Williams is now discussing racial profiling and how the method - a series of pinpointed criteria that "don't have to do with race" are actually super racialized AND how this method was used earlier than what we associate it with (we associate it with the war on drugs, not the late 19th century convergence of slave patrols and night watchmen)

One of the scariest things in this book is a lengthy quotation from LAPD Chief of Police William H. Parker writing in the middle of the 20th century in defense of (racial) profiling and in denial of individual racist bias within the police. He says

"Identification is a police tool, not a police attitude."

IDK why but this is just chilling as fuck to me

"While admitting that the very categories of race are 'unscientific' and 'a fiction,' [LAPD Chief of Police] Parker argues that race is a 'useful fiction' and so should be maintained. But we should ask, useful for what? Presumably for identifying criminals, or rather - for identifying suspects. That is, race is a 'useful fiction' for delineating groups of people to be treated as suspects by the police."

Theres a whole bunch of great statistical breakdowns of traffic stops and getting pulled over by police

but its too much to quote but YOU CAN TOTALLY GUESS the absurdly high ratios of black people living in an area and how often they're arrested

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html

If you want to read the entire decision that ruled stop-and-frisk as unconstitutional, you can here

it's long but its good

i would say that my first actual "intellectually grappling with police as an oppressive institution" bent started in like 7th or 8th grade when we started doing KYR training and the NLG's "magic words" and it was so weird that we started by looking at stop and frisk quotas in NYC and not, you know, things in Oakland

as if police harassment was a far-off thing in the fabled New York City

"If we insist on viewing the police as crime-fighters, profiling can only be seen as a mistake, a persistent disaster. But if we suspend or surrender this noble view of police work, and look instead at the actual consequences of what the cops do, profiling does make a certain kind of sense; it follows a sinister logic. Racial profiling is not about crime at all; it's about controlling people of color."

*screams and points at this quote frantically* NOW do you want to abolish the police?!

"While people of color are the targets of racial profiling, there are actually two audiences. Profiling serves to humiliate and threaten those who are targeted; even when it does not lead to criminal sanctioning, it serves as a not-very-subtle reminder of their 'place.' And it helps to align White people with the power structure by convincing them that the state protects them from purportedly criminal people of color."

- Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue

ooooooooo he's gonna write about local law enforcement and immigration law now esp post-9/11

*shimmies*

note im not shimmying with joy

its a shimmy like a "good-i-was-hoping-you-wouldnt-leave-this-out" shimmy

"Police pull over Latino drivers, usually on some pretext. Since undocumented immigrants cannot apply for a driver's license, they will be arrested for operating a vehicle without one. In jail, then, police will run their prints and check their status - leading to criminal charges or deportation."

presented without comment (but big raised eyebrows for sure)

i feel like its common knowledge that hella cops are klan members

but williams is citing source after source of narcotics officers, elected officials, firefighters, etc who have had klan members in their ranks since the 1920s

honestly, terrifying

https://tinyurl.com/y877h6rr

The Gestapo in Detroit - Thurgood Marshall

~ on policing in Detroit in the 1930s-1940s

Williams quotes Marshall in his book Our Enemies in Blue

https://timeline.com/the-fbis-mole-in-the-kkk-murdered-a-black-man-while-under-bureau-protection-and-got-away-with-it-dcd6e0962e1d

For those of you who doubt that cops and Klan go hand in hand - for those of you who never got a comprehensive education on the history of the Freedom Riders - for those of you that don't believe that cops and the FBI are as corrupt and evil as they truly are

Thankfully, Kristian Williams talks about Liuzzo's murder and Gary Thomas Rowe at length - and in conjunction with Bull Connor, and other police-KKK ties

"The participation of a law officer was evidently considered vital to the conspiracy [around the disappearances of white Freedom Riders]. Not only would the civil rights workers be more likely to stop for a marked police car, southern lynch mobs had traditionally had their victims handed over to them by the police, a convenience that lent the proceeding a shade of social legitimacy"

"In 1969 alone, police raided Panther offices in SF, LA (twice), Chicago (three times), Denver, Sacramento, and San Diego. In nearly every case, several Panthers were arrested. In at least two of the raids, office equipment and food (for distribution in the community) were destroyed. 1 Panther was killed in LA, 2 in Chicago... 30 Panthers were charged with capital offenses, 40 faced life imprisonment, 55 faced sentences of up to 30 years, and another 155 were either in jail or in hiding."

I hate that COINTELPRO was so "successful"

and i hate that there are Panthers who are still incarcerated

Heaving a big ol sigh

traffic stops are a form of police harassment and intimidation

police seek to undo our movements of building autonomy and taking care of ourselves

thus - criminalization of the Panthers, harassment of the Panthers, etc, etc

Remember the Greensboro Massacre?

Yeah it was the FBI that arranged this KKK march that ended in the deaths of five Communist Workers Party members

Cops and Klan go hand in hand

I don't think it's helpful to frame KKK members becoming cops or cops joining the KKK as "infiltration" in either direction. Both the KKK and the police are different sides of the same white supremacist capitalist coin.

Williams doesn't follow this necessarily but I do think that "infiltration" is not necessarily the most accurate word to use in this context. The relationship between the two is willing and enthusiastic - hardly sneaky or covert.

http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-2933-the-cop-who-liked-nazis.html

I would love to make a list of law enforcement personnel names who have been outed as Nazis

I mean... community self-defense...

"The police did not create the racism in American society. If anything, it's the other way around. But the police have, since their inception, enforced and defended the racist status quo - by controlling slaves, maintaining segregation, resisting civil rights efforts, and generally terrorizing the Black community and other people of color."

"[When cops are Klan members] they use their professional position to advance the aims of the group, they use their standing in the community to legitimize vigilante violence, and they are often considered attractive recruits for just these reasons...

Cops engage in these crimes when they have sworn to stop them... [This is] a sustained institutional relationship."

The next chapter is called "The Natural Enemy of the Working Class"

which, true

oh boy and now we get to talk about strikebreakers

"Where conflicts arise between workers and bosses, between the rights of one class and the interests of the other, the machinery of the law is typically used as a weapon against the workers. Even where the law is contrary to the demands of powerful corporations, the police often act not from principle or legal obligation, but according to the needs of the ruling calss."

-- Our Enemies in Blue by Kristian Williams

would love to see some examples not from the 1910s and 1920s in this chapter but also im only like 4 pages in

Strike breaking includes "racism and ethnic divisions, disdain for unskilled or low-wage workers, organizational norms and penalties, the law-and-order ideology, the criminalization of strike activity, and financial and professional incentives. Most work by using the personal biases and institutional culture of the police to undercut any sympathy for disobedient workers - especially when those workers are immigrants or people of color."

1) childcare must always be a part of any leftist organizing

2) holy shit cops are bastards fuck every single cop (and fuck THIS in light of ICE "losing" (read: selling) ~1500 children). The children of those deemed "disposable" by the state are disposable too. Sickening.

And now, I am reading about the formations of police unions, or as I like to call them,

special clubs for pigs

As political machines dwindled, Williams casually points at two trends:

- schools change to follow a corporate model

- police reforms move towards following a military model

"While the new system of administration diminished the influence of machine bosses, it did so by bolstering the position of municipal bureaucracies as independent seats of power...

If authority was invested exclusively in the police chiefs, then the chiefs would also incur whatever blame was directed at the department, though they faced few consequences of public disfavor."

sounds familiar...

"The [Progressive] reformers hoped to break the machines and, at the same time, push working-class immigrants out of politics. Because immigrants generally lived together in distinct neighborhoods, they had been well placed to influence the ward-based machines. So Progressive reforms replaced districted elections with city-wide contests and strengthened the mayor's office to the detriment of the ward councilors."

"The Progressive Era saw simultaneously an increase in state hegemony and the full rise of capitalist class hegemony.

To understand this concurrence, we must recognize that 'hegemony' is not synonymous with dictatorial rule. It is more subtle, more flexible, and therefore also more insidious and more resilient... It is through hegemony that the ruling class creates a bounded sphere of institutional autonomy."

and POLICE

o wow

the depression era heralded in a bunch of middle class protestant (bootlickers/system sympathizers) who were seeking steady employment

and were then able to move up in ranks as time moved on

creepy!!!!! and scary

more reason that police unions are not unions at all:

williams shows how combining police unionization with police reforms - towards autonomy for individual officers/patrolmen AND autonomy for individual police departments - AND how police suddenly got involved in electioneering and their support of a local candidate could "make or break" someone - all of these things point to the increasing power of the police and how they are NOT unions at all