetrators not guilty of any criminal behavior,
causing shock, grief, and resentment among family and community members. I am outraged by the seemingly common and
wanton practice of police violence and murder in this nation's urban
communities, as well as by a judicial system that exonerates killer cops. These actions represent the absolute
disregard for the sanctity of Black life.
Hence, I find myself mentally rehearsing why I have come to resent cops
and the (il)legal order of urban community terrorism they enforce.
Growing to manhood in Los
Angeles during the 1950s, I learned to fear and hate the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD). This resulted from a
combination of experiences, most notably the constant stories that my father, a
Los Angeles County probation officer, told me about how LA cops savagely and
brutally beat Black men brought into custody on charges of violating the law. Since he worked in adult investigations, my
father saw first hand the results of police assaults, as he interviewed their
victims in his capacity as probation officer.
He heard countless stories of racialized and excessive police violence.
One reason my father
recounted these events was to keep me from loitering on Los Angeles streets and
corners with my friends late at night after the curfew. Another reason was his sense of outrage and
resentment that city officials tolerated, and indeed encouraged, such
local-state violence against Black men.
So it was that I, like so many other Black and Latino Angelinos,
developed a longstanding antagonism toward the LAPD. At a relatively early age, I learned that the police, although
sworn to uphold the criminal law, were often men full of lawless impulses.
Black and Latino communities
in big cities across America have long complained about police brutality and
repression. The 1965 Watts uprising, as
well as many other urban revolts during the turbulent 1960s, resulted from the
abuse of police coercive power. Yet,
wealthy and middle-class white Americans ignored these charges of racialized
police terrorism and tyranny until the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King
by LA's "gang in blue" revealed to the world how racial injustice actually is
practiced in the "City of Angels." The
American practice of cultural domination gives currency mainly to white
perspectives of social reality while largely silencing Black points of view. However, the American culture of white
supremacy, notwithstanding, there is no essential relationship between
whiteness and rightness.
"The police, although sworn to uphold the criminal law,
were often men full of lawless impulses."
The order of police
violence, terrorism, and murder directed at Black Americans today takes place
with a systematic viciousness and savagery comparable to the dehumanizing
sadism of white slave-owners, lynchers, and anti-Black rioters during the
periods of chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation. This is because the criminalized image of the Black man as
violent and threatening (along with that of his Latino brothers) is so fixed in
the white American imagination - the Black man is always already guilty of
something - that the most degrading and unwarranted police violence on the
Black man's body is accepted as justifiable.
This accounts for the unrestrained murder of Black men by "gangs in
blue" across this nation.
To be sure, elite white
media and policy managers also demonize Black females (and their Latina
sisters), framing them as prostitutes or morally reprehensible single mothers,
undeserving of any societal concern.
Historically, whites have used negative representations of Blacks to
rationalize the most heinous crimes against Black humanity. In his book, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 UCLA urban historian Eric
Monkkonen demonstrates that as American cities emerged and as chattel slavery
declined in the nineteenth century, Blacks made the transition from chattel
slaves to being characterized by white elites as members of the "dangerous
classes," who were subjected to the coercive power of a developing white urban
police force. Since an anti-Black
society places little or no value on the Black body, cries of racialized injustice
largely go unheard. Therefore, in the
face of societal indifference, incidents of police brutality and murder of
Black men and women occur with increasing frequency.
"Blacks made the transition from chattel slaves to being
characterized by white elites as members of the ‘dangerous classes.'"
Some years ago, the
videotaped incidents of excessive police violence in Inglewood, California,
Oklahoma City, and New York City demonstrated the growing regularity of
anti-Black police murder and terrorism in contemporary American society. Because of Inglewood's close proximity to
Los Angeles, the legal battle surrounding the police assault on sixteen
year-old Donovan Jackson captured national attention for a moment. The incident reminded people of the Rodney
King case a decade earlier. Additionally,
what made the Inglewood situation significant was the demographic shift from
the 1970s through the 1990, as South Central Los Angeles' Black population
moved further west. Hence, formerly
middle and working class white areas, like Westchester and Inglewood, now
contain predominantly middle and working class Black populations. As with Los Angeles during the years of
Mayor Thomas Bradley's regime, Inglewood's political managers are Black, but
the police force remains largely white.
Similar to inner city residents throughout America, large numbers of
Blacks in Los Angeles and Inglewood regard cops as a violent and repressive
occupying force. This reality is
reminiscent of James Baldwin's comments about the New York Police Department's
structure of domination in Nobody Knows
My Name:
"The only way to police a
ghetto is to be oppressive....They represent the force of the white world, and
that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the Black man corralled up here,
in his place. The badge, the gun in the
holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion
become overt....He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in
a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where he is, and is
the reason he walks in twos and threes."
Alternatively, when police
savagely attack or murder Black people - for example, the well-known 1997
torture of Abner Louima and 1999 murder of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD - cops and
their defenders immediately deny any racist motivation and cynically
characterize each event as an "isolated incident." When Black cops are involved, as in the Inglewood assault and the
murder of Sean Bell, the denial of racism's existence is even louder, as if
these cops, as adherents of the police code, could not also view the Black body
as possessing little value. Public
officials (judges, politicians, and police) then legitimize or rationalize
police misconduct. In the face of
public resentment and outrage, former LAPD chief Daryl Gates - whose regime largely,
but unofficially, encouraged lawless and racist police behavior - often sought
to rationalize unrestrained police violence in Black communities as the actions
of a few bad cops. According to him,
such conduct was an aberration. This
has become the common response of city officials. But how should we really view the dramatically increasing numbers
of savage attacks on urban Black residents and the cops who perpetrate them -
as isolated incidents or as systemic repression?
"Cops and their defenders immediately deny any racist
motivation and cynically characterize each event as an ‘isolated
incident.'"
The effort to construct big
city police violence against Blacks as an aberration or as the behavior of
rogue cops masks the culture of racism and tyranny that historically has
characterized the policing of Black and poor communities in America. Los Angeles is a prime example. Under a political regime established by LA's
good government reform movement at the turn of the twentieth century, the mayor
does not appoint the police chief.
Rather, a mayor-appointed police commission selects the chief of
police. Over the years, the police
chief appropriated mounting managerial, political, and coercive power, which
came to rival the mayor's authority. In
the 1980s, this often conflicting dynamic became visible during the leadership
of Thomas Bradley, LA's first Black mayor and a former cop himself, when police
czar Daryl Gates sought to challenge his authority.
Police power and its
concomitant order of violence reached their zenith under one of Daryl Gates'
predecessors, Bill Parker, who in the 1960s established LA's system of police
terrorism that became the model for urban police departments throughout
America. As Joe Domanick reveals in his
book, To Protect and Serve: The LAPD's
Century of War in the City of Dreams, it was the iron-fisted police chief
Bill Parker who built the LAPD into a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant apparatus
of organized male chauvinism that, in judgment-call situations, had a license
to kill. Significantly, the
introduction of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in 1966 set in motion
the increasing militarization of the LA police force, as Christian Parenti
details in Lockdown America: Police and
Prisons in the Age of Crisis.
Taking over as police
commissar in 1978, Gates continued and expanded the essential Parker philosophy
and practice of policing Los Angeles: Give no slack and take no shit from
anyone. Confront and command. Control the streets at all times. Always be aggressive. Stop crimes before they happen. Seek them out. Shake them down. Make
that arrest. Never admit that the
department has done anything wrong.
As LA's cultural, racial,
and class transformation occurred after the 1960s, the LAPD's code of (mis)conduct
took on an increasingly militaristic, racist, and repressive character.
"I see a growing prison-garrison state in which urban
residents will become the targets of mounting police murder and incarceration."
It is against this
background that we need to view mounting incidents of police brutality and
murder of urban Black residents throughout America. Significantly, the order of police violence is neither an
aberration nor limited to rogue cops.
As numerous videotapes have demonstrated over the years, cops do not
operate alone and in isolation. Rather,
they work in a largely autonomous institution that sanctions, and even
encourages, racialized injustice and terrorism. Many cops in large urban centers across America are
representative of the kind of decadence that often characterizes vicious police
behavior; cops literally hate and fear the Blacks and Latinos inhabiting the
communities they seek to control. As
the videotaped incidents of vicious police assaults on Blacks have shown, cops
are willing to do anything in their twisted conception of power to dehumanize
Blacks and other people of color, and to deny them the equal protection of the
law.
William Muir observes in Police: Streetcorner Politicians that
the use of coercive power often corrupts urban cops. Big city police forces are infected with a culture of racism and
violence that historically has sanctioned the savage and brutal treatment of
Black people, other people of color, and the poor. In short, the increasing incidents of wanton police brutality and
murder of Blacks are by no stretch of the imagination "isolated
incidents." Rather, in contemporary
urban America, excessive cop violence and terrorism take place with increasing
regularity!
A colonial mentality, rooted
in chattel slavery and imperialism, has structured the entire history of
policing in urban America. That kind of
thinking and practice needs to be overturned.
An assortment of policy ideas has been advanced in order to reform
police (mis)behavior, including community-based policing, racially balanced
police forces, and more educated cops.
In my judgment, these reforms, even if implemented, are pipe
dreams. For a number of reasons, I am
not optimistic about positive alternatives to an increasing order of police terrorism
in urban America. Rather, I see a
growing prison-garrison state in which urban residents will become the targets
of mounting police murder and incarceration.
First, the so-called war on
drugs during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the incarceration of massive
numbers of young Black and Latino men and woman. Of course, largely denied was the US government's involvement in
the urban drug epidemic in the first place, as Gary Webb exposed in his
important book, Dark Alliance: The CIA,
the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Second, the 9/11 attack
forced the American polity to realize its vulnerability to international
assault, leading governmental elites to set in motion the militarization of
American society. Third, the public
exposure of corporate elite greed, corruption, and fraud is resulting in a
crisis of confidence in America's managerial capitalist political economy. Finally, under increasing media scrutiny for
past corporate corruption, failing imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and arrogant and incompetent leadership, the George W. Bush regime is being
plagued by a deepening public crisis of credibility. Clearly, these dynamics do not constitute a political framework
necessary for overturning the structure and practice of urban police violence
and terrorism.
Therefore, how might
American people respond to these developments?
In the face of political and corporate decadence, nihilism and social
anarchy continue to mount among the exploited and disenfranchised Americans. Fed up with increasing rates of police
brutality, murder, and terrorism, angry and outraged urban residents may have
no alternative but to undertake new strategies of political protest and popular
resistance.
Floyd W. Hayes, III, Ph.D., is senior lecturer a the
Department of Political Science and coordinator of programs and undergraduate
studies at the Center for Africana
Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. He can be contacted
at [email protected].