The death of Kendra James from a bullet fired by a Portland police officer raises
a number of questions about the use of guns in the enforcement of the law. Why
is violence a part of law enforcement at all? Why are guns drawn by the police
even when theirs are the only guns on the scene?
What is the relationship between law enforcement and violence? The natural—that
is to say the establishment—answer is that laws exist to protect our liberty—our
right to live freely and in peace, without violent interference from others.
Without laws, we would not be secure in our lives and our possessions. But laws
can provide this security only if they are enforced, since the things laws prohibit
are things people often want to do—theft, murder and rape, for example.
Enforcement, of course, means coercion. And coercion that cannot resort to violence
is not really coercive. (This is why Kant says, “Strict justice can…be
represented as the possibility of a general reciprocal use of coercion that
is consistent with the freedom of everyone in accordance with universal laws”
(Metaphysical Elements of Justice, p.36). But coercion rests on a bedrock of
violence.
Protecting us against unauthorized violence, then, requires law, and the law
requires authorized violence. Authorized by what? By the State. In fact, the
State has been defined as that institution in a society that
has the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, and the police are
the delegated arm of authorized violence. The State, then, is violent by definition.
The violent state, however, is a reflection of the kind of society it serves—one
in which the controlling interests are those of an economic elite, namely those
who own and manage capital. When wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few,
that wealth and its owners require protection from the many. Thus the state
uses its weapons to protect the privileges of the dominant class. The criminal
justice system targets the delinquencies of the disadvantged among us—the
poor, the black and the brown, and the undereducated, and pays much less attention
to the far greater damage done to us by the management of capital: dangerous
working conditions, toxic wastes, and unsafe-at-any-speed products. Moreover,
in its never-ending quest to reduce the costs of labor, capital leaves more
and more of us unpaid and underpaid, thereby creating the population the criminal
justice system is charged with controlling.
When police officials talked to the African-American community in North Portland
a couple of weeks ago, most of the audience went away feeling that the police
were not responsive to their concerns. We can see better now the reason for
that disconnect. The community the police are assigned to serve and protect
is not exactly the community they patrol. The community they protect is the
community of business and affluence, the mostly white people who drive nice
cars and live in nice parts of town. This is the community that government represents
and whose interests the police instinctively serve. The community they patrol—and
where guns are in play—is the community of have nots and have littles,
and that is the community that must be managed and kept from bothering those
who run things and buy things. What police and city officials say to North Portland
will not be responsive to the concerns of North Portland because those are not
the concerns they are there to protect and serve.
The community can and should demand that the police revise their policies and
their training so as to be respectful to the people they patrol. But this will
be an uphill battle, for the basic problem will remain: the fundamental institutional
loyalties of the police are to those with property and political power. This
is why the struggle for justice in the streets has to be at the same time a
struggle to make the economy a people’s economy instead of a capitalist
economy. When the life of a society is organized around the interests of a few,
the institutions of that society will serve those few. The law will serve the
common good only when our fundamental economic institutions are set up to serve
us all.
What I’ve said so far, though, goes only part of the way towards explaining
the killing of Kendra James and many others like her across the US. Even if
the police implicitly take their job to be the management of the underclass
and the protection of the business class, it would make sense to be careful
not to kill unarmed non-violent suspects. There must be a complex of attitudes
and expectations on the part of police that makes them too quick to pull out
their guns. It’s almost as if they think they’re occupying enemy
territory. Consider the military forces patrolling Baghdad. Of course they have
their guns out: they are an occupying force imposing the will of a foreign power
on the Iraqi people many of whom are opposed to the US occupation. The attitude
of occupation is quite different from that of protecting and serving. The fact
that police forces patrol American inner cities with guns at the ready suggests
a parallel relationship: The police undesrstand, if only implicitly, that they
enforce a kind of foreign rule, the rule of the well-to-do over the poor, the
rule of economic and social elites over the underclass.
There is greater inequality of wealth in the US today than at any time since
1936, and “among the industrialized nations, the U.S. has the highest
concentration of individual wealth—roughly 3 times that of the No. 2 nation,
Germany.” The level of social services available to the poor has always
been worse than what’s available in other advanced nations, and it’s
getting worse. So we might say that the US has a more virulent form of capitalism
than other nations, producing a much wider gulf between the ruling elites and
the rest of us. The police find themselves protecting and serving the folks
who can spend hundred dollars for a restaurant meal, who can buy the furs and
jewelry advertised in the New Yorker, folks who live in Dunthorpe and the West
Hills, while on the other hand, they patrol very different neigborhoods full
of people who are increasingly stigmatized and degraded by the social, political
and economic policies that diminish their ability to live with dignity. Moreover,
the people the police come in contact with are often driven by their circumstances
to do desperate and dangerous things. So it’s no wonder that police officers
are inclined to rely on force.
I’m trying to explain, not to excuse, police violence. It’s important
to see it as created by more than just bad attitudes, for such attitudes are
themselves rooted in the soil of social domination and inequality, the soil
of virulent capitalism. This soil has to be plowed under by a people’s
movement for a new society, one whose explicit purpose is the full and free
development of all rather than the enrichment of a few.
