Blue Lives Memorialized: Collective Memory and the Production of Ideology and Injustice in American Policing (original) (raw)
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'Fight the reds, support the blue': Blue Lives Matter and the US counter-subversive tradition
Race and Class, 2021
In the wake of the rightwing siege of the US Capitol, which put ‘Blue Lives Matter’ supporters at odds with police protecting the Capitol, the authors look to the history and contours of the ‘counter-subversive tradition’ in the United States and its locus in local police departments. They examine a similar moment of social unrest – the mid-to-late 1960s – and the pro-police organising undertaken by Support your Local Police (SyLP), a front group of the ultra-right John Birch Society, which blended anti-communism with opposition to the Black Freedom Movement, with particular anxiety about the spectre of united white and black revolt from below and the encroachment of the federal government on local power from above. The campaign also presented a kind of uniquely rightwing anti-statism, largely through the rejection of impediments to local powers and, specifically, the untrammelled power of the cops. In making sense of the Capitol siege, and the years of rightwing organising that preceded it, the article argues that this important precursor to ‘Blue Lives Matter’ presents a schema for understanding longstanding efforts in police organising in defence of what James Baldwin called ‘arrogant autonomy’ – freedom from civilian oversight or political challenges to cop power, and from all challenges to locally entrenched structures of white power.
Fear the Monster!: racialized violence, sovereign power and the thin blue line
Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime: Murray Lee and Gabe Mythen eds.
In the United States, a spate of high profile killings beginning with Michael Brown in 2014, have mobilized a broad coalition against police violence. This action has brought about much needed attention to the increasingly prominent role of police in American social life, demonstrated for the first time the need for an accurate accounting of lives lost to the police and brought coercive practices such as " stop and frisk " under increased public scrutiny. While these and other victories have been won, they stand in sharp relief against a history of cyclical and facile police reform stretching back more than a century. In order to elaborate upon the failures of reform, we focus upon the mass-mediated fear of crime, theorizing it not simply as propaganda or ideology, but rather as a technique and instrument of pacification. In doing so, we outline a dialectics of fear which arrests social change and obscures the horrific nature of everyday police violence and of the social order which it upholds.
Pretext and Justification: Republicanism, Policing, and Race
The Cambridge Handbook of Policing in the United States, 2019
with a cool that resembled target practice. Scott's name joined a heartbreaking list of men of color killed by unjustified police violence. The video of the incident also broadcast to the world the spectacular violence always lurking beneath the surface of daily interactions between police and men of color. The "Black Lives Matter" movement has fiercely insisted Scott's death not be viewed as an isolated incident but understood as woven into the fabric of American policing. American policing harms individual people of color, guts communities and establishes an image of Black or brown men as criminal. Tragically, current Fourth Amendment law insulates the very police practices that allow a different policing regime for communities of color and ensures that the rising death toll of unjustly killed Black and brown men will continue. † Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School. For a number of helpful comments and conversations on this Article, I am grateful to more scholars and students than I can recognize. I am indebted to
Revisiting the Ferguson Report: Antiblack Concepts and the Practice of Policing
Critical Inquiry, 2021
Now is a suitable moment to revisit the US Department of Justice's Ferguson Report. 1 What the report suggests, I propose, is that explicitly disparaging and stigmatizing antiblack racial stereotypes shaped the ordinary, business-as-usual, communications of the FPD, and that we may err in taking these stereotypes simply, or primarily, as evidence of bias or of the intent to discriminate-that is, as evidence of psychological states attributable to discrete individuals. To be sure, I do not deny the power of such an approach. Here, however, I take a different tack and suggest that we take FPD employees' taken-for-granted and quotidian email communications of pejorative stereotypes as evidence of the workings of a practice of policing in which police officers participated-as evidence, that is, of what the DOJ report describes as a policing "culture." In recent work, law professors Bryan Stevenson and Paul Butler have considered racist policing in a similar perspective. According to Stevenson, "People of color in the United States. .. are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness.. .. This presumption of guilt and the racial narrative that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system." 2 In a similar Critical Inquiry 47 (Winter 2021)
This paper theorizes police violence by elucidating the relationship between racialized violence and law. We contrast Giorgio Agamben’s generalized state of exception with Walter Benjamin’s targeted and localized account, which we complement with Saidiya Hartman’s work on periodization and affect. We argue that racialized police violence is constitutive of law because police routinely enact violence in racially targeted ways, and judicial practice sanctions this violence through predictable deference to racialized affect, legitimizing anti-black racism as fear for safety. We conclude that a theoretical account of law and violence must include material practices of policing and enforcement, for it is the latter that, in a racial state, are, in fact, law.
The Durability of Collective Memory: Reconciling the "Greensboro Massacre
Social Forces, 2010
While the general dynamics governing collective memory processes are well developed theoretically, our tool kit for systematically assessing how collective memory changes over time remains limited. Here, we focus on a particular tragic event-the killing of five participants in an anti-kkk march in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Nov. 3, 1979-to assess continuity and change across accounts presented as part of a 1980 federally-sponsored investigation and a 2005 truth and reconciliation commission. Specifically, we employ a block modeling methodology to describe the structure of narrative themes shared across multiple accounts in each time period. We then analyze the sources of temporal variation in these narratives, and show how shifts in the range of actors participating in the 1980 and 2005 initiatives, as well as the institutional contexts within which accounts were offered, shaped how themes were strategically deployed to increase the resonance of specific positions. We find that, in the Greensboro case, the contours of these demographic and institutional dimensions resulted in a decrease in the polarization of competing narratives and an increased emphasis on key themes that contested elite "institutional" accounts. "Memory is a living thing-it too is in transit."-Eudora Welty (1984:104) "Memory is a process, not a thing; and it works differently at different points in time."-Olick and Robbins (2002:122) The concept of time is embedded in the very fabric of work on collective memory. Accounting for how events are remembered and represented by collectivities requires that we take seriously a bedrock assumption of historical process-the fact that past events shape present actions and outcomes. Schudson (1992) explains
Black lives and policing: The larger context of ghettoization
Journal of Urban Affairs, 2017
President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (Kerner Commission) followed a series of inner-city riots in the 1960s. The Commission's 1968 report, issued months before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, famously concluded that the United States was moving toward separate societies, one Black and one White. In recent years, another version of racialized violence has garnered public attention: systemic police brutality and repeated killings of unarmed Black and Brown men by police, spawning a new civil rights movement proclaiming Black Lives Matter. Condemnation of this violence and acknowledgment of its racial content by leading public officials is now standard fare, but criminal convictions and departmental discipline are scarce. This review essay brings attention back to the institutionalized racism called out by the Kerner Commission, arguing that occasional and even chronic police violence is an outcome rather than the core problem. A more fundamental issue is a routine function of policing-protecting mainstream United States from the perceived risk from its "ghetto" underbelly through spatial containment. We are at the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's 1967 appointment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (also known as the Kerner Commission). Rioting was continuing at that time in Detroit, having already occurred on a large scale in Los Angeles (Watts 1965), Chicago (Division Street 1966), and Newark (1967). The Commission's report the following year famously concluded, "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal" (Kerner et al., 1968, p. 1). Most recently public attention has focused on another version of racialized violence: systemic police brutality and repeated killings of unarmed Black and Brown men by police. Widely disseminated videographic evidence of homicide after homicide (shooting, tasing, choking, rough riding), instantly distributed through social media, has spawned a new civil rights mobilization proclaiming that Black Lives Matter (BLM), a nascent social movement centered on the problem of violence by agents of the state (Pellow, 2016). Condemnation of this violence and acknowledgment of its racial content by leading public officials became standard fare in 2015 and 2016, though criminal convictions and even departmental discipline of offending officers were scarce.
Protect or Serve: The Racialized Politics of Police Militarization
How does the racial composition of an area affect its level of police militarization? Since the conflict between police and protestors in Ferguson, MO following the shooting of a local teenager, police militarization in the U.S. has become increasingly salient. These levels of militarization are frequently observed during protests in which a person of color was shot at the hands of police, whereupon police respond to protests with a strong show of force. As the relationship between police and communities of color have been thrust into mainstream discourse, it is important to understand the relationship that is present between the racial makeup of an area and the level of police militarization present. This paper focuses on finding a causal relationship between race and police militarization by utilizing a unique dataset accounting for every county or county-equivalent in the United States. This is done in order to establish the foundation for a generalizable theory of racialized police militarization on which further research can be conducted.