Afternoon Comrades.
For as long as this newsletter has been around, even for as long as Black Lodges as an idea has been around I have always been very vocal about the police. Obviously, over the last 20-30 years my reasons and methods of articulation have changed and possibly even improved but here we are. For one, it’s May Day on Wednesday and for the first time I had to have a “chat” about operational security etc with the spawn and then secondly, the images of snipers on University roofs will always get to me, hence this prompt to, once again, talk about cops. It’s not a debate to be clear, and on this subject I offer no room for reform.
The first time I was arrested was just before my 13th birthday, after having thrown a brick in a cops face during a protest to protect a couple of squats in my then neighbourhood. I haven’t counted the times since then when I have had unpleasant run-ins with the cops in whatever country I was in at the time but if I remember correctly, I have been arrested about 7-8 times, usually due to some sort of involvement that challenged the power structures and / or status quo. Admittedly, up until I was about 30 years old I never gave much thought to not accepting any sort of police authority but to be sure, my resentment towards the police has moved beyond the “fuck the police” attitude of a pissed off teenager to a more principled case against the entire reality of the police. Not that this has had any softening affect on my feelings towards these brutish fascists, on the contrary, the ability to articulate a clear case against their existence has only sharpened my anger.
Again, over the last 20 years alone there has been enough research published that unequivocally calls for the idea of the police to be abolished and I am not saying anything new here, yet, it has to be said. The reality of the police displayed, yet again, in the home of free speech and the brace, only made the decision to put this into words more urgent, but to be entirely clear, this is not US specific, this is a global issue and one at the heart of the work we all have to do.
The police exist purely for the protection of the social order enforced onto everyone by the ruling classes and their only job is to protect them, their laws and their property. There are no good cops and the police is never on your side. If you are arguing, fighting, doing what needs to done to make life better for everyone the police will be in your way, the will harass you at best and disgustingly kill you at worst. The police cannot be allies in struggles for reform, let alone revolution, in any way; for purposes of organizing and strategy, we must always bear in mind that the police are, simply put, our enemies.
That’s truly all that needs to be said here but let’s get into it.
The most explosive urban uprisings in recent memory, have one thing in common: they were sparked by a widely reviled act of police violence- usually in response to underlying dehumanizing conditions set in place by the ruling classes- from Bezos to your shift manager, politicians to your landlord. This connection between police brutality and sudden acts of mass resistance is not new: think of Stonewall or the 1967 uprising in Detroit or the rebellion in Los Angeles in 1992 following the beating of Rodney King. We must see the police as a product of capitalism and class society. This helps us see why the function of the police is, and always has been, to serve as an armed force of repression for the ruling classes in order to maintain and reproduce the so-called order of a vastly unequal, racist, and undemocratic world.
Secondly, once we see the function of policing is the violent enforcement of unequal social relations, we must discard the conventional idea that the police exist to protect and serve, i.e. to fight crime and keep ordinary people safe. Contrary to the way they’re often portrayed in popular culture, the cops do a miserable job of preventing crime. Indeed, cops play little to no useful role for the working masses of society; they only provide a measurable benefit to the ruling class. I was tempted to include a massive list of statistics here to proof the fact that the police as an institution does not prevent crime, in the same way that CCTV does not make any city safe, but you know all those.
For anyone still unsure on the subject: the police should not be seen as part of the working class. This a highly manufactured illusion created by the unholy marriage of Media and Police PR departments - who, especially in the US, have bigger budgets than most tech companies these days- and copaganda is something truly worth unlearning, and yes, that includes Die Hard. In any case, movements of the working class and the oppressed should afford them no solidarity. They should not be understood as a force that can be, or should be, won to our side in struggle in any capacity. The most effective stance that working class movements can take towards police is one of fundamental antagonism.
In regards to the debate of reform, defunding etc: the ultimate goal is the abolition of policing itself, we must grasp that nothing short of a social revolution that breaks the machinery of the existing state could achieve this task. Inequality requires its keepers, its enforcers: you simply can’t have capitalist exploitation without a state that has a repressive apparatus to keep the direct producers from going into open revolt.
The ruling class will not be convinced or tricked into giving them up willingly. This doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t fight for reforms in the here and now that aim to curtail the power of the police. But we should fight for such reforms without any illusions that we could reform our way to a just, non-racist version of policing. Indeed, the kinds of reforms we fight for, and the way we fight for them, must be informed by a clear analysis of who the police truly exist to protect and serve.
The fact is there is absolutely nothing the police is good for that cannot be done in ways that do no involve violence. Again, entire libraries have been written on what can exist in place of the police, but until we direct our collective anger and oppression against the oppressors, the violent, corrupt, organized gangs in uniforms will exist to do the oppressing.
When you remove the violent agents of the state from your reality, your “rights” transcend from concept to reality. In other words, it creates a reality in which “conflict” is dealt with via communication and what is “right” and not what is legal. Quite a wonderful feeling.
With that, fuck the police. Well and truly, always and forever. Thank you for your time, attention and support. I remain yours, without compromise,
V.