Capitalism
were previously managed by local militias. 15 Those militias, owing to their limited tools, were ‘forced’ to open fire on protesters, which subsequently created martyrs and inflamed the resistance. And so, as a new, ground- breaking replacement, a ‘peace preservation force’ was created, neutralizing troublemakers and ringleaders. In fact, the primary jobs of early detectives were to spy on political radicals. Policing emerged as new political and economic formations developed to produce social upheavals, as a response to material inequality, that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes. 16 The purpose of police has always been to manage the consequences of worsening inequalities by suppressing social movements, a method irrevocably tied to three basic eighteenth-century arrangements of inequality: slavery, colonialism, and the control of a new working class. Those in power rely on the police to aggressively and proactively prevent political formation, which can manifest itself as riots, strikes or revolts, through threat of lawful punishment or simply brute force. The anarchist author Kristia n Williams argues that ‘the police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens’ . 17 Of course, modern police are clearly concerned with matters of public safety, despite their misguided methods, ‘but this crime -fighting orientation is itself a form of social control’ . 18 They decide what crime to target while committing horrific crimes themselves, focusing on individual breaches of law to shift the attention from any plausible idea of systemic crime. The dramatic expansion of police power and its role in mass incarceration must be resisted. Systemic corruption has been exposed and a new professionalism has been demanded only to be met with symbolic change – in the form of civil service exams, training, and new technology, causing overt corruption and brutality to be somewhat reined in. Yet a system created on a basis of control will remain the same despite any cosmetic changes, which is why the concept of reformation is fundamentally flawed. Brutality leads to outrage which leads to protest, of which the best result is police reform, which translates to police budgets increasing to do so, and the convenient cycle continues. 19 Evidently, abolition is the only way to step out of the circle. Real crime prevention begins with restoring communities, building trust, and ‘reducing the social forces that drive crime’ , i.e., alleviating people from the constraints of capitalism of which the current drastically unequal material conditions are a fundamental part. One of the lies of capitalism is that the homeless are an essential by-product of the system and not a chronically unemployed reserve population created by the state to incentivize the rest of the population to continue to work for low wages. The homeless provide visible incentive to contribute to the economy, acting as a constant threat of what happens to you when you reject the system. If you have ever wondered how our government can allocate billions to militaries and nuclear warfare, for example, but fail to house and feed the humans it is tasked with caring for, it is because they do not want to. Homelessness is not a crime, yet they have extensive contact with the police, who are often called to regulate them by the propertied class, which results in fines being imposed. These fines, impossible to pay for those with no resources, are rarely paid, which in turn leads to court appearances and, often enough, time in prison. The syndrome – arrest, fine, non-payment, charge, conviction, prison – disrupts
15 Duff 2021. 16 Vitale 2017. 17 Williams 2015. 18 Ibid. 19 Baraka 2021.
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