The system purred along smoothly when a superior officer
briefly interviewed Slager, only to make it clear that he had
nothing at all to worry about: “they’re not gonna ask you any kind of
questions right now.” The system worked in the sense that it performed
the function it was designed to perform: to kill Black people and either
justify it, cover it up, or both. This is the system, this
has always been the system, and yes: the system worked.
Every system has a glitch, however, and in this case,
that glitch was named Feidin Santana. Not only did Santana courageously
capture the murder of Walter Scott on video, but he—crucially and
revealingly—released the video not to the police, but to Scott’s family.
Santana’s immediate orientation toward the police was one of distrust
and fear: he knew better than to trust the police with evidence, and he
feared for his personal safety. He was justified on both counts.
When Oscar Grant was shot dead on an Oakland transit
platform on January 1, 2009—a scene immortalized since in Fruitvale
Station—police immediately attempted to confiscate all cellphone
video, but a similarly heroic
Karina Vargas released her footage to the public, sparking outrage
and riots that transformed the city and forced the system to respond. In
Philadelphia today, activists and family members continue to
demand the release of the footage of the police killing of Brandon
Tate-Brown, to no avail. If Santana had taken his video to the police
first, there’s no knowing whether it would ever have been released.
Santana’s fear, too, seems justified. Ramsey Orta, the man who captured
on video the choking death of Eric Garner at the hands of NYPD,
has been continuously harassed, including the use of procedural
delays to keep him jailed on Rikers Island despite posting bail.
Santana’s video was a game-changer, but not in the way
we are told. North Charleston Police already knew, based on the
initial forensics performed at the scene, that Scott had been shot
multiple times in the back. North Charleston Police already
knew from Slager’s own admission on dashcam footage that Scott was
running from him when he fired. For North Charleston Police, Santana’s
video was not a surprise, but an embarrassment.
What is important is not that Santana’s video allowed
the indictment of Michael Slager for murdering a Black man for the
tiniest slight to his fragile cop ego. What is important is that
Santana’s video provides the basis to indict the entire system of which
Slager was but a small part, and which kicked automatically into motion
to legitimize the murder of Walter Scott. But the video could only begin
to short-circuit the order of truth determined by police power by
escaping police control to begin with.
This is why those who see in the murder of Walter
Scott an opportunity to renew calls for mandatory body cameras miss the
point spectacularly. It is not video footage per se, but video footage
outside police control that has at least some potential to rein
in police power. Like dashcams, bodycams can be turned off, covered up,
or their footage tampered with or covered up. According to
one recent study, “body cams help cops, not the community” in large
part because “officers control the on/off switch.” But even those
bodycam manufacturers who tout automatic upload to cloud storage are
merely attempting to provide a technological fix to the
fundamentally political problem of who controls the footage
itself.
In fact, oft-cited claims that bodycams reduce police
brutality derive from a single study in Rialto, California, but even the
co-author of the Rialto study insists that there’s
no firm basis for widespread claims about bodycam effectiveness.
Others have debunked the weak
science of the study, showing moreover that the increased visibility
provided nationally by bodycams and dashcams has nevertheless
coincided with an
increase in police violence, not a decrease. Finally,
many fear that a proliferation of bodycams will dramatically increase
conviction rates, thereby contributing to an already ballooning system
of mass incarceration. We need more glitches in the system—more Feidin
Santanas, more Ramsey Ortas—not more bodycams.
But in a system where police are glorified and Black
people demonized, even independent video footage is either useless
or—refracted through white supremacist courts and juries—transformed
alchemically into its opposite. Thus while the stomach-churning footage
of Eric Garner’s murder and his last words—“I can’t breathe”—sparked
popular resistance nationwide, his killers were neither indicted by a
grand jury nor even fired.
In the rare case that police are actually indicted, as
famously with the Rodney King beating, existing footage is chopped up,
freeze-framed, and scrambled before the eyes of jurors so that, in the
words of Patricia Williams, “King’s body helplessly flopping and
twitching in response to a rain of blows, became in the freeze-framed
version a ‘cocked’ leg, an arm in ‘trigger position,’ a bullet of a body
always aimed, poised, and about to fire itself into deadly action.” If
and when Michael Slager goes to trial, we should expect nothing less
than a similarly brutal farce.
By revealing the underlying functioning of the system,
moreover, Santana’s video also revealed the aggressive ambition at the
heart of American policing, how it is an expansive force demanding ever
more power and autonomy while jealously shielding officers from even the
slightest degree of public scrutiny and accountability. Slager’s
eventual indictment proves this inversely: he worked in a
relatively small department with fewer protections and lacking the
intimate relationship with the district attorney enjoyed by larger
departments.
Slager’s indictment therefore says little to nothing
about police accountability in large departments with powerful unions
like the Fraternal Order of Police—which recently deemed those
protesting the police killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore a “lynch
mob”—or New York’s ambitious (if bungling) Patrolmen’s Benevolent
Association. When the PBA felt threatened by the elected mayor Bill De
Blasio late last year, they used the death of two NYPD officers to make
a power grab that some called a “blue
coup.”
A key pillar of police power is their demand for
privacy, enshrined nationwide to the detriment of the public and of
the victims of their violence, with several cities and states making it
difficult to make public the names of those who kill in the name of the
state. California is in many ways at the vanguard of this trend with its
Police Bill of Rights, which effectively shields public servants
with guns from even the most basic level of public oversight.
And so the murder of Walter Scott shows above all that
there is an intrinsic contradiction between democracy—even our very
limited democracy—and the police, that the police will take every
opportunity to seize more power and evade more responsibility. Even the
most basic precepts of the most lukewarm liberal democracy—oversight,
transparency, and accountability—are too much for the police. It’s time
to choose once and for all between democracy and the police.
In so doing, however, we would not be choosing just
any democracy, but something closer to what W.E.B. Du Bois called
“abolition-democracy”: the kind of democratic horizon this country
hasn’t known since the brief interlude after the Civil War known as
Radical Reconstruction, when Black Americans—for the first time, for the
only time—governed themselves and others. Since the police in
the U.S. were
originally slavecatchers, abolition-democracy was a kind of
democracy that could only exist without the police, and the result was
greater equality for everyone: women and men, Black and white.
Radical Reconstruction was beaten back by white
terror, and instead of abolition-democracy, we got the police. As the
age of Jim Crow set in and Black Americans moved, in Du Bois’ words,
“back toward slavery,” the police and the courts became the most
important mechanisms to uphold white supremacy—and nothing has changed.
With every move toward freedom, the importance of such legal instruments
only increased: it was therefore no surprise that the winning of some
limited civil rights in 1964 and 1965 soon coincided with the
exponential ballooning of a racialized system of mass incarceration.
This is why today,
some are proposing the three D’s: seeking to disempower,
disarm, and ultimately disband the police. Ambitious?
Yes, but if there were an armed gang wandering the streets with
impunity, responsible for
thousands of killings over the past ten years, we wouldn’t hesitate
to act decisively. Why not do the same with what former New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg
once boasted was the city’s “biggest gang”?
Abolishing the police is a daunting task indeed,
requiring as it would a total restructuring of socio-political life in a
country that has never known anything else. But the very centrality of
the police, as a sort of linchpin upholding white supremacy, means that
even small steps can unleash radically new possibilities. And
practically, the steps are concrete: the abolition of police unions, the
main pillar of creeping police power, as well as the derogation of any
law that treats police as a special class of people. It begins with
breaking police power in the United States once and for all.