The Function of The Police

Note: this essay is a bit of a thought-experiment.  I am open to, and invite, critique and insight. Please comment or email me if you have either.

The Police are a functionary unit.  The function of The Police is, ostensibly, to “enforce the law.”   The phrase to “enforce the law” is semantically broad in that it can legitimately and illegitimately mean, or be legally interpreted to mean, many things.  An investigation of the function of the police, especially considering those instances like what we experienced on November 9^th on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, would involve the tracing of the power from the micro-interface point between an officer’s baton and my skull all the way up (through the succession of decisions, orders, precedents, policies, norms, etc.) to the “top” – who or what it is that the police are functionaries of.  The question is, on one hand, who or what do the police actually serve (as a functionary unit) and, on the other hand, how does this unit function.

These questions aren’t nakedly deployed: they are asked in order for those of us who find ourselves interfacing with The Police in potentially violent situations to better understand The Police and in so doing more effectively accomplish our own strategic goals.  The scenarios in which people find themselves face-to-face with The Police are an important component of the overall movement, and are therefore important to the question of how we can bring about actual social change.  They also embody the uncertainty and arbitrary nature of all combat-related conflicts – at very few stages during these events is it clear just what is going to happen.

I’ve seen all manner of reactions to police presence and brutality: people yelling at the police, people trying (rather disingenuously I think) to reason with, plea to officers’ humanity, etc.  Most of these sorts of reactions, barring emotional factors, spring from not fully keeping in the front of our minds the functionary nature of the police.  Participants in demonstrations are often attempting to approach issues of broad, wide-sweeping, structural issues.  In the case of the 99% movement, this issue is the massive economic inequalities and injustices propagated by The Corporations and their partners in just about every sphere of life.  Our “guff” is, in this respect, with the “powers that be,” is not – at least directly – with The Police themselves.  Even if we do – and we do – have “issues” with The Police, those instances of potentially violent interaction with The Police, where the structural issues are being contested, are usually not strategically appropriate times to address them.  Our “guff,” when we’re calling out The Banks, is with The Banks.  The police, as elements in these scenarios, are just that – moving barricades and functionaries of acceptable ‘lower-level’ (most of the time) violence.  We deal with them , or should deal with them, the way we deal with barricades, open spaces, parks, intersections, plazas – strategically and, thus, tactically.

Here’s the deal with human beings – and therefore with The Police – we have an extraordinary capacity for doing what we are told.

Re The Police: place a human subject within the organization of a highly disciplined, pseudo/ para-military organization like The Police, an institution with its own historically and culturally deep-rooted traditions, whose function overwhelmingly involves enforcement of law and maintaining order, and deploy him or her into a scenario like Sproul Plaza on November 9^th and you will not find me surprised at the behavior that ensues.  This does not justify or absolve said human subject by any means – but it does help us understand.  And a single understanding, I think, has a multiplicity of uses.  Also consider the fact that this quick analysis does not touch on the nature of the fact the The Police are a unit populated with people for whom it is their job, on top of the fact that they also must (paradoxically, I think), carry out orders if they wish to keep that job.  These social pressures should not be underestimated.  They’re the very reasons thousands and thousands of people have taken to the streets in recent months.

Finally, it should be noted that at the interface between the organization of The Police and that large body of participants that are The People –the relationship between the two – an interesting form of dehumanization is both born and bred.  The Police themselves are decked out in varying degrees of battle gear, intimidatingly wielding batons and pepper-spray, with armor, helmets, shields, etc.  The dehumanization is two-fold (at least): on one hand The Police look more and more like robots, or battle-droids, soulless, lifeless – their faces are mostly hidden – non-human beings that actualize the violent capability – and probably nature – of The State and The Corporations, and therefore begin to be seen as valid objects of hatred and frustration on the part of The People.  This is unfortunate because it seems to me that the powers that deploy The Police want us to fight them.  Or in the least would not mind if we did, for a myriad of reasons.  Secondly, we’ve all heard it said that the cause that the 99% is taking up is not a partisan one but a human one – and we’ve already established the fact that The Police are human, regardless of the level of dehumanization that has worked against them.  Secondly, to the man or woman forced to suit-up as such, to the human being that is instrumentalized through their own self-image, who has already been given orders, who has their pay-check on the way, whose plexi-glass screen blurs the faces of those they are required to inflict violence upon, their battle-dress performs a second and deeper act of further separating them from The People, another aspect of the dehumanization of individuals who have been instrumentalized in the machinations of power.

In my next essay I will build on the idea of the functionary nature of The Police, and specifically consider strategy and nonviolence.

For now this is the black rabbit, broadcasting live from the Cal Hotel in lovely downtown Berkeley, signing off and wishing you all peace and love.  To all the ships at sea, dudes in space, Occupiers and CEOs: goodnight and good luck with that.

Up the 99%!