Today for the #ScholarStrike I'm going to do a 🧵on the history of policing in the U.S. We can't understand how we got to where we are with policing today without going back to this history.
First, policing is not and has never been about public safety or fighting "crime." The history of policing Is one of colonization, racial domination, xenophobia, and labor control. Police are enforcers of a particular vision of citizenship and nation. #ScholarStrike
Police are less concerned with eliminating crime and violence and more concerned with enforcing social hierarchies and enabling the smooth functioning of both the state and capital. #ScholarStrike
The police are representatives of the State in the everyday lives of people. They enforce the will of the state and are empowered to use violence (at their discretion) up to and including death in order to enforce the "rule of law," which is determined by the elite #ScholarStrike
The police emerged informally from watches and patrols. In the South, these watches and patrols were about controlling Black mobility and coercing Black labor. We know these as Slave Patrols. #ScholarStrike
Slave Patrols deputized white men to protect the rule of law & private property. In other words, white men were enlisted to protect the institution of slavery. All white men were expected to participate in these patrols whether formally or informally. #ScholarStrike
Slave patrols, and white citizens generally, were expected to enforce Slave Codes, which sought to stop Black rebellions as well as attempts to escape to freedom. Brutal violence, backed by law, was essential to enforcement of the Slave Codes. #ScholarStrike
This is where we see the emergence of the "whiteness of the police" to draw from @nikhil_palsing. Whiteness become consolidated and sutured to law, while Blackness became criminalized as Khalil Gibran Muhammad has shown. This has persisted post-emancipation. #ScholarStrike
While the roots of policing in anti-Blackness and the unequal power relations forged by slavery must be central to our understanding, questions of colonialism and capital are equality crucial and often intersect with the history of slavery and its afterlife. #ScholarStrike
The military, vigilantes, and newly formed police forces helped grease the wheels of westward expansion as Anglo settlers dispossessed indigenous and Mexican populations of their lands, particularly during the mid and late 19th century #ScholarStrike
State-sanctioned violence either carried out or facilitated by law enforcement helped to cemented settler geographies. Monica Munoz Martinez and Kelly Lytle Hernandez show this in their respective works #ScholarStrike
This is also the case for overseas U.S. expansion. For instance, in Puerto Rico the installation of a military police force (eventually civilian police force) was central to the consolidation of colonial rule. Policing in this sense is about pacification. #ScholarStrike
Scholars Julian Go, Alfred McCoy, and Stuart Schrader have done incredible jobs pointing to the ways in which policing is central to the U.S. imperial project around the world. #ScholarStrike
Now, we've spoken about the how policing emerged in the South out of slavery and the West out of settler colonial expansion. But what about the industrial North? #ScholarStrike
Much like in the South and West, policing in the North is about managing/disciplining racialized labor and ensuring the smooth functioning of the state and capital. As Sidney Harring puts it in his classic text, it's about "policing a class society." #ScholarStrike
The police from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the first World War played a key role in capital accumulation by controlling labor struggle and managing the growth of the industrial working class, which was a largely immigrant working class. #ScholarStrike
The late 19th century was a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization. As a result, it was also a period of intense labor conflict. There were thousands of strikes & police routinely intervened with labor on behalf of the ruling and capitalist classes. #ScholarStrike
Police functioned as violent anti-strike forces on behalf of corporations – guarding company property, dispersing striking workers and supporters, protecting scabs, arresting strikers for “disorderly conduct,” and beating workers to discourage them from striking. #ScholarStrike
Police engaged in “mass terrorism” (Harring) against striking workers. Workers were chased, beaten, and harassed by police. Hundreds were shot and many killed as police tried to break strikes and manage working class rebellion. The most famous example is Haymarket. #ScholarStrike
Violently policing labor strikes is probably the most obvious example of policing class struggle, but police managed the workers in ways that criminalized entire communities and intervened in everyday life in working class communities. #ScholarStrike
The police functioned as a socializing & disciplining force 4 the working class. They did this through public order policing that dealt with bodily comportment (drunkenness, fighting, etc.) as well as anti-vagrancy laws. Police ensured you were a proper worker. #ScholarStrike
I share all this history because it highlights the fact that policing is a *structuring* component of all of our lives whether we are the policed or those who "benefit" from police power. It has shaped countless aspects of our lives & relationships w/ one another. #ScholarStrike
When we are aware of this history it also forces us to seriously ask whether the police can be reformed. If this is its foundation, how can we move forward and expect different, less violent outcomes? #ScholarStrike
We need to be thinking alongside abolitionists who imagined ways of being in the world and embodiments of freedom and safety that did not rely upon the enactment of violent exclusions. #ScholarStrike
And with that I'll just say we deserve and must fight for a world that makes abolition possible. And as scholars, we should begin at home, so to speak, and join the mvmt to get cops of campus so we can keep our students, colleagues, and neighbors safe. #ScholarStrike
Okay, fin. I'll share some additional links to resources later in the day, but looking forward to learning and thinking with you all during the #ScholarStrike
