[If you can’t rein in the police, you can’t save democracy]
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AFTER FLOYD  
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Austin McCoy
October 17, 2022
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_ If you can’t rein in the police, you can’t save democracy _

, Callum Abbott

 

“SOMETHING IS HAPPENING,” I thought, as I watched coverage of
hundreds of people flood the Minneapolis streets in response to the
murder of George Floyd. It was three days after his death on May 25,
2020, and two days after widespread circulation of a bystander’s
video showing police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck.
On the evening of the 28th, protesters seized control of the Third
Precinct building of the Minneapolis Police Department and set it on
fire. Before the end of the week, the governor of Minnesota activated
the National Guard. As someone who studies histories of anti-racist
protest and social movements, I knew there had been similar explosions
of rage in American cities in the 1960s. As someone who has tried to
organize opposition to police violence, I had never seen anything like
it. I had never witnessed such a direct attack on a symbol of police
power.

Something _was_ happening. By June 6, protests had spread to more
than five hundred cities and towns across the country. About half a
million people were in the streets that day, according to estimates by
the _New York Times._ Protests continued that summer throughout the
country—in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, St. Louis, Louisville,
Phoenix, and in Columbus, Ohio; Lexington, Kentucky; Ann Arbor and
Ypsilanti, Michigan; and even smaller towns such as Auburn, Alabama
(where I lived at the time), and my hometown of Mansfield, Ohio. Polls
suggested between fifteen million and twenty-six million people had
joined the protests. The _Times_ reported these figures in July
under the headline “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement
in U.S. History.”

It had been a tough spring. In addition to living in isolation due to
the coronavirus pandemic, I seethed at the news: the lynching of
twenty-five-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in February, Amy Cooper threatening
to call the police on birder Christian Cooper in Manhattan the same
day Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck, and revelations about the
Louisville Police Department’s killing of twenty-six-year-old ER
technician Breonna Taylor. It all stirred the secondary trauma and
psychic pain that accompanies living as a Black man in a nation that
seemed unwilling to reckon with its racist past.

Now, a few years after participating in frustrated efforts in Ann
Arbor to hold the local police department and the city’s elected
officials accountable for the November 2014 killing of forty-year-old
Aura Rosser, I truly felt anti-racist activists and organizers, and
the Movement for Black Lives generally, had taken a leap forward. The
protests represented the greatest collective instance of political
education around racist police violence of my lifetime. The uprising
led to more non-Black Americans engaging in protests and inspired
many—including vast numbers of young, white suburbanites—to learn
more about the United States’ histories of racism and colonialism.

And, as demonstrations continued, the protesters took wider aim at the
vestiges of structural racism. They started pulling down Confederate
monuments and statues of reviled historical figures. Recalling the
days of the Occupy Movement, demonstrators in Louisville and Columbus
appropriated public spaces to set up bases for protest and organizing.
Louisville protesters also put up a memorial in honor of Breonna
Taylor. In Seattle, radical activists took the Occupy tactic the
furthest by establishing a police-free autonomous zone, the Capitol
Hill Occupied Protest.

Minneapolis activists’ calls to “defund the police” announced
the agenda of the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests. In June
2020, the Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to replace the
police department with a more “holistic” system of public safety.
Demanding cuts to police budgets, and even calls to abolish law
enforcement institutions, were not new. But the new political moment
allowed people to hear these calls. Suddenly one could see signs with
“defund the police” at protests in cities throughout the country.
Television pundits, columnists, and public officials debated the
merits of the demand. Even the reliably center-right _New York
Times_ published an argument by organizer Mariame Kaba that affirmed,
“Yes, we mean literally abolish the police.”

With the winds of change swirling, corporations and public officials
scrambled to declare solidarity with the protests, often to the
consternation of more radical grassroots activists. Corporations such
as Apple and Intel threw millions of dollars at initiatives to address
racial inequality, while dozens of institutions of higher education,
such as Brown, Northwestern, and the University of Alabama, released
statements condemning racism. Local leaders emblazoned “Black Lives
Matter” on city streets, and some went so far as to pursue cuts to
police budgets, even if they were meager and temporary. Meanwhile,
Democrats in Congress drew up the George Floyd Justice in Policing
Act, which would use federal funding to encourage police departments
to end the use of chokeholds and carotid holds, as well as provide
resources to law enforcement agencies for training and to community
groups exploring alternative approaches to policing.

Empire Strikes Black

Then came the backlash. The movement against police violence seemed to
run into headwinds as soon as it gained momentum. Initially caught on
their heels, the Trump administration and its reactionary allies
regained their footing and initiated a crackdown: Trump threatened to
deploy the military to cities if governors and mayors didn’t act,
telling them, “You have to dominate.” While police forces in
scores of cities continued their brutal crackdown on demonstrations,
the Department of Homeland Security deployed Customs and Border
Protection agents to Seattle, Portland, and Washington, D.C., to
apprehend protesters.

The movement against police violence seemed to run into headwinds as
soon as it gained momentum.

Politicians on the right, as well as some Democrats, launched attacks
on the movement’s demands to defund the police. Attorney General
William Barr scoffed at the notion that structural racism existed in
the United States. President Trump and conservative activists also
attacked the movement’s cultural gains. Trump announced the “1776
Commission,” a nationalist retort to the _New York
Times_ journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones-helmed 1619 Project, which
sought to place chattel slavery at the center of U.S. history.
Activist Christopher Rufo led the charge in seeking to eradicate
“critical race theory” in the private and public sectors, which
led to the passage of anti-CRT laws throughout the country. Many
legislatures also moved to prohibit the teaching of anything deemed
“divisive,” whether it be racism or gender and sexuality. Then
came a rush to ban books from curricula and libraries. As activist
Kali Akuno warned in the summer of 2020, “The empire will strike
back. Of that, there is no doubt.”

Since the 2020 protests, police killings overall—and of Black
people, specifically—have remained generally steady. According to
the _Washington Post_’s Police Shootings Database, law enforcement
officers shot and killed 1,055 Americans in 2021. As of this August,
police have shot and killed 666—and are on track to kill more than
one thousand people for a third straight year. The barbarism
continues: in June of this year, eight Akron police officers shot
twenty-five-year-old Jayland Walker forty-six times after a traffic
chase.

What, then, has the movement accomplished? The George Floyd Justice in
Policing Act is stalled in a deadlocked Congress. Minneapolis
activists’ campaign to dismantle their police department failed when
residents voted down a proposal to replace it with a “public
health-oriented” Department of Public Safety. Some Democratic cities
such as Los Angeles are also back to amply funding their police
departments. While the media stoked fears of a “crime wave,” New
York residents installed Eric Adams, a Black former police captain, as
mayor, and San Franciscans recalled progressive District Attorney
Chesa Boudin. In his State of the Union address early this year,
President Biden said that “we should all agree the answer is not to
defund the police. It’s to fund the police.” Months later, he
released his proposed 2023 budget, which calls for an additional $13
billion to allow the hiring of one hundred thousand new police
officers across the nation.

Two years after that summer of protest, we are stuck again in status
quo America. Yet anyone who has confronted the power of police
authority, buttressed by their unions and by politicians in both
parties, will understand why huge demonstrations and strong public
sentiment against police brutality are not enough. Though I hoped the
uprisings of 2020 would somehow break through, my mind reels back to
hard lessons learned from my own activism in Ann Arbor in the fall and
winter of 2014.

Survival Tactics

My experiences participating in sustained efforts to hold the Ann
Arbor Police Department and city officials accountable showed me the
sometimes contradictory outcomes of protests and organizing. Working
through these contradictions also pushed me further in an abolitionist
direction. When you have an entrenched power structure that is
resistant to basic democratic dialogue and negotiation, it’s an
insult to the very idea of self-governance to meekly accept its
continuation. Just as troublesome, we know that the police will never
give up their presumed right to kill a citizen whenever they can claim
they felt threatened, and we know the courts and public officials will
almost always accept their rationale.

Two years after that summer of protest, we are stuck again in status
quo America.

In the late hours of November 9, 2014, Ann Arbor Police officers Mark
Raab and David Ried responded to a domestic disturbance call to Aura
Rosser’s apartment placed by her partner. According to the Washtenaw
County prosecutor’s report, Rosser tried to rush the officers while
holding a knife. Within seconds of entering the apartment, Officer
Raab discharged his taser while Officer Ried shot Rosser in the chest,
killing her.

Two weeks later, across the country, former St. Louis County
Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced that a grand jury had decided not
to charge Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri. As Rosser’s killing went beneath the radar, organizers
from a radical University of Michigan campus group planned a protest.
In addition to showing solidarity with victims of state violence
outside of Ann Arbor—Michael Brown; the disappeared students in
Ayotzinapa, Mexico; and Palestinians struggling against Israeli
occupation—the organizers also sought to use the moment of national
outrage to highlight how no Black person is safe, even in a town most
of its residents consider liberal.

Outrage about Ferguson surely boosted the protests over the Rosser
killing. On the evening of November 25, hundreds of supporters
gathered in front of the Hatcher Graduate Library on the University of
Michigan’s campus. With “ACAB” banners unfurled over bannisters
on the library, several of us delivered emotional speeches calling for
justice. The demonstration culminated in a march to city hall and the
police department downtown, where activists from the nearby industrial
city of Ypsilanti gave another round of speeches.

More meetings and demonstrations led us to form the ad hoc group
“Ann Arbor to Ferguson,” which was initially comprised of a few
dozen individuals. At the beginning, anarchists, Marxists, graduate
student labor organizers, liberals who were interested in reform,
radical intellectuals, law students, and former New Leftists,
including one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society,
attended meetings. Eventually, as the group shrunk, it evolved into an
organization driven by Black women—students and one community
member.

We made three demands: fire Officer Ried, provide more transparency
around the incident, and compensate Rosser’s family for her burial.
Before long, we encountered organizing dilemmas. We knew that even as
Blackness was pathologized, there was little attention given to Black
women victims in conversations about police violence. We also wanted
to organize around structural racism, sexism, and classism in a city
that liked to perceive itself as progressive. The mayor and many
members of the city council operated on the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party, and the town boasted an activist tradition.

We used several tactics—street marches and protests; attending,
speaking at, and even disrupting city council meetings; publishing
articles and pamphlets contesting the city’s interpretations of
Rosser’s killing. The initial protests forced law enforcement to
respond with some modest reforms, including the adoption of body
cameras. Eventually, the city instituted trainings around diversity
and mental illness. However, the authorities refused to see Rosser’s
killing as anything other than an unfortunate—but
justified—“tragedy.” The city never fired Ried, nor did
authorities offer any material renumerations to the Rossers, although
activists raised some money for the family.

In the nearly two years of Ann Arbor to Ferguson (which later changed
its name to Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives), we extracted only the
smallest concessions from elected officials and law enforcement
leaders. If the goal of our organizing and protests was
accountability, then we failed. Why? Those in power mostly ignored us.
They tried to discredit a leading community member. They seemed to
invest more resources in trying to blunt protests. Also, over time,
our own contradictions became difficult to bear. We could not resolve
debates around strategy (community organizing versus protests and
mobilizing), although we did consider issuing a demand to cut the
police budget by half. Organizing is hard work, of course. But in most
places, the alliance of local government and the police is
unassailable. Even in a place like Ann Arbor, leaders act as if they
agree with Trump: you have to dominate.

Taskforce Majeure

The quest for accountability continued after the demise of Ann Arbor
to Ferguson. By 2017, a new group, “Transforming Justice
Washtenaw” (TJW), had formed to press for civilian oversight of the
police department. The new group had to contend not just with the
adamant opposition of the police force and its union but with a mayor
and city administrator who were lukewarm about the idea, as were the
mayor’s city council allies. These officials sought to weaponize the
city charter and the city’s collective bargaining agreement with the
police against TJW. TJW and the mayor issued dueling plans, with
activists demanding a civilian review board that was independent,
citizen-led, and democratic. The city eventually passed the mayor’s
plan, which extended him the authority to appoint eleven members to a
commission that would not be independent but “part of city
government.”

It was at best a half-step forward. There appeared to be little
discussion of creating civilian police oversight before the movement
that arose in the wake of Rosser’s death. Our protests, pamphlets,
and writings put policing onto the local political agenda, and many of
us tried our best to keep Rosser’s name in the conversation long
after. Our campaign not only contributed to developing a culture of
protest around structural racism and police killings—we organized
responses to the spate of killings in 2014 and 2015 elsewhere—we
produced a body of work for future activists to draw upon and learn
from. But any analysis of outcomes is wholly incomplete without
thinking about the deeply entrenched nature of police power. There was
not any slogan, policy change, or form of political engagement that
was going to convince law enforcement in Ann Arbor to cede any power
to its residents, especially those who might be the most vulnerable to
state violence. We were, and are, fighting an institution that
believes itself to be essential to an “orderly society.”

In September 2020, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the
University of Michigan engaged in an “abolitionist strike” in
response to the university’s slow Covid-19 response, and in
solidarity with Black and brown victims of state violence. Members of
the union Alejo Stark, Jasmine Ehrhardt, and Amir Fleischmann
summarized its platform:

Therefore, GEO’s proposal of a “safe and just” campus
articulates two sets of demands: Covid-19 demands . . . And
anti-policing demands which include disarming, demilitarizing, and
defunding campus police (GEO is demanding a 50 percent cut in the
campus police budget, which should be in turn redirected to
community-based initiatives), as well as severing ties from both Ann
Arbor police and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

GEO’s actions represented more than a continuation of Ann Arbor to
Ferguson’s critique of local policing—it was an escalation. Not
every member of Ann Arbor to Ferguson, including myself at the time,
would have considered themselves a police and prison abolitionist.
However, GEO organizers understood what I still failed to comprehend:
we needed to find a way to dislodge and dismantle police power if we
hoped to prevent police killings. GEO activists learned from our
campaign for accountability and started to talk about transformation.

The Thick Blue Fortress

It’s been more than ten years since Trayvon Martin’s death, and
more than eight years since Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed.
The two waves of protests—in 2014–2015 and 2020—raised
existential questions about an institution with outsized power in
American life.

Though I hoped the uprisings of 2020 would somehow break through, my
mind reels back to hard lessons learned from my own activism in Ann
Arbor in the fall and winter of 2014.

A key difference between the first and second waves of Black Lives
Matter protests is that more anti-racist activists in the summer of
2020 directly called for dismantling police power, not just reforming
it. This distinguishes the Black Lives Matter movement from the civil
rights movement, which pushed for overturning Jim Crow segregation in
the South, racism in the North, and the fulfillment of citizenship
rights for all Black people. Though civil rights and Black Power
activists protested police brutality, the focus of the movement was on
voting and desegregation.

That also conveys how daunting it is to sustain a movement against
police power in the United States. It was ultimately possible to get a
portion of white America to see Black voting rights and an end to
outright segregation as a matter of fundamental democratic fairness.
Getting white Americans to imagine drastically reduced police forces
is a harder sell. Many Americans not only adhere to the late Los
Angeles Police Department Chief William H. Parker’s Cold War-era
delusion that the police represent the “thin blue line” between
order and disorder, but many valorize the institution—while having
no experience with police misconduct. And one does not have to go far
to find pro-police messaging, or “copaganda,” when they turn on
the television, with many shows presenting police as heroic at best
and complicated at worst. Blue Lives Matter stickers plaster the
bumpers of cars across the country.

There is much work to be done in deflating the “we serve and
protect” public image accepted by most of the white population.
Shocking videos of police brutality—Rodney King, George Floyd, and
so many others—seem to have only temporary effects. More recently,
police incompetence and passivity during the school shooting in
Uvalde, Texas, demonstrated something fundamental: most police are far
from the superheroes they pretend to be. When they have the upper
hand, they are quick to use lethal force, especially against victims
they see as less than human. But while fourth graders were being
massacred in Uvalde, police, in a true “Blue Lives Matter” moment,
held back. And as usual, the initial police version of events turned
out to be a slipshod patchwork of falsehoods.

Police leaders and union officials aggressively guard their public
image. They are respectfully quoted in the media while disparaging
anti-police-violence protesters, and they have called for boycotts of
celebrities who articulate anti-police positions or express support
for political prisoners. Beyond copaganda, though, there’s no
getting around the question of who holds actual power. Activists have
learned that the expansion of police forces also means the growth of
police unions. While some in the labor movement might try to find
common cause, police unions invest considerable resources to defend
officers accused of brutalizing and killing citizens. And local police
unions might endorse Democrats and Republicans, but the Fraternal
Order of Police, which describes itself as the largest national police
officer association, has not endorsed a Democrat for president since
Bill Clinton in 1996.

So while many skeptics might characterize demands to defund the police
as unrealistic, the protest movements have drawn a line between the
authoritarianism embedded in policing as an institution and practice
(which includes the prison system) and grassroots participatory
democracy, or the right of communities to determine what justice
should look like. There are efforts all around the country—led by
groups such as the Chicago-based Black Youth Project 100, Black
Visions in Minneapolis, the Detroit Justice Center, and Project
Nia—that define safety and fairness expansively, to include racial,
economic, environmental, and reproductive justice. Most important,
they speak the language of democracy and inclusion—but not in the
way you’d ever hear from the leader of a police union. As Cathy J.
Cohen, a University of Chicago professor and the founder of the Black
Youth Project wrote in November 2020, “The rebirth of our democracy
lives in the possibility of protest, organizing and, as Frederick
Douglass famously insisted, agitation.”

Organizing is Local

Nobody ever knows where mass protests might lead. Yet the focus on
tangible reforms often obscures the important work going on in the
background: the practice of continuous political engagement with local
peoples and communities, which is necessary to turn short-lived
protests into an enduring movement. Sociologist Charles Payne refers
to the community organizing tradition of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee as “slow and respectful work.” It is true
that organizers and their groups do not typically start mass uprisings
like the one that erupted in summer 2020. However, after they catch up
to the people, they provide the crucial support of assisting
protesters on the ground.

The focus on tangible reforms often obscures the important work going
on in the background: the practice of continuous political engagement
with local peoples and communities, which is necessary to turn
short-lived protests into an enduring movement.

Grassroots organizers, radical organizations, and the networks they
comprise, can also play a role in the short windows of opportunity
that accompany disruptive moments. Even though the commitment was
brief, the Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis took advantage of
the uprisings when it pressured local leaders to pledge to transform
the city’s system of policing. “Defund the police” might not
have emerged as a signature demand if it were not for Minneapolis
activists. And when mass protests develop, either locally or
nationally, it is often the community organizing groups that help
direct support to protesters in need (through bail funds and other
forms of mutual aid), educate non-participants who might be interested
in joining in protests, and continue to frame issues in a manner that
continues to mobilize support.

Still, there are always tensions and contradictions within community
organizing, movement and institutional building, and mass protests. As
movement scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward warn
in _Poor Peoples’ Movements_, mass protest and institutional
building can be in conflict, as the latter might sap the energies of
the former or even actively discourage spontaneous protest. Yet it is
important to build robust movement institutions that won’t collapse
under the weight of their contradictions. They must be flexible and
retain the ability to honestly assess mistakes and experiment with
tactics and strategies.

Paying attention to community organizing reminds us of the importance
of local, and even state-based, political work. It is tempting to
measure the “progress” of protests and movement-building against
the national legislative scoreboard. But cuts to police budgets, the
implementation of grassroots justice projects, and the transformation
of economic and political conditions that breed state and
interpersonal violence will occur locally, where democratic
participation is more achievable. When we see democracy wither in
cities and towns, we know we are in deep trouble.

Power Failures

As I found out in Ann Arbor in 2014, confronting entrenched power can
cause a person to question whether the long hours of movement work are
worth the effort. But what would it mean to go beyond the binary of
failure/success and to adopt a more nuanced view? That’s the advice
of activist-intellectuals Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and
Beth A. Ritchie in _Abolition. Feminism. Now._ They contend that we
miss much in terms of the impact of abolitionist organizing when we
focus on “dominant metrics for success and failure created by the
very systems and institutions that produce and naturalize racist and
heteropatriarchal violence.” They point to “normative evaluative
logics of success,” such as passing legislation, crafting policy,
and creating organizations as examples.

As historians Mary Frances Berry and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argue,
protests and movements can reverberate long after street
demonstrations and campaigns dissipate. National events sometimes
mobilize people locally and create protest cultures. These cultures
not only demonstrate what is possible in terms of building peoples’
confidence and capacity to act, they can establish necessary networks
for future protests and organizing.

All the while, we know that the power imbalance between racial justice
activists and the police is huge. I’ve come to think about the
meanings of the 2020 protests in the context of this dialectic. While
the saying “it’s a movement, not a moment” has almost become
cliché in the last several years, it is vital that we think about
what the summer 2020 uprisings did in that moment—the protests
against the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd ushered in the
kind of legitimation crisis for the police that this country has not
seen before. The global protests against state violence also initiated
a leap forward in anti-racist consciousness, especially among the
young. While mass protests can open opportunities for accelerated
changes in politics and culture, the results are seldom assured. They
can bring us to a moment of reaction, as we have experienced, or to
what I call the “in-between” moment of political struggle, until
the next wave of protests.

Cathy J. Cohen, speaking as “a Black queer woman in a country built
on anti-Blackness,” wrote in 2020 that there is “no saving,
repairing, or reimaging democracy, at least for me, that does not
start with the cessation of our systemic death. To save democracy,
first and foremost, you have to stop killing us.” And, as
abolition-feminists such as Davis, Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and
Andrea J. Ritchie have long noted, the movement to stop police
killings must be oriented toward long-term transformation. This
orientation forces us to think about how policy changes, collective
actions, and institutional efforts not only save lives in the near
term but also undermine the legitimacy of policing in the long term.
It requires attention to grassroots participatory democracy and a
rejection of a system of criminalization, punishment, and our consent
to be ruled by the arm of the state that exploits its monopoly on
deadly force. Instead of just asking, “What bills has the movement
gotten passed?” we should be asking how we can enlist more people in
a movement to create a more humane, nonviolent, and democratic system
of public safety, one that is based on justice and respect, not
domination.

* Police
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* Racism
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* Inequality
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* protests
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* George Floyd
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* Black Lives Matter
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* anti-racism
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* democracy
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* Donald Trump
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* Violence
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* African American history
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* organizing
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* Congress
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