At least since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Los Angeles and New York police departments used and justified chokehold techniques, while at the same time banning and sanctioning some versions of the technique. In a five-year period in the 1980s, LAPD officers killed sixteen people with a chokehold, and fourteen of these deaths were of Black people.
Kate Derickson reports from the Minneapolis Uprising: "During those long nights, new subjectivities were formed, and the grammar of the social order was suspended, allowing arrangements to be newly sensed, new forms of solidarities to be detected. These tentative arrangements repositioned the police as not on 'our' side."
While delegates made their way to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, tens of thousands of protesters were set to converge in the city for a week of civil disobedience. Protesters, passersby, and even residents out on their porches were beaten. The chasing, swinging, and clubbing was indiscriminate. Journalists, denied any special treatment, were battered and taunted, at times even targeted.
More than 2,000 police helicopters prowl the skies over US cities. If we consider the tactical helicopters operated by US police departments as a unit, it is larger than every military on earth except for the fleets maintained by the United States, China and Russia.
The elite fear the destruction of their property, yes, but even more they fear the destruction of the social relations that make private property possible. And so they fear a world without police.
"What separates a martyr from an ally lies in who calls the shots, who does the grunt work, who gets the glory and who decides, in the aftermath, how the story of the uprising is told." Audrea Lim reports on this week's protests against racist police violence in New York City.
Policing is itself a kind of endless curfew. To the defenders of order, there are always fires that need covering because there is always disorder lurking in the populace, threatening to burn the system down.
The police have always been used as a tool for the social control of minority populations and to protect the power and property of the elite. A reading list that puts the call for the abolishment of the police in historical context.
A recent history of broken windows policing with Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform.
An interview with Angela Davis in October 1970 from the Women's House of Detention, New York.
The place of this riot is the street, the street where Michael Brown was murdered, the street where people gathered to await the news that his killer would not be indicted, the street where people met up afterward. The matching scenes from around the nation convey an uncanny sense of coordination, of organization without an organization.
The tainted origins of modern policing are as a tool of social control. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.