Whether they’re handing out tickets, kicking in doors, enforcing injunctions or murdering
people in the street, cops are the loyal servants of power.
They are the shock troops of the ruling class, charged with defending social, economic and
political hierarchies through the targeted use of force.
Police violence is one of the primary elements
of coercion underpinning the logics of state and capital.
It is therefore no great shock that its most frequent targets are the individuals and communities
most marked by colonial oppression and capitalist exploitation.
On reservations, in ghettos and other racialized, working-class neighbourhoods, police maintain
a constant and visible presence.
They conduct round-the-clock surveillance, intercepting communications, running covert
intelligence operations and harassing people
at random as they travel home from the corner store.
They use tactics of terror and intimidation, aimed at forcing people to internalize their
oppression, accept their subordination, and abandon their dreams of freedom and justice.
Due in part to the sophisticated counterinsurgency strategies they employ, the seemingly endless
amount of resources at their disposal, and their sheer capacity for violence... police
tend to be pretty effective at staving off urban uprisings.
But the pursuit of dignity is a basic human
condition, and the desire for security is universal.
Repression breeds resentment.
And ultimately... resistance.
And so every so often, cities light up as long-brutalized community members decide they’ve
had enough and set out to realize their collective power.
Over the next thirty minutes, we’ll speak with a range of individuals as they dissect
the history and development of modern policing, and share their experiences of organizing
for community defence, throwing down against cops in the street...
and making a whole lotta trouble.
You fight violence.
What do you fight it with? You fight violence.
What do you fight it with?
Superior violence, righteous violence, yeah?
Violence is your tool, violence is your enemy, violence is the realm we operate in.
You are men and women of violence.
You must master it, or it will destroy you.
It’s not like one day Sir Robert Peel woke up and said “I have a good idea, let’s
call it the police,” instead these characteristics developed one at a time in separate municipalities.
And as innovations were introduced in one place they would then be adopted once their
utility was shown somewhere else.
So very slowly, those characteristics became a symbol and the character of policing as
we know it emerged.
The point at which that first occurred – at least the earliest example that I could find
– was Charleston South Carolina, right around the time of the American Revolution.
The body that it evolved from was a less formal, less professionalized, less continuous operation
called the slave patrols.
And the slave patrols adopted those characteristics
immediately following real or rumoured slave revolts.
The history actually of the slave patrols just goes back to the 1700s but we see the
dynamic of policing and enforcement of these invaders’ laws as something that’s established
in the initial waves even before the establishment of the so-called US.
Policing and the enforcement of settler invader laws were really a practice of many entities,
not just like formalized law enforcement entities, but military entities or just individual invaders
or settlers who would come in and enforce the perceived laws weather it’s doctrine
of discovery, manifest destiny and other laws that were established that were anti-indigenous.
Once the model was crystallized in Charleston, it was very quickly replicated in other cities
throughout the south and then in cities throughout the north which did not have a slave population
to contend with, but did have a new immigrant working class with similar sorts of concerns
about civil unrest.
The cops have always been the armed enforcers of everything that we hate.
At base, they maintain the property rights that are essential to the functioning of capitalism.
They’re on the front lines of the state’s attempts to criminalize poor and racialized people
They protect the rich and powerful and they’re
also at the front lines of suppressing popular revolt.
We can see the roots of how cops came to be in the action that they take these days.
We see cops killing black people in the States and in Canada, committing sexual violence
against indigenous women.
And in general cops are continuing every day to enforce the order of a world that is unlivable
for many people.
Violence in this country is generalized the same as repression.
And in the Mexican territory there are countless acts of brutality and violence that we live
in our daily lives
Terrorism is something that is done purposely it’s not something that’s an accident,
and of course we know that police brutality and police murder of African people in America
is something that’s ongoing.
And the murders and the numbers of the murders are just going up and up.
Two sets of criteria characterize the modern municipal police force.
The characteristics that any agency involved in policing will more or less have these.
Those being a public or a governmental character, the authority to use force and general law
enforcement duties.
...we’re doing is serving an eviction on you.
You have to get a change of clothes, stuff like that, and take off in about 15 minutes.
Well I have my son upstairs and he’s sleeping right now.
Okay, you need to wake him up.
If you think you’re gonna fall you’d better fall on your face.
If your hands go back into the small of your back or down, we are going to shoot you!
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of intense social and political upheaval.
In the United States, the call for civil rights gave way to the demand for Black Power, a
transition marked by waves of intense rioting
and the proliferation of armed revolutionary groups.
Police administrators and counterinsurgency specialists responded to this threat with
a number of key innovations, such as the introduction of heavily militarized Special Weapons And
Tactics, or SWAT Teams, and a host of new intelligence-gathering and public relations
strategies grouped under the umbrella of ‘community policing’.
At around the same time, the FBI was ramping up an illegal campaign of dirty tricks packaged
under the code name COINTELPRO, which aimed
to disrupt and eliminate subversive elements in society.
While the Counter-Intelligence Program was officially ended in 1971... it wasn’t long
before it was replaced with the so-called “War on Drugs”, a policy framework that
allowed for tough new anti-crime legislation, increased funding for law enforcement and
the widespread militarization of local, county and state police forces.
Over the following decades, more and more local police forces were outfitted with military
grade weapons and trained in the tactics of urban warfare.
While these changes were sweeping, they were also, for the most part, incremental and gradual.
That is... until one sunny morning in the autumn of 2001.
In terms of policing, the most immediate effect of the september 11th attacks was there was
a general scaling back of the constraints that police and other law enforcement agencies
were operating under.
Especially in terms of domestic surveillance and political interference.
Today the FBI is a national security and law enforcement organization that uses intelligence
to prevent and respond to crime and to terrorism.
Becoming better at gathering useful informations for ourselves, for policy makers and our partners
in both the government and the private sector is one of our top priorities.
Intelligence-led policing an approach to policing that puts intelligence activities first, and
also that uses the intelligence to direct everything else that the police are doing.
Police detain and collect information on people who are not suspected of any crime.
They stop people on the street, sometimes search them, sometimes just ID them, and collect
information on, you know, who they are, why they’re there, who they’re with, where
they’re going, that sort of thing.
That information of course goes into some database which then, in the aggregate, gives
some broad idea of who is in the targeted community, the kind of things that are going
on there, the things that the police can observe.
Re-configuration of policing really just extends their reach in different ways.
So we can see this in the history of community policing for example.
Where this attempt to make cops nicer by integrating them to the fabric of local communities is
really just a strategy to normalize police presence, to extend the resources that are
available to them, to encourage citizen cops and snitching and things like that.
And to neutralize potential sites of resistance.
So we can actually see a lot of parallels between community policing as a policing strategy
and counter-insurgency strategies.
There are a variety of domestic actors involved in this policing and surveillance complex.
We’ve seen different agencies coming together trying to figure out ways to share resources,
share intelligence, within the context of the war on terror.
Around what are described as mega events, large political events or sporting events
such as the olympic games or the G7, G20 meetings, policing and security agencies and government
bodies are very proactive in organizing vast amounts of security resources to prepare for
any security incidents that may arise.
Usually around these events, we see the formation
of what are called joint intelligence groups, or JIGs.
At the G20 in Toronto in 2010 you saw the establishment of a jig which was a collaboration
between the RCMP and local and provincial forces.
And quote “one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in Canadian history.”
reports later received through access to information requests show that this group specifically
targeted anarchists, and these same freedom of information documents later revealed that
there was at least twelve undercover officers that had infiltrated different groups in Vancouver,
Guelph, Kitchener, Waterloo, Toronto, and Montreal.
In the context of the war on terror, Canadian security agencies are organizing under the
rubric of critical infrastructure protection.
And what that means is any groups that are seen as potentially targeting critical infrastructure
become wrapped up in Canada’s security agencies’ surveillance complex.
Indigenous or environmental groups that threaten or are perceived as potentially threatening
critical infrastructure, such as blocking a road, blocking a rail line, threatening
an energy facility, trying to stop pipeline construction, these types of resistance activities
are caught up in the policing and surveillance
complex that falls under critical infrastructure protection.
In terms of resource extraction, resource-colonialism, what we face is the police are always the
front line protecting those corporate interests or private interests that are waging violence
against mother earth and inflicting trauma through whether it’s coal mining, whether
it’s fracking for natural gas, whether it’s gold, whether it’s oil extraction, or whether
it’s even recreational commodification of natural environments which is a form of extractive
violence against the land.
These laws are established, they’re premised on the severing of indigenous people’s ties
to the land.
There are land giveaways for neoliberal corporations, and people are defending their territories.
So when people come out to defend their territories.
And the way to defend capital or neoliberalism is with repression
From the moment that Peña Nieto stepped into the congress to start his term as president
of Mexico, A harsh police operation is unleashed, where a comrade is lethally hurt, and who
died a year later because of his injuries.
Another comrade lost his eye, many more injured.
For me that represents the vision of the future that Peña Nieto brought, to the point that
he had to mark to the point that he had to
mark his first day with how things were gonna go.
Police and corporate interests work very closely together to share intelligence, to develop
plans on how to best carry out their activities,
to facilitate the work of resource extractive industries.
There are no clean breaks between the present and the past.
Everything that exists today is a product of what came before it.
And so it’s no surprise that Policing in the United States, an institution that grew
out of a body formed to put down slave revolts, continues to play a central role in maintaining
white supremacy to this day.
Just as slavery evolved, shifting from the vast plantations of the American south to
the factories, workshops and call centres of the prison-industrial-complex... so the
Slave Patrols of old have traded in their horses for police cruisers, and their lever
action rifles for AR-15s.
So it’s no big mystery why Black people are arrested and killed in such disproportionate
numbers in the US – or, for that matter, in other former slave-based economies, such
as Brazil and Colombia.
The system wasn’t designed by accident.
It’s not broken, and it’s definitely not simply a matter of a few bad apples.
The institution of American policing is inherently racist... because it was designed to enforce
institutionalized racism.
Members of the community, as a whole, view the police department as an occupying army.
They see themselves as outsiders.
The training from the polilce academy has trained them and indoctrincated them to view
our communities in a certain way, with a certain perspective.
And this is what our people understand, and they see this on a day-to-day basis.
Members of the younger generation, they view the police department as some people who're
just out to get them.
Put them in local jails... or maybe find a way to put them in the prison-industrial-slave-complex.
And this is working-class African communities all over this country.
And that's how they view it.
That's how they're raised up viewing it.
Because of the actions of the police department, which we know is the first line of defense
for the capitalist state.
Guerrilla Mainframe is a revolutionary grassroots organization, actually has programs and services
for the people.
The Huey P Newton Gun Club, which we founded, was started to encourage people to practice
self-defense in their communities.
Shots fired.
Officer down.
We've got a guy with a long rifle... don't know where the hell he's at.
SWAT Officers on 4-2.
They're taking fire.. with the uhh... suspect shooting on police.
The case of Micah X Johnson, who shot and killed members of the Dallas Police Department
in 2016 in downtown Dallas, during a solidarity march for the latest victims of police terrorism.
Course we always know... when somebody in our community responds, or reacts in a certain
way, that they're going to pin the bad-guy symbol on the Black movement as a whole.
Black veteran organizers, organizers who are new to the movement, Black Lives Matter...
they wanna put it on anybody they can who was organizing against injustices in the community.
You seeing more and more people are gettin tired of injustice.
Especially African people in America... since we built this country up in just less than
300 years for free.
Chief Rakem Balagoon of Guerrilla Mainframe
was arrested - we say captured - on December 12, 2017.
Him and his 16-year old son was awakened at around 4 or 5 am in the morning by the FBI
and ATF, who stormed into their apartments with military gear and weapons.
They gathered the manuals of our organization that they thought could help them in this
case of labelling him a Black Identity Extremist, and someone who is a danger to society.
So they used this to build up this character that they wanted him to be.
Because they understand what real, consistent grassroots organizing can turn into.
As far as this Black Idenity Extremist classification, we view it as COINTELPRO 2.0.
This is something that they wanna use to target people in the revolutionary movement.
That will give them the outright justification to, y'know, come into people's homes with
military weapons at 4AM to try and charge them with crimes they know don't even exist.
We don't walk in fear that this will happen again.
Even though it could.
But we don't walk around, y'know, lookin all over our shoulder and wondering what's next.
To us, what's next is we're gonna help our people be free by any means necessary, and
we're gonna continue to do what we do.
You need to disperse immediately, or you will be subject to arrest... do it now.
The relationship between the Ferguson Police and the St Louis County Police as a whole and
the Black community - I would describe it as a negative one.
They instill fear in the Black community in many different ways, and it changes the way
that we move.
It dictates how we move when we're outside of our houses, literally every single day.
How they handled the Mike Brown situation... his death.
From the initial interaction, all the way to him dying and being left for 4.5 hours
in this hottest months of the year...
people were just pissed off.
YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO ARREST.
Straight mayham out here!
In the protests in those immediate days and weeks, a lot of the national organizations
and local non-profits weren't exactly able to penetrate the movement at that point.
And a lot of the grassroot organizations that eventually emerged, didn't exist at the time.
So it was organic.
I would say on the ground, especially in the later months and years after, there was a
mentality built amongst activists locally that shunned any big name, so-callled leaders
that tried to come and attach themselves to what we were doing.
Non-profits and the so-called leaders were trying to position themselves to control the
narrative of what was happening in the streets in Ferguson.
One non-profit - Black Lives Matter - they were successful at what they did.
Now any movement or protest that happens in the United States that includes Black people,
they're automatically affilated with thtat organization.
So they were successful at what they were trying to accomplish, in my eyes.
But the other ones, they were pushed out.
Black Lives Matter should have been pushed out, but they weren't.
Activists have been murdered.
That's definitely real and true.
It's happened on multiple different occasions here in St Louis.
There was defintely several hundreds of people that were charged during the Ferguson movement.
Trumped up charges.. especially early on.
And it instilled a lot of fear in a ot of folks.
It also made a lot of folks not want to come out any more.
Seeing the other cities rise up in the years following Mike Brown's death was amazing.
Me and my organization, we actually travelled to a few of these places. Seeing the other cities rise up in the years following Mike Brown's death was amazing.
Me and my organization, we actually travelled to a few of these places.
We went to Baltimore.
We went to Baton Rouge.
We went to Milwaukee.
We went to Chicago.
We went to Charlotte...and uh... it was a beautiful thing to see.
All around the world, police departments are constantly recruiting and training new members,
integrating new technologies, updating their strategies and refining their tactics… all
in order to better deal with the threat of social unrest.
Those of us seeking to defend ourselves and our communities against police violence would
be wise to do the same.
In practical terms, this means organizing with our neighbours to build institutions
of counter-power that can make it more difficult for police to enter our communities, and make
members of our community less likely to call police or provide them with intelligence.
It means conducting research, learning their tactics, and coming up with creative ways
to thwart them.
It means sharpening our own tools of attack.
There is no shortage of work to be done.
As always, the secret is figuring out where to begin.
It’s important to empower ourselves to understand their laws so we can assert them in any interaction.
And I don’t necessarily believe in nonviolent
direct action, de-escalation tactics, sometimes
we need to strategically escalate and assert
and confront but obviously be smart about it.
We must learn to study and work, work and study, cause you’re not goin’ nowhere
without the study.
You’re just going to be reactionary, it’s
just going to be a continued process of emotionalism for you.
But emotions go up and emotions come down and we have to learn to be consistent and
that consistency starts with what’s in us.
There's also a very important point.
Is to look deeply within ourselves And by that I mean To look at our daily lives,
to look at our relationships between collectives and individuals.
To reflect about patriarchy, that it's not only neoliberalism, that it's not only capitalism,
there is a larger system that's crushing us, that is punching us in the face every day.
Specially here in Mexico.
So it's crucial for all of us to always be analyzing that
and critiquing ourselves as comrades.
Get to know people who are also affected by white supremacy and police brutality and build
with them in real ways in your community.
I would also encourage you to cross some lines that you may not have crossed.
Racial lines…
Gender lines…. because you we all need each other in order to beat this beast.
Become friendly with your brothers and sisters who are also oppressed.
Value different kinds of contributions that people can make.
Coordinate across differences.
Come up with ways that people with different tactical preferences and capacities can be
involved.
Organizing against police isn’t just about fighting cops in the streets, even though
that’s definitely part of it.
Keep cops out of demos by making demo spaces that are unsafe for cops to get close to.
Sometimes that can look like using reinforced but flexible banners, also potentially flags.
Equipment could look like fire extinguishers filled with paint or foam.
There are of course fireworks.
There are the classics like rocks, sticks and bricks and other debris that one might
find.
We have to also understand that we’re operating in a new political environment and we have
not only state or federal entities that we have to go up against but we also have private
security forces that are basically paramilitary forces that enforce the interests of corporations.
Those forces can be a lot more dangerous.
I would recommend that you get armed, get you a firearm, get the people around you and
part of your organizations armed.
And not only get armed but train and become really efficient with your tools.
See what works, like don’t get too caught up in the ideology of how you think society
is going to work.
Try different things and be pragmatic about it.
Stay consistent you know don’t worry about what might happen that’s not in your favor.
Just do what you know you have a god given right to do.
And that is organize for sovereignty and the practice of self determination, all people
have that right on earth to safeguard their interests, their resources for their people’s
growth and development.
Understanding the ways that the state operates, the new ways that the state operates, what
its capabilities are and thinking through our actions and being as responsible as possible.
And not succumbing to the fear, recognizing that our culture is stronger, is more powerful
than that and will carry us forward.
Police tactics aren’t static, they adapt their tactics to us.
One way they do that is by watching videos of what happiness in a demo.
So it’s important to push media out of the demo but in the case where there is media
footage or YouTube video or whatever of what the black bloc did during a given demo, you
know the cops are watching it and studying it and learning from it so it’s also important
for anarchists to do that.
We need to be constantly reassessing what we do, innovating and changing things up.
Going into it you need to be prepared for a long struggle.
It’s not a problem that’s going to be easily solved and then moved on.
And that to address the problems of policing in a really fundamental way, you need to address
the inequalities that the police exist to protect.
And so struggles against the police need to be directly tied to struggles against racism
and class inequality.
We have the right to a pursuit of happiness in life and not because we have the most money,
or we’re an athlete playing for the Dallas Cowboys, no.
Because we have the right because we are human beings.
We have the right to have the best things in life, just because.
In the face of the billions of dollars spent on their budgets every year, their deep integration
into public institutions, social service agencies, NGOs, community and faith groups, and the
cutting edge tools of surveillance and repression that they employ... it’s easy for those
organizing against the police to get discouraged.
But it’s important to keep in mind that the reason that they need all these fancy
tools, the reason that they spend so much time running drills and polishing their PR
image through community policing initiatives and the seemingly endless stream of pro-cop
propaganda produced by Hollywood and television executives... the reason they do all of this
is because they see us as a threat.
Police are tasked with defending an ecologically destructive system built on institutionalized
inequality and the exploitation of the many by the few.
It’s a precarious arrangement, held together by a combination of trust, fear and routine.
By attacking these mutually-reinforcing support beams, we can each do our part to destabilize
the entire system.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in
groups, and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you interested in organizing a local campaign against police... or building a community
defence network with your neighbours?
Consider getting together with some comrades, organizing a screening of this film, and discussing
where to get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop, community
center, or even just at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show, and a screening
kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use to get a discussion
going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@sub.media.
Just a heads up that we have officially launched our 2019 fundraising campaign.
SubMedia is a small collective made up of four people working full-time to produce films
and short videos that we hope resonate with the people who watch them, and help spread
anarchist ideas, strategies and tactics.
If you’ve never supported us before… or if you used to in the past and are in a position
to do so again, please consider going to our website and making a one-time donation, or
signing up to be a monthly sustainer at sub.media/donate.
This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of Jodi, Pepe,
Garrett & Jaz’min.
Stay tuned early next year for Trouble #19, are we explore the relationship between technology,
resistance and social control.
It's not just companies like Google that are
are sucking up your data everything you click on, everything you like
everything your friends like all of the people you know
where you are going, everything about you
they are storing it forever
Now get out there…. and make some trouble!