Attorney General Eric Holder added, “At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message.”28 Soon thereafter, the president ordered a review of the police use of military weaponry.29
It’s too early to know whether any lasting structural changes will result from the current unrest, but if nothing else it has certainly changed the terms of the debate. Time magazine, for example, ran a surprising piece titled “In Defense of Rioting.” It cogently argues:
Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society.… [Until human rights are respected] the legitimate frustration, sorrow and pain of the marginalized voices will boil over, spilling out into our streets.… Blacks in this country are more apt to riot because they are one of the populations here who still need to.30
Rolling Stone, likewise, published a short piece looking at historical—and, in retrospect, entirely justifiable—uses of property destruction, pointing to precedents like the Boston Tea Party, slave rebellions, the Suffragists, the anti-nuclear movement, and ongoing resistance to fracking.31 The magazine then went a step further, arguing that “It’s time to start imagining a society that isn’t dominated by police,” and offering suggestions to help build a “Cop-Free World.”32
Even some conservatives—among them Senator Rob Portman, Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Paul Ryan, and the writer Erick Erickson—expressed concern about the crackdown on protests.33 “There is a systemic problem with today’s law enforcement,” Senator Rand Paul wrote in an op-ed, pointing to “militarization . . . [paired] with an erosion of civil liberties and due process” represented by “national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, [and] pre-conviction forfeiture.” Then, unexpectedly, he departed from the Tea Party script:
Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them.… Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention.34
It may be that the video of police literally strangling an African American man—is it too much to compare it to lynching?—disturbed the conscience of the nation, even those on the political right. And it may be that the sight of armored vehicles on suburban streets proved disconcerting to the “small government” crowd. But the cops kill Black people with some regularity, and the militarization of local police has been underway for decades, often with the support of some of the same figures now expressing their somber concerns. The simple fact is that the authorities are responding, not to the deaths or to the military-grade weaponry as such, but to the riots.
Rioting made policing a problem for elites. On its own, the death of a Black man is what economists call an “externality”—somebody else’s trouble. Racial profiling and zero-tolerance policing—the treatment of whole communities as suspicious in themselves, and the idea that the cops might stop, arrest, or even kill you simply for jaywalking—are just business as usual until they provoke a crisis. Neither President Obama nor Attorney General Eric Holder had any qualms about giving the police military hardware; it was only when the armored vehicles and assault rifles started showing up on the television news that they started to worry.35 It was the riots that put these issues on the national agenda. No number of petitions, lawsuits, op-ed columns, or books on the subject could have had the same effect.
The riots of the previous few months pulled into focus some of the most troubling aspects of policing, and with them, some of the deepest injustices in our society. The unrest was not just about Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Officer Wilson, Officer Pantaleo, gunshots, and chokeholds. It was also about racial profiling and the standards of public order. But beyond that, too, it was about race, class, and violence—ultimately, about questions of freedom and equality.
Revisions
Our Enemies in Blue first appeared in 2004, ten years before the events described above. Yet so many of the themes central to the book have suddenly found themselves in the headlines—race, class, violence, standards of public order, rioting, crowd control, the militarization of local departments, the power of police unions, collaboration with racist paramilitaries, the co-optation of social movement leaders, the promise and perils of reform, and alternatives to policing. History, suddenly, seems very present.
I have, in this preface, only begun the story of Ferguson and the nationwide wave of resistance that followed Michael Brown’s murder. We do not yet know how that story ends, but I hope that it comes to represent, not merely a new chapter in the history of policing, but a decisive break from the past.
It is with the future, as well as the past, that this book is concerned. I began my research on policing, nearly twenty years ago now, not as an academic exercise, but because in my political organizing I was confronted with pressing questions that I did not then know how to answer. I turned to the past to help us understand the present, so that we might change the future.
Returning to the book, ten years later, my aims are largely the same. This new edition brings the history up to date and revises some of the earlier material, while keeping the same general structure, argument, and narrative as the original. As one might expect, the bulk of the revisions come toward the end of the volume. In addition to updating statistics, adding more recent examples, and correcting some mistakes or oversights, I have also substantively adjusted my analysis when new developments—or just new ideas—require it. For instance, the implications of the USA Patriot Act, shifts in crowd control strategies, and even the domestic effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all far clearer now than they were ten years ago. Fortunately, the decade’s changes are not all in the same direction. As policing intensifies, resistance also seems to be growing—not only in the recent riots, but in the immigrants’ rights movement, in the short-lived (but long-reverberating) Occupy encampments, and in a marked increase in experiments with community alternatives to the criminal legal system. I have tried to incorporate all of those developments into this new edition.
There is much, still, that I could have added. Historical accounts are by their very nature incomplete. There are other stories that could be told, other histories still to be uncovered—and, with each new day, more that could be said. So I begin, here, not at the end, but in the midst of a crisis. We can see in these moments of rebellion—and this is true, however they turn out—not only anger and grief, but also an almost instinctual feeling for the demands of justice, an urgent recognition of the humanity of the oppressed, and a sense of possibility, however vague or distant, for a different kind of life, a new society.
The fires of rebellion burn with rage, but they shine with the light of hope.
—Kristian Williams
Portland, Oregon
December 31, 2014
Introduction by Andrea J. Ritchie: Broken Windows, Broken System
As the original edition of Our Enemies in Blue would predict, not much has changed in terms of how policing functions in the United States since it was first published. This reality, in and of itself, underscores the unique contribution and critical importance of this book, and of its timely update.
Our Enemies in Blue offers a systematic, well-researched, readable, and engaging examination of the evolution of police forces as tools of political control as well as political entities of their own. Tracing the roots of policing from imposition of colonial order in England, Ireland, and the Americas to slave patrols and urban watches allows us to see the skeleton underlying the present shape of policing, illuminates the social forces that drive policing paradigms, and charts the complicity of community members, from the Klan through
