WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Galatea: The urgency to abolish the police and a note on moral anti-racism - Part Two (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The governmentality that emerged with liberalism (end of the 18th

century) would have broken down the sovereign functions of the police:
on the one hand there would have been the management of the population
(through urban policies and social medicine) and, on the other, direct
interventions and repressive (through disorder prevention tools). ---- "
Economic practice, population management, a public law articulated for
the respect of freedom and liberties, a police force with a repressive
function: the ancient police project that appeared in correlation with
reason of state is dislocated, or rather decomposed into four elements -
economic practice, population management, law and respect for freedoms,
police -, four elements that are added to the great diplomatic-military
device which, for its part, did not undergo significant modifications in
the 18th century." 1

This summarizes the functions of the modern state through political
technologies - which go far beyond direct state intervention.

For this reason, when we propose the abolition of the police we must
understand their role beyond the institution and beyond the uniform and
the officers.

By framing the police as a government technology and following its
metamorphoses throughout history, we can[defuse]those reformist
discourses and those criticisms of police behaviors considered abusive[-
ideological tools that]promote and renew a new police based on
assistance and check.

These reformist fallacies perpetuate the behaviors and counter-behaviors
that transform and mutate the sovereign police into a security device
(aimed at maintaining internal order) and a set of biopolitical
governmental practices. The abolition of the police must be a struggle
against governmental reason and against the State - both as a category
of interpretation of reality and a way of doing and thinking. An
anti-police movement must also be anti-political - where political means
a set of governmental techniques. Otherwise, any criticism of the police
will only be the announcement of a new police force or the change, under
different names, of containment practices.

The modern policeman and a brief note on moral anti-racism

Making a temporal and geographical leap, let's focus on the figure of
the modern policeman. Whenever we talk and write about the police, we
only consider the legal functions of the police - represented by images
or media falsifications. However, the police, both as an institution and
as a form of behavior, have multiplied in a way never imagined before.
Nowadays you can't go anywhere without encountering some kind of law
enforcement or a wide variety of police behavior. At the same time, the
police mentality has become so widespread that the creation of a police
force has become the first solution that people and social groups think
of when faced with a problem - even when that problem is the police
themselves . So nowadays we have a police "police".

Let's take a very brief example of this multi-presence of the police in
the life of the citizen. In the Brazilian Federal Constitution, Article
144 of Chapter III deals with public security, its means and functions.
It contains a list of the different police forces: " I - federal police;
II - federal traffic police; III - federal railway police; IV - civil
police; V - military police and military firefighters. " 2 From this
constitutional article and from this list of police forces derive
regulations, functions, protocols, recommendations, codes of ethics and
conduct and a whole series of functions on how[these institutional
security groups]should act.]

Added to this list are legal private police forces, security and asset
defense companies, and illegal police forces (called militias and/or
criminal factions) that defend "illegally" obtained assets. An infinite
variety of police; yet no one is safe. On the contrary. Everyone is
suspected and everyone is called to monitor their own and others'
behavior. This leads to the spread of the "citizen-policeman" - which is
a form of political action and public life linked to police practices
and controls. And despite there being so many police forces, so-called
"crimes" or "conflicts with the law" continue to occur en masse. Not
only that: this variety of police forces hosts the agents of lethal
violence who, when they become uncontrollable or exceed a (fairly
elastic) limit of what is tolerable,[must be "stopped". Thus]the first
solution is to create the police "police" or other forms of
judicialization of behavior and lifestyle

Finally, there are various institutes, NGOs, university research groups
and even human rights movements which, faced with abuses by the police,
not only refuse to consider police violence as a practice linked to the
institution itself but, even , they want to counter it by imitating
police technologies: action protocols, regulations and monitoring practices.

These are actions which, in addition to renewing trust in police
controls, become a point of support for the expansion of police and
security mechanisms. 3 When the question of the abolition of the police
arises, the gradualist or reformist path is rejected.[The reason]does
not derive from a pure and simple political-ideological positioning (as
if it were a whim), but from a decision to act tactically. The ultimate
goal is to end police violence once and for all. Choosing the lesser
evil means maintaining and expanding safety devices. In simple words: to
give continuity to the penal system with its murderous criminal
selectivity - where the modern repressive police presents itself as a
terminal element of intervention and action.

One final question remains: how does this technological complex of care,
control and repression produce so much death? It is the same question
posed by Michel Foucault about biopower as a technology that "lets you
live and lets you die". And the answer is the same and unequivocal: what
allows a power to let people live and let people die is state racism.
The latter produces subjects who, in the name of life and in the pursuit
of the production of order, must be eliminated or consigned to slow
death always in accordance with the established order.

It is no coincidence that "8 To Abolition" was born during the Black
Lives Matter protests of 2020. The police, as the direct operators of
this deadly intervention device,[act]against racialized targets.

This is not a question of police misconduct or excessive force;[the
point]is how the device works. Any anti-racist discourse that ignores
this functioning is merely a moral objection; it describes racism as a
kind of ethical deviation (which can be corrected through the
condemnation of racism). Consequently, this position transforms racist
conduct into a prejudice to be corrected with some kind of awareness or
sanction (criminal or social) - so as to moralize and regulate the conduct.

The police, historically, is a modern political technology that operates
simultaneously as sovereign power (murderous actions) and biopolitical
management in the life of every citizen and/or the entire population.
Since the emergence of neoliberal rationality in the 1970s, sovereign
and deadly police actions and processes have intensified:
militarization, hyperincarceration, judicialization of life, and
pacification of impoverished urban territories (such as favelas) or
entire countries (such as Haiti and Syria). Biopolitics, once again, has
brought the care of life to its paroxysm of large-scale death; this was
demonstrated in the mid-20th century by authoritarian and genocidal
regimes (such as German Nazism and Italian fascism). But nowadays the
deadly sovereign power, achieved through state racism, has become
democratic. This power, in democracies, operates through the police
security apparatus, which has become transterritorial and merges with
the diplomatic-military apparatus.4

The politics of world governments, colonized by the security apparatus,
has maintained a semblance of democracy (without manifesting an
authoritarian dictatorship). All this is known as "security democracy"
or "security democracy".

The police, as a security device in security democracies, intervenes
with its policy of control and death beyond the institution and the
subjects that compose it; it produces an order based on the security of
life (ecopolitics 5 ). And by life we do not mean only the category
"human" but every living being that produces obedience and order -
everything that is considered good and orderly. If a living being does
not fall into this ordered productivity, State racism acts in a
homicidal way, killing him or letting him die.

In today's democracies, there is no anti-racism without the abolition of
the police: starting from the actions against the execution of George
Floyd, there is a change that is spreading across the planet. Outside of
this vital clash aimed at deactivating the security apparatus, there is
the diplomatic-police apparatus engaged in a moral rhetoric (prejudice
and misbehavior) of racism. We must go further if we want to stop
counting the corpses of racialized people - whether on the outskirts of
São Paulo, in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or Soweto (Johannesburg), in
the banlieues of Paris, on the streets of Minneapolis or in the Gaza
Strip in Palestine.

The urgency to abolish the police means wanting to be alive! The urgency
of affirming life as anti-politics[means]countering the deadly sovereign
power of state racism.

We don't want the damn police anymore!

  Note

1 Ibidem, p. 258

2Note from the Galatea Anarchist Group. In the Italian case we have
three systems of police forces: a civil one (which includes the State
Police and the Penitentiary Police), a military one (which includes the
Carabinieri and the Financial Police) and a local one (which includes
which includes the Local Police and the Provincial and Metropolitan
Police). The firefighters and the coast guard (civilian and military
corps respectively) carry out police functions - that is, they carry out
public order and safety services in certain situations. At the legal and
illegal private "police" level we have: the Private Surveillance
Institutes and the figure of the Sworn Private Guard (GPG) who
collaborate, as required, with the aforementioned three systems of the
Police Forces; the part of the laborers of the Italian and non-Italian
criminal clans who carry out patrimonial and personal protection functions.

3 For an overview of this expansion of security arrangements see Adalton
Marques, "Humanizar e expandir: uma genealogia da segurança pública em
São Paulo," Tese de Doutorado, São Carlos, UFSCar, 2017.

4 On the constitution of the "diplomatic-police device", see Edson
Passetti et. al, "Ecopolítica", São Paulo, Hedra, 2019, pp. 219-257.

5 Ibid

https://gruppoanarchicogalatea.noblogs.org/post/2023/09/20/lurgenza-di-abolire-la-polizia-e-una-nota-sullantirazzismo-morale-seconda-parte/
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