Racist narratives of law and order were mobilized to expand policing and prisons at the very moment when structural unemployment became a permanent feature of the political economy. Instead of addressing its structural issues, the U.S. state chose to incarcerate the crisis.
Rahul Rao on how Nelson Mandela is used against the 'Rhodes Must Fall' Campaign
These activist demands to defund the Seattle Police Department, prepared by COVID-19 Mutual Aid Seattle, emerged out of the city-wide movement that made headlines last week when the SPD abandoned a police precinct in the city's Capitol Hill neighborhood and activists reclaimed the space, naming it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
One of the most insidious problems of police reform is how police departments that have been subjected to reform measures, usually by a federal consent decree, are actually rewarded for their misconduct. Reform is a windfall of more money from new grants to hire more cops and purchase more weaponry, technology, training and education.
Reform doesn’t fix police because the thing we find wrong with police—the use of violence against poor and working-class people of color and Indigenous people—is not an aberration. There is no reform to fix the central mandate of police and policing, which is to impose order. Policing is not about law enforcement. It is not about guaranteeing everyone’s safety and security equally, no matter what police may say.
What forms of participation are available to us in the wider moral and political economy of cultural production, now and in the imaginable near-future?
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"We have two ongoing epidemics. One has been with us for only a few months; the other is over 400 years old." Joseph Godfrey on Covid-19 and protesting while Black.
These protests are not just about reshuffling municipal financing, these protests are about reshaping how society is organized, what its priorities are, how it's run, and how the logic of capital and capital accumulation organizes the levers of the state through racism and state violence. People have had enough. They are saying, no more.
Body-worn cameras are tools organized, controlled and deployed by police. How should they be used? When should they be used? Where should they be used? These are all questions answered exclusively by police. Any police reform demand that includes a call for all police to wear body cameras is a call to invest total oversight authority of police with police.
Some of this country’s most coercive institutions – including the Metropolitan Police and Security Service (MI5) – can be traced to the imperial needs of 19th and early 20th century imperial Britain.
From the Philippines to the War on Terror, the U.S. state has utilised its vast imperial domains as grounds for experimentation for coercive social control.