Police Officers Are Not Workers

Can police be part of the struggle against capitalism? Should the left fight for a better police or for the abolition of the police? This text is my attempt to answer these questions from an anarchist point of view.

In "Anarchy Works," Peter Gelderloos argues that, instead of the common notion that we need police to fight crime, crime exists because the police exist. The role of the police is to protect private property and suppress resistance movements or dissent. In an anarchist society, security would be provided by the community itself, without the need for a specialized class.

The existence of the police is contradictory because its function was never to protect us, but to control us and protect private property. The state cannot protect us from police abuses, while at the same time, the police cannot protect us from crimes committed by the state. The police are part of the state. If the state protects us from itself, who will protect us from the state?

The police commit abuses every day. The so-called "ombudsman," a kind of police of the police, is as illusory as the police itself. It is not by creating an additional layer of policing that police violence will be resolved. As long as the police exist, human activity will be subject to the interests of those who control it. As long as there is a police force, the people will never have power. We do not need a better police force. We need the end of the police.

The political movement for the abolition of the police, or police abolitionism, is related to penal abolitionism. In "The End of Policing" (2017), Alex S. Vitale argues for the abolition of the police, proposing the decriminalization of all crimes or non-coercive approaches to resolving conflicts, depending on the case. He argues that the role of the police is to sustain class, gender, race, and sexuality inequalities, and that historically, the police facilitated slavery and colonialism and suppressed labor movements. What truly reduces crime are policies of social equality, housing, and access to mental health care.

Criticism of police militarization needs to evolve into a critique of the institution as a whole. If the police are, by nature, racist and exist to protect privileges, there can be no good police. If the police stopped protecting privileges, the privileged would dismantle them, replacing them with private security. It makes no sense to advocate for police reform in a capitalist context. The abolition of the police is a revolutionary goal, just like the abolition of the state and private property.

Without the police, how would we protect ourselves from the stronger? How have we always protected ourselves, after all? Who really feels protected by the police? Gelderloos cites examples where self-organization has achieved better results than the police. The proposal to reform public security would, in practice, require abolishing the current model and creating something from scratch. But what prevents a new police force from becoming like the current one? There is no viable solution for public security beyond community security practices. Combatting crime at its roots is the only truly consistent proposal with the political goal of keeping people safe in the long term.

It is common to think that education prevents crime, yet the state allocates a much larger budget to public security in Brazil than it does to education.

An "antifascist" police force is a far more idealistic proposal than the absence of the police. The failure of public security in Brazil is actually a success of the police as a colonizing force that came from Europe to support slavery and genocide. The left that fights alongside the police remains reformist, as it only produces a "less violent" way of perpetuating the power of the ruling class while it leads the country to an uninhabitable state.

It’s enough to know the urban development plans of police defenders to understand that the "city of the future" is a prison city, where you have the right to work and return to your cell, nothing more. Jacques Ellul, in "The Technological Society," argued that the technical improvement of the police aims at the total control of society, not due to the perverse decisions of specific governments, but because this is the inevitable consequence of the advancement of police techniques.

As police techniques increase effectiveness against criminals, they also create new forms of surveillance and control over all citizens. Even preventive policing, which seeks to prevent crimes before they occur, depends on continuous surveillance, which benefits authoritarian governments. The police benefit from permanent propaganda of their "heroic" image in films, TV shows, games, and other cultural products. But the end result of policing techniques is the creation of concentration camps. The police state, by creating the administrative mechanisms of imprisonment and re-education, gives birth to a prison society.

The quest for order and security in modern society requires the continuous progress of police methods. It is the very technical structure of modern society that inevitably leads to the need for extensive police control to ensure order and security. It is useless to build relationships of trust between the police and the community because the police are part of the civilizing apparatus that destroys community bonds. The police officer is the jailer of the concentration camp called "civilization." Indigenous communities never needed police. The police are not the solution to crime. Crime exists because privilege exists. Privilege is based on the accumulation of private property. Private property exists because the police exist to protect it.

The end of the police is not impractical. It is the persistence of the police that points to a dystopia. The police will always be an instrument of the ruling class. That is why police officers are not workers. Workers produce something for the community. Police officers produce nothing, they serve the interests of those who live off the work of others, and they follow the orders of the class that plans the destruction of the community. They are accomplices in the expropriation of labor, just like any manager dedicated to their work. All police officers are Adolf Eichmann.

Originally published in Contrafatual, by Janos Biro