Abstract
In September 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to raze 85 acres of city-owned forest land and to replace it with a massive new police training facility. The proposed facility, dubbed ‘Cop City’ by organisers who mobilised against it, was backed by Atlanta’s ruling class, but faced widespread community opposition. 1 Before voting in favour of the proposal, council members listened to seventeen hours of public comment from community members who overwhelmingly opposed the project.
The public pointed out a broad range of issues about the proposal: it would further militarise the police, just one year after nationwide uprisings against police violence. It would destroy forest land that is critical to buffering temperatures and preventing flooding. It would invest $90 million of public and private funds into policing, instead of following calls to invest in community safety. If completed, the project would further expose residents to the dual violences of climate disaster and policing, destroying, in the name of public safety, a vital source of genuine public safety.
It’s difficult to make sense of projects like Cop City if one believes that policing is an institution generally designed to promote public safety. Why would a city and its corporate backers pursue such an unpopular and destructive project? How can they justify the destruction of nature in the era of oncoming climate catastrophe?
Those who are looking for answers will find many in Violent Order: essays on the nature of police, an edited collection by scholar-activists David Correia and Tyler Wall that explores not only the police’s role in repressing social movements, but also their role in constructing the harmful conditions that social movements work to transform.
Violent Order is set up in opposition to a deeply ingrained belief held by many that the job of police is to enforce the law, to protect and serve, and to defend ‘us’ against the ‘bad guys’. That when police kill, it’s a necessary outcome given the ‘criminal’ behaviour of the person killed, or an exception to the rule which signals a need for additional training or body cameras (pp. 1–3). Pervasive copaganda, frequent bipartisan declarations of support for policing, an extensive police legitimation academic infrastructure and the police themselves work overtime to create a cultural commonsense that policing is both fundamentally good and fundamentally necessary for the maintenance of life as we know it.
Introducing the collection, Correia and Wall ask what is it that the police actually do? What is their systemic function? What role do they play in the interconnected crises that we are witnessing across the globe? ‘Nature’ in the title, gestures to multiple meanings, probing not only the true nature of police, but also how policing teaches us to understand our own nature, the ways in which police further the capitalist commodification of nature and the role of police in naturalising the unequal status quo.
Three overlapping claims run through the collection: 1) police fabricate order; 2) police organise and commodify nature; and 3) police naturalise both systemic inequality and their own role in maintaining it. These feats are achieved through violence, whether threatened or realised. Policing, the editors argue, is a key stabilising force for capitalist order, maintaining through violence the conditions under which human labour power and natural resources are ‘cheap and reliable, and cheaply and reliably available where and when needed’ – a key requirement of a capitalist system (p. 7). Police aid the commodification of both labour and nature, ‘whether by policing the mobility of the working class or by policing environmental movement challenges to capitalist uses of nature’ (p. 6). And through it all, policing covers its tracks, naturalising the racialised, gendered, classed inequality it sustains by framing policing as the unquestionable precondition for a safe world.
The Thin Blue Line
Wall’s opening chapter on the ‘Thin Blue Line’(TBL) provides one of the book’s theoretical through-lines by exploring the ideological function of policing. The TBL tells us that there are two types of people: predators and prey, monsters and humans – and that civilisation, or life as we know it, is impossible without the police to hold the monsters at bay.
The TBL’s logic is demobilising. It makes abolitionist futures feel impossible. Erasing any analysis of power, it teaches us that people who do bad things do so because they’re bad people, and we will always need police to stop them. The TBL is an invention to ‘naturalize the violence of the racial capitalist order as the necessary and inevitable violence of cops and cages’, described by political prisoner and revolutionary George Jackson as ‘patronizing shit’ (p. 16). However, the TBL also emphasises its own precarity. As Wall notes, it is ‘always thin, perpetually on the brink of being broken or obliterated by bestial hordes, if it were not for the valiant “boys in blue” keeping darkness at bay’ (p. 19). This is the alchemy of policing, powerful enough to transform any scenario into a call for more policing. When ‘crime’ goes down, it’s evidence that policing is working, and that we must double down on a successful strategy. When ‘crime’ goes up, it’s evidence that we need more police.
The historical roots of policing
Despite a mainstream (mis)understanding that police exist to protect public safety, the history of policing shows that they exist to protect power. As sociologist Philip V. McHarris shows in his chapter exploring historical accounts of police in the US, policing is not located in safety, but rather in the maintenance of an order conducive to capital accumulation, racialised labour exploitation, land dispossession and environmental domination.
In the South, McHarris explains, early policing took the form of mostly rural and often loosely organised patrols that worked to catch escaped enslaved people and prevent rebellions. Similar forces in urban centres, such as the Charleston City Guard and Watch (founded in 1783) increasingly professionalised, and, with the abolition of slavery, small towns formalised policing to ‘suppress, intimidate, and control the newly freed Black population and force them into convict leasing and sharecropping’ (pp. 37–38). Police were used to enforce the existing labour regime, control Black people’s movement and enforce segregation. In the North, McHarris recounts how policing similarly began as informal and privately funded ‘night watch patrols to control working-class immigrants and growing unrest among the industrial working class’ (p. 38). The threat of labour strikes and riots prompted the formalisation of public policing to serve the interests of ruling class elites, enforce morality laws and suppress labour organising. McHarris also incorporates the history of colonial policing, surveying the Texas Rangers, established in 1935 and ‘hired to protect the interests of newly arriving white colonists under the Mexican government’ (p. 39). Through ‘violence, intimidation, and political interference’, the Rangers ‘facilitated white colonial expansion by pushing out Indigenous Mexicans’ and worked to suppress Mexican American voter turnout and subverted farmworker movements (p. 39).
While police were initially viewed as corrupt servants of ruling elites, McHarris shows how this began to change as reformers from the 1920s onward emphasised professionalisation, centralisation and bureaucratisation, recasting police as protectors of public safety. But in the following years, the function – if not the description – of policing remained the same. Federal lawmakers opened up massive funding streams, police were deployed to quash urban uprisings during the 1960s, politicians mobilised racialised crime narratives to secure power, courts granted police ever-increasing immunity and police responsibility expanded to immigration control and the War on Terror (pp. 43–44).
Local sites of struggle: extraction, pollution and disinvestment
One of Violent Order’s strengths is its application and nuancing of the collection’s key theme of local sites of struggle. Environmental justice scholar Julie Sze takes us to Kern County, California, a place of extreme violence, both fast and slow. It is fast in that Kern was the county with the highest per capita rates of police murder in the United States in 2015, and has featured longstanding documented patterns of police abuse and extensive use of its K9 unit (police dog units). It is slow in that due to its extensive industrialised agriculture and oil production, Kern featured the worst air pollution in 2016 and is home along with its surrounding area to just 2 per cent of US farmland but 25 per cent of the nation’s pesticides (pp. 56 –59). In Sze’s account, the former (police violence) sustains the latter (an order that relies on ‘energy extraction and labor violence’), underpinning the ‘social and economic order based on racial domination in Kern County’ (p. 56).
In Baltimore, Maryland, Correia paints a similar picture, one in which police maintain an extractive economic and social order through violence, exploring how the mostly Black residents of West Baltimore are both ‘poisoned and policed to death’ (p. 69). Correia begins with the stories of Freddie Gray and Korryn Gaines, both of whom were murdered by the police, and both of whom also suffered lead poisoning as Black children growing up in apartments owned by slumlords – something experienced by tens of thousands of other Baltimore children (p. 71). As Correia explains, Gray’s and Gaines’ stories result from a set of interdependent dynamics: ‘racialized disinvestment, weak or nonexistent oversight and regulation, the lack of affordable housing for poor residents, and a refusal to prosecute Baltimore’s lead slumlords’ (p. 75).
What does it actually mean to say that police enforce and maintain this order? Correia offers helpful insight into how these dynamics of disinvestment, deregulation and exploitation require policing: ‘the political economy of slumlord profitability in West Baltimore requires not only laissez-faire regulation of housing’ but also ‘the intense policing of a population made surplus by the poisoning and disinvestment that underwrite slumlord profitability’ (p. 74). In other words, policing protects the status quo that is as profitable for slumlords as it is disabling and deadly for residents.
Upholding settler colonialism
The collection consistently draws out the centrality of policing to the US settler colonial state. Indigenous scholar Melanie Yazzie takes us to Winslow, Arizona where in 2016, white police officer Austin Shipley shot and killed Navajo Nation citizen Loreal Tsingine just twenty-three seconds after pulling up next to her (p. 127). Protests quickly followed, prompting an investigation which found that ‘Shipley’s actions were not only justified but also in full compliance with the expectations and procedures that police officers are expected to follow in their daily conduct on the job’ (p. 128). Rather than join reformist calls to change expectations of how police might behave, Yazzie affirms the investigation’s conclusions, arguing Shipley’s actions did indeed conform with expectations for police – and that this is an argument for police abolition. Shipley’s actions, Yazzie argues, stand squarely within the legacy of policing meant to control and repress native people – perceived always as insurgent threats against the settler order, and therefore in need of elimination or containment (p. 127).
Repression of social movements
In addition to (or as part of) ‘patrolling a racial and class line essential to bourgeois order,’ police are also tasked with defending against organised social movements – perhaps one of the most severe threats to the existing order (p. 5). Examining the role of police in repressing protests against oil pipelines, Axel González argues that ‘capitalism is and will continue adapting to the climate crisis with nightsticks, handcuffs, Tasers, and rubber and metal bullets’ (p. 87). In the war against antipipeline activism, González’s account shows, ‘capital is waging war on antipipeline activists’ in which ‘police and the law are its soldiers’ (p. 89). González maps part of this war onto the No Bayou Bridge struggle, a campaign waged to stop the construction of a 162-mile oil pipeline running through Louisiana’s wetlands to connect the Bakken oil fields in the northern United States to refineries on the Gulf Coast (p. 90). As the resistance surged, the pipeline owner mobilised both local police forces and private security companies to surveil and violently repress the movement, boosted and backed by legal infrastructure, including Louisiana’s 2018 law targeting climate activists by intensifying penalties for damage or obstruction of ‘critical infrastructure’ (pp. 97–98).
Additional contributions expand the planes on which policing fabricates order. A contribution from security studies scholar Andrea Miller examines the police’s role in land dispossession and upholding racialised property relations through the 1951 creation of the Savannah River Site in Ellenton, South Carolina, which was made possible through the police-backed process of eminent domain enforced against former residents of the area (p. 101). Essays from critical theorist Mark Neocleous and cultural criminologist Travis Linneman explore the ripple impacts of police media. Looking at the television show Dexter and the ‘police trophy shot’ (pictures featuring goods and belongings seized by police), respectively, Neocleous and Linneman highlight how narratives of police power, protection and benevolent order maintenance are consistently reinforced through media.
Conclusion: understanding the function of policing
Returning to the earlier questions Violent Order helps to make sense of projects like Cop City, not by looking at how they may impact on public safety, but rather at how they enhance the police’s ability to maintain existing property, class and race relations. The contributors point us instead toward the role of police: in disciplining Atlanta’s working class and managing the outcomes of severe inequality; in ordering physical space and facilitating gentrification and racialised displacement amidst rapid corporate development; in reinforcing the perception of themselves as protectors of civilisation amidst growing discontent; in controlling and repressing radical social movements; and above all, in maintaining profitable conditions for capital – even, or especially, when the cost is the destruction of forest land in a warming world.
A vital contribution to abolitionist literature, Violent Order is both haunting and comforting. It details the power that we’re up against, but also illuminates the similarities across place that organisers face, and the ability to learn from each others’ struggles. Building on a broad range of abolitionist insights and drawing on local resistance to the capitalist order fabricated by policing, Violent Order’s insights are deeply clarifying for those active in abolitionist struggles, urging us to continually sharpen our analysis of policing’s role in the many interconnected crises we face. And because many contributors highlight various place-based manifestations of order maintenance and resistance, the door remains open to expand and stretch the analysis to other struggles, as well as other scales and institutions.
While a handful of chapters may be less digestible for those without a dictionary nearby, overall the volume is accessible and creatively reiterative across chapters without being repetitive. As the contributors make painfully clear, building the future that anyone on the Left envisions – or even just having a habitable world in the coming years – will require confrontation of police power.
As organiser Mariame Kaba wrote in The New York Times, ‘When you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America’. 2 And as Violent Order clarifies, when a city destroys a forest in the midst of climate disaster to build a massive playground for cops, that too is the logical result of policing in America.
Atlanta, Georgia