Of Acorns and Martyrs: Reno 911, Police Violence, and the Prospect of Reform

By Owen Symes

Cop shows have been around since TVs first gained popularity in the 1950s. From the 1970s onwards, they’ve weighed heavily upon the popular imagination, making up around 20% of the scripted output of major US television networks even as recently as 2020. From the beginning, shows like Dragnet, Police Story, Law & Order, or SWAT have often advertised their authenticity, claiming to entertain audiences with at least somewhat plausible or realistic stories. But most of these shows are little more than copaganda. Despite the occasional episode involving police misconduct, only a few procedurals have focused on criticizing the police, most notably The Wire in the early 2000s. But as recent news has amply demonstrated, the most realistic cop show isn’t that prestigious HBO drama, but rather an oft-overlooked mockumentary that began airing around the same time: Reno 911.

Bad Boys, Good Cops

If you’re not aware, Reno 911 began as a parody of the reality TV show Cops, a pioneer of the genre which presented audiences with half-hour episodes filled with vignettes of officers out on patrol. In the world of Cops, the streets are usually dark, the civilians uncooperative and suspicious, the law enforcers competent, knowledgeable, worldly, sometimes even philosophical. The shaky footage and pitch-black vistas of the show are given meaning by the explanatory narration of the police themselves. Their perspective is the truth.

Reno 911 took the same cinematic techniques employed by Cops but used them to skewer, rather than valorize, the police. Instead of presenting the cops with some baseline of professional competence, as even critical dramas like The Wire typically do, Reno 911 deflates its cops, bringing them down from the mythic cultural pedestal they’ve occupied for nearly a century. In so doing, the show highlights aspects of policing that we rarely see on US television: the stupidity, cupidity, timidity so common in real departments. Nothing illustrates this better than the opening scene of the pilot episode.

While on evening patrol, deputy Garcia hears on the radio that there is an officer down and shots fired. He flares his lights and speeds to the address provided. Arriving on scene, Garcia makes for the entrance and, gun drawn but without backup, lunges into the domicile. He shouts into the darkness, “Sheriff’s department!” The lights come on and we see a wall of cops starting to yell Surprise! It’s clearly a birthday party for Garcia. Already keyed up for action, however, Garcia discharges his weapon and hits an officer. The other cops look at their fallen comrade, then back at Garcia, then begin to scan the room awkwardly as they murmur surprise. The camera zooms in on deputy Jones, who sheepishly radios: “We have an officer down…”

The cops of Reno 911 are fundamentally fearful creatures: afraid of losing respect at least as much as they are of losing their lives. Recent news out of Okaloosa County, FL and Washington, DC has made the reality of this fear abundantly, maddeningly, clear.

Acorn Comes Into Frame

As detailed by a recently-released police report on the incident, early on the morning of November 12, 2023, police arrived at a woman’s house in the Florida suburbs responding to a call about a missing car and a threatening boyfriend. Soon after the police arrived at the woman’s house, the boyfriend appeared. He offered no resistance while he was searched. He was then handcuffed and placed inside the vehicle of one deputy Hernandez, a non-combat military veteran who had recently become a cop.

When news arrived that the girlfriend’s car had been found, Hernandez began moving back to his SUV in order to search the boyfriend again. As he later recounted, Hernandez approached his vehicle and heard:

…what I believe would be a suppressed weapon off to the side. Definitely heard this noise. At the same time, I felt an impact on my right side, like upper torso area…Um, so I feel the impact. My legs just give out. Um, I don't know where I'm hit. I think I'm hit.

He then summersaulted away from his vehicle in a desperate attempt to gain some distance from the shooter. Now on his back, Hernandez panicked like a flailing turtle, drew his service pistol, and discharged the entire magazine into his own vehicle.

Nearby, the experienced and long-serving sergeant Roberts saw Hernandez fall, saw his terror-stricken face, and heard him screaming that he had been shot. Without taking any time to understand what was happening around her, Roberts immediately went for her gun. She fumbled the quickdraw, accidentally dislodging her spare magazine from its pouch. As it struck the ground, she began firing haphazardly in the direction she thought the shooter was. Afraid of being struck by friendly fire, Hernandez crawled to cover.

When the smoke cleared, the officers belatedly began to assess the situation. Miraculously, the hapless boyfriend, still handcuffed inside the vehicle as it was being pulverized, survived unscathed. No other civilians (or police) were harmed during the fusillade. Medical staff later confirmed that Hernandez had never suffered a gunshot wound. What had happened?

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During the subsequent investigation, Hernandez gave his statement and was allowed to watch his bodycam footage. Then he was shown a still photograph from that footage. Investigators pointed out a tiny object striking the officer’s vehicle. Gears turned within the deputy, then clicked into place, prompting him to ask a vital clarifying question: “Acorn?”

An Investigator responded with appropriate brevity: “Acorn.”

Amid stutters and pauses, Hernandez tried but failed to articulate a response, eventually admitting that it was possible that an acorn had made the inciting noise. An investigator followed up with a question I’m sure every civil servant dreads: was Hernandez, “…in general…familiar with the sound of acorns striking vehicles?” He answered in the affirmative.

Investigators now offered him a chance to watch the footage again, that he might analyze the evidence anew and judge if the acorn had in fact been the mainspring of his actions. He declined.

Deputy Hernandez resigned from the department before the investigation concluded. Ultimately, the investigators found that Hernandez had acted unreasonably. They also determined, however,  that sergeant Roberts, the other officer who discharged their weapon at the scene, had behaved within reason. The investigating officers concluded that Roberts had acted under the impression that another officer had just been shot, thus justifying the (haphazard and panicked) use of her firearm.

Why Don’t FireFighters Carry Guns?

On February 25th, 2024, Air Force member Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in protest against the Gaza Genocide. Having just received a call about potentially “distressing” behavior, uniformed Secret Service officers were already on the scene when Bushnell began his protest. The Secret Service response was captured by Bushnell’s livestream.

The video begins with Bushnell matter-of-factly explaining that he is about to engage in an extreme act of protest. Having done so, he calmly sets his camera down, walks into center frame, douses himself in accelerant, and lights himself on fire, yelling Free Palestine. Off screen, we hear responding officers trying to communicate with him. Once the flames appear, they begin shouting that a man is on fire, that they need fire extinguishers. But we also hear someone repeatedly yelling for the young protester – already aflame – to get on the ground. We hear this over and over: Get on the ground! Get on the ground!

Officers then appear on camera. One rapidly engages his extinguisher, befogging the area. Despite the cloud of extinguishant, Bushnell’s fire still rages. Another officer appears on camera with his service weapon drawn and pointed at the protester. As officers move around Bushnell – and through this Secret Service agent’s field of fire – we hear further pleas for extinguishers. An officer, I think it’s the one who’s been calling for extinguishers the whole time, finally exclaims, “I don’t need guns. I need fire extinguishers!”

When later asked to comment on the officer pointing his weapon at a dying man, the Secret Service told a journalist at Reason: "The armed officer was ensuring the safety of the two Secret Service officers who were working to extinguish the fire and render aid to the individual." Once again, the police had judged their own actions to be reasonable.

“Get some cops to protect our policemen!”

- Intertitle from Buster Keaton’s 1922 short Cops

From their origins in the 19th century up through the 1920s, cops were not respected in the popular imagination. They only achieved a degree of social respect in the 1930s thanks to PR campaigns by the likes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and LAPD chief William Parker, with the cooperation of radio and TV producers like Phillips Lord and Jack Webb. Despite this new-found respectability, however, cops could never shake their fear of losing status. As a group, they remain afflicted by a Napoleon Complex, wanting to be treated as professionals on par with doctors and lawyers but fearful that people will cease to honor their authority and expertise. We see this anxiety manifest in the innumerable small indignities and petty punishments meted out at traffic stops and metro turnstiles. Sometimes we see it explode in bouts of comic farce or deadly violence.

In achieving professional credibility, cops have built for themselves another world, one where they are the put-upon sheep dogs defending the ungrateful and ignorant sheep from the wolves of society. So whenever embarrassments or fiascos occur, many cops fall back on the an refrain: we have tough jobs; it’s a dangerous world out there; we’re doing the best we can with the meager resources you give us! Secret Service communications chief Anthony Guglielmi echoed this rhetoric when he defended the February 25th response, claiming: "[T]his situation was unpredictable and occurred rapidly. In that instant, the level of threat to the public and the embassy was unknown, and our officers acted swiftly and professionally." The swiftness of the response is undeniable, but it can only be characterized as professional if we take that to mean, as the police themselves do, that cops have a primary professional duty to defend themselves from any threat, regardless of its actual potential to inflict harm upon them, and regardless of the cost to the public.

Reformers, well-meaning but naive, recognize some of the shortcomings of police and recommend improved training, stricter use-of-force policies, better equipment. These reforms are stillborn, however, because cops don’t take them seriously. They can’t. Simply put, they don’t think that outsiders are qualified to judge police behavior. They’re happy to accept additional funding and resources, and maybe the savvy police executive will tow the reformist line during budget meetings, but once they have a greater share of the budget, cops will invariably do whatever they want. More money for reform simply results in more cops to protect policemen. 

Right after World War 2, sociologist William A Westley imbedded himself in the department of a mid-sized US city for about a year. The book that resulted, Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality, remains a seminal work in the study of police culture. He identified the police as a society in miniature, with its own customs and its own moral code. Paramount to that code was – and remains – a determination to repel critics and outsiders. Thus, he observed, while most cops did not engage in violence, and a surprising number actively tried to avoid it, the brutes and the thugs that did exist were given a wide berth. Sadism was met with silence, badges deployed as a shield wall against the slings and arrows of ignorant critics.

Westley summarized the world of the cop:

The policeman’s most significant contact is with the law-evading public, which defines him as a malicious and dangerous intruder into their business and acts accordingly. His resolution of this problem includes an insistence on his will and on obtaining respect, by the use of violence, if necessary…He is exposed to public immorality. He becomes cynical. His is a society emphasizing the crooked, the weak, and the unscrupulous. Accordingly, his morality is one of expediency and his self-conception one of a martyr. [Emphasis mine]

Deputy Hernandez, the yet-unnamed Secret Service officer, and all the other members of that copper fraternity are given power, a gun, and a chip on their shoulder, so to go out and do battle with the demons of their own mind and making: with the hiss of acorns and the crackle of a true martyr’s flames. Our stories often bolster this state of affairs. They can do better. Reno 911 showed us how.

On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way

(Photo taken by Jordan Gale for The New York Times)

By John Kamaal Sunjata

The United States is a project of both anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. From the founding of this white supremacist settler-colonial state, Black people have endured 250 years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of “separate but equal” legal doctrine, and thirty-five years of explicitly anti-Black housing laws among other insidious forms of de jure and de facto racial discrimination. The racial capitalist state and its policing functionaries employ state violence as a means of containing and controlling the working-class, especially racialized and colonized domestic peripheries. The late political prisoner and revolutionary ancestor George Jackson (1971, p. 99) writes the following:

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. …Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.

The United States is a punitive carceral state with 25 percent of the world’s population behind bars despite comprising only 5 percent of the world’s population (Collier, 2014, p. 56; Hayes, 2017, p. 17). The American criminal so-called “justice” system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile prisons, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. settler-colonies (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). U.S. incarceration is disproportionately racialized, targeting Black and brown people who represent 60 percent of the incarcerated (Marable, 2015). If Black and Latino people were incarcerated at the same rate as whites, their imprisoned and jailed populations would decline by almost 40 percent (NAACP, 2019). The problems are not rooted in crime but policing itself which constructs, (re)produces, and institutes white supremacy and anti-Blackness through racial capitalism. The police have been waging asymmetric domestic warfare on Black people, encircling, and capturing their prospects for self-determination and self-actualization. From the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 to the murder of Marcus Deon Smith of 2018 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the only solution for Black liberation is abolishing the police and freeing what is essentially a semi-colony of peripheral peoples.

This essay has five sections. This first section discusses the problems of policing. The second section explains the history of U.S. policing and its development. The third section lays out the failure of liberal reforms to grapple with policing as an institution. The fourth section argues the case for police abolition. The last section concludes.

The History of U.S. Policing

The earliest origins of policing in the United States evolved from directly slavery, settler-colonialism, and brutal control of an emergent industrial working-class (Vitale, 2017, p. 34). The organization of police forces within the United States was modeled after that of England. In the early colonial forms, policing was informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch” or private-for-profit policing, also known as the “Big Stick.” These policing models had little with fighting crime and more to do with “managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble” (Vitale, 2017, p. 35). Strike-breaking and labor surveillance were among the most important services provided by private-for-profit policing, the Pinkerton’s were among the more notable agencies (Spitzer, 1979, p. 195). The “Big Stick” dissolved when 1) company towns declined, 2) labor costs grew more socialized, 3) organized labor grew in its militancy and strength, and 4) major changes happened in U.S. socioeconomic infrastructure (1979, p. 195).

The watch system was not particularly effective at halting crime as watchmen were often drunk or asleep on duty (Potter, 2013, p. 2). As a method of process improvement came the implementation of a system of constables—official law enforcement officers—who were normally paid according to the warrants they served (2013, p. 2). Informal policing models persisted until 1838 when Boston implemented a centralized municipal police force based on the London Metropolitan Police force and New York followed suit in 1845 (Vitale, 2017, p. 36). The main functions of the London Metropolitan Police Force were “protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force” (Vitale, 2017, p. 36).

In Southern states, modern U.S. policing developed from the “Slave Patrol” (Potter, 2013, p. 3; Vitale, 2017, p. 46). Slave patrols were tasked with developing terroristic infrastructure designed to prevent slave revolts (Hadden, 2001, p. 20; Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP,  2019). They were vested with the power to “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” taking up slaves who did not have a ticket from their masters (2001, p. 20). The slave patrols could forcibly enter any private property[ii] solely on the suspicions of harboring runaway slaves (Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP, 2019). The slave patrols had three primary functions: 1) chase, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners; 2) organize terror squads to deter slave rebellions, and; 3) maintain legal and extralegal disciplinary measures for slaves who violated plantation rules to produce desired behavior (Potter, 2013, p. 3; NAACP, 2019).

White people had “tremendous social anxiety” about large groups of unaccompanied slaves and free Blacks intermingling. The police responded by regulating their behavior through the “constant monitoring and inspection of the [B]lack population” (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). After the Civil War, slave patrols were replaced by modern Southern police departments who controlled freed slaves who were now entering the workforce which was primarily agricultural (Potter, 2013, p. 3). The work of the modern police force included enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws and denying Black people equality de jure and de facto (2013, p. 3). The primary concern during this period was forcing Black people into sociopolitical docility (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). More than a response to crime, the police are for instituting a social order that is safe for capital penetration for the sake of capital accumulation, especially from the Black masses (Marable, 2015, p. 94). Capital accumulation requires a stable and orderly workforce for a predictable order of business (Potter, 2013, p. 4). The racial capitalist state, therefore, absorbs the costs of the private sector, protecting its enterprises. The environment must be made safe for capital through an organized system of social control (Potter, 2013, p. 4; Vitale, 2017, p. 34; Marable,  2015, p. 95). Under a system of racial capitalism[i], Black people are among the most brutalized by the carceral state.

The Failure of Liberal Reforms

Liberal efforts at reforming the police have largely been adject failures mostly because liberals misunderstand the role of the police. They ignore that policing itself is an inherently anti-Black institution that is premised on the repression of the domestic Black periphery for the purposes of capital penetration for capital accumulation. The role of the police has served to protect white supremacy and wealth creation for white people while denying Black people essential human rights (Vitale, 2017, p. 33). In the face of 400 years of anti-Black policing institutions that have, through every evolution, maintained a systemic logic of settler-colonialism that relegates the Black masses to a semi-colony within white America, liberals have proposed more training, more diversity, and community policing (Vitale, 2017, p. 33; Samudzi & Anderson, 2018,  p. 13; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45).

The push for more police training is well-intentioned but it misses the point. Whenever a Black person is killed by police, a common refrain from liberal reformers is “improve use-of-force training.” If these same reformers were around during slavery, there is no doubt they would have called for slave masters to employ more ethical whip deployment techniques. Despite the racial bias training that many officers have undergone, researchers have found that outcomes remain unchanged with respect to racial disparities in traffic stops and marijuana arrests (Vitale, 2017, p. 8). Racist policing is not merely a matter of individual bigotry but institutionalized racism. Asking for increased training of police so police learn “restraint” ignores how the police already exercise restraint against populations that are not marginalized and not targeted. The Capitol Hill riots were illustrative of the police’s ability to show remarkable restraint. The mostly white rioters were not subjected to nearly as much force as Black protestors are for nominally peaceful protests (Henderson & Alexander, 2021). Any training that justifies the institution of policing will only strengthen its white supremacist and anti-Black logics, even if there is a rhetorical shift from “Warrior mentality” to “Guardian mentality.”

Another common liberal reform to policing involves diversity hires, in hopes this will result in communities of color being treated with “greater dignity, respect, and fairness” (Vitale, 2017, p. 11). There is no evidence that diversifying police forces affects, much less reduces, their use of force (Friedrich,  1977; Garner, Schade, Hepburn, & Buchanan, 1995; Brown & Frank, 2006;  Lawton, 2007). This tactic of reform is even more insidious because it is a method of counterinsurgency through promiscuous inclusion (Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45). Through political warfare against the domestic Black periphery, the racial capitalist state seeks to (neo)colonize its colonized subjects within their own communities.

Diversity is a tool for manufacturing credibility, increasing external institutional legitimacy without dramatically changing internal institutional formations or technologies of repression (2021, p. 45). Diversity changes the presentation of the white supremacist order, but it does not change its outcome: domestic warfare (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13; Rodríguez,  2021, p. 51). White supremacy is a multicultural enterprise: just because the beneficiaries of the racial-colonial order are primarily white does not preclude the use of semi-colonized peoples to accomplish white supremacist ends. Diversity hires will not solve the problems of policing, but they will ensure the white supremacy runs through a sepia filter.

Liberal reformers may present “community policing” as possible reform and prima facie, it sounds reasonable. Who would not want neighborhood persons, known and respected by the communities they live, as officers? The answer to that question maybe someone who understands the role and the institution of policing. Police are tasked with criminalizing disorderly conduct, using up to and including lethal force, and responding to populist resistance with state-sanctioned assertiveness. This is well illustrated in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina by its City Council. At a Greensboro City Council meeting from July 31, 2020, the members of the City Council spoke favorably of community policing. Councilwoman Marikay Abuzaiter is on record saying, “[I]f we ever did consider incentivizing [police officers to live in the neighborhoods they work]. I would think the Chief would need a big raise in his police budget because you are looking at money there.” In the same session, Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said:

In reading articles about ‘community policing,’ it never emphasizes resident, it always talked about relationships. And we can start to build relationships, so we can eradicate this distrust in my community because right now, a lot of people I talk to in my community see a police car and their hair stands up on their neck. So, let’s start to work on that. Build that trust, and if somebody moves in the neighborhood? Great, that’s fantastic. …Let’s spend our resources where we get the most bang for our buck. As community talks about more investment in community problems, let’s do that.

It was certainly admirable that Councilwoman Sharon Hightower wanted to “eradicate distrust” and “build relationships,” but the solutions to the problems for the domestic Black periphery of Greensboro are rooted in anti-Black racism and racial capitalism more broadly, not a lack of police presence. What tools do the police possess for “community”? Punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing (Vitale, 2017, p. 16). Community policing is only possible as a solution if the police do not have police powers. Attempts at community policing, as demonstrated by the Greensboro City Council members, prioritizes giving more resources to the police to live in neighborhoods than giving resources directly to the marginalized members of the communities. Community policing does not empower the domestic Black periphery, but it strengthens the tools of repression and suppression on the part of the police by increasing their proximity to the territories they occupy.

Recently, the #8CantWait campaign has gathered significant support from liberal reformers who wish to address “police brutality.” It is a set of ideas from the nonprofit Campaign Zero, with policy proposals such as ban chokeholds, change reporting standards for use of force incidents, require police officers to warn before they shoot, and more (Murray, 2020). The #8CantWait campaign is not trying to solve racist policing, it is trying to reduce police killings by 72 percent (2020). Mayor Nancy Vaughan endorsed the #8CantWait proposals (Greensboro City Council, 2020):

I have been looking at some resolutions, I have been looking at one from the city of Memphis who is codifying the #8CantWait, we are looking at making it for the City of Greensboro. It has not been finalized but I would like the City Council to look at, once we get it all written up for the City of Greensboro, passing a resolution for the #8CantWait. I don’t want to wait until [the] next meeting because it’s quite a ways [sic] out, so maybe we could have a meeting and a work session because our next meeting is quite a ways away and the #8CantWait and I don’t think we should wait.

After a similar comment from Councilwoman Sharon Hightower, Greensboro Police Chief Brian L. James responded, “In reference to the #8CantWait and looking at that, we are almost there with some of the things that I have recently [done] and some of the things that I did previously as well as our regular policies and there’s one on the #8CantWait that I would like to have some conversation with y’all around the specific wording…” This underscores not only the uselessness of the #8CantWait campaign but the overall failure of liberal reforms to produce meaningful structural change.

The Argument

The concrete historicity of the United States’ state-imposed, state-promoted, and state-tolerated anti-Black racial-colonial violence and white supremacist domination has perpetuated a consistent and persistent situation of Black devalorization, disinvestment, devastation, destruction, and dislocation. White supremacy articulates and structures the American polity; race as a social construct articulates and structures every social relation and institution. This reality produces a domestic Black periphery, an underclass—a subproletariat—that exists as mere residents of a settler-colony (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 6). The Black community itself exists as semi-colony within the United States wherein the police are an occupying army (Allen, 1969).

The police have consistently represented (and erected) institutional barriers to Black agency, equality, self-determination, and political expression. That is because policing within the United States is inherently white supremacist and extends the logics of racial-capitalism and anti-Blackness throughout the political economy. With the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, slavery was only abolished as “except as punishment for crime [emphasis added]” (Gilmore, 2020). Black people have been subjected to targeted police surveillance, coercion, force, and incarceration. Slavery was never abolished, it was reformed.

For the domestic Black periphery, the American carceral state and its functionaries have always been in a state of permanent asymmetrical warfare against them (Vitale,  2017, p. 27; Burden-Stelly, 2020, p. 8; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 42). James Baldwin compared policing Black communities to settler-colonial occupation (Baldwin, 1966):

And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. … Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.

Black people are not citizens, we are residents of settler-colonial occupation. Black lives do not matter under a regime of racial capitalism and ironically enough, Black people were at our most valuable (i.e. most insulated from public executions and imprisonment) when we were legal chattel. In that sense, doing irreparable damage to property-in-chattel was bad for business and few slave patrollers wanted to foot the bill (Marable, 2015, p. 97). A citizen would have a Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, but the residents of the domestic Black periphery can be legally and extralegally murdered by police with impunity (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 14; Briond, 2020).

The regime of racial capitalism has at its heart, private property ownership, an institution fiercely protected by the carceral state and its settler-colonial agents in policing. Racial capitalism reproduces and buttresses itself and the white supremacist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019, p. 44). Race-neutral policies themselves have been used to both “discredit and rationalized practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000, p. 106). Hence why white supremacy and the anti-Black order it entails can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris, 1994, p. 759). The earliest origins of property rights are rooted in racial domination and the interactions between race and private property have played a critical role in subordinating the domestic Black periphery within the American political economy (Harris C. , 1993, p. 1714). Whiteness itself, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination over non-white others (Mumm, 2017, p. 103). Whiteness is valorized and private property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014, p. 238; Bhandar & Toscano,  2015, p. 8). That is why in American society it is perfectly acceptable for white people to kill Black people in defense of private property; however, the domestic Black periphery can never destroy private property in response to the murder of a Black person. Blackness itself represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession (Burden-Stelly, 2020).

The domestic Black periphery exists at the nexus of indispensability and disposability (Burden-Stelly, 2020), subhumanity and superhumanity. The technologies of white supremacy and their accompanying legal strictures and structures reify white supremacist ideologies into the carceral state. Black people represent 28 percent of all people killed by police in 2020 despite being 13 percent of the United States population (Sinyangwe, 2021). Black people are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people are, and Black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed as well (2021). This demonstrates that “[a]t any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class” (Briond, 2020).

Freedom for the domestic Black periphery poses an existential threat to white supremacy as a political economy within the United States because “free[ing] Black people necessitates a complete transformation and destruction of this settler state” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13). The United States cannot exist without the predominant systems of domination and oppression of Black people; it cannot exist without the hyper-policing and hyper-regulation of Blackness. For an internal semi-colony to be free across a geospatial territory, it must be decolonized. For an enslaved people to be free, they must not reform slavery’s conditions but abolish it in its totality. Police abolition is but one step, but a necessary step, in the Black liberation struggle.

Conclusion

The domestic Black periphery can never know freedom so long as policing exists within this settler-colonial state. So long as the Black masses exist as mere residents, citizens in name only, as a semi-colony of white America, constantly surveilled and brutalized by arms of the state, the United States will exist. The United States as a carceral nation begets anti-Black oppressive systems and institutions and that is best exemplified through the police, who act as an occupying army in Black territories, rather than guardians within Black communities. The ideological resistance to police abolition within Greensboro is in part informed by the “racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage” (Briond, 2020).

There is a Hobbesian assumption that the domestic Black periphery will descend into “the state of nature” unless they are constantly patrolled, surveilled, and policed according to the logics of settler-colonial occupation. The underlying fear has been a constant feature of white supremacist anxieties, a justification for ceaseless instances of anti-Black violence by police who see Blackness as a synthesis of subhumanity and superhumanity incarnate. The amazing feat of political economy has been the militarization of police, the multiculturalism of white supremacy via diversifying the police force, and the escalation of wanton violence against semi-colonized subjects. The central contradiction of the United States is settler-colonialism, the structural location of the domestic Black periphery as simultaneous indispensable and disposable. If Black masses are semi-colonized, the solution is decolonization. If slavery was merely reformed, slavery must be abolished in all its iterations. The U.S. police are the representation and manifestation of modern-day slave patrols. For these reasons and others, the police must be abolished in their entirety and other carceral institutions as well.

Bibliography

Allen,   R. L. (1969). Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History.  Trenton: Africa World Press.

Baldwin, J.   (1966, July 11). Report from Occupied Territory. Nation, pp. 39-43.

Bhandar, B.,   & Toscano, A. (2015). Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction. Radical Philosophy, 8-17.

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[i] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalorized and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[ii] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

We Have To Stop Valorizing Black Cops

By Mary Retta

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

The purpose of policing—to jail and kill Black folks—remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Policing in America is facing a PR crisis. Following the May 25th murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the term “defund the police” has become a rallying cry for thousands across the country. Six months later, however, America has not defunded its police force––and in fact, has in some cases taken steps to give police departments even more money. Instead, police forces across America have taken an insidious approach: painting their departments in blackface.

After the January 6th Trump riot at the Capitol building , Yoganda Pittman, a Black woman, was named the new Chief of Capitol Police. Her appointment followed the resignation of former Chief Steven Sund and the arrest and firing of several white police officers who were found to be in attendance at the MAGA riot. Pittman’s appointment appeased many liberals who falsely believe that allowing Black folks to infiltrate or run law enforcement agencies will lead to higher levels of safety for Black Americans. The termination of several officers  who took part in the riot has convinced many that we are one step closer to “reforming” the police by weeding out the racist, bad apples within the department. 

This is a nice narrative, but a false one; in order to understand why, we must look at the history of policing in this country. Modern policing in America was originally created as a replacement for America’s slave patrol system wherein squadrons made up of white volunteers were empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. These “enforcers” were in charge of locating and returning enslaved people who had escaped, crushing uprisings led by enslaved people, and punishing enslaved workers who were found or believed to have violated plantation rules. After slavery was legally abolished in 1865, America created its modern police force to do the exact thing under a different name: maintain the white supremacist hierarchy that is necessary under racial capitalism. The purpose of policing––to jail and kill Black folks––remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Liberal media has also contributed to the recent valorization of Black cops. In the days after the January 6th riot, many news outlets aggressively pushed a story about Eugene Goodman, a Black capitol police officer who led several rioters away from the Congress people’s hiding places while being chased by a white supremacist mob. Several news outlets published testimonials of Black police officers disclosing instances of racism within the department. A January 14th article in ProPublica  notes that over 250 Black cops have sued the department for racism since 2001: some Black cops have alleged that white officers used racial slurs or hung nooses in Black officer’s lockers, and one Black cop even claimed he heard a white officer say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.” 

These white officers’ racism is unsurprising, and I am not denying any of these claims. But focusing on these singular, isolated moments of racism wherein white cops are painted as cruel and Black cops are the sympathetic victims grossly oversimplifies the narrative of structural racism that modern American policing was built upon. After hearing these slurs that they were allegedly so disgusted by, these Black cops still intentionally chose to put on their badge, don their guns, and work alongside these white police officers who insulted and demeaned them, laboring under a violent system with the sole purpose of harming and terrorizing Black and low-income communities. Similarly, while Goodman’s actions most likely saved many lives during the riot, we cannot allow one moment of decency to erase centuries of racist violence. 

The great Zora Neale Hurston once said: “All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” Her words ring ever true today, and these Black police officers are an excellent example of why. It’s tempting to believe that putting Black folks on the force will solve racial violence, but this is a liberal myth we must break free of. Allowing Black people into inherently racist systems does not make those systems better, safer, or more equitable: a quick look at many Black folks in power today, such as Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Lori Lightfoot, and Keisha Lance Bottoms immediately prove this to be the case. Everyone supporting racial capitalism must be scrutinized and held accountable, regardless of their identity. We cannot on the one hand say that ‘all cops are bastards’ and then suddenly feel sympathy when those cops are not white. If we want to defund and abolish the police, we must resist the narrative that Black cops have anything to offer us.

Policing the Blacks: Ferguson and Past Histories

By Jason Michael Williams

The continuing protesting efforts in Ferguson are a constant reminder that democracy left unchecked is totalitarianism disguised as freedom and inclusivity. The protestors in Ferguson, who represent all walks of life, are protesting in defense of a mentality and ideal that is unable to conceive inequality and mistreatment as a normative function within American democracy. They understand that no American citizen should have to face differential treatment within a society that allegedly claims to be among the leaders of the world and yet is not whole. How could it be 2014 and yet, still, as a society, brutalization against Black bodies is tolerated and, in many cases, quickly justified by those who have yet to accept Blackness as their equal within the human family, let alone within American democracy. Yes, the problem is largely race-based, and America should accept this truth however hard it might be to fathom.

Many critics on this subject rush toward politically correct speaking points that overwhelmingly discount a truth that is knowable and historic. The politically correct orientation of Ferguson is one based in the fantasy of colorblindness. It attempts to shield the hard historical fact that policing in America has always been one of color/class-consciousness. Thus, American policing at its foundation is inherently protective of the status quo. Regarding Blacks, this reality dates back to plantation justice-a time within which Black bodies were brutality policed at the behest of White domination. Sadly, almost 400 years later, this would still be the dominant thinking behind policing the Blacks, whether known consciously or not.

Given the history of American social control and its relationship to Black bodies, there could be not a single question of doubt against the general inquiry of those in Ferguson-police accountability. America has long tolerated and justified the brutalization of Black bodies (even when the culprit is Black) and, because of this historic hard fact, it is hard to fathom how some are unable to conceive the possibility that police officers might be engaging in the same activity that was once legal or customary within American society. Police officers are not somehow disconnected from the broader American ethos as they too are socially conditioned and therefore susceptible to the biases, prejudices, and misperceptions that ought to be checked given the amount of power they hold over the lives of citizens.

The answer lies in the stark racial contrast regarding the value of life and how certain lives are legitimated to the detriment of others. An example of this contrast was eloquently and expectedly showcased at a Cardinals game where pro-Brown protestors were met face to face with an all-White crowd of pro-Wilson responders. Thus, the racial make-up of this incident speaks volumes to the impact that histories of racial control and exclusion have had on modern day social-racial discourses.

Why are people surprised by the fact that Black men, in particular, are the quintessential victim of police brutality and violence, again, given the history of brutalization in America? For example, a study published by ProPublica, recently found that Black teens were 21 times more likely to be murdered by police than White teens from 2010-2012 (see figure 1). Yet, most will inevitably fail to realize the deep importance of this study as it situates, clearly, the level of vulnerability that Blacks must still face in 2014.

Moreover, the revelations noted in this study and many others like it, is what compels those in Ferguson to protest. The revelations in studies like these also give power to the significance of past histories; for example, the often quoted words of Chief Justice Taney in the United States Supreme Court Dred Scott decision regarding Africans:

"In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument…They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics which no one thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute, and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion."

Given the rampant amounts of blatant and hidden discrimination in the American administration of justice, how could anyone argue that Taney's words are not as important today in reflexive contexts as they were when they were written? Like Mr. Scott, the protestors in Ferguson are asking for inclusion and the humanity of all to be respected. History serves as a constant reminder on the extent to which their simple requests have not been met, but when will this nightmare end? Moreover, how can America continue to be the mediator of world problems when it continues to ignore domestic issues like police brutality? It is the inconsistencies in American democracy that hinders U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and beyond. Even before Ferguson the international community knew that the U.S. does not always practice what it preaches.

One of the last bastions of pre-sixties white supremacy is, in fact, the criminal justice system itself. For instance, the use of the criminal justice system as a post-sixties tool of racialized social control begun with the state's hampering down on resistance movements and groups in the '70s and later with the war on drugs, which targeted Blacks. It is the ultimate tool because most people (especially the majority) do not question the law as a result of being taught to respect it at all costs. Thus, judicial mistreatment is justified via majoritarian trickery masquerading as justice. Also, people are taught that justice in America is colorblind, albeit easily debunked by decades of social science research. The result is a recipe for judicial deceit and betrayal because it complicates what is essentially in plain sight, at least to the non-majority.

Nevertheless, Ferguson is an excellent test case on which to examine race and criminal justice. For example, many pundits are arguing for better training, community relations, and the inclusion of people of color on police forces, all of which has been tried before with little difference. On the contrary, however, the solution is simply police accountability. Officers of color are equally guilty, at a lesser rate, though, of some of the same questionable behavior predominately exhibited by White officers. Therefore, more training and diversity, although probably useful, is not a panacea. Like Taney, rogue officers understand the Constitution very well, and they recognize that racial profiling and excessive force is inappropriate even though they choose (like any ordinary criminal) to engage in those kinds of behavior. Yet, at the same time, these officers also know that there are very little consequences for poor decision making that is often life changing and ending

Therefore, the solution to problems like these must be akin to the same kinds of consequences faced by civilians. The people in Ferguson are tired of the term, "justifiable homicide" they instead would like to see investigations and consequences as opposed to having to witness two different forms of justice. They see no difference between the extrajudicial murders of yesterday and so-called justifiable homicides today, which Blacks are accounted disproportionately. They are tired of subjective citizenship when they deserve full citizenship. They are tired of having to respect the rights of others while their rights are unacknowledged. They are tired of being guilty until proven innocent unlike Darren Wilson (and other White males) who seem to never be guilty first of criminal behavior because they are likely perceived as innocent and non-dangerous. Finally and perhaps more important , their tiredness falls on the backdrop of histories of racial discrimination (legal and custom), brutalization of their bodies via systems of social control/criminal justice, and outright democratic exclusion. The only fix to this problem is police accountability . No other fix will work. Those in Ferguson and beyond must believe that they too matter and that the death of their bodies will be met with swift justice . The Ferguson movement is essentially proposing that now is our society's chance to prove Taney wrong.