There are new names—Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley—and with each of them, new moments of resistance. Yet the history of modern-day policing outlined in careful and compelling detail in the first edition of Our Enemies in Blue, now updated and applied to the events of the past ten years, continues to play out, not only in single incidents of deadly force against Black and Brown bodies, but also in the everyday violence of policing—be it racially discriminatory “stop and frisk” practices in New York City, continuing racial disparities in traffic stops on the nation’s streets and freeways, or through daily stops, searches, beatings, sexual assaults, and police occupation of communities of people of color that are not just reminiscent of slavery and the Jim Crow era, but its direct descendants. Exposing the core of policing, as well as the social forces that drive it, enables us to see that, even as its outward form shifts over time, the underlying structure and purpose ultimately remains the same, decade after decade.
This is not to say that resistance has had no impact: it has forced police departments to shift strategies and has at times reduced some harms of policing. It is simply to say that the history of policing, the underlying forces of punishment, and responses to calls for reform laid out in the following pages is essential to understanding how we arrived at the present moment, and to envisioning what lies ahead. By placing the string of individual cases of police violence that have captured headlines over the past two decades into a larger context, we are pushed beyond an understanding of them as individual acts of racist police officers to an examination of their root causes and sinister systemic underpinnings. Our demands for change are thus necessarily expanded beyond prosecutions in individual cases and advocacy for policy reform, while simultaneously acknowledging the pain and outrage generated by each individual act of police violence, and the limited respite changes to policing policies can bring.
Particularly relevant to the present moment and the “broken windows” policing practices that ultimately killed Mike Brown and Eric Garner, Our Enemies in Blue chronicles the emergence of “order maintenance policing” as the modern-day manifestation of Black Codes, vagrancy laws, and common nightwalker ordinances. Pursuant to this theory, through what has become known as “quality of life” policing, officers are given explicit permission and discretion to target populations inextricably intertwined with notions of the “dangerous classes” described in Our Enemies in Blue. Police extortion schemes of old are replaced with a more elaborate shakedown of poor people through assessment of exorbitant fees and fines for minor, vague, and discriminatorily enforced “quality of life” offenses such as littering, sleeping, eating, or appearing disorderly or lewd in public. Indeed, it is telling that the biggest impact of the slowdown by NYPD officers in early 2015 was loss of revenue, not increased crime, and that first olive branch offered by the Ferguson police department in the wake of the uprising following Mike Brown’s murder by Darren Wilson was a reduction in fees associated with failing to appear in court to answer to minor charges which were the bread and butter of city coffers.1
Perhaps the most critical intervention Our Enemies in Blue makes to the current moment comes in the final chapter, which traces the roots of militarization of police departments displayed in such stark and brutal relief during the days and months following Mike Brown’s killing in Ferguson to the advent of SWAT teams and the declaration of a “war” on drugs. Here, Williams reveals “community policing,” the kinder, friendlier face of law enforcement being advanced as its alternative, to simply be another side of the same coin. Like early police forces, “community policing” works to conscript civilians and “helping” institutions into the project of social control, while serving as the stick that continues to enforce the “order” that serves existing power relations.
One thing that has changed since the first edition is the way we understand how policing operates along the axes of gender and sexuality, within and alongside those of race and class. Over the past decade a body of work has emerged, which, like Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith, traces its lineage back to Indigenous women’s resistance to the sexualized violence by state actors that has been an essential weapon of colonization, or, like “Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color,” an article I authored for Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (South End Press 2006), to Black women’s resistance to slave patrols and lynching, and to the struggles of freedom fighters like Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur in response to police violence against themselves and their communities.2
Some of this work—like the book I co-authored with Joey Mogul and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States—draws directly on the history of morals enforcement through vagrancy laws and on the critical analysis of “broken windows” policing offered by Our Enemies in Blue to highlight how policing operates to enforce racialized and classed norms of gender and sexuality in both public and private spheres.3 This process is mediated, as we discuss in Queer (In)Justice, through criminalizing narratives and archetypes that literally shape how the same conduct by different people is perceived differently within the context of maintaining “order” and ensuring community “safety.” Others, like Dean Spade’s Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Nat Smith and Eric Stanley, further elucidate the multiple ways in which law enforcement, prisons, and other systems of control explicitly police the lines of the gender binary.4
This literature, along with research conducted by grassroots organizations, policy advocacy groups, academics, and even law enforcement, as well as powerful interventions made by Black feminists in the post-Ferguson public discourse, has irrevocably expanded the frame of the conversation around policing to incorporate the voices and experiences of women of color and LGBTQ people of color targeted by gendered and sexuality-based forms of racial profiling and police violence, painting a more complete picture of the structures and dynamics of policing.
For instance, researchers have begun to dig deeper into the statistics illuminating patterns of racialized policing detailed in Chapter 4 to unearth the experiences of women of color. As noted in a submission endorsed by over seventy-five organizations and individuals to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (which was convened as a result of sustained national outcry in the wake of failure to hold officers who killed Mike Brown and Eric Garner accountable):
Although racial profiling data reported by federal and state governments is rarely, if ever, disaggregated by race and sex, racial profiling studies which do analyze the experiences of women of color separately from those of men of color conclude that “for both men and women there is an identical pattern of stops by race/ethnicity.” For instance, in New York City, one of the jurisdictions with the most extensive data collection on police stops, rates of racial disparities in stops and arrests are identical among men and women. Racial profiling of women of color has specifically been reported in the context of law enforcement practices associated with the “war on drugs” and the policing of prostitution-related offenses.5
Black women and women of color, who have played a leadership role in struggles against state-sponsored violence since colonial times and slavery, have increasingly insisted on recognition that we too are direct, and not collateral or occasional, targets of police shootings and violence. As pointed out to the Task Force:
Black women and women of color also experience excessive force up to and including police shootings, including most recently Jessie Hernandez, a 16 year old queer Latina killed by Denver police as this submission was being prepared, Aura Rosser, a forty-year-old Black woman killed by Ann Arbor police, and Tanisha Anderson, a 37 year old Black woman killed by Cleveland police, all of whom were killed in the short period of time since this Task Force was established. In the weeks following Eric Garner’s killing in New York City, an NYPD officer put Rosan Miller, a Black 27 year-old 5 month pregnant woman in a chokehold as they attempted to arrest her for grilling on the sidewalk, Denise Stewart, a Black grandmother who also had asthma was dragged naked into a hallway by officers who falsely assumed she was abusing her children,
