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

 With a wave of Covid-19 infections spreading across the planet, an

incident of police brutality on May 25, 2020 in the United States caused
a major shift in the fight against security measures. ---- A black man,
George Floyd, was strangled to death by a white police officer in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. As had happened in previous years, faced with
cases like this there was a strong reaction from the various sectors of
the black movement complete with demonstrations where the slogan "Black
Lives Matter" - created by the movement in 2013 - was chanted. But the
small change that emerged, in the midst of the protests, was a very
concrete, specific and immediate demand: the abolition of the police. 2

If on the one hand this had not been a majority demand within the entire
movement - to the extent that the police reform proposals were
predominant -, on the other hand, however, there was a "rebirth" and
support for the proposal of police abolition, beyond the demands for
criminal justice in the death of George Floyd. This whole situation had
sparked riots, culminating in the burning of a police station in
Minneapolis and the worldwide spread of the proposal to abolish the police.

An example, at an international level, occurred with the French magazine
"Lundi Martin" (number 248, dated 26 June 2020) where the " Manifesto
for the general suppression of the national police " was published. The
article was not only linked to the protests in the United States, but
was also a response against police violence against "Yellow Vest"
protesters 3 and racialized people - especially those living in the
suburbs of Paris.

These "8 To Abolition" debates have arrived here in Brazil, where the
proposal has already been discussed in some cycles of penal abolitionist
movements and university research groups. The campaign of the Initiative
for the Right to Memory and Racial Justice (in Portuguese "Iniciativa
Direito à Memória e Justiça Racial") 4 ), for which this short text is
intended, underlines the urgency of abolishing the police in Brazil.
This is an irrefutable urgency given that the country has one of the
most violent and deadly law enforcement agencies on the planet. The aim
of the article is to propose some ideas on how to develop an analysis of
the police without falling into the trap of reformist arguments - which
always leave the functions and existence of the police structure itself
intact.

Starting from a course held by Michel Foucault 5 ,[we define]the police
not so much as a simple institution but, rather, a government technology
whose history is linked to the formation of the modern state and to the
means of care and control of the population. We reiterate, therefore,
that it is necessary to question the institution and, above all, focus
on the figure of the average policeman (precisely in his ordinary
functions as a professional of violence and as an "armed bureaucrat" 6).
If we start from this analysis that frames the police as a technology of
government, we can broaden our scope of action to the point of calling
for its abolition. With this perspective,[the police]is perceived as an
element of the technologies of control and subjective construction of
contemporary citizenship, that is, of the ways of doing, thinking and
imagining the subject of today's security democracies 7: the
citizen-policeman. 8

The police as a technology of government

We must look at policing beyond institutions and uniforms. Firstly
because it represents an image of fear in the streets and is fed by a
voluminous media discourse and the entertainment market - the latter
portrays police officers as subjects capable of the most unlikely feats
and/or entangled in moral dramas between duty and the law. Thus, when we
criticize the police, we build a trap where we focus on their abuses, on
their exceptionality in life and in society like Captain Nascimento from
the film "Elite Squad", a character full of personal dilemmas, violent
to the point of extreme but with a conscience to heal and a sense of
justice which, even if doubtful, gives him a certain "humanity."

Thus, the abuses of some policemen or a "rotten" group are criticized
because what is sought is honest, democratic, human rights and
non-brutal policing. In this way, a discourse of reform and/or
demilitarization of the police is renewed, based on an image of the
officers and the police themselves that does not exist, is exaggerated
or, simply, projects an ideal of an unattainable reformist order. This
set of reforms and this image of the police ignore (or try to disguise)
the fact that the main activity of law enforcement is the legitimized
(asymmetric and unequal) distribution of violence throughout society -
particularly towards those who are considered dangerous.

Constructing a critique of the police that separates the good cops from
the bad ones means reproducing the approaches and functional divisions
typical of this repressive institution. These logics are spread, in
particular, by the entertainment market where crime films represent the
simplistic binary "good cop/bad cop".

As in films, these images of good and bad are complementary for the
police and serve their very existence, institutional continuity, and
predominant form of persuasion.

Policing is a set of practices and technologies for the management,
control and repression of the population;[put simply,]the most valuable
technology for modern statecraft, capable of being both individualizing
and all-encompassing, general and specific, and affecting everyone and
individual people.

If in the emergency phases[the police]were used as an instrument of
reason of state - and therefore to[defend]state sovereignty -, now, with
the dismembered state, the police are used as an internal security
device of neoliberal governmentality .[In light of this,]the function of
the police force is to promote good governance of things and people,
promoting the preservation and expansion of state government.

It is in the form of this second characteristic that police practices
emerge today as a tool for promoting security: supporting the production
of an unequal and asymmetric order in capitalist societies and
protecting private and/or state property.

It is a very complex and heterogeneous whole that combines methods of
promoting public health (social medicine), interventions in urban plans
and reforms (urban planning) and tools for regulating the workforce
(modes of control and care of workers, aimed at productivity increase).

Therefore the history of the police,[within the vast]history of
government technologies, goes far beyond its forms of recognition (such
as the repressive apparatus of the State, the figure of an armed man in
uniform, the ostentation of a team of policemen present in streets
and/or ready to repress a group of demonstrators). Throughout its
history, the police have intertwined its knowledge with sociology,
political science and political economy.

As Michel Foucault tells us in his 1977-1978 course, " from the 18th
century "police" begins to designate the set of means that serve to
increase the forces of the State , guaranteeing the good order of the
State itself. That is, the police will be the calculation and technique
that will allow the establishment of a mobile, but still stable and
controllable, relationship between the internal order of the State and
the growth of its forces. " 9 In summary: the police emerging in Europe,
linked to sovereign power, has as its primary objective the use of state
forces within its territory. The goal of all this is the realization of
state splendor.

The police is the direct device of the Reason of State and has
statistical deciphering as its instrument - that is, knowledge of the
State itself. But the emergence of the police form, or the techniques
performed by the sovereign police, has undergone mutations due to the
specificities and aggregations of knowledge of the various European
countries - which, in the end, created the forms and functions of the
police modernity or the related forms of state intervention in today's
societies. In addition to these forms, in the territories colonized by
European nation states, the specificity of the police was linked to
whippings, brutality and large-scale killing of people - for the
splendor of the colonial state!

Following Michel Foucault's genealogy of the State - where the police is
a decisive element for the functioning of modern governmental practices
-, we note how the formation of police technologies brings together
specific knowledge and different institutional practices. Foucault shows
that in not yet unified Germany, the police was a creation of the
university - where a police science was produced.

The[French]author reports, in his writings dedicated to forms of
government, the word " polizeiwissencraft, police science, which from
the middle or end of the 17th century until the end of the 18th century
will represent a specifically German phenomenon and which will spread in
Europe exercising a capital influence." 10

Parallel to this theory of the police produced by German political
science, in France, which already had a centralized administrative state
with a delimited territory, the police would have been conceived and
managed by the nascent state bureaucracy (through decrees and
regulations aimed at the control and circulation of goods in cities). If
in Germany the police were a creation of the university, in France they
would be a creation of the state bureaucracy serving the regulation of
property, people and wealth.

The important aspect of these references collected by Foucault is not
the selection of a set of facts that would constitute a sort of history
of the modern police. The use of these references serves to understand,
on a genealogical level, how the police have a history of formation
within modern power-knowledge relations. In summary: the police is
linked to the art of governing, that is, to those means of knowledge and
control, without setting limits such as the judicial instrument or a set
of state apparatuses. This genealogy highlights the positivity of the
police form in the formation of the modern state. It is a device with
its own functions, objects and well-defined objectives, producing order,
regulation of trade, administration of cities and discipline of subjects.

In short, the positivity of the police, from its origins to what it will
become, is the production of the bourgeois world - in the historical
sense of this term. This is the positivity of the nascent police:
producing the property-based bourgeois order. Parallel to these
practices, in the European colonies, this art of governing and producing
order would have had other functions such as the hunting of
non-subjects: the savages of the land and the people brought there as
slaves.

As Foucault summarizes, the police will have a specificity of functions
detached from the law: it deals with the ordinary and small things,
while the law must deal with the important things of the State. " In
other words, policing is the direct governmentality of the sovereign qua
sovereign. In this sense, the police is the permanent coup d'état, which
will be exercised in the name and function of the principles of its own
rationality, without having to conform or model itself on the rules of
justice established elsewhere. " 11

Today this definition is important in order to analyze the police as a
technology of government. Although this sovereign form of policing has
changed over the centuries - to become what we now know as repressive
policing - this independence or autonomy from the law endures. This
resistance is justified because the police act as a form of immediate
intervention and address a number of urgent issues that the law cannot
foresee. The consequence is that police officers consider themselves
citizens of another category, free from respect for the law and subject
to special rules and regulations. Faced with the rigidity of the law,
police control remains elastic.

However, this form of sovereign policing had been criticized since the
late 18th century; this has produced mutations in its form and
dismantled its functions in other fields of action. This critique was
brought forward by an emerging knowledge that opposed the artificiality
of sovereign intervention - the police device - and supported a "natural
environment" susceptible to regulation - thus opposing a police state
(Polizeistaat).

A group connected to this emerging field of knowledge would articulate
this critique - a group that, according to Foucault, was almost a sect:
the economists. This knowledge, i.e. Political Economy, was aimed at an
object of government that was no longer a group of heterogeneous
subjects but a common field, almost a natural environment: society - or
what we today call "civil society" -, in opposition to political society
(the State). This division was made possible thanks to a measurable
field of intervention, produced by the statistical knowledge of the
State. This field of intervention would have been the population itself;
this was made possible thanks to statistical knowledge and political
economy which dealt with society as a population,

Thus, the articulation between political economy knowledge and
population management practices created a dynamic relationship in
security and protection mechanisms, producing what was understood as
modern (liberal) freedom. This would mark, within the genealogy of
policing, the transition from sovereign governmentality (through
sovereign policing) to liberal governmentality - which will shape modern
policing.

Continue in Part Two

Note

1 Professor of the Department of International Relations of UNIFESP. He
coordinates the LASInTec (Laboratório de Análise em Segurança
Interacional de Tecnologias de Monitoramento), and the Programa de Pós
Graduação em Psicologia Institucional of the UFES. Contact
acacio.augusto@unifesp.br

2 Above this, see the Eight Points for Police Abolition. Link:
https://www.8toabolition.com/

3 LASInTec has translated and published, with an introductory note from
Brazil, this manifesto:
https://lasintec.milharal.org/files/2020/08/Boletim-AntiSeguran%C3%A7a-n1-1.pdf

4 See https://dmjracial.com/

5 Note from the Galatea Anarchist Group: in Italian it is known as
"Security, territory, population. Course at the Collège de France
(1977-1978)"

6 "Armed bureaucrat" is a term coined by anarchist anthropologist David
Graerber; indicates the ordinary function of a police officer. See David
Graeber, "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret
Joys of Bureaucracy," New York, Melville House, 2015.

7 On the notion of security democracy, see Acácio Augusto and Helena
Wilke. "Neoliberal rationality and security: links between democracy,
security and anarchy", in Margareth Rago and Mauricio Pelegrini.
"Neoliberalism, feminismos and contracondutas. Perspectivas
fouacultianas," São Paulo, Intermeios, 2019, pp. 225-245. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/42444431/Racionalidade_neoliberal_e_seguran%C3%A7a_embates_entre_democracia_securit%C3%A1ria_e_anarquia

8 On the police associated with monitoring technologies and the
constitution of the citizen-policeman, see Acácio Augusto, "Política e
polícia: cuidados, controles e penalizações de jovens", Rio de Janeiro,
Lamparina, 2013 and Edson Passetti et. ali, "Ecopolítica", São Paulo,
Hedra, 2019.

9 Foucault Michel, "Security, territory, population. Course at the
Collège de France (1977-1978)", Feltrinelli, Milan, 2005, pag. 226

10 Ibidem, page. 230

11 Ibidem, page. 246

Translation from the original " The urgency of the abolition of the
police and a note on moral anti-rracism "
https://dmjracial.com/2021/04/03/a-urgencia-da-abolicao-da-policia-e-uma-nota-sobre-antirracismo-moral/
https://gruppoanarchicogalatea.noblogs.org/post/2023/09/18/lurgenza-di-abolire-la-polizia-e-una-nota-sullantirazzismo-morale-prima-parte/
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