Suhail Gharaibeh 1 Cw: Police Violence, Sexual Assault, Abuse, Anti-Blackness Table of Contents
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MAKING FREEDOM ABOLITION GEOGRAPHY & THE MOVEMENT TO DEFUND PITTSBURGH POLICE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY / PROF. DANIEL JOSLYN HISTORY OF AMERICAN RADICALISM / JUNE 2020 SUHAIL GHARAIBEH 1 CW: POLICE VIOLENCE, SEXUAL ASSAULT, ABUSE, ANTI-BLACKNESS TABLE OF CONTENTS introduction 5 part I. pittsburgh’s police and prisons: a 7 people’s history ‘the land in the fork’: empire, 8 enslavement & industry in the making of the pittsburgh police bootlegging, bribery, & 14 brutality: policing in pittsburgh’s long twentieth century ‘things will be great when you’re downtown’: pittsburgh police in the 21 post-ferguson era part II. toward a 27 pittsburgh without police reframing social harm 28 the world we want is the world we 31 need: thoughts & conversations 2 NOW, WHAT I HAVE SAID ABOUT HAR- LEM IS TRUE OF CHICAGO, DETROIT, WASHINGTON, BOSTON, PHILADEL- PHIA, LOS ANGELES AND SAN FRAN- CISCO--IS TRUE OF EVERY NORTHERN CITY WITH A LARGE NEGRO POPULA- TION. AND THE POLICE ARE SIMPLY THE HIRED ENEMIES OF THIS POP- ULATION. THEY ARE PRESENT TO KEEP THE NEGRO IN HIS PLACE AND TO PROTECT WHITE BUSINESS IN- TERESTS, AND THEY HAVE NO OTH- ER FUNCTION...SINCE THEY KNOW THAT THEY ARE HATED, THEY ARE ALWAYS AFRAID. ONE CANNOT POS- SIBLY ARRIVE AT A MORE SUREFIRE FORMULA FOR CRUELTY. THIS IS WHY THOSE PIOUS CALLS TO ‘RESPECT THE LAW,’ ALWAYS TO BE HEARD FROM PROMINENT CITIZENS EACH TIME THE GHETTO EXPLODES, ARE SO OB- SCENE. THE LAW IS MEANT TO BE MY SERVANT AND NOT MY MASTER, STILL LESS MY TORTURER AND MY MURDER- ER. TO RESPECT THE LAW, IN THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THE AMERICAN NEGRO FINDS HIMSELF, IS SIMPLY TO SURRENDER HIS SELF-RESPECT. --JAMES BALDWIN, “A REPORT FROM OCCUPIED TERRITORY,” 1966 3 ss ALISHA B. WORMSLEY, 2018 4 INTRODUCTION Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, responding recently about clarifying the actual impact that various on Twitter to Minneapolis City Council’s decision strategies have, and recognizing that alternative to disband the Minneapolis Police Department, approaches to the ‘official’ solutions are alive, are as well as to growing local calls to defund the politically viable, and are being pursued by activists Pittsburgh Police, wrote: and organizations around the United States and beyond.”2 “Real change does not occur through extremist demands--no [sic] through the right, nor through American thinkers like Angela Davis, Mariame the left. Real change only happens when consen- Kaba, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have argued for sus is earned, through listening, through under- decades not only that the US policing system dis- standing & through compassion. I ask all to Pray proportionately targets, harasses, and murders for Peace.”1 people of color, but furthermore that the system of policing should itself be historicized as a but- The deafness of this statement is astound- tress for the U.S.’ system of racial capitalism. ing--Mayor Peduto has evidently not internalized the BLM slogan, “no justice, no peace.” The idea As these abolitionist scholars continuously note, that only widely-shared, nonpartisan, “earned” the idea that de jure racism ended with the Civil beliefs can create societal change is utterly ahis- Rights Movement of the 1960s represents a fail- torical. A civil war was fought in this nation in no ure to fully comprehend the catastrophe of mass small part because the abolition of chattel slavery incarceration in this country. Indeed, we know was such a contested, “radical,” partisan idea. The now that the U.S. prison boom of the second half fall of Jim Crow apartheid in the South was not a of the twentieth century began in direct response consensus decision. to the leftist politics flourishing in the country and around the world at that time.3 As John Erli- Pathologizing a movement that aims to defend chmann, Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, black lives from police violence as “extremist” is admitted in a 1994 interview about the War on a convenient and weighty strategy, one that dates Drugs: back a long time, as we will see. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either Extrajudicial execution is extreme. The use of mil- against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting itary gear, ballistics, and chemical weapons against the public to associate the hippies with marijuana civilians is extreme. The almost-115 million dollar and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both Pittsburgh Police budget is extreme. Leon Ford’s heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We shooting by Pittsburgh Police was extreme. could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night If, as President Trump wants to claim, being an- on the evening news. Did we know we were lying ti-fascist makes one a “terrorist,” then we must all about the drugs? Of course we did.”4 be terrorists. If demanding the abolition of police and prisons is “extremist,” then we must embrace U.S. carceral geographies reproduce, via both extremism unreservedly. As Morgan Bassichis, judicial and extrajudicial regimes in the domes- Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade write in their important essay, “Building an Abolitionist Queer 2 Bassichis et al., “Building an Abolitionist Queer and and Trans Movement with Everything We’ve Got”: Trans Movement with Everything We’ve Got,” in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. “This is less about creating false dichotomies Stanley and Nat Smith, AK Press, 2011, 17. between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ approaches, and more 3 See Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incar- ceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press, 2012 for one of 1 Peduto, William (billpeduto). “Real change does not oc- many detailed accounts. cur...” 8 June 2020, 12:59 AM. Tweet, https://twitter.com/billpeduto/ 4 Baum, Dan, et al. “[Report]: Legalize It All.” Harper’s Maga- status/1269856636736286720. zine, 31 Mar. 2016, harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/. 5 tic sphere, the geopolitical projects of militarism and occupation that U.S. armed forces incur abroad. By manufacturing various “Wars On,” the state has funnelled increasingly massive portions of its own citizenry behind the walls of prisons. Law enforcement professionals--from federal agents to suburban municipal police officers--are the foot soldiers in these wars. The “sanctuary city” move- ment (which aims to reduce ICE’s footprint in certain jurisdictions) is, in theory, an application of Gilmore’s concept of “abolition geography.” Pittsburgh claims to be a sanctuary city (despite, for example, Latinx community organizer Martin Esquivel-Hernandez’s eight-month detention and eventual deportation from the city in 2017 by ICE.5) Pittsburgh Police use tasers on protestors at a police recruitment event, 20 August 2005, as cap- The Defund movement asks--why can’t we also make tured by PIMC our city a sanctuary for Black folks? For working folks? For the differently abled? For our children? Abolition means challenging the necessity of coer- cion; questioning the validity of codified, sanctioned, and even “common-sense” forms of social organi- zation and disorganization; and pushing back against the incursions of the state--not only in a figurative sense, but also with embodied geopolitical struggle. In a 2015 presentation of her pathbreaking essay “Ab- olition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” Ruth Gilmore gives us a critical outline of “abolition geography”: “Abolition geography: how and to what end people make freedom provisionally, imperatively, imagining and practicing ‘home’ against the perpetually disin- tegrating grind of partition and repartition through Demonstrators face police during the Antwon Rose which capitalism (which is always and everywhere protests of 2018, from The Nation racial capitalism) concocts the means of its own val- orization.”6 Part political manifesto, part historical scrapbook, the purpose of this project is to document Pitts- burgh’s terrains of policing, incarceration, struggle, and resistance; to offer a historical sweep of how the Pittsburgh carceral complex developed; and to argue, then, that abolishing that complex as we know it today is not only politically viable, but is in fact vital, and already happening all around us. Cops assaulting a young man outside the Wood Street T station, 2015. Recorded by Ryan Deto for the City Paper. 5 Blackley, Katie. “Despite Significant Support, Pittsburgh Im- migration Activist Is Deported To Mexico.” 90.5 WESA, 2017, www.wesa. fm/term/martin-esquivel-hernandez-0#stream/0. 6 “RUTH WILSON GILMORE.” YouTube, Institute for Geographies of Justice, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmjgPxElk7A&t=959s. 6 PART I. PITTSBURGH’S POLICE & PRISONS: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY Like in most mid-sized American cities, violent “supply-side” economics, the weakening of labor crime in Pittsburgh has been generally falling unions, cuts to social spending, etc.) is always accom- steadily for around two decades. 2019 in par- panied by organized violence (surveillance, policing, ticular saw a dip in violent crime.1 Homicide incarceration, deportation). While social services rates were at historic lows,2 keeping on trend suffer and shrink, the police’s piggybanks are stuffed with a nationwide steady decrease in homicide. with more and more taxpayer dollars and federal grants. The most vulnerable people in our city, over- So why did the 2020 operating budget, drafted between whelmingly Black and working class, are perpetually City Council and Mayor Bill Peduto, boost the police’s forced into socioeconomic precarity and marginality. budget by 10.2 million dollars? Why did the budget in- clude plans for a new police station in the North Shore So how did we get here? We know that history has a stadium district, two new substations in Homewood tendency to radicalize, because unearthing history and Southside, and 24-hour staffing for the Down- unsettles our notions of what is necessary, possi- town substation, which itself was just opened in 2017? ble, and viable, reminding us that we are the prod- ucts of a genealogy, of a series of human actions and While departments specifically meant to improve reactions.