The dilemma of ‘racial profiling’: an abolitionist police history^#

^#Prepared for Judah Schept and Michael Coyle, special issue editors, Contemporary Justice Review; draft date June 11, 2017.

Abstract

While the conquest of the world by the concept of ‘racial profiling’ was a major victory for activists, real victory for racial justice at the hands of the police was foreclosed, for the notion is a Trojan Horse. Snuck inside this term developed for radical purposes are distinctly conservative propositions. This paper analyzes the ways the individualizing implications of the concept of racial profiling mask the depth and reach of the state’s commitment to containing resistance and eliciting consent by deploying technologies of race. Against ‘racial profiling’s’ suggestion of incidental, improper police practice, this essay offers a history of the U.S. police that shows their deep and abiding commitment to reproducing race and racism. Tracing police history in relation to colonialism and slavery, the essay argues that the history of this fundamental instantiation of state racism leaves no hope for successful reform, but rather demands a practical and thoughtful commitment to police abolition.

Keywords:

• Abolition
• police racism
• police reform
• police history
• racial profiling

Notes

^# Prepared for Judah Schept and Michael Coyle, special issue editors, Contemporary Justice Review; draft date June 11, 2017.

1. The NY Times coverage of racial profiling concerns the NJ Superior Court trial only until 1998, after which the issue balloons.

2. See Dubber, 2005, for discussion of the patriarchal hierarchy woven into the police power.

3. Monkkonen actually agreed with this, noting in a synthetic review that ‘many of the early innovators were southern, slave cities, where the police were very much in the military mode of slave control’; Monkkonen, 1982, p. 578, citing Wade, 1964.

4. It happened in England as well: the 1970s moral panic discussed in Policing the Crisis, over ‘mugging,’ involved a London officer who was a former member of the police force in British colonial Rhodesia; Hall et al., 1978, p. 43.

5. The notion that the ‘war on crime’ dates from the 1960s, as many assume (e.g. Simon, 2007), is also incorrect. The phrase has been used since at least the 1920s, if not before. See Gollomb, 1931; Kuhn, 1934; esp. his statement in support of federal crime control and international cooperation, ‘to the end that the war on crime may proceed, as Chief Justice Hughes has expressed it, “on many fronts,”’ 544; Camp, 1934, esp. 217.

6. For a critique, see Harcourt, 2007, especially his points that actuarial methods are necessarily discriminatory, encode assumptions about race and class, and are not neutral.

7. ‘Amphorousness’ may be a misspelling of ‘amorphousness’ but stands in this spelling as well, as a reminder that police as vessel can hold anything, in reference to the Greek vase, the amphora.

8. There were, of course, many people involved in post-WWII social movements who were not subsumed into the racial politics of the nation state; see Berger, 2014; Camp, 2016; Moore, 2010; Paik, 2016; Singh, 2004; Woods, 1998; Young, 2006.

9. The brutal irony of this last point – how military service functions to concentrate state violence yet again against the over-policed – is today a particularly brutal enlistment of Black death on behalf of state power. Here the hammer and anvil violence of the state destroys Black and brown lives at home and abroad in systems that reinforce reciprocal ideologies of merit and value. Prisoners and soldiers die to strengthen the nation, or so the myth would have it, the former deserving their sorry fate due to their reprehensible actions, the latter forgiven all sin in the absolution of their bloodshed. Unless, of course, they survive to come home, and traumatized, suffer the erosion of social ties and material resources that keep other people off the streets and out of cages. Thus do these categories again collapse, in the most vicious cycle of this particular vortex.