POLICING THE PLANET Jordan T. Camp is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Christina Heatherton is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. Contents How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way MARTÍN ESPADA Introduction: Policing the Planet JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON I. THE PLANETARY CRISIS OF POLICING 1. Thug Nation: On State Violence and Disposability ROBIN D. G. KELLEY 2. #BlackLivesMatter and Global Visions of Abolition: An Interview with Patrisse Cullors CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 3. Broken Windows at Blue’s: A Queer History of Gentrification and Policing CHRISTINA B. HANHARDT 4. Ending Broken Windows Policing in New York City: An Interview with Joo-Hyun Kang JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 5. The Baltimore Uprising ANJALI KAMAT 6. Total Policing and the Global Surveillance Empire Today: An Interview with Arun Kundnani JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 7. Mano Dura Contra El Crimen and Premature Death in Puerto Rico MARISOL LEBRÓN 8. Policing the Crisis of Indigenous Lives: An Interview with the Red Nation CHRISTINA HEATHERTON II. BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING AS NEOLIBERAL URBAN STRATEGY 9. Policing Place and Taxing Time on Skid Row GEORGE LIPSITZ 10. Asset Stripping and Broken Windows Policing on LA’s Skid Row: An Interview with Becky Dennison and Pete White JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 11. Broken Windows, Surveillance, and the New Urban Counterinsurgency: An Interview with Hamid Khan JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 12. The Emergence of Command and Control Policing in Neoliberal New York ALEX S. VITALE AND BRIAN JORDAN JEFFERSON 13. Beyond Bratton RUTH WILSON GILMORE AND CRAIG GILMORE 14. They’re Not Solving the Problem, They’re Displacing It: An Interview with Alex Sanchez STEVEN OSUNA 15. Resisting State Violence in the Era of Mass Deportation: An Interview with Mizue Aizeki JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON III. THE CRISIS OF BROKEN WINDOWS COMMON SENSE 16. Community Policing Reconsidered: From Ferguson to Baltimore JUSTIN HANSFORD 17. How Liberals Legitimate Broken Windows: An Interview with Naomi Murakawa JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 18. “Broken Windows Is Not the Panacea”: Common Sense, Good Sense, and Police Accountability in American Cities DON MITCHELL, KAFUI ATTOH, AND LYNN A. STAEHELI 19. We Charge Genocide: An Interview with Breanna Champion, Page May, and Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 20. The Magical Life of Broken Windows RACHEL HERZING 21. Poetry and the Political Imagination: An Interview with Martín Espada JORDAN T. CAMP AND CHRISTINA HEATHERTON 22. This Ends Badly: Race and Capitalism VIJAY PRASHAD Acknowledgments How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way Not songs of loyalty alone are these, But songs of insurrection also, For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over. —Walt Whitman I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting. I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops, shot so many times there are bullet holes in the soles of his feet. I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocketknife, crossing the street in front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrong door kicked in, the minister’s heart seizing up. I see the man hawking a fistful of cigarettes, the cop’s chokehold that makes his wheezing lungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window, kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet. I see the suicides: the conga player handcuffed for drumming on the subway, hanged in the jail cell with his hands cuffed behind him; the suspect leaking blood from his chest in the backseat of the squad car; the 300-pound boy said to stampede bare-handed into the bullets drilling his forehead. I see the coroner nodding, the words he types in his report burrowing into the skin like more bullets. I see the government investigations stacking, words buzzing on the page, then suffocated as bees suffocate in a jar. I see the next Black man, fleeing as the fugitive slave once fled the slave-catcher, shot in the back for a broken tail light. I see the cop handcuff the corpse. I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads, faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen. I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore. Martín Espada INTRODUCTION: POLICING THE PLANET Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton I Eric Garner lived on the brink of uncertainty. His death at the hands of New York City police officers in 2014 followed years of incessant harassment for small-scale infractions, including the sale of untaxed loose cigarettes. Garner was regularly stopped and searched, and—as his 2007 civil rights lawsuit detailed—humiliated and sexually violated by police in public. Before he was slain on a Staten Island sidewalk, he pleaded with approaching officers, “Every time you see me you arrest me. I’m tired of it. It stops today.” Garner’s murder, filmed on a phone by his friend Ramsey Orta, was viewed millions of times by people around the world. Garner’s final desperate words to the officers choking him, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for organizers and activists fighting to end police violence and impunity. Similarly, his plea, “This stops today” was transformed into a demand to end the prosaic surveillance, arbitrary harassment, and intimate violations—the daily life of policing—that led to Garner’s fatal assault. Protesters not only questioned how Eric Garner died; they also challenged the conditions under which he was forced to live.1 Eric Garner’s name has joined a morbidly expanding roll call of the racialized poor killed by police and vigilante violence. Demonstrators have refused to let these premature deaths be explained away as mere excess or accident. They instead cast this violence as routinized and widespread.2 In so doing, they have called attention to the underlying material conditions that have preceded and ultimately enabled these killings. Rather than asking how the police can kill less, they have forced a broader set of questions: Why have the police been endowed with the arbitrary capacity to regulate the lives of the racialized poor in US cities? Why do they have expanding and unfettered access to the bodies of poor people in general and poor people of color routinely? How and why are poor people criminalized for occupying public space? Can the problem of police violence actually be solved with the addition of more police (even better trained, more diverse, or better monitored) as many police departments and federal proposals suggest? How have these issues been addressed in other global contexts? And finally, what alternate definitions of security might we imagine? This book, Policing the Planet, is a collaborative effort between social movement organizers, scholar-activists, journalists, and artists to address these questions. Following the lead of social movements, it reassesses the policing philosophy known as “broken windows theory.” Praised as a comprehensive model of “community policing,” this doctrine has vastly broadened the capacities of police both nationally and globally. Through essays and interviews, the book explores the rise and spread of broken windows policing. In analyzing vengeful policing campaigns waged against the racialized poor, Native people, immigrant workers, Black and Brown youth, LGBTQI and gender-nonconforming people, the homeless, sex workers, and others, it demonstrates that broken windows policing emerged as an ideological and political project. In examining its spread throughout the United States and around the world, it explores how broken windows policing has become the political expression of neoliberalism at the urban scale. Racism, it argues, has sustained and naturalized these processes as inexorable and inevitable. The book therefore considers the struggle against racism, militarism, and capital—the policing of the planet—as a central political challenge of our times.3 The underlying concept of broken windows policing is deceptively simple: to stop major crimes from occurring, police must first prevent small signs of “disorder” from proliferating, such as graffiti, litter, panhandling, public urination, the sale of untaxed cigarettes, and so forth. It proposes that the best way to prevent major crimes is for people to take responsibility for their neighborhoods and for the police to facilitate that process.4 The metaphor goes that if a window in a neighborhood stays broken, it signals neglect and encourages small crimes, which then lead to larger ones. Disorder in the form of minor violations is presumed to breed larger disorder. Instead of addressing “individual crimes,” broken windows theory has given police new authorization to control and moderate behavior. While analysts note that such invasive policing is by no means unique to the present moment, given the broad transformations in police policy, training, and funding, there is a general consensus that broken windows policing has constituted a fundamental expansion and redefinition of state capacities at the urban scale both across the country and worldwide. In the current crisis of mass incarceration, broken windows is often presented as the milder, more community-minded alternative to more aggressive forms of policing.