Noam Chomsky, "The Manufacture of Consent," in The Chomsky Reader, ed, James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 126.
It is worth remembering that other sources - hip-hop albums and anarchist newspapers, for instance - do not share this assumption. To cite an example of the former, better written than most, but not unusual in its sentiment: "five-O was outside waitin' with their vans/hopin' that shit would get out of hand/so dat they could test their weapons/on innocent civilians,/the high tech shit costin' millions and millions/money should've spent somethin' for community/but that's O.K. 'cause we got the unity./So fuck the police! We can keep the peace'." Spearhead, "Piece 0' Peace" Home (Hollywood: Capitol Records, 1994). For examples from anarchist papers, see: "Why a No Pig Zone" and "Kicking the Cops Out and Keeping Them Out," in Profane Existence: Making Punk a Threat Again!- The Best Cuts, 1989-1993 (Minneapolis: Profane Existence, 1997), 54-55 and 73.
Rodney Stark, Police Riots: Collective Violence and law Enforcement (Belmont. CA: FOCUS Books, 1972), I.
Carl B. Klockars, "The Rhetoric of Community Policing," in The Police and Society, ed. Victor E. Kappeler (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1999), 428.
I am familiar with three exceptions: Center for Research on Criminal Justice, The Iron fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the US Police (Berkeley, CA: Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975): Daniel Nina, "Popular Justice and the 'Appropriation' of the State Monopoly on the Definition of Justice and Order: The Case of the Anti-Crime Committees in Port Elizabeth," in The Other law: Non-State Ordering in South Afiica, ed. Wilfried Schirf and Daniel Nina (Lundsdowne: JUTA Law, 2001); and Dennis R. Longmire, "A Popular Justice System: A Radical Alternative to the Traditional Criminal Justice System," Contemporary Crises 5 (1981). Longmire proposes pragmatic alternatives to police, courts, and prisons. His recommendations are as remarkable for their simplicity as for their radicalism.
For more on this point, see: George Orwell, "Thoughts on James Burnham," in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace 8: World, 1950), 122-148.
"The repressive police institution, so necessary for the maintenance of capitalism, simply could not perform any social functions at all without its legitimating crime-fighting role." Sidney L. Harring, Policinga Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 246. Put differently - "The threat of crime, as evidenced by the myriad constructed images and narratives projected serves only as the pretext for the installation of a growing and increasingly complex enterprise of social control." Victor E. Kappeler and Peter B. Kraska, "A Textual Critique of Community Policing: Policc Adaption to High Modernity," Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies" Management 21:2 (1998): 293.
My criticisms of community policing appear in chapter 9.
Nikolas Rose, "Government and Control," British Journal o fCriminology 40:2 (2000): 329. David E. Pearson argues along similar lines: "To earn the appellation 'community,' it seems to me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a measure of compliance from their members. That is, communities are necessarily - indeed, by definition - coercive as well as moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them the carrot of certainty and stability if they don't." David E. Pearson, "Community and Sociology," Society 32:5 (July-August 1995) [database: Academic Search Elite, accessed March 26, 2003].
Amatai Etioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 127.
Carl Klockars puts the point more forcefully: "Sociologically, the concept of community implies a group of people with a common history, common beliefs and understandings, a sense of themselves as 'us' and outsiders as 'them,' and often, but not always, a shared territory. Relationships of community are different from relationships of society. Community relationships are based upon status not contract, manners not morals, norms not laws, understandings not regulations. Nothing, in fact, is more different from community than those relationships that characterize most of modern urban life." Klockars, "Rhetoric," 435.
Ibid.
For a discussion of gang suppression activities and their impact on communities of color, see: Felix M. Padilla, Gangs as an American Enterprise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 85; and Randall G. Sheldon et al., Youth Gangs in American Society (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), 244. For an account ofgang efforts to protect their neighborhoods from street crime, loan sharks, slum lords, price gouging, gentrification, and police brutality, see: Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (Berkeley: University U! of California Press, 1991),11-12 and 179-192.
These under-reported aspects of gang life, and the political potential they suggest, may help to explain why the LAPD actively sought to disrupt the gang truces negotiated after the 1992 riots. See: Malcolm W. Klein, The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence, and Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 165; and "Bloods/Crips Proposal for LA's Face-Lift," in Why [A Happened: Implications of the '92 Los Angeles Rebellion, ed. Haki Madhubuti (Chicago: Third World Press, 1993), 274-282.
Mike Davis describes the government's response to the riots, and its efforts to keep the gangs at war with one another, in terms of counter-insurgency: "In Los Angeles I think we are beginning to see a repressive context that is literally comparable to Belfast or the West Bank, a where policing has been transformed into full-scale counterinsurgency (or 'low-intensity warfare,' as the military likes to call it) against an entire social stratum or ethnic group." Mike Davis, "L.A.: The fire This Time," Covert Action Information Bulletin 41 (Summer 1992): 18.
Raymond Michalowski, "Crime Control in the 19805: A Progressive Agenda," Crime and Social Justice 19 (Summer 1983): 18. Michalowski seems to overlook the most radical possibilities suggested by his analysis. He recommends that popular justice organizations operate parallel to, and with the assistance of, the existing police. Michalowski, "Crime Control," 19.
See chapter 5.
Pennsylvanian State Federation of Labor, The American Cossack (New York: Arno Press The New York Times, 1971); Bruce Smith, Rural Crime Control (New York: Institute of Public Administration, 1933), 175; and Bruce Smith, The State Police: Organization and Administration (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), 62.
Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), 107-108; and Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present (New York: Harper Perrenial, 1995), 368.
Quoted in Brecher, Strike! 109.
Brecher, Strike! 112-113; and Zinn, People's History, 369-370.
Quoted in Brecher, Strike! 111.
Brecher, Strike! 111 and 113; and Zinn, People's History, 369-370.
Brecher, Strike! 111; and Zinn, People's History, 369. Such good order - in the absence of police - also accompanied the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the Havana General Strike of 1959. Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1988), 33-34.
Williams describes the first such encounter, in the summer of 1957: "[W]e shot up an armed motorcade of the Ku Klux Klan, including two police cars, which had come to attack the home of Dr. Albert E. Perry, vice-president of the Monroe Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People." Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns, ed. Mark Schleifer (Chicago:Third World Press, 1973), 39. Emphasis in original.
Faced with armed resistance, the Iflan beat a hasty retreat, and the raids in Monroe ceased. Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F Williams & the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 88; and Williams, Negroes with Guns, 57.
Charles R. Sims (and William A. Price), "Armed Defense [Interview] ," in Black Protest: 350 Years of History, Documents, and Analyses, ed. Joanne Grant (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1968), 336-344. For a description of a similar organization, see: Harold A. Nelson, "The Defenders: A Case Study of an Informal Police Organization," Social Problems (Fall 1967): 127-147. In addition to protecting civil rights workers and guarding against police brutality, the Defenders also reprimanded members of the Black community who became a nuisance to their neighbors.
Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970), 93.
Huey P. Newton, "A Citizen's Peace Force," Crime and Social Justice: A Journal of Radical Criminology 1 (Spring-Summer 1974): 30-31; and Henry Hampton et al., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 356-357.
Bobby Seale, "Bobby Seale Explains Panther Politics: An Interview," in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip S. Foner (Da Capo Press, 1995), 86.
Scale, Seize the Time, 412-418; and Seale, "Bobby Scale," 85. Huey P. Newton identified the principle of self-defense as the common theme running through all the programs. "What never became clear to the public, largely because it was always de-emphasized in the media, was that the armed self-defense program of the Party was just one form of what Party leaders viewed as self-defense against oppression. The Party had always urged self-defense against poor medical care, unemployment, slum housing, under-representation in the political process, and other social ills that poor and oppressed people suffer. The Panther means for implementing its concept of self-defense was its various survival programs...." Huey P. Newton, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 34.
Newton, War Against the Panthers, 35.
Jerome H. Skolnick, "The Berkeley Scheme: Neighborhood Police," The Nation, March 22, 1971, 372-373: Center for Research on Criminal Justice, Iron fist, 152; Scale, Seize the Time, 420-421: and, Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 296.
Skolnick, "Berkeley Scheme," 373.
Center for Research on Criminal Justice, Iron fist, 152; Fogelson, Big-City Police, 300.
Flores Alexander Forbes, "Point No. 7: We Want an Immediate End to Police Brutality and the Murder of Black People; Why I Joined the Black Panther Party," in Police Brutality: An Anthology, ed. Jill Nelson (New York: WW Norton, 2000), 237. The FBI put the numbers somewhat lower. In a secret report that same year, they warned President Nixon, "a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the black population has a great respect for the Black Panther Party, including 43 percent of blacks under 21 years of age." Quoted in Zinn, People's History, 455.
See: Mitchell Goodman, ed., The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970), 234-244 and 546-548.
Quoted in Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 180.
The repression of the BPP is detailed elsewhere in this book, especially in chapters 4 and 7.
Jeremy Brecher argues that the limited ambitions of the strike directly created the conditions for its defeat. Brecher, Strike! 112.
These are not, by any means, the only examples available. Ultimately all popular movements, once they develop beyond a certain point, experience conflict with the police. I have chosen here to focus on South Africa and Northern Ireland for two reasons: first, these cases are reasonably well-documented: and second, I expect that an American audience will be somewhat familiar with the politics involved.
For other examples, see: Udo Reifner, "Individualistic and Collective Legalization: The Theory and Practice of Legal Advice for Workers in Prefascist Germany," in Richard L. Abel ed., The Politics of Informal justice, Volume 2: Comparative Studies (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 81-123; Jack Spence, "Institutionalizing Neighborhood Courts: Two Chilean Experiences," in Abel, The Politics of Informal Justice, 215-249; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "Law and Revolution in Portugal: The Experiences of Popular Justice After the 25th April 1974," in Abel, The Politics of Informal Justice, 251-280; and Barbara Isaacman and Allen Isaacman, "A Socialist Legal System in the Making: Mozambique Before and After Independence," in Abel, The Politics of Informal Justice. 281-323.
Wilfried Scharf, "Policy Options in Community Justice," in Wilfried Scharfand Daniel Nina, eds., The Other Law: Non-State Ordering in South Africa (Lundsdowne: JUTA Law, 2001), 45.
Quoted in Nelson Mandela, "Outlaw in My Own Land: Letter by Nelson Mandela, Released June 26, 1961, From Underground Headquarters," in Lindsay Michie Eades, The End of Apartheid in South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 163.
Rebekah Lee and Jeremy Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice After Apartheid," in Informal Criminal Justice, ed. Dermot Feenan (Aldershot, England: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 2002), 99; Jeremy Seekings, "Social Ordering and Control in the African Townships of South Africa: An Historical Overview of Extra-State Initiatives from the 1940s to the 19905," in Scharf et al., The Other Law, 71; and Monique Marks and Penny McKenzie, "Alternative Policing Structures? A Look at Youth Defense Structures in Gauteng," in Scharf et al., The Other Law, 188.
Andries Mphoto Mangokwana, "Makgotla in Rural and Urban Contexts," in Scharfet al., The Other Law, 148-166; Seekings, "Social Ordering and Control," 81-85 and 89-90; Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 100 and 105-107; Scharf, "Policy Options," 47 and 52; and Daniel Nina and Wilfried Scharf, "Introduction: The Other Law?" in Scharf et al., The Other Law, 7.
Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 103.
One of the harshest practices associated with Street Committees was that of "necklacing." Usually reserved for apartheid-era informers, collaborators, and political opponents, necklacing involved placing a gas-soaked tire around a suspect's neck and setting it on fire. "Second Submission of the ANC to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, May 1997," in The End of Apartheid in South Africa (by Lindsay Michie Eades)(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 184; and Anthony Minnaar, "The 'New' Vigilantism in Post-April 1994 South Africa," in Informal Criminal justice, ed. Dermot Feenan (Aldershot, England: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 2002), 118 and 132.
Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 102; and Schiirf, "Policy Options," 46. Here is a general definition: "Restorative Justice is an approach to dealing with the harms created by crime which views such problems as a breakdown in relationships and seeks to repair those relationships.... It seeks to replace the traditional focus of retributive JUSEICC on the punishment of the offender with an approach which seeks to heal the injuries caused by crime to all the parties involved." Jim Auld et al., "Our Practice: The Blue Book [Designing a System of Restorative Community Justice in Northern Ireland] ," http://www.restorativeusticeireland.org/ourpractice.html (accessed November 20, 2002), 1.2.
Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 100; and Minnaar, "'New' Vigilantism," 119.
Quoted in Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 103-105.
Schiirf, "Policy Options," 49.
Sch'arf, "Policy Options," 50.
See: Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 110; and Schiirf, "Policy Options," 50-51. An official with the South African national Civic Organization explained the change in attitude: "We used to handle cases as a movement. If we had a dispute the community would handle that, not go to the police. People were saying we had kangaroo courts. These things have changed now that we have a government of our own. Now we encourage people to go to the police, if someone is stabbed. Before it was not like that." Quoted in Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 109.
The persistent support for extra-legal violence is indicated by a 1999 survey of the Eastern Cape province. Five percent of respondents indicted that they had personally taken part in vigilante actions, and another 20 percent said that they would be willing to consider it (five percent of the population would equal approximately 150,000 people.) Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 102-103. Also: Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice." 104 and 109.
Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 1111; and Minnaar, "'New' Vigilantism," 119-120.
Nina, "Popular Justice," 103.
Dermot Feenan, "Community Justice in Conflict: Paramilitary Punishment in Northern Ireland," in Informal Criminal]ustice, ed. Dermot Feenan (Aldershot, England: Ashgate/Dart-mouth, 2002), 42.
Feenan, "Community Justice," 43 and 50. The People's Courts collapsed for a number of reasons, including a lack of resources, procedural difficulties, security concerns, and the priority of military aims over crime control. Ronnie Munck, "Repression, Insurgency, and PopularJustice: The Irish Case," Crime and Sada/justice 21-2 (1984): 88.
Kieran McEvoy and Harry Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership? Community Restorative Justice in Northern Ireland," in Informal Criminal]ustice, ed. Dermot Feenan (Aldershot, England: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 2002), 62.
Feenan, "Community Justice," 49-50. A former chief probation officer explained the problem: "The main reason punishment beatings take place is that you move a civilian police force into being the frontline fighters of terrorism, and if that terrorism is endemic in certain communities as in Northern Ireland, it is obvious that you will lose the confidence of those communities in the civilian police force." Quoted in Feenan, "CommunityJustice," 50.
Feenan, "Community Justice," 43. It is estimated that between 1973 and 2002, 2,300 people in Northern Ireland suffered punishment shootings - usually in the knees, thighs, elbows, or ankles. Additionally, between 1983 and 2002, 1,700 have been beaten with bats, nail-studded boards, iron bars, or other kinds of clubs. McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 61.
Munck, "Repression, Insurgency, and Popular Justice," 89.
Munck, "Repression, Insurgency, and Popular Justice," 87.
McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 65.
Quoted in McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 63.
Feenan, "Community Justice," 45.
Quoted in McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 64.
Auld et al., "Our Practice," 81.
Gerry Adams expresses the party's enthusiasm: "Sinn Fein is in total agreement with the use of non-violent mechanisms for making offenders more accountable for their crimes, giving victims an input and involving communities in the ownership of the justice process." Quoted in McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 73.
McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 66.
The IRA's statement of support announced: "We want people to support the Restorative Justice approach by bringing their problems to the dedicated and highly trained workers operating in the programmes rather than to the IRA." Quoted in McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 74.
Melivoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 66-67 and 69.
Melivoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 67 and 74.
Melivoy and Mika. "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 66. "The Blue Book" recommends the following solutions: mediated agreement, discussion. family counseling, restitution, payment of damages, referral to treatment programs, referral to statutory agency (but never to the police), community service, boycott. "A community boycott means all relevant elements of the community. especially neighbors and traders, as well as the organizations represented on the Area Management Committee, mobilising themselves to refuse to allow the individual concerned to live normally within the community. This would mean, in effect, an organized denial of access to goods and services in the local community, such as pubs, off licenses [liquor stores], shops. etc. It is a practical closing of ranks against the person who has offended against, the community in a serious way and refused to make any sort of reparation to the victim or the community as it whole." Atild et al., "Our Practice," 8.3.
Quoted in Mclivoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 74.
The differences between community-based systems and the modern police institution are striking. Compare, for instance, the characteristics distinguishing modern police (listed in chapter 2 of this volume) to those Richard Abel identifies with informal justice systems: "[I]nformal justice is said to be unofficial (dissociated from state power), noncoercive (dependent on rhetoric rather than force), nonbureatrcratic, decentralized, relatively undifferentiated, and non-professional: its substance and procedural rules are imprecise, unwritten, demotic, flexible, ad hoc. and particularistic. No concrete informal legal institution will embody all these qualities. buteach will exhibit some." Richard L. Abel, "Introduction." in The Politics of Informal Justice. Volume 2: Comparative Studies, ed. Richard L. Abel (New York: Academic Press, I982). l0. Parentheses in original, For a more detailed articulation ofthe ideal type, see: Heleen F. P. letswaart, "The Discourse on Summary Justice and the Discourse of Popular Justice: An Analysis of Legal Rhetoric in Argentina," in The Politics of Informal Justice, Volume 2: Comparative Studies ed. Richard L. Abel (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 154-156.
Melivoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 66. Sinn Fein told the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland: Local structures should not be seen as an alternative to formal policing. In our view restorative justice is an approach which can build trust and empower individual communities affected. Effective liaison between police and community can also serve to deal more effectively with neighborhood disputes and less serious offenses in a way that also frees up police time and resources to deal with more serious crime...."
But they insisted on this important caveat: "[It] needs to be clearly stated at the outset that these proposals are set in the context ofa new police service that can enjoy widespread support from, and is seen as an integral part of, the community as a whole. The RUC quite clearly do not fit this criteria." Quoted in McEvov and Mika. "Republican Hegemony of Community Ownership?
Representatives of the Community Restorative Justice program argued along similar lines: "We do want a partnership with a reformed police service in the future... We intend to plan for that day. Brit it is not, unfortunately, here yet," Quoted in McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 75.
Auld et al., "Our Practice," 9.2.3. It is a little hard to know how seriously to take such a remark, since the Blue Book also notes, immediately beforehand, that "'normal policing' has not been possible in many working class nationalist communities during the violent conflict." Auld et al., "Our Practice," 9.2.3.
It seems clear then that there was no need for the CRJ to supplant formal policing, since the military conflict had already done as much.
Nina, "Popular Justice," 115. Nina also notes that, in places where the civic associations refused to cooperate with the government. "Peace and order existed without the state. In fact, the state was perceived as an agent of chaos and disorder." Nina, "Popular Justice," 106.
Of course, counter-institutions should only be one part ofa broader anti-crime strategy, Common-sense measures should also be taken to add to the public safety. Some public safety tasks could simply be taken on by fire departments, health departments, and other agencies. Victimless crimes should be de-criminalized, with social resources invested in drug and alcohol treatment programs and counseling services rather than law enforcement and prisons. Other elements require substantial social changes, like reducing poverty and unemployment, and combating domestic violence by improving the real opportunities available to women and thereby eliminating their dependency on men.
For other ideas, see: Center for Research on Criminal Justice, Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove. 162; and Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), especially chapters 3 and 4.
Lee and Seekings, "Vigilantism and Popular Justice," 113-114. Parentheses and emphasis in original.
Auld et al., "Our Practice," 8.2.1.
Auld et aI., "Our Practice," 3.4.2. Parentheses in original.
Auld et aI., "Our Practice," 3.4.
Auld et al., "Our Practice," 8.2.1.
Auld et al., "Our Practice," 9.3.2.
Harry Mika and Kieran McEvoy, "Restorative Justice in Conflict: Paramilitarism, Community, and the Construction of Legitimacy in Northern Ireland," Comparativejmtice Review 4:3-4 (2001): 307-310. Parentheses and emphases in original.
It has been suggested, perhaps too optimistically, that the very ideology of restorative justice puts some check on abuse, since it emphasizes a respect for diversity, human rights, and mutual understanding. McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 69-70.
Auld et al., "Our Practice," 7.2.
Feenan, "Community Justice," 53-54; and McEvoy and Mika, "Republican Hegemony or Community Ownership?" 68-69.
Quoted in Munck, "Repression, Insurgency, and Popular Justice," 87. These concerns are real, and they should be carefully weighed. But we should also remember that the practical alternative is the justice of the state - that is, the justice of the police, the courts, overcrowded prisons, and lethal injections. As we evaluate the limitations of popular justice we should measure it, not only against our ideals, but also against the very real system of the state. In all the cases discussed here, the revolutionaries' efforts at policing are far from perfect, but a good bit better than those of the authorities. To offer just one point of comparison, the legal system in Northern Ireland has been characterized by arbitrary detention, torture, broad powers of search and seizure, internment without trial, courts without juries, secret evidence, constant surveillance, a reliance on paid informers, and military intervention. Munck, "Repression, Insurgency, and Popular Justice," 84-85.