blame for the resulting mass incarceration crisis, Alexander’s analysis shows how policing and crime have come to assume their central place in maintaining inequality in our day.39
As policing has become central to the production of general social inequality, it has also had to adjust the way it contains attempts to fight back against this inequality. In the 1960s and 1970s, heavy-handed “escalation of force” responses had entailed a serious loss of political legitimacy from Birmingham to Berkeley and played a key role in mobilizing widespread support for anyone on the wrong end of the police baton. Cops urgently sought a new, less politically costly means of containing demonstrator transgression. With most dissident formations relatively cowed by recent repression and therefore backing off of confrontational methods, police and protesters settled on a modus operandi known as negotiated management, in which protest organizers would consult with police beforehand, notify them of the general outline of the action (including even likely number, names, and method of arrests), and sometimes themselves take on policing functions, acting as “peace marshals.” As the next chapter will discuss, contemporary “nonviolent” approaches often have not come to terms with this shift in policing strategy. Classic nonviolent approaches brilliantly played up and played off the contradictions of escalation-of-force policing, but using those same approaches within a negotiated management model risks having the opposite effect: aiding, rather than contradicting, the mechanisms police use to contain public disruption and dissent.
In the Seattle protests of 1999 and within wider waves of alter-globalization contention, the model of negotiated management collapsed—protesters not only refused to notify police beforehand of their plans but also actively (and successfully) strategized to outmaneuver police on the ground. Illegal activity was suddenly no longer limited to predetermined, agreed-upon acts of nonviolent civil disobedience; it included politically embarrassing employments of disruptive tactics—most importantly in Seattle, with the successful blockading of delegates from entering the WTO ministerial and massive disruption of downtown business flow during Christmas shopping season, in addition to Black Bloc property destruction. Employing new electronic communications media, protest organization became utterly decentralized and autonomous, removing the traditional core of coordinators with whom to negotiate or, alternately, target for elimination. Consequently, police had to come up with a new plan. They arrived at a new approach that Patrick Gillham and John Noakes call “strategic incapacitation.”40 By employing fierce but focused violence, scrambling communications, conducting preemptive arrests and detention until protests are over, targeting support networks such as medical and legal assistance, seizing food, interrupting protesters’ sleep, and disrupting coordination of actions, police tactics aim primarily to impose limits on the ability of protesters to carry out their plans by miring them in the muck of logistical dilemmas. Publicly, police try to limit sites of political action to “free speech zones” far from the target of the protests, while demeaning protesters through intensified media coordination that limits their larger webs of support. In extreme but increasingly common cases, police encourage right-wing vigilantes to preoccupy demonstrators and organizers with the logistics of their own safety and survival. Attempts to control demonstrators end up mimicking the tactics of the demonstrators themselves, as police, too, become more diffuse and multimodal. In turn, protests tend to be increasingly focused on countering the actions of the police. Responses to strategic incapacitation thus become an unavoidable core “message” in the politics of contemporary protest.
In this back-and-forth negotiation of power in contemporary protest, the attempt to even define what protest means becomes a key point of struggle. David Graeber presents a compelling analysis in his “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” when he wonders why, during a number of alter-globalization protests, the police often reacted with such outrage to the puppets seized from protesters, gleefully backing their patrol vehicles over or absurdly bludgeoning with batons the heads of these papier-mâché mock-ups.41 The antiauthoritarian orientation of many contemporary social movement participants hinges on an assertion of the potency of imagination and a refusal to negotiate the right to define a social situation. This insistence on the realization of a collective imaginary is precisely the confrontational trigger for police, who, far more than worrying about infractions of the law or disorderly social conduct, seek to impose and maintain a “reasonable,” agreed-upon definition of the situation. However civil or “nonviolent” the conduct of protesters, this interaction will result in (police) violence the moment protesters refuse to surrender the right to define what, exactly, it is that they’re up to. The consequences for protest strategy are significant: while “nonviolent” analyses of protest interactions generally posit protester aggression as the cause of violent police response—a theory inconsistent with most protest experiences in which aggression and violence are most often initiated by police—attention to the right to define the moment shows that conflict arises in the political moment when protesters claim their autonomy to understand a situation in their own terms. This issue is completely tangential to their “violent” or “nonviolent” conduct.
The Black Lives Matter movement has been perhaps unique in bringing such widespread concern to policing as a social issue. Such concern, however, is hardly novel. The Boston Knowles Riot of 1747, described by historian Paul Gilje, reveals the centrality of policing to issues to which it might at first seem tangential. The crowd, gathered against new policies of forced naval conscription, threatened to hold several navy officers hostage, but peacefully surrendered them before the home of the governor. Yet “[t]hey did take an under sheriff, physically abused him, and, in a nice bit of role reversal, locked him in the town stocks.”42 As an embodiment of the legal violence forcing them into conscription, which Gilje describes as “practical imprisonment, horrid conditions, and an earlier death,” the crowd found the undersheriff—as the functionary finally tasked with driving them into a deplorable situation—a more apt target than the navy officers or governor who might be more obviously held responsible for the policy. While conventional wisdom might hold this decision to be ill considered, the crowd certainly seemed to weigh their decision. Is it so clear that they were wrong?
The refusal to acknowledge policing as a persistent concern in its own right is especially noticeable in the public amnesia around Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the March on Washington. While the final, “I have a dream” portion of the speech may well be the most frequently cited act of public oratory of the twentieth century, the speech in its entirety is seldom cited, particularly the middle portion, where King extols “[t]he marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community.”43 Rather than mentioning policing in passing as a local impediment to his campaigns, King presents it as core to the movement’s goals, as a sort of summary of actually existing racism in the United States. “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”44 Addressing those who have traveled to the nation’s capital from the struggles in the South, King again presents the violence of policing as the epitome of racist hatred faced by movement participants: “Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.”45 Bizarre metaphors aside, police brutality is of such pervasive importance to King that he evokes it repeatedly, throughout multiple sections of the speech, unlike the incessantly quoted dream of the day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,”46 which appears only in the closing passage, when “all of God’s children…will be able to join hands.”47 While the horrors of police brutality warranted more space in King’s speech (already heavily edited by state censors) than the dream of children of different races joining hands, the latter image came to stand in for the entire message of his speech, and indeed his entire life; his critique of endemic, racist police violence, however, has been utterly erased from public memory.
The prevalence of antipolice slogans under neoliberalism is reason enough to suspect that policing has been an issue of central concern to movements long before Black Lives Matter brought it to wide attention. In the mid-1980s, the once mighty British Left struggled in vain to hold off Margaret Thatcher’s brutal neoliberal reforms. The conflict came to a head during the protracted coal
