The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing

An abridged version of a longer article
(http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Interface-3-1-Williams.pdf);

The Other Side of the COIN:
Counterinsurgency and Community Policing

by Kristian Williams

The following discussion of U.S. domestic
counterinsurgency is adapted and condensed with
permission from "The Other Side of the COIN:
Counterinsurgency and Community Policing" by
Kristian Williams. Williams is a member of Rose
City Copwatch in Portland, Oregon, and the author
of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in
America (Soft Skull, 2004; South End Press,
2007). The full paper appeared in the May 2011
issue of Interface, and a full list of
bibliographic sources can be found there.


The unrest of the 1960s left the police in a
difficult position. The cops' response to the
social movements of the day -- the civil rights
and anti-war movements especially -- had cost
them dearly in terms of public credibility, elite
support, and officer morale. Frequent and overt
recourse to violence, combined with covert
surveillance, infiltration, and disruption
(typified by the FBI's COINTELPRO operations),
had not only failed to squelch the popular
movements, it had also diminished trust in law enforcement.

The police needed to re-invent themselves, and
the first place they looked for models was the
military. Military training, tactics, equipment,
and weaponry, made their way into domestic police
departments -- as did veterans returning from
Vietnam, and, more subtly, military approaches to
organization, deployment, and command and
control. Police strategists specifically began
studying counterinsurgency warfare.

"Counterinsurgency" (or "COIN" is military
jargon) refers to a kind of military operation
outside of conventional army-vs.-army
war-fighting, and is sometimes called
"low-intensity" or "asymmetrical" combat. But
counterinsurgency also describes a particular
perspective on how such operations ought to be
managed. This style of warfare is characterized
by an emphasis on intelligence, security and
peace-keeping operations, population control,
propaganda, and efforts to gain the trust of the people.

This last point is the crucial one. As U.S. Army
Field Manual, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency,
declares: "Legitimacy is the main objective."

So during the period of police militarization,
the cops also began experimenting with a
"softer," more friendly type of law enforcement
-- foot patrols, neighborhood meetings,
police-sponsored youth activities, and attention
to quality-of-life issues quite apart from
crime. These techniques eventually coalesced
into an approach called "community policing."
Both militarization and community policing arose
at the same time, and in response to the same
social pressures. The advantages the state
receives from each aspect are fairly
clear: Militarization increases available force,
but as important, it also provides improved
discipline and command and control. It re-orders
the police agency to allow for better
coordination and teamwork, while also opening
space for local initiative and officer discretion.

Community policing, meanwhile, helps to
legitimize police efforts by presenting cops as
problem-solvers. It forms police-driven
partnerships that put additional resources at
their disposal and win the cooperation of
community leaders. And, by increasing daily,
friendly contacts with people in the
neighborhood, community policing provides a
direct supply of low-level information.

Such information is vital, because COIN theorists
advocate preemptive action against budding
rebellions. The problem is that, at the early
stages, subversion is not obvious and the state
may not know that a threat exists. In order to
anticipate conflict and prevent an insurgency, as
FM 3-24 explains, COIN strategists "require
insight into cultures, perceptions, values,
beliefs, interests and decision-making processes
of individuals and groups." The resulting
intelligence work is concerned with questions that are primarily sociological.

The U.S. government's mapping of the American
Muslim population should be viewed in this
light. In 2002 and 2003, the Department of
Homeland Security requested -- and received --
statistical data, sorted by zip code and
nationality, on people who identified themselves
as "Arab" in the 2000 census. And in February
2003, FBI director Robert Mueller ordered all 56
Bureau field offices to create demographic
profiles of their areas of operation,
specifically including the number of
mosques. One Justice Department official
explained that the demographics would be used "to
set performance goals and objectives" for
anti-terror efforts and electronic
surveillance. Similarly, in 2007, the LAPD began
planning its own mapping program, dressed in the
rhetoric of community policing. As the L.A. Times
reported, the "Los Angeles Police Department's
counter-terrorism bureau proposed using U.S.
census data and other demographic information to
pinpoint various Muslim communities and then
reach out to them through social service agencies."

By working with welfare services, churches,
non-profits, and similar organizations, police
can insinuate themselves into the fabric of
neighborhood life, gain access to new sources of
information, and influence community
leaders. Sometimes the police can used these
relationships to channel and control political
opposition, moving it in safe, institutional, and
reformist directions, rather than toward more radical or militant action.

We saw this dynamic at work in Oakland after
transit police shot and killed an unarmed black
man in 2009. In practice, preventing riots
became the primary focus of the institutionalized
left, as local nonprofits and churches
collaborated with police to contain community
anger and channel it into ritualized
protest. There is no guarantee that resistance
would have gone further had the nonprofits not
intervened, or that greater conflict would have
won greater gains. But their intervention
certainly helped to contain the rebellion, and
closed off untold possibilities for further
action. That is, quite clearly, what it was intended to do.

We also see the logic of counterinsurgency at
work in police anti-gang campaigns: The creation
of databases listing suspected gang members; the
mapping of the social environment, illustrating
connections between gang members, associates,
families, etc.; the development of community
contacts, especially with local leaders -- all
these police practices mirror the techniques of
military occupation. Police intelligence efforts
are then paired with a campaign of persistent
low-level harassment -- stops, searches, petty
citations, and the like. Each instance of
harassment offers the cops the opportunity to
collect additional information on the gang
network while at the same time creating an
inhospitable environment for those associated with gang activity.

For example, in Salinas, California, the Monterey
County Gang Task Force conducts mass-arrest
"round-ups," makes random traffic stops, and
regularly searches the homes of gang members on
parole or probation. The sheer volume of such
activity is astonishing: Since it was formed in
2005, the Task Force has been responsible for
21,000 vehicle or pedestrian stops, 5,000 parole
and probation "compliance" searches, and 2,800 arrests.

Furthermore, since February 2009, combat veterans
from Iraq and Afghanistan have been serving as
advisors to Salinas police, with the stated aim
of applying counterinsurgency tools to local
anti-gang efforts. Along with their expertise,
the military advisors also arrive with software,
including a computer program that maps the
connections between gang activity, individual
suspects, and their social circles, family ties, and neighborhood connections.

This police-military partnership is occurring
alongside a renewal and expansion of the SPD's
community policing philosophy. The new community
focus (encouraged by the military advisors)
includes Spanish language training, "Gifts for
Guns" trade-in events, an anonymous tip hotline,
senior-citizen volunteer programs, a larger role
for the Police Community Advisory Council, and
police-sponsored after-school activities.

Salinas police have also initiated partnerships
with other local, state, and federal law
enforcement agencies, including the Marshals, the
ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms), the FBI,
and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The most
spectacular product of these partnerships, so
far, was a set of coordinated raids on April 22,
2010, codenamed "Operation Knockout."

The raids -- coming after months of investigation
-- mobilized more than 200 law enforcement agents
and resulted in 100 arrests, as well as the
confiscation of forty pounds of cocaine, fourteen
pounds of marijuana, and a dozen guns. Operation
Knockout was intended, not only to disrupt the
targeted gangs, but to serve as a warning to
others. Deputy Police Chief Kelly McMillin said:
"We're going to follow quickly with call-ins of
specific groups that we know are very active. . .
. We are going to tell them that what happened
on the 22nd could very well happen to them."

Such anti-gang efforts are always implicitly
political, especially as they become permanent
features of life in poor Black and Latino
communities. Though ostensibly aimed at
preventing gang violence, counter-gang campaigns
inevitably lead police to monitor the entire
community. One Fresno cop explains the intended
scope of his department's gang files: "If you're
twenty-one, male, living in one of these
neighborhoods, been in Fresno for ten years and
you’re not in our computer­then there’s definitely a problem.”

With the emergence of the counterinsurgency
model, the state has ceased to view subversives
in isolation from the society surrounding
them. Increasingly, it has directed its
attention -- its intelligence gathering, its
coercive force, and its alliance building --
toward the population as a whole. Repression, in
other words, is not something that happens
solely, or even mainly, to activists; and it not
just the province of red squads, but of gang
enforcement teams, neighborhood liaison officers,
and even police advisory boards. It comprises
all those methods -- routine and extraordinary,
coercive and collaborative -- used to regulate
the conflict inherent in a stratified
society. Our task is to decipher the politics
implicit in these efforts, to discern the ways
that they preserve state power, neutralize
resistance, and maintain social inequality.

Our further task is to respond. An effective
response to repression must include an offensive
component -- an attack against the apparatus of
repression, which (if successful) will leave the
state weaker and the social movement
stronger. This outcome, of course, should be the aim from the start.

But it is, in a sense, misleading to speak solely
in terms of responding to repression. Repression
exists already. It intervenes preemptively. It
forms part of the context in which we
act. Oppositional movements cannot avoid
repression; the challenge, instead, must be to overcome it.

Profiles of Provocateurs

by Kristian Williams
Thursday Jun 9th, 2011 indybay.org

Recent case studies; warning signs; practical advice

A recent article in Seattle's Stranger detailed a long-term police operation to monitor, infiltrate, and entrap activists in Seattle: "The Long Con," by Brendan Kiley, May 4, 2011: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-long-con/Content?oid=7989613.

The story is long, convoluted, and more than a little absurd; it's all rather like the plot of a Coen Brothers' movie. But the short version is that an undercover Seattle cop infiltrated an after-hours party scene -- what prosecutors called "underground illegal gambling enterprises (concurrent with illegal liquor sales)." (All quotes in this section are from the Stranger article.) The SPD hoped to find some dirt on local politicians, the FBI hoped to find a connection to the Earth Liberation Front, and after two years they finally managed to hook someone with a drug scam:

"Bryan [Owens] had been pushing Rick [Wilson]—and everyone in their social set—for years to help him buy ever-larger amounts of cocaine. . . . he tried to play on people's greed. 'He's like, "I can make you a millionaire,"' Rick remembers. . . . 'He said he would pay for the drugs and I would take no financial risk. I told him to go fuck himself. He kept pestering me. I did, to my eternal shame, help him out,' Rick says. 'I asked around to some people who asked around to some people who eventually gave him some.'"

Owens then asked Wilson to come along when the exchange happened, just in case things went bad. On the way, a SWAT team surrounded Wilson's car and arrested him.

It turns out Bryan Owens, purported trust fund kid and environmental activist, is really Bryan Van Brunt, Seattle Police Detective.

When Wison was interrogated, the cops were particularly interested in asking about the ELF. They told him, "We have hundreds of hours of surveillance, wire, video. . . ." The Stranger adds, "SPD surveillance logs show that police were following the families of suspects, their sisters and mothers, and that some family members' homes . . . were raided and turned upside down for evidence."

Wilson was convicted of the drug crime, and also of an unrelated offense he'd committed years earlier -- running guns to Chiapas for the EZLN. He was sentenced to 40 months. A handful of other party regulars were charged with "professional gambling in the first degree."

The usual criticisms -- that these sorts of operations waste money, only stop crimes that the cops themselves create, and threaten our freedom -- have already been made elsewhere. So I want to turn instead to the question of how activists might avoid this sort of infiltration and entrapment. After all, it makes no difference whether you take technical precautions like encrypting your email if it is your co-conspirator who is collecting the evidence against you.

With this in mind, I will sum up three recent cases involving the use of provocateurs against the anarchist and radical environmentalist movements. And I'll point out some of the warning signs that should have made people wary.

Provocateur Profile 1: "Bryan Owens" / Bryan Van Brunt

Looking at the Seattle story from the outside, and with the benefit of hindsight, one of the things that most stands out is the number of (if you'll pardon the phrase) red flags that should have signaled that something was awry. For example:

1- Money issues: Bryan's habit of throwing around cash meant that, even though a lot of people didn't like him and were annoyed by his "blustery bro-dude personality," they were willing to put up with it. He bought drinks, he took people out to dinner, he helped people out with their rent. And it sounds like Bryan paid for everything concerning the party space: "Rent, paint, locks, lumber, drywall, new plumbing—it all came out of Bryan's pocket." (At the same time he was "insisting that it turn a profit (when everyone in the group had been taking losses for the parties). . . .") Bryan also covered the expenses, including plane tickets, for a pair of activists going to St. Paul to demonstrate against the 2008 Republican National Convention.

2- Legal questions: Bryan had made plans to go to the RNC himself, but was escorted off the plane by the authorities. The reason wasn't clear: he never really explained, and nothing more seemed to come of the episode -- no arrest, no charges. Of course, it turned out, he staged the incident himself to add to his reputation.

3- Bluster: "Several people remember Bryan bragging that he had a record and had been arrested for political action" -- though again, the details were lacking.

4- Questions about his personal life: One friend recalls: "When I went to the bathroom [in his apartment], there was nothing in there. . . . You'd expect some soap or towels or something. I started asking how long he'd been living there, and he got all aggravated.'"

5- Responding to normal inquiries with hostility: (See #4).

6- Pressuring others toward illegal action: "Bryan kept pushing Brady [McGarry] toward more radical 'real militant action,' asked Brady to teach him how to make Molotov cocktails, and hinted that he wanted to 'make explosives' and do some 'property damage' at Weyerhaeuser or at CEOs' houses, Brady remembers. He wanted to talk about the Earth Liberation Front. Brady remembers telling Bryan to take it easy. 'It weirded me out,' Brady says."
Similarly: "Mia Brown . . . remembers Bryan as a guy who 'always ranted about how he hates cops' and who tried to talk an enlisted friend of hers . . . into stealing weapons from Fort Lewis."

7- Warnings from others: Several of Rick Wilson's friends told him something was wrong, including one person who reported being followed. But Wilson just blew them off.

Of course, none of these, on their own or even taken together, would prove that a person was a government agent. (And in one way, this case is unusual in that the infiltrator actually was an undercover cop, not an amateur recruited for the purpose). A person could easily exhibit some of these traits and behaviors and not be in the employ of the police agencies.

And naturally, it's only human to assume the best of our friends and write off uncomfortable details as harmless eccentricities or minor flaws.

But several of these behaviors, characteristics, or inconsistencies would be a good reason to hold off on engaging in political work, crime, or other high-risk activities with the person involved. At the very least, it might make it seem like a good idea to check up on their background.

Of course, Rick Wilson is not the only person to pay the price for failing to take such precautions.

Provocateur Profile #2: "Anna"

Eric McDavid fell prey to a paid FBI informant operating under the name "Anna."

(I'm working here from the legal documents, especially trial transcripts, available at supporteric.org. Unless otherwise noted, the quotes in this section are from those documents.)

Anna entered the anarchist scene during the 2003 anti-FTAA protests, when at the age of 17 she infiltrated anarchist Spokes Council meetings as part of a class project. A fellow class-mate, a police officer, was impressed with her work and arranged a meeting with the FBI. As the prosecutor in McDavid's case explained: "Over the next year or so she attends various functions where illegal protests are expected. The Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, and the G-8 Summit. . . ." Ultimately she helped to put together -- and then break up -- a conspiracy to attack the "Institute of Forest Genetics, cell phone towers, Nimbus Dam and possibly the fish hatchery nearby." (Zachary Jenson's testimony.)

Anna met Eric McDavid at a Crimethinc meeting in 2004 -- ironically, at a workshop on identifying undercover agents. She later testified, "At the time I thought he was inconsequential. I thought he was a college student and not of interest to the FBI." But he formed a romantic attachment to her, and she later used that emotional connection to join a "cell" involving McDavid and two others, Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner. Over the next several months, Anna moved increasingly into the leadership of the group. She organized meetings, kept notes, covered expenses, pressed the others onward when they had doubts, and urged them to solidify their plans.

As the Sacramento News and Review put it: "Documents from the investigation reviewed by SN&R suggest that Anna provided much of the financial support, the encouragement and the know-how needed to turn their talk into action. They also show that whenever the group started to lose focus, or to have second thoughts, Anna badgered them about being all talk and not sticking to an action plan."

Anna was crucial to forming and sustaining the plot, pushing the others to get more serious, move faster, and make real plans. It was Anna, facilitated by the FBI, who provided the instructions and materials for making a bomb. (No actual bomb was produced.) Diane Bennett, one of the jurors from the case, described Anna's role: "providing all of the essential tools for the group; the cabin, the money, the idea, the books, everything."

It was Anna who provided the bomb recipe, and the materials, and was insistent on moving ahead with the plan, even when others were unmotivated or expressed reservations. As Lauren Weiner's testified: "Anna was most concerned about keeping on schedule. . . . She wanted to speed things up." Or, as the prosecutor put it: "they discuss maybe slowing up this conspiracy, maybe going slower, so they don't have these mistakes. Anna is pushing to get more organized."

Jenson and Weiner pled guilty to reduced charges and cooperated with the prosecution. They got five years each. Eric McDavid was sentenced to twenty years. Anna was paid $65,000.

Among the many clues that McDavid missed:

1- Money issues: Anna seems to have paid for nearly everything -- food, the car, gas, tents, plane tickets, the cabin where they were arrested. Over the two year period, January 2004 to January 2006, Anna's expenses totaled $35,000.

2- Vague or inconsistent explanations:

Lauren Weiner: "Anna always had -- she had a lot of $100 bills. . . ."

Q. "And she said purportedly that came from stripping, right?"
Weiner: "Yes. . . . Well, she also said that she had money from working in a chemistry lab over the semester while she was at school. That she had all these jobs. . . . She was very vague about it."

3- Asking about previous arsons, and future illegal actions: Anna testified: "I asked him if he had any involvement with the actions [an arson] that Ryan Lewis took over Christmas, and he denied it. I further asked him -- I said, you know, I know a little bit about you. I think you might have been involved. It seems like something you'd be interested in. He says, no, I didn't do that. I have my own plans. . . . I asked him what his plans were. And that was when he stated that Ryan Lewis had made the mistake of doing the actions too close to home, and that McDavid's actions would take place nationwide. And I again asked him, well, what are you planning? And he said that he had gotten a bomb recipe for C4 from an individual in West Virginia. And his plan was to make little C4 bombs."

4- Documenting incriminating evidence: Anna was insistent that the group keep a notebook and write down all of their plans. "Anna introduces something that we'll come to know as the Burn Book. The Burn Book, she says, is something that the group can use to record their thoughts, their to-do lists, their -- if they need to go buy chemicals, they can write a list of all the chemicals down there. . . . Why call it the Burn Book? Because a couple of the members of the conspiracy, specifically Lauren Weiner and Zachary Jenson, kind of bridled at the fact that we're writing all this stuff down. We don't want to commit any of this to writing. Anna solves that problem. She says, that's simple. We'll burn it at the end. After we're done, we're going to burn this book." (That's the prosecutor's description, and the Burn Book became important evidence in the trial.)

5- Failure to follow agreed upon security protocols: Weiner: "Well, it was stated by Eric back in November that absolutely nothing would be written down, and we all agreed with that. And then all of a sudden everything was being written down, and that was obviously very uncomforting to me."

Also, Anna testified: "That night there was a discussion, and Jenson specifically mentioned that he was very uncomfortable with the fact that I still had my cell phone, as the rest of the members of the group did not carry cell phones and had no desire to carry cell phones, and felt that cell phones were a method for law enforcement to track them. So they began to pressure me to get rid of my cell phone." (Anna used her phone to provide the FBI "real time" intelligence.)

6- Pressure toward illegal action: Weiner: "She was upset that there were no plans, and . . . I was upset because I felt like I didn't know where these plans were coming from."

7- Discomfort of other team-mates:

Q. "Do you remember the conversations in that car ride? . . . Were any of them about a feeling you had that she was leading you and the rest of the group into a trap?"

Zachary Jenson: "I do remember having a conversation about that. . . ."

Q. "Okay. And it was where you said something to the effect of, you know, I have this feeling that you, Anna, you're leading us into a trap, right?"

Jenson: "Yes."

8- Discrepancies between stated intentions and actual activity: Earlier, at a 2005 protest against the Organization of American States, Anna presented herself as a medic, but she had no training and never actually served in that function. Instead, she claimed specialized skills as a means to gain access to planning meetings and collect information.
According to Del Papa, one of the protest organizers, "Anna didn’t seem very interested in offering medical care and comfort to protesters. She was more curious about the protest organizers. . . . She started asking all of these really specific questions about who was coming and how many people were coming. She got really aggressive about wanting detailed information about our plans.”

At the demonstration itself, Anna then used her position to push tactics that were not only illegal, but contrary to existing plans and probably counter-productive: "During the march, Del Papa said, Anna started recruiting high-school students to stage a sit-in to block traffic, right in front of a large group of Broward County sheriff’s officers in riot gear. Del Papa was sure the provocation would lead to arrests and to the police clearing protesters from the area. . . ."
(Del Papa quotes are from the Sacramento News and Review article, "Conspiracy of Dunces": http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/conspiracy-of-dunces/content?oid=80311)

9- Discovering the bug: Anna testified: "On the drive down into Auburn, there was -- a wire had fallen out of the dash of the car, and as McDavid was fiddling with the wire, the recording device in the car fell out of the dash into his hand. . . . I took the recorder out of his hand, and I shoved it back into the dashboard. And I said, stupid old car, just a . . . piece of shit. . . . He let it go. He didn't question me further about it, but he acted strange as if somewhere in his subconscious he knew that that was a weird occurrence, but he never pressed me about it. . . . He had basically just found me out but didn't quite know it."

What’s remarkable about this case is that McDavid and the others failed to challenge Anna on these behaviors despite their collective obsession with "security culture." The term shows up again and again in the trial, as an explanation of why they did certain things the way they did. They got new email accounts, they communicated in code, they used fake names, they went without cell phones (except for Anna) -- and on and on. But they did not, apparently, think carefully enough about who they wanted to work with and what they wanted to do.

They clearly underestimated the level of technical skill their plan required, but more importantly, it seems they underestimated the level of risk involved, and therefore also the level of commitment and trust necessary. All four conspirators were working far outside the scope of their experience, and they don't seem to have seriously considered the basis on which they were working together. Anna, for instance, seems to have been invited in because McDavid had a crush on her.

In this sense, the conspiracy failed twice. It failed, first, because the group lacked a sound basis for working together, could not agree on a coherent plan, didn't have the necessary technical proficiency to succeed, and finally -- much to Anna's frustration -- were too flakey to follow through on their ideas. It failed, again, because one of the four was an agent provocateur, and two later turned state's evidence. It's worth noting, though, that both sets of failures occurred for many of the same reasons.

Profile #3: Brandon Darby

Similarly, David McKay and Bradley Crowder got in over their heads with activist-turned-informant Brandon Darby.

(A lot has been written about this case, but unless otherwise noted, I'm taking my quotes here from Michael May's story for This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/381/turncoat.)

Brandon Darby was a prominent organizer, originally in Austin. He went to New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and became a leader of Common Ground, a grassroots relief agency that provided free food, medical aid, legal assistance, and home repair -- while also fighting home demolitions and police brutality.

In August 2008, Darby traveled with the "Austin Affinity Group," including McKay and Crowder, to St. Paul to protest against the Republican National Convention. When they arrived, police searched their van and seized home-made riot shields. Darby urged the group to escalate its tactics in response: “We’re not going to take this lying down. You’ve got to do something about it.” (Quoted in Cincotta, cited below.) That evening, McKay and Crowder made some molotov cocktails, and stashed them in the basement of the house where they were staying.

According to McKay, when they mentioned the molotovs to their affinity group, they were told in no uncertain terms, "what you are doing is ridiculous, stupid, and dangerous."

At that point they basically gave up on the idea of using firebombs, and went to the demonstration without them. Later, though, Darby asked McKay what they planned to do with the bombs. "David says he didn't want to lose face with Brandon, so he made up a plan" about attacking a parking lot full of police cars. Darby simultaneously told McKay he didn't think he and Crowder were ready for that sort of action, and goaded him toward it, and offered to help. They agreed to meet at 2 a.m., but McKay blew it off and stopped responding to Darby's messages. McKay was arrested in bed at 4:30 a.m.

We now know that Darby had been giving the FBI information since at least February 2007, and had actually been on the payroll since November that same year. It's not clear exactly when the collaboration began, and many people now cite suspicions about Darby from much earlier. Darby's own story is that he first approached the FBI after a Palestinian activist asked him to help raise money for Hamas and Hezbollah. That experience led him to reflect on his own views about militancy, after which he called the FBI and volunteered to work as an informer. In 2008, the FBI put him to work as part of their campaign against the anti-RNC protests. In that capacity, he attended planning meetings and regularly wore a wire.

It was during this period that Darby met McKay and Crowder. The two younger activists looked up to Darby and sought to emulate his militancy, while he relentlessly razzed them for being "tofu eaters" and "weaklings" -- a dynamic that led them to feel that they had something to prove. McKay says: "We really didn't feel very comfortable about Brandon for a long time, but it always came into play that we had never done anything, anything like this, ever. . . . And that's everything that Brandon was. . . . With him we felt like we were legitimate."

Of course it was Darby who told the FBI about the riot shields and, later, the molotov cocktails.

The first attempt at a trial ended in a hung jury -- the result of McKay's entrapment defense. Ultimately, however, both McKay and Crowder plead guilty to firearms charges. Crowder got two years. McKay got four. Darby was paid $12,750, plus $3,028 for expenses.

In this case, too, there were numerous clues that Darby was not to be trusted:

1- Previous behavior: The Austin Chronicle wrote: "ask around Austin activist circles. . . . Several local activists describe Darby as a troubled, paranoid man with a volatile history with women, a penchant for violent rhetoric, and a strong authoritarian streak." (Some of the quotes in what follows -- those not from This American Life -- are taken from Diana Welch's Chronicle story, "The Informant": http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2009-01-23/729400/.)
Similarly at Common Ground, Malik Rahim, recalls: "At the very beginning, he was helpful, but after [a point], he became harmful. . . . He did everything he could to destroy St. Mary's, which was where we were housing the majority of our volunteers, by letting a bunch of crackheads move in there. And he also drove a wedge between me and Lisa Fithian and eventually caused her to leave, too. He was doing everything you're supposed to do as a government agent in that situation. Divide and conquer."

2- Demanding access to sensitive information he didn't need: Fithian says that, during the RNC, Darby had to be asked to leave meetings where the details of actions were being worked out: "He said he was there to do medical, but instead he was at all the meetings." She recalls, "I actually asked, 'What the fuck is he doing here?' . . . I told him he needed to leave."

3- Assumption of authority: Scott Crow, one of the founders of Common Ground told This American Life: "He doesn't ask. A lot of time he just assumed that nobody knew what they were doing. And he was going to do it, even though he never organized anything -- never organized, never organized anything. Zero."

4- Exaggerating his own knowledge and experience: Crow also told the Chronicle: "He inserted himself as 'co-founder'; he wanted that status, even as people were getting written out of the Common Ground history, people who did a lot of work organizing."

5- Taking credit for others' work: Crow, again: "If you look at the way Brandon tells it, he did the whole Lower 9th Ward with one hand tied behind his back, when really there were a lot of people who did the work, and the organizing too, who you'll never hear about because of Brandon's monopoly on the media."
He explains: "[Darby] made sure that the media followed him extensively and didn't interview other people. . . . So, did he do that just because he's crazy, or did he do that to get more credibility for himself so that he could gather more information?"

6- The Hero Complex: Lisa Fithian summed up Darby's attitude: "It's all about him. . . [and his need] to be the savior."

7- Bravado: Darby announced, regarding his plans to disrupt the RNC: "Any group I go with will be successful."

8- Paranoia and tendencies toward violence: Scott Crow: "I'm not a psychologist, but I would definitely say that guy's paranoid. I mean, he sleeps with guns under his pillow. This is not something I have been told; this is something I have seen. The guy has a cache of weapons."

9- Machismo: Fithian: "He did a lot of Wild West shit – Mister Macho Action Hero."

10- Misogyny: The Chronicle reports: "[O]ther sources . . . spoke of a particular romantic relationship in Darby's past that they describe as emotionally abusive and Darby as paranoid, jealous, and possessive."
Fithian says this behavior was poisonous to the culture at Common Ground: "He was a leader of the organization. . . and because of that, he was able to set some patterns in motion that I believe led to systemic issues of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and violence."

11- Bullying: McKay: "We had a lot of discussions. . . where he was criticizing us about where we were physically. . . . He put [Crowder] in a choke hold out of nowhere just to test what Brad would do."

12- Concerns raised by others: People who knew Darby described him with words like: "megalomania," "manipulative," "very brash, very macho," "very confrontational," "violent at times," "crazy," "a wing nut," "hero complex," and "pathological liar."

Fithian adds: "I always said at Common Ground: If he was not a cop or an agent of the state, he was doing their job for them, creating division and disrupting our work."

13- McKay and Crowder also should have paid attention to their own reservations: McKay remembers saying to Crowder: "I hope this isn't one of those 'when keeping it real goes wrong' scenarios."

Commonalities

There's a broad pattern common to all of these cases: People passing themselves off as tough, militant, super-radical big shots manipulated, bullied, or guilt-tripped less experienced, more pliable people, and pushed them toward actions far beyond anything they were prepared for, tactically or politically.

In the Darby case this dynamic advanced through the medium of masculinity. Darby's presentation of himself centered on an image of a tough, decisive, bold, heroic "man of action," and he prodded his younger, more impressionable comrades largely by challenging their masculinity. McKay and Crowder, then, made some dumb decisions -- not simply because they trusted the wrong person, but because Darby's influence helped them to wrongly conflate radicalism, militancy, and personal commitment with an exaggerated masculinity and the psychological need to be tough guys.

I realize that these cases may not count as "entrapment" in the narrow legal sense, but they certainly fit the commonsense meaning of the word: the government manufacturing a crime for the sake of luring unsuspecting people into a conviction. In none of these cases would the plot have existed, much less been enacted, without the intervention of the provocateur.

I've chosen three cases involving the anarchist or radical environmentalist movements, but a similar pattern has emerged in FBI "terror" cases targeting Muslims. In 2009, the Islamic Center of Irvine discovered that the FBI had hired Craig Monteilh, using the name Farouk Aziz, to infiltrate numerous mosques in the L.A. area. His activity led to one arrest: Ahmadullah Niazi was charged with lying on his immigration application to hide the fact that his brother-in-law was Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard. In this case, too, there had been plenty of reason to worry: Two years earlier the Council of American-Islamic Relations was so shocked by Monteilh's big talk about jihad that they reported him to the police and filed a restraining order against him.

Likewise, the 2006 plot to bomb the Sears Tower was a creature of two FBI provocateurs active in Miami's poor, black Liberty City neighborhood. That case went to trial three times before producing convictions. As Thomas Cincotta wrote in the Public Eye: "Previous juries viewed the FBI informant posing as a member of al Qaeda as the driving force behind the plot. Despite paying informants over $130,000, the FBI produced no evidence of explosives, weapons or blueprints, only a videotape of defendants pledging an 'oath' to al Qaeda, recorded in a warehouse wired by the FBI." (Unless otherwise noted, details in this section are taken from Cincotta's 2009 article, "From Movements to Mosques, Informants Endanger Democracy," http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n2/movements-to-mosques.html.)

Also in 2006, the government took note of a group of Albanians who had videotaped themselves riding horses, shooting guns, and shouting "Allah akbar." The FBI sent two untrained informants to befriend the group. One of the informants, Mahmoud Omar, quickly assumed a position of leadership, and offered to get them weapons. When they finally agreed, they were arrested.

More recently, in late 2010, the FBI arrested a Somali-born teenager for trying to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. The young man, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, had tried to get in touch with jihadists online, but the FBI responded instead. Over several months, federal agents helped Mohamud concoct his plot, providing technical advice and financial assistance, and supplying both the (fake) bomb and the vehicle used to transport it. As Steven Wax, Mohamud's attorney explained: "The government provided the money, the government provided the transportation, the government was involved in the meetings." (Quoted in USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-12-15-fbi-sting_N.htm).

The Standard Profile

In all these cases, the provocateurs shared some common traits which, one would hope, we might have learned to recognize by now. Way back in 1983, the Anti-Repression Resource Team and Midwest Research Group studied the available information on dozens of infiltration and entrapment cases and created a standard profile of the provocateur:

"Extraordinary Agents-Provocateurs are individuals who are agents of the state, although not usually regular employees, who make a living out of destroying ongoing movement organizations by disruption and factionalizing a group to an extraordinary degree. These individuals are extraordinary action people, ready to deal with guns and armed struggle, ready to participate in direct action in all its forms and to be arrested. . . .
"One of the telltale signs of an extraordinary agent-provocateur is the advocacy and use of excessive violence. . . . Quite often, extraordinary agents-provocateurs gain their initial respect by procuring guns for a group. Others constantly urge the groups on to violent confrontations or armed actions which will be counterproductive.

"Extraordinary agents-provocateurs are usually very close to one or more top leaders and make sure they get along well with them. But they are generally very difficult for others to get along with. Their usual social behavior is bad to atrocious except when leadership is around."
(Anti-Repression Resource Team and Midwest Research Group, Protecting Ourselves from State Repression: A Manual for Revolutionary Activists, 1983. This document is not available online; sorry.)

In addition to these characteristics, and those mentioned earlier in the case studies, we might also note that in most of these cases the militancy is accompanied by vague or inconsistent politics:

"Very often their political lines change abruptly, without apparent reason or explanation. . . . Along with the political disruptiveness is a basic lack of solid political growth. When long experience with a particular issue does not lead to qualitatively better political understanding of the issue, there are grounds for security suspicions. Extraordinary agents-provocateurs are usually action-oriented and press ahead with more daring and more illegal activities without any increase in their political understanding of an issue. . . . [I]nformers often push their interests far beyond their political capacity. Quite often informers are at events that they cannot understand or explain politically."

Proceed with Caution

Here a word of caution is in order. It is totally conceivable, maybe even likely, that a person could fit this sort of pattern and not be a government agent.

There is a whole range of other possible explanations: He could be employed by a private agency. He could be sabotaging movement work for personal or ideological reasons. He could be well-meaning, but misguided, mentally ill, or merely very foolish. There is also the possibility that the state is not employing him, but has made a calculated decision to leave him alone while his behavior wrecks havoc in the movement. Or the cops might be biding their time, monitoring him while they build as big a case as they can.

Usually, all we have to judge by is the actor's behavior, and so we just don't know what the full story is. It is important, therefore, not to jump to conclusions -- and especially, not to jump to conclusions publicly. There is entirely too much mud-slinging, rumor-mongering, and trial-by-flame-war in the anarchist movement already. We can't afford to make it worse with premature denunciations or allegations we can't substantiate.

For one thing, it is a favorite trick of police agencies to make false allegations and spread such rumors themselves in order to neutralize leaders, sow suspicion, and generate rifts in the movement. "Snitch-jacketing" they call it.

For another thing, there is a real danger that by overstating the conclusion, one can inadvertently overshadow the real concerns that exist. If the allegation is "this guy's a fed," then the question becomes "Is he a fed?" If the evidence doesn't conclusively show that he is, the whole affair may be written off as false, even if there are genuine reasons to worry.

The answer, then, is to concentrate on the demonstrable evidence, rather than peddling conjecture. In practical terms, that means addressing the person's problematic behavior rather than leveling accusations about their intent.

The point that really deserves attention is that, whether or not people matching this description are provocateurs, their provocateur-like behavior ought to be enough to discredit them.

Conclusions

The people entrapped in these recent cases got into trouble partly by trusting the wrong people, but also by needing too much to impress them, trying too hard to please them. ("I was always trying to impress her," Lauren Weiner testified.) But most of all, I think the victims here failed to trust their own better judgment.

The conclusions ought to be commonsensical: Know the people you do political work with. The more risky the work, the better you need to know them. Be realistic about your skills, experience, understanding, and limitations -- and those of the people you work with. Use your own judgment in deciding what sort of work to pursue, what tactics to adopt, and the level of risk to accept. Don't let yourself be bullied, guilt-tripped, or baited into anything that seems to you like a bad idea. And don't shrug it off if something seems wrong.

Of course, that still may not be enough to keep you out of jail. But it seems to me like the least we can ask of the people we work with -- whether we're doing anything illegal, or not.

Author Bio

Kristian Williams is the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America and American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (both from South End Press).

Police Violence Is Not An Accident

Jan. 27, 2011 Puget Sound Anarchists

There are gaping holes in the efforts of police spokespeople, community
members, and city officials to apologize and rationalize the ongoing
violence of the Seattle Police Department. What we hear repeatedly are
sentiments like, "They are just doing their jobs, which are stressful and
dangerous," as well as, "These are isolated incidences." Dialogue around
how to correct overt force demonstrated by SPD revolves around reform and
"making the police remember who they work for."
While police accountability is certainly an issue that many communities
rally behind for good reason, it also neglects the reality of the history
of the modern day police force in the United States as well as who
constitutes its body. You cannot apologize away an insitution that was
formed to protect capital and the rich, nor can you deny the pattern of
abuse in the SPD as being "isolated." In fact, a culture of violence
intiated the police force and maintains it's power today.

The Modern Day Police Force

While the modern day police force has had several incarnations (including
the commonly corrupt sherriffs and constables of days past), the system of
policing as we know it today was never intended to protect citizens from
one another: it was intended to provide insurance to slave owners who felt
that their minority status in the South was a threat to their estates.

"Faced with the difficulties of keeping a major portion of the population
enslaved to a small elite, Southern society borrowed from the practices of
the Caribbean...There, slaveowners used professional slave catchers and
militias to capture runaways, while overseers were responsible for
maintaining order on the plantations...in the 1680s, the militia began
making regular patrols to catch the runaways, prevent slave gatherings,
search slave quarters, keep order at markets, funerals, and festivals, and
generally intimidate the Black population." ("Our Enemies In Blue,"
Kristian Williams)

The modern day police force is modeled after these slave patrols and their
job is to protect the social mechanisms of capitalism. Cops, SPD included,
do not serve the public, they serve private interests. This is what is
happening as they meticulously pick off the homeless, people with
disabilities, and other marginalized communities who do not have the
resources to fight back, and why they are so often not prosecuted.

The Culture of SPD

Recently the Stranger and the Seattle Times both reported on the newspaper
written and distributed by the Seattle Union Police Officer's Guild, The
Guardian. The Guardian is a monthly publication written by cops, for cops.
The content in the SPD paper that both publications reported on include an
open disdain for civilian insight into the way the SPD is run as well as
flaming critiques of the racial and social justice programs implemented in
the last 5 years. Editorialists in the Guardian go so far as to call
Seattle city officials "socialists," as well as promoting the idea that
social rights advocates are "enemies."
The Stranger spotlights Officer Clayton Powell's editorial, "Reality or
Ignorance: the State of Being Out of Touch" (November 2010). Powell writes
that cops should have access to racially and sexually charged words in
order to relate to the communities that police are trying to develop
credibility with. It is unclear at what point he believes using the "n"
word in a community of color will "connect" his whiteness to their
systematic oppression by the police and State. Disturbingly, Powell
recommends that other officers watch the movie "Kings of Comedy,"
particularly what Bernie Mac has to say about using profane language such
as "Motherf****r," in order to appreciate officer's abilities to utilize
problematic language.
It should be no surprise then that Powell, unable to understand the racism
behind a white cop using the "n" word, was also investigated by the SPD in
2000 for threatening and stalking his ex-wife. The Seattle PI reported in
an article on July 23, 2003 ("Cops who abuse their wives rarely pay the
price") that these charges were not taken seriously by the department and
Powell was not disciplined.
The Times reported that City Councilmember Tim Burgess said, of the
Guardian editorials, "[the comments are] not consistent with the values of
the police department or the rules of behavior the department sets for our
officers." Taking a brief look at SPD's history of recent violence could,
however, prove otherwise.

SPD's (Incomplete) Recent History of Violence

-May 2009, Christopher Sean Harris was chased down a street in Belltown by
unidentified men. In reality, Deputy Matthew Paul, who was not
identifiable as a member of the sherriff's department, shoved Harris' head
into a wall and crushed it, resulting in a catastrophic brain injury that
only recently won Harris a $10M settlement.
-November 2009, 15 year old black youth Malika Calhoun was slammed into a
wall and punched twice while being detained in a holding cell by King
County Sherriff's Deputy Paul Schene.
-April 17th, A group of Hispanic men are pulled over near Lake Union.
Officer Shandy Cobane asserts: "I'm going to beat the f***ing Mexican piss
out of you homey. You feel me?" and stomps one of the men.
-June 14th, two black youths crossing MLK are stopped by the cops for
jaywalking and one is punched in the face by officer Ian Walsh.
-September 2010, 6 people shot in one week, 5 killed, including John T.
Williams. Williams, a Native woodcarver holding a 3-inch closed blade, was
shot by Ian Birk within four seconds of being accosted and ordered to drop
his wood carving knife.
-January 2011, a man is handcuffed and forced onto the ground, punched,
and spit socked by two officers on Rainer Ave. S. after wandering into the
street. Witnesses report excessive force

It shouldn't be a surprise that SPD invests time and energy holding
community meetings intended for public relations outreach and then defames
critics of the department in their private union paper. The Stranger
reports, "'The intended audience is the police department,' says [Sean]
Whitcomb. 'It's very police-y. It's specific jargon. They are writing to a
specific audience.'"
The two faces of the SPD are meant to soothe the public while protecting
private interests. They cannot accept money from the state if they are
open about the internal culture they are cultivating. As author and police
investigator Kristian Williams has said, "The main function of the police
has very little to do with crime or enforcing the law and is more directed
toward maintaining existing social inequality, especially those based on
race and class."
It is a mistake to believe that the police can be reformed. If we wish to
take our lives back from the chokehold of the prison industrial complex,
we must abolish all its servants--including the police-- and end our
enslavement to capitalism and its enforcers.

Dialogue?
rotebark@riseup.net

Police Violence, Resistance and The Crisis of Legitimacy

— Kristian Williams Solidarity

ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2010, Los Angeles police shot and killed a Guatemalan day laborer named Manuel Jamines.

The next day, a crowd gathered on the corner where Jamines died. They assembled a small memorial, then piled debris and set fires in the street, and hurled rocks and bottles at the cops, reportedly injuring several.

Police responded with rubber bullets and tear gas; they arrested more than two dozen people. Rioting continued for three nights running.

Police claimed that Jamines was threatening passers-by with a knife — a story widely disbelieved in the Latino community and contradicted by eyewitness accounts. “I did not see a knife in his hands,” one witness told reporters.(1)

“He had nothing in his hands,” another confirmed; “At the moment when the police were shooting, he had nothing.”(2)

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised an investigation, and simultaneously voiced his support for the police. “These guys are heroes,” he said.(3)

Los Angeles is the most recent site of a multi-city policing crisis affecting the entire West Coast. What clearly sets a number of recent cases apart is not the fact of police violence, but the fact that that violence is being challenged. The controversy, in other words, is not only about violence, but about authority. It is a crisis of legitimacy.

In Oregon and Washington, as well as in California, an assortment of legal proceedings, peaceful marches, riots, and repeated attacks against police and their property all point to the contested nature of police violence and the slow normalization of violence in response.

Oakland: Exceptional Symbols

Oakland, California set the tone: On New Year’s Day, 2009, transit police killed an unarmed Black man, Oscar Grant, in front of numerous witnesses. Video of the incident shows Grant lying facedown, his hands behind his back.

One cop, Tony Pirone, can be heard calling him a “bitch-ass nigger;”(4) another cop, Johannes Mehserle, draws his gun and shoots Grant in the back, point-blank.

Grant’s killing sparked a series of protests and small riots. Largely in response to the rebellion, the authorities arrested Mehserle and charged him with murder.(5)

More than a year later, in July 2010, Mehserle was convicted — not of murder, but of involuntary manslaughter. The response of the community, once again, was outrage expressed in marches, barricaded streets, broken windows, dumpster fires, and looting; damages were estimated at $750,000.(6) Mehserle was sentenced in November to just two years in prison, provoking further unrest.

It was barely two months after Grant’s shooting, in March 2009, that a Black ex-con named Lovelle Mixon killed two Oakland cops at a traffic stop, and then two more during the SWAT raid to bring him in. Mixon died in the shoot-out.

These two cases immediately came to symbolize the tense relationship between Blacks and the police — a relationship often defined by violence. Yet both cases are also exceptions to the usual pattern, though they are exceptions for very different reasons.

Grant’s case is exceptional, practically unique, because police are so rarely punished for their violence; Mixon’s because, in the conflict between African Americans and police, the casualties are usually all on one side.

Washington State: “We will fight!”

Further north, in Washington State, at least nine cops have been shot since Halloween, 2009; six of them died.(7)

In a way, the chain of events began on November 29, 2008, when King County Deputy Paul Schene beat a teenaged girl in a holding cell. The following February, the deputy was charged with assault and a videotape of the incident was released. He was fired that September, and later tried — but not convicted.

In October 2009, Schene was mentioned by name in a communiqué left at the site of an arson in which several unoccupied police vehicles were firebombed. A few days later, on October 31, two cops were shot in a drive-by attack; one died.

The suspect in both cases, Christopher Monfort, was later shot by police, paralyzing him from the waist down. He is presently awaiting trial in King County Jail. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

The district attorney argues that Monfort was acting out of anger over the Schene incident. Monfort himself has repeatedly referred to the case in media interviews and in court. At one hearing, he lashed out against the cops: “We will fight! ... We’ve had enough. The people will not take it any longer. . . . We’ll fight and we’re everywhere. You can’t see us coming.”(8)

Monfort acted alone, but shortly after the Halloween ambush, in November 2009, Maurice Clemmons killed four cops in a Lakewood, Washington coffee shop. Clemmons was later killed by Seattle police.

Then, in April 2010, Everett police arrested Michael McConnachie for plotting a similar attack targeting local sheriff’s deputies. He is now awaiting trial.

“A Tipping Point”

This series of planned attacks generated quite a bit of sympathy for the police, and concern for the hazards they face. But almost at once, two videotaped beatings undercut the cops’ collective credibility, and renewed public anger.

The first video, from April 17, 2010, shows two Seattle cops kicking and stomping a Latino man. Gang unit Detective Shandy Cobane can be heard threatening, “I’m going to beat the fucking Mexican piss out of you, homey. You feel me?”(9) The victim was later released without charges.

The second incident came two months later. In June a white Seattle cop, Ian Walsh, was filmed hitting a Black teenaged girl.

The incident began as Walsh tried to cite another girl, Marilyn Ellen Levias, for jaywalking. Walsh grabbed Levias’ arm; her friend, Angel Rosenthal, pushed him away; and the cop punched her in the face. Levias was arrested for obstructing an officer, and Rosenthal for assault.

James Kelly, chief executive officer of the Urban League, told reporters, “The provocation by this 17-year-old kid may have presented a confrontation situation, but the use of violence in the form of a full punch in the face was just plain wrong. . . . This is another case where we are standing here, saying, ‘shame on you’ to the Seattle police.”(10)

Then, at the very end of summer, on August 30, Seattle police shot and killed John T. Williams, a half-deaf Native American woodcarver. Police say Williams was whittling when Officer Ian Birk approached. He failed to drop the pocket knife he was working with, and Birk shot him.

On September 2, hundreds of people attended a candlelight vigil for Williams. The next day, Native leaders held a press conference in which they demanded community representation in the review of the shooting. Around 80 people participated in a “speak-out” against police violence a few days later. This was followed by a series of demonstrations, drawing hundreds of people, which continues to the present.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote an open letter to the mayor, police chief, and city council, calling for “basic changes — a new set of approaches, expectations, and daily practices in the Seattle Police Department.”

The letter went on: “Too often, officers have overreacted or escalated incidents when the subject is an individual of color, disabled, homeless or, otherwise ‘different.’ We fear that the drive for so-called ‘civility’ laws has created a mindset that our streets need to be rid of ‘undesirable’ people.”(11)

The next day, Tim Burgess, the head of the City Council’s public safety committee expressed his worries over the effect of the controversy: “(T)he cumulation of incidents has the potential to reach a tipping point, where large segments of our community lose confidence in the police. . . .”(12)

Cops on a Killing Spree

Police violence in Washington state has not been isolated to the Seattle city limits: In the week following the death of John T. Williams, police in the greater Seattle area killed four other people, and shot one more (who survived).

The day after Williams’ death, Federal Way police shot and killed David Charles Young as he fled in a stolen truck. That same day, Pierce County Sheriffs deputies tased a man who they say was resisting arrest; after receiving a 50,000-volt shock, the man stopped breathing, and later died.

On September 3, Tacoma cops shot and killed a man holding a knife at a bus stop. That night, Seattle police shot a reportedly suicidal man who pointed an AK-47 at them; he survived. The next morning, a deputy in the town of Gold Bar used a taser against an unarmed man yelling in the street; the 25-year-old man, Adam Colliers, died.

This cluster of fatalities was immediately followed by the death of an Iraq War vet at the hands of police in Vancouver, Washington; the cops say the victim was standing in the street with a handgun, and refused to put it down.

The week-long killing spree was, likewise, immediately preceded by an August 26 incident in which a Spokane County deputy killed a 74-year-old Southern Baptist preacher, Wayne Scott Creach, on his own land. Creach had gone out armed to investigate a strange car on his property; it turned out to be an unmarked police car.

According to police, Creach refused to put his gun down when ordered. “[My] father was murdered,” Creach’s son, Alan, says. “I don’t believe it’s written in the Constitution that when a deputy approaches you have to put your gun down.”(13)

Meanwhile, in the nearby city of Everett an older drama drew to a close. In June 2009, Officer Troy Meade shot a DUI suspect seven times as the man attempted to drive away.

The suspect died at the scene, and Meade was charged with murder. Almost a year later, in April, a jury acquitted the cop of all charges, despite another officer’s testimony that the shooting seemed unnecessary. And yet, in deciding a separate question, the same jury rejected Meade’s claim that he acted in self-defense. Meade was satisfied with the verdict. “I’m going back to work,” he said.(14)

Portland: Cops, Clergy and Anarchists

On January 29, 2010, Portland Police officer Ron Frashour shot and killed an unarmed Black man, Aaron Campbell. Campbell was not a criminal suspect, but was thought to be suicidal. Yet as Campbell was trying to surrender, Frashour shot him in the back.

Barely two months later, in March, another cop shot and killed a distraught homeless man, Jack Collins, as he approached carrying an X-acto knife.

Then, in May, the Portland police killed again. Keaton Otis, a young Black man, was stopped on a pretext because Officer Ryan Foote thought he “kind of looks like he could be a gangster.”(15) Police say that, when Otis was pulled over, he became belligerent and started shouting obscenities. They tased him, and he pulled a gun. Otis fired twice, hitting Officer Christopher Burley in the groin. The police returned fire, striking Otis 23 times and killing him on the spot.

The death of Aaron Campbell set off a series of protests, and anger mounted with each subsequent shooting. A coalition of Black clergy, the Albina Ministerial Alliance, took the initial lead, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson has twice traveled to Portland to urge action. The day after his first visit, a crowd of 200 marched into City Hall to confront the mayor.

By the time Jack Collins was killed, tensions were so high that demonstrations began that same evening, including the blocking of streets and some minor property damage.

As the weeks went on, resistance took several forms: community forums, leafleting, street-corner demonstrations, copwatch patrols, and — with surprising regularity — militant anarchist “black bloc” demonstrations in which windows were broken, numerous people arrested, and reportedly several cops injured.

Nighttime sabotage has also occurred: police substations, a community corrections office, and the headquarters of the Portland Police Association have all had their windows broken — the police union, twice.(16)

In the meantime, the Police Association president was forced to step down following two road rage incidents. The police chief was fired, ostensibly for complaining about her budget. And the mayor took over the responsibilities of the police commissioner.

In late August, the Use of Force Review Board recommended that Officer Frashour be fired. In late August, the Use of Force Review Board recommended that Officer Frashour be fired, and in November he finally was.

Political Narratives and Displays

The political uses of these stories are familiar enough.

The left mobilizes around the murders of people like Manuel Jamines, Oscar Grant, Aaron Campbell and John Williams, advancing a civil rights or police accountability agenda.

Conservatives, often led by police unions, mobilize around the deaths of cops, pushing a law-and-order agenda — budget increases, demands for more firepower, longer prison sentences, and so on. After the Lakewood shootings, for example, Washington passed laws raising the payments to the families of slain cops, increasing the penalty for aiding a fugitive, and tightening restrictions on bail.

But the particular demands, while important, are often incidental.

Police shootings serve as an opportunity to discredit the cops, especially when the victims resemble a particular “ideal type” — socially disadvantaged (Black, Latino, Native American, homeless, mentally ill, or disabled) and innocent (unresisting, unarmed, and not credibly accused of a crime).

Police funerals, in contrast, are public pageants that the cops can use to silence their critics. They pull politicians into mandatory displays of support, and are dutifully portrayed by the media as memorials of heroism and sacrifice.

For instance, Sergeants Mark Dunakin, Ervin Romans and Daniel Sakai and Officer John Hege, the cops Lovelle Mixon killed, were honored as “fallen heroes” by the U.S. House of Representatives; California’s two Senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger all spoke at their funeral; 20,000 spectators attended.(17)

In either case, the victim is converted into a symbol. But there are important differences: Police shootings are relatively common, but only rarely create public controversy. The victim is usually forgotten, except by those who knew him personally. The cops involved are often treated as heroes and issued commendations.

But nobody gets a medal for shooting at cops. The best a cop killer can expect is a very long prison sentence; many die before they make it to trial. But even when the cops clearly go too far, they rarely face meaningful discipline, and murder charges — like those proffered in Oakland and Everett — are rare to the point of being anomalous. Surveying the entire country, the San Francisco Chronicle could find only six cases from the 15 years before the Grant shooting. None of the 13 officers involved were convicted.(18)

Behind these dissimilarities is a greater asymmetry in the way these stories are used. The left has generally gone out of its way to avoid seeming to condone violence.(19) The police, however, do defend their right to kill. And, in particular, they use those specific instances when they are attacked to justify their much more general reliance on force.

By this account, people who attack the police are criminals, and the police need to defend themselves. And the people the police attack are also criminals — and therefore, potential attackers. Thus, the cops represent their own violence as being always defensive. The facts, however, show that police use violence far more often than it is used against them, at higher levels, and with more fatal consequences.

Counting Casualties

There are several features that make the recent stories remarkable, but unfortunately police violence is not one of them. The police kill people fairly regularly, and use other violence as a matter of routine.

No one keeps very good track of the numbers, but the few existing studies establish something of a pattern: According to a 2005 Justice Department survey, 19% of the American public had direct contact with the police during the previous year. Most of these contacts took the form of traffic stops, and most were unremarkable.

Only 1.6% of the people interviewed reported the use of force or the threat of force. That means, out of every 100 people the police come into contact with, they will threaten or use force against one or two of them. This rate is much higher for Blacks (4.4%) and Hispanics (2.3%) than for whites (1.2%).(20)

That 1.6% adds up quickly. Almost a million people (991,930) were subject to the use or threat of force at the hands of police sometime in 2005. In 55% of these cases — approximately 546,000 incidents — force was actually used.(21) If we got all those people together, we’d have a group as large as the population of Portland (537,081).(22)

That same year — 2005 — 57,546 officers were assaulted in the line of duty, representing 11.9 assaults per 100 officers. Most of these reported “assaults” involved unarmed assailants and produced no injuries. The vast majority of attackers (80%) used only “personal weapons such as hands, fists, or feet”; only 3.7% used firearms. Only about a quarter of these assaults (27.4%) resulted in injury to the officer.(23)

Comparing the numbers we see that the police use violence (546,000 times in 2005) nine times as often as they face it (57,546 times that year).

An analysis of fatal incidents shows a similar imbalance: During the period 2003-2005, 380 police died on duty. Only 159 of these deaths were homicides, while 221 were the result of accidents.

During that same time, 1,095 people were killed by law enforcement officers in the process of arrest. That averages 365 per year, or one a day.(24)

Of the people the police killed, nearly all were men (96.8%). Disproportionately many were Black (30% or 32%, depending on the count, whereas Blacks are 12.8% of the nation’s population).(25) Three-quarters (74.2%) were suspected of violent crimes (including 26.1% for crimes against the police); 8% of victims were accused of public order offenses; 3.9%, property offenses; 2.9%, drug offenses; and 2.5% — approximately 27 people — were not suspected of any crime at all, but were being taken into custody for medical or mental health reasons.

In 80.1% of the cases, the victim had a weapon, but only in 16.9% did they fight with officers; 3.6% — 38 people — were killed after they had been restrained.(26)

In Oregon, during the years in question, no cops were murdered, but 36 people were killed by the police. In Washington: 3 cops, 35 arrestees. In California: 17 cops, 162 arrestees.(27)

A Crisis of Legitimacy

The present crisis — stretching from L.A. to almost the Canadian border — is evidence that the police have lost credibility, first in the eyes of the public, and then in the eyes of the elites. As a result, the presumption of legitimacy is shifting, and the special protections the police enjoy are weakening.

One indicator of this shift is the leveling of murder charges against officers involved in on-duty shootings. Another is the slate of reforms being offered — in Portland, for example, the recent strengthening of the Police Review Board after years of delay; and in the Bay Area, the creation of an auditor’s position to investigate complaints against transit cops.

A third development is the revision of judicial standards for justifying violence. In a ruling from December 2009, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers all three states under discussion) restricted police use of tasers; more surprising, that October, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that a person has a right to defend himself if police use excessive force.

Paradoxically, even events that seem to point in the opposite direction — such as the extraordinary 62-year sentence leveled against two burglars who shot, but only slightly injured, a Vancouver Police sergeant in 2009 — nevertheless reflect elite anxieties about the public’s unwillingness to cede to police authority. The “Extra-long sentence [was] proposed,” The Columbian newspaper explained, “for [the] sake of deterring imitators.”(28)

But the most important indicator may be the existence of the crisis itself. Under ordinary circumstances, the police kill with relative impunity. At present, however, the public’s accumulated sense of outrage represents a challenge to the legitimacy of state violence. It is this challenge — not the violence itself — that has produced the existing crisis.

Radical Imperatives

The crisis shows that public trust in and political support for the police has been greatly eroded; the concessions are offered as a bid to win it back. The investigations, prosecutions, committee reports, and policy changes are real victories — mostly symbolic, a few substantive. They may, for a while, rein the police in and put a check on some of the worst abuses. But they will not, on their own, address the fundamental inequalities that the police act to preserve.

To address these inequalities, the left needs to be prepared to challenge police violence, not only in its most spectacular forms, but as it exists in the normal operations of the institution.

We need to challenge, not only a handful out of the hundreds of police shootings, but also the half-million times every year that the cops use lower levels of violence.

That means we need to learn to see police violence politically — that is, to recognize the politics inherent in it. Violence is a core function of policing. And the injustices of policing both reflect and reproduce the injustices of our society. The targets of police attention — and therefore also of police violence — reflect and reinforce existing inequalities of both race and class.

At the same time, the character of police violence, and the ideology supporting it — the view of violence as a contest between male antagonists, and the casting of police as chivalrous protectors — is itself deeply complicit in the subjugation of women, and historically linked to racial myths about the purity of white womanhood and Black sexual aggression.(29)

There’s not a review board in the world that can touch these fundamental inequalities. To do so would require more than some simple revisions to police policy; it would require the restructuring of our entire society. To be ultimately effective, then, the fight against police brutality needs a police-abolitionist perspective beyond the more limited reform or accountability framework, and must necessarily be a part of a much broader social movement.

Defeating the cops politically, in the most general terms, means broadening, deepening, and extending the present crisis of police legitimacy. Such an effort requires that we add to public distrust of the police, and undercut public support.

We have to be radical in our approach to each side of this equation — going to the root of both the distrust and the support. Public suspicion of the police, already acute in many corners, can be deepened by exposing, not just individual abuses or even whole patterns of abuse, but the basic function of the institution and its use of violence to preserve social inequality.

Public support, meanwhile, can be undercut by providing alternative means to resolve disputes, address interpersonal conflict, and insure public safety. These are the functions that, however badly the cops perform them, the public presently feels itself dependent on the police to provide. Our strategy should be, simultaneously, to attack the core function of policing and to remove the basis of its legitimacy, thus shifting support away from the police and toward our social movements.

Furthermore, we have to learn to use the state’s strength against it — and to use its weaknesses against it as well. We have to establish the political conditions such that the cops’ tactical victories become political liabilities, and their tactical defeats are only signs of their weakness. In other words: we need to make sure that the cops’ violence costs them in terms of legitimacy, while violence turned against police only shows that they are vulnerable to attack.

Re-Thinking Terms of Resistance

From the state’s perspective police violence is presumed legitimate, and violence against police illegitimate. The left has had a tendency to challenge the first premise but endorse the second. This posture has made it hard to recognize attacks against the police as political resistance. In effect it cedes to the state the right to define not only legitimate force, but legitimate resistance as well. It allows the police to convert attacks against them into a source of legitimacy, and accommodates the narrative by which the state’s violence is always defensive, and thus justified. By omission, this legalistic (or moralistic) approach seems to justify the police use of force so long as it is not, by the state’s standards, “excessive.”

But if we accept that police violence is political — and not merely a technical problem — then it follows that we need to understand the violence against police as political as well. We need a more nuanced view of its causes, of the forces that propel people toward it, of its consequences (both personally and socially), and of its meaning — its expressive content, intentionality, and implications. In short, we need to discuss the violence against police not simply in terms of crime, but in terms of resistance.

This is not to say that those who attack the police, or who simply defend themselves against a police attack, have a self-conscious ideological motivation or an explicit political agenda (although among those mentioned earlier, Christopher Monfort certainly did).

It is also not to say that the left necessarily needs to condone, endorse, advocate or use violence. Violence — whether in general, or in particular cases — must still be subject to criticism on ethical, political, strategic and tactical grounds. I think it’s time for the left to change our understanding of anti-cop violence — not because I think we need to use violence against the police, but in order to stop the police from using the violence they face as a pretext to justify the violence they employ.

Fighting Politically

Violence against the police obviously challenges the state’s effective monopoly on force, but does not on its own challenge the legitimacy of that monopoly. The social movements opposing police violence, on the other hand, need to challenge the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly.

In Oakland, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement organized a vigil and march in memory of Lovelle Mixon, comparing him to “Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser, enslaved Africans once vilified and today considered heroes.”(30) Less organized but no less meaningful were the small crowds of people taunting cops at the scene of the shooting, and interrupting live newscasts to shout, “Fuck the police!”(31)

More interesting, however, is the fact that these sentiments received even a modest hearing in the mainstream. Jackson West, writing for NBC online, produced a thoughtful commentary titled, “Why would anyone cheer OPD killings?” In answering, he points to the “history of antipathy” between the local community and the police, and suggests that the conditions that led to the creation of the Black Panther Party in 1966 largely still exist today:

“Of the 45 officer-involved shootings from 2004 to 2008, 44 were African-American or Hispanic. However, African-Americans and Hispanics account for only 56 percent of the city’s population according to the 2000 census. More troubling is that in only 60 percent of the police shootings was a weapon found on the suspect. And in none of those shootings were any officers reprimanded.(32)

There has been less vocal support for Christopher Monfort, in Seattle. But the Urban League’s defense of a young woman who did, in fact, assault a policeman is a small step in the same direction.

Meanwhile, in Portland, the police have been so discredited that even while cops face criticism for shooting Keaton Otis, his counterattack has been reduced almost to a non-issue. The steadfastly non-violent Albina Ministerial Alliance, for example, put the blame squarely on the police: “Keaton Otis did not have to die and Officer Christopher Burley did not have to be shot,” Reverend LeRoy Haynes said at the coalition’s press conference. “Keaton Otis, a citizen of this community, was pursued on an erroneous assumption that he was a gang member on the basis of his racial identity and attire.”(33)

A pacifist group, Portland Copwatch, went even further. In a letter to the District Attorney, the group cited court rulings limiting the cops’ use of tasers and affirming an individual’s right to defend himself against police brutality. Given the use of the taser in this incident, they were logically compelled to ask: “isn’t it possible that . . . [Keaton Otis] had a right to self-defense?”(34)

Notes

1. Quoted in Robert J. Lopez, “L.A. Police, Residents Face Off Over Police Killing of Guatemalan,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2010.
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2. Quoted in Victoria Kim, “Victim of LAPD’s Fatal Shooting in Westlake was Unarmed, Witness Says,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2010.
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3. Quoted in David Zahniser, “Villaraigosa Defends Police Action in Westlake, Says Officers ‘Acted With Bravery’,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2010.
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4. Quoted in Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, “ ‘N-Word’ Bombshell Waiting to Go Off in BART Police Shooting Trial,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 2009.
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5. For a good account of the demonstrations in the months between the shooting and the trial, see: Raider Nation Collective, Raider Nation, Volume 1: From the January Rebellions to Lovelle Mixon and Beyond (Oakland, 2010).
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6. Jaxon Van Derbeken and Carolyn Jones, “Glitches Hurt Cops’ Protest Response,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 26, 2010.
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7. Tan Vinh, “Man, 45, Held in Shooting of Pacific County State Trooper,” Seattle Times, February 16, 2010.
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8. Jonathan Martin, “Accused Cop Killer Rants at Hearing: ‘We Will Fight’ Seattle Times, June 5, 2010.
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9. “Q-13 Footage of Seattle Police Beating a Latino Man.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIJpxyUV5_g.
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10. Steve Miletich and Jennifer Sullivan, “Jaywalking Suspects Scuffle With Officer,” Seattle Times, June 16, 2010.
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11. Kathleen Taylor, “ACLU-WA Calls for Change in Mindset and Training of Seattle Police,” http://aclu-wa.org/news/aclu-wa-calls-change-mindset-and-training-seattle-police, September 7, 2010.
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12. Quoted in Mike Carter, et al., “Protests, Calls for Change Grow over Shooting,” Seattle Times, September 8, 2010.
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13. Quoted in Associated Press, “Preacher’s Son Accuses Deputy of Murder,” Seattle Times, September 8, 2010.
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14. Quoted in Sara Jean Green, “Everett Cop Acquitted,” Seattle Times, April 27, 2010.
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15. Quoted in Maxine Bernstein, “Police Stop Went Bad Almost Instantly,” The Oregonian, June 2, 2010.
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16. For a chronology of anarchist attacks against the Portland Police, see: “Anti-Police Activity in the Northwest + Beyond,” Fire to the Prisons 9 (Summer 2010) 29-34.
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17. Quoted in Carolyn Lochhead, “House Honors Fallen Officers With Resolution,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 2009.
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18. Demian Bulwa, “Mehserle Convicted,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 9, 2010.
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19. See: Ward Churchill (et al.), Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections of the Role of Armed Struggle in North America (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 1998); and, Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2007).
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20. Matthew R. Durose, et al., “Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2005” (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report: April 2007) 1 and 8.
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21. Durose, “Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2005,” 7 and 10.
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22. U.S. Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts: Portland (city), Oregon.” http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/41/4159000.html. Population figure is circa 2006.
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23. Uniform Crime Reporting Program, “Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2005: Law Enforcement Officers Assaulted” (U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation: October 2006). http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2005/assaulted.htm.
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24. Christopher J. Mumola, “Arrest-Related Deaths in the United States, 2003-2005” (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report: October 2007) 3.
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25. Mumola, “Arrest-Related Deaths in the United States, 2003-2005,” 13 and 2; and U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, The American Community — Blacks, 2004 (February 2007) 1.
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26. Mumola, op. cit., 15-16.
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27. Ibid., 21.
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28. Laura McVicker, “Shooting of Cop Merits 62 Years,” The Columbian, September 3, 2010.
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29. For an analysis of the interactions between racist ideology and sexual violence (as well as economic exploitation), see: Angela Y. Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Capitalist Setting” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) 129-137.
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30. Quoted in InPDUM Oakland, “Stop the Genocidal War on the African Community Now!” UhuruNews.com, March 24, 2009. http://uhurunews.com/story?resource_name=stop-the-genocidal-war-on-the-african-community-now-economic-and-social-justice-for-the-african-community.
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31. Quoted in Jackson West, “Why Would Anyone Cheer OPD Killings?” NBC Bay Area, March 25, 2009. http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local-beat/Why-Would-Anyone-Cheer-OPD-Killings.html.
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32. West, “Why Would Anyone Cheer OPD Killings?”
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33. “Albina Ministerial Alliance: ‘Keaton Otis Did Not Have to Die’,” Willamette Week Online, June 8th, 2010. http://blogs.wweek.com/news/2010/06/08/albina-ministerial-alliance-keaton-otis-did-not-have-to-die.
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34. “Portland Copwatch Raises Concerns About Keaton Otis Grand Jury,” Portland Observer, May 26, 2010. http://portlandobserver.com/?p=2703.
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ATC 150, January-February 2011