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Sunday, November 13, 2011

The Police Are Part of the 99% But They Are Working for the 1%

From the corralling of public protest into "free speech zones" and the proliferation of "non-lethal" crowd control measures like rubber bullets and acoustic bombs and ubiquitous tasering together with the circumvention and circumscription of public assemblies from vast pre-emptive arrests of activists at national party conventions and international trade organization meetings and highly choreographed Potemkin Village "town hall" meetings, this generation has witnessed an ongoing criminalization of assembly and dissent along with the concomitant privatization of public spaces and services. As with so much else connected to the Occupy movement, all the many criticisms and protests of these developments that have fallen more or less on deaf ears for years have seemed suddenly in Occupy to attract real attention and to crystallize into demands that have real force. And with every militarized overreaction to the Occupiers the movements have gained wider attention, sympathy, numbers, and power.

Although the police are part of the 99% whose paychecks and pensions are being defended by the Occupiers against the fraudsters and parasites of the 1% there is no question that so far these police have been the face of the force most palpably directed against these assemblies, these re-publications of privatized space. In these fraught contestations it has been human, all too human, police who have been the conduits through which the malign will of the 1% has expressed itself. And it really does yield a painful perplexity, that the ineluctable emergence of a police state must be resisted by civic-minded citizens and all people of good will, but that the police who are the face and force of that police state are themselves victims of its authoritarianism even as they implement it. In the distressed inhabitation of that perplexity it is unsurprising that many individual police (some of whom are no doubt temperamentally unsuited to "protect and serve") behave badly, even criminally, just as it is unsurprising that many protestors vilify police as fascist thugs when they seek to give voice to the structural reality of a hierarchized organization with a policing function that has been misdirected into the service of a predatory minority at the expense of the majority of citizens among whom the police should properly number themselves.

There is no easy way to navigate the perplexity that the face of the interface of the force of the 1% against the 99% belongs to members of the 99% themselves, and it is to the credit as well as the distress of the Occupy movement that it has taken on this perplexity head-on, as it has so many others, come what may. A key passage of Pat Taibbi's well regarded How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests elaborates on this point:
I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government “committed” to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle.

But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

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