By Nick Walrath
Dr. Brendan McQuade is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine. His work centers on the study of police power, abolitionist politics, pacification, and the critique of security. McQuade's first book Pacifying the Homeland - Intelligence and Mass Supervision, released through UC Press, provides an in-depth look into the secretive, often poorly-understood world of intelligence fusion via a radical critique of the discourse that informs and guides the culture and ideology of security-what he terms the "prose of pacification." McQuade's overarching point is that pacification as both process and theory involves not only instances of brute force including tear gas and the bludgeon of the police baton on the one hand and softer tactics such as "negotiated management" of protest on the other, but also draws upon a specialized discourse of depoliticizing language. This terminology -including security advice such as "If you see something, say something," "Report suspicious activity," "We are all on duty," and "Be vigilant"- seeks the consent and participation of the pacified in the own subjugation as well as in the hunting of the enemies of capital. I thank Dr. McQuade for his thorough responses to my questions regarding the contemporary landscape of political policing, mass incarceration, the politics and ideology of security, and the logic that guides and informs its never-ending police-wars of accumulation.
What is the critique of security and what are the key concepts of this discourse?
The critique of security is an effort to understand and write about security without being subsumed by security. We often talk about security as if it was an unassailable good. Who doesn't want to be secure? How could anyone possible have a problem with security? But the problem isn't so much what "security" promises but how it packages that problem. If we buy into the premise of "security," then we accept the idea that the world is dangerous … that crime and terrorism are real threats. It's then a logical step to say we need some entity-the state-to protect us by providing this magical entity called "security."
When we talk about security, we often to forget to ask why people are driven to the violence we call crime or terrorism. Rather than accepting these assumptions, my goal was to examine how a particular security practices emerged and with what effects. Rather than assuming that security is good and asking how it can be more effective or more sensitive to the limits of law, I sought to examine what "threats" are being targeted and whose "security" they preserve. While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war of one against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites to us consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed.
Here, I build on the work a group of scholars, the anti-security collective organized by Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos. One the key concepts we use is pacification. The basic idea here is that capitalism is an order of insecurity-"all that is solid melts to air"-that demands a politics of security. Instead of talking about security as transcendental good, we view it as an ideological claim articulated within particular types of societies, capitalist societies. To avoid the trap of security, we talk about pacification. The turbulence and conflict created by capitalism must be pacified. This isn't just the work of repressing rebellions and resistance of those on the losing end of capitalist society polarizations of wealth and power. It's more subtle work of continually reproducing capitalist social relations. In other words, the work pacification entails consent and participation as much as it connotes coercion and repression.
One the key mechanisms of pacification is policing. We usually think of policing as the police, the uniformed men that enforce law and order. However, the actual history of the police idea is something different. Policing was a pre-disciplinary discourse that united English liberals and Continental philosophers in a shared discussion about how to build strong states and wealthy societies. It was one of the most important concerns of political theory and philosophy in the early modern period, the time between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. At this time, policing meant a comprehensive science of social order that tried to cover all of life, from the minutiae of personal behavior to the loftiest affairs of state. By end of the 19th century, however, the meaning of "police" contracted to the police, the uniformed officers "enforcing the law." This narrowed meaning reflected the growing influence of liberalism, in which the individual and the market supplanted the sovereign and the state as the theoretical wellspring of social order. These philosophical shifts masked capital's reliance on the state to fabricate social relations, but it did not end the structural necessity of such work. In this context, police science gave way to criminology, public health, urban planning, and various other administrative discourses, which sought to regulate different domains of life in a manner consonant with the class biases of the old "police science." In this sense, the different genres of social policy are also and always police discourses.
Many Marxists have made similar points, though they have not connected it all back to to the deeper history of policing. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America, for example, detail what they call the "correspondence principle" where the nature of social interaction and individual rewards in public schools mirror the workplace. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in Regulating the Poor likewise, conclude that social welfare policy regulates the labor market. Public benefits expand during economic crisis to dampen working class militancy and contract during times of economic expansion to cheapen the cost of labor. Howard Waitzkin in The Second Sickness analyzes healthcare from the same perspective. He shows access to healthcare expands and contracts with the ebb and flow of popular unrest, creates capitalist markets through public subsidies, and depoliticizes politics of health with an individual approach to health and reductionist biomedical paradigm. In other words, your teacher is cop. Your social worker is a cop. Your doctor is a cop.
For this reason, I use the term the prose of pacification. As I mentioned earlier, pacification isn't just about physical violence. It's also about popular participation in the politics of security. This is what the prose of pacification is all about. We're constantly told every day to participate in the politics of security. It's not just ham-fisted campaigns like "if you see something, say something." It's also the buying into that idea of security. It's the culture and ideology of security: the belief that the world is dangerous and the state is here to protect us from ourselves and others. This idea totally pervades popular culture and political discourse so that it can be hard to even acknowledge it, let alone think past it. The prose of pacification is my attempt to name this aspect of the problem. There's a huge body of ideas that constitute security cultures. It's the rituals of bureaucratic compliance: the documents created to administer us from cradle to grave. It's the lyrical exaltation of security in popular culture and political discourse. It's the internalization of the politics of fear that cause many of us to greet each other with fear and distrust or lend our energies to the police wars against our official enemies: so-called criminals, terrorists, illegals, delinquent youth, and whatever else.
You studied two fusion centers for this book -New Jersey's Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) and the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC). How has the prose of pacification been essential in guiding their mission, but first, what exactly are fusion centers? What work do they -or do they not- perform and how have they shaped the criminal legal system including policing?
As a general concept, fusion centers are interagency intelligence hubs. Intelligence analysts at fusion centers "fuse" together disparate pieces of information in order to provide useful analysis for state managers. Much of the data comes from government records, chiefly data from the criminal legal system but also from other entities like the DMV or social service agencies. This information will be supplemented by the records of private data brokers, social media, and other forms of "open source intelligence." New technologies like automated license plate readers, and facial recognition also create new forms of data that are often accessible to or managed by fusion center staff.
Fusion center analysts will analyze and combine this data in all sorts of ways. Often times, it can be simple case support, analysts will perform basic searches for police investigators who call into the fusion center to get more information about suspect: address, criminal histories, known family members and friends. This is fusion centers as Google for cops. Sometimes, case support is more technical. With specialized software, analysts can take wiretap data-unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls-and turn it into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can transform cumbersome masses of data, such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records, into useful information like "predictive" heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur. Sometimes analysts will work with police teams for weeks and months as part of longer term investigation. For these projects, fusion center analysts will complete multiple rounds of data analysis and may even get deeply involved in intelligence collection. I'm not just talking about trolling social media platforms or working on wiretaps either. Some fusion center personnel are involved the collection of what's called "human intelligence" or the information that's obtained by working with informants or interrogating persons of interest. This is fusion centers as an outsourced intelligence division, a little CIA or NSA on call for the cops.
At the same time, it's important not to overhype fusion centers. They bring together all this data but how it is all used? No doubt, all of it isn't used. Fusion center analysts complained to me that their police supervisors didn't make full use of their capabilities. A lot people on receiving end of fusion center products claim that a lot the intelligence produced isn't that useful. "Intelligence spam" is term that I heard from quite a few interviewees. There's also a lot of liberal hand wringing about data retention, concerns that fusion centers are holding on too much information for too long.
At the end of the day, understanding what a given fusion center is an empirical question that requires investigation. Each fusion center has their own mission, which orients their work. The term "fusion center" is associated with what's called "the National Network of Fusion Centers" recognized by DHS. There are 79 of these fusion centers. The first were set up for counterterrorism, although their mission quickly broadened out to an "all crimes, all threats, all hazards orientation." These fusion centers will do counterterrorism analysis and all hazards preparedness in addition to criminal intelligence work. There's another set of fusion centers created in the 1990s for the drug war-the 32 investigative support centers set up under the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Program. There's even older interagency intelligence centers like the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center and the six multistate Regional Intelligence Sharing Centers administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which date back to the 1970s. All of these fusion centers sit in their own little political space of interagency coordination and conflict. There's a phrase in the fusion center community: "if you've seen a fusion center, you've seen a fusion center." Each one has their own dynamics. Some might be doing very aggressive criminal intelligence work, supercharging the drug war with high tech surveillance and intelligence analysis. Others might be spamming state and local officials with counterterrorism intelligence of limited value.
How have fusion centers changed the criminal legal system? The first important point to know is that fusion centers aren't just a story about DHS and the war on terror. What we can retroactively call the institutionalization of intelligence fusion is part of much longer larger story of change in policing, the criminal legal system, and political economy. Fusion centers are part of the same general punitive turn in the criminal legal system that we associate with the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Scholars like Reuben Miller have started to talk about "mass supervision," as a complementary set of legal, policing, and administrative arrangements that developed alongside mass incarceration and manages "problem populations"-the poor, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminalized people-outside of the prison. I argue that intelligence fusion is now the center of gravity of mass supervision. The varied fusion centers pull policing, community supervision, and the courts together in shared project to pacify criminalized surplus populations. Mass supervision has become more important in the recent period bookended by the Dot Com Crash of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008. Meanwhile, mass incarceration is now viewed as too expensive. Prison populations are contracting, but we're not getting a return to any rehabilitative ethos of punishment. Instead, we get more massive supervision, a police - and surveillance - intensive form of control turns disinvested communities into open air prisons. The change is not just limited to how the state manages surplus populations.
The rise of intelligence fusion is also part of new pattern of administration. Intelligence fusion subjects police agencies to a new form of workplace discipline, the same systems of statistical management and algorithmic decision making that increasingly manage labor across sectors. Rank and file cops are now chasing numbers and trying to meet quotas. Investigators are increasingly the human link in automated networks of surveillance and data analysis. It's the era of "big data policing." Things have changed in some real and significant ways. Still, these changes are institutionally and politically mediated. We're not living in 1984 ¸ even though we now have the technical capacities to make Big Brother look quaint. To understand exactly how these changes institutionally and politically mediated, I consider the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation on-going processes of state formation and related shifts in political economy.
I see fusion centers as part of what the Greek Marxist Nicos Poulantzas called authoritarian statism. By this he means new type of state and practice of administration that curtails formal liberties, expands the executive, and creates special bodies that make the decisions outside of democratic channels. Fusion centers are part of this trend in the general sense that they're a product of this post-9/11 security surge that restricts the freedoms that ostensibly provide liberal democracies their legitimacy. In so doing, they also expand the powers of executive bodies like the police departments. Fusion centers are also an example of authoritarian statism in the sense that they take political power away from popular control. Fusion centers are a product of a distinct era of public policy formation, where efficiency is considered to be more important than the standardization. The key policies that shape fusion centers are not binding regulations written by legislators or agency heads. They were drafted as "recommendations" and "baseline capabilities" in large working groups of "stakeholders," including the police professional associations.
These changes in the state are, of course, grounded in wider shifts in political economy. Here, the basic argument is that globalization and financialization have decisively shifted power to global capital at the expense not just of the working class, but also at the expense of the state itself and other segments of capital. In this hyper competitive economy, where money moves quickly and everyone competes in a global economy, it's hard to have a welfare state, the type of strong state that can both protect less competitive sectors of capital and provide a good bargain with workers. Instead, the hegemonic compact shifts toward coercion and more disciplinary aspects of security take over. Under authoritarian statism, we get more prisons and cops and less "social security" measures like investments in welfare, public health, and education. Pacifying the Homeland situates the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation to these trends. From the 1970s to the 2000s, authoritarian statism consolidated, in large part, through the punitive turn in criminal justice that produced what we now call mass incarceration. One of my claims -the balance of police strategies to administer population has shifted away from incarceration and more toward surveillance and intelligence-led policing- I'd like to think this passing development, a morbid stage as authoritarian statism withers and dies and we build a new type of economy and society. Whether it's the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, however, is a matter of politics.
The recourse to privacy is a common argument and familiar appeal within liberal discourse to not only ostensibly combat the ramifications of surveillance technologies' tendency to mission creep beyond their stated intent and purpose, but to reign in the way these objects and practices strengthen the edifice of authoritarian statism. However, the parameters of the private sphere have always been shifted and made malleable to the requirements of capital [as well as police]. In your book, Pacifying the Homeland, you make very clear the point that, as part of liberal ideology, privacy functions as pacification. Would you elaborate upon this critique?
Privacy is an insufficient response to concerns about surveillance and police power. Scholars of surveillance often focus narrowly on the implementation of privacy policies and their inadequacy. Civil libertarians assert privacy as a universal right that can be defend against the encroachment of outside parties. They position "the right to privacy" or "the state" as independent entities that stand apart from the social relations and political processes that, historically, created them and still imbue them with meaning.
This way of thinking turns historically specific social relations and the ideas that animate them into abstract "things." "Privacy" is not a natural condition that is always and already in opposition to "the public." Instead, "privacy" is a particular claim made within a particular context: 16th century liberal theory. A concession that the consolidating administrative state made to "the public," privacy has no essential essence. Instead, its boundaries set and reset by the state.
Rather than a basis of resistance, privacy is a tool of regulation: privacy as pacification. In a social world already governed by the commodity form and wage relation, privacy reinforces the very divisions between people that make capital accumulation and its security regimes possible. Privacy promises a life of individuals who live apart and choose to do so. Since we lack access to the means to any autonomous means of subsistence, we're coerced into selling our labor and buying our lives back at price that we don't set. Ideas of like privacy are part of a liberal ideology that tell us this is a natural and desirable state of affairs.
For this reason, privacy, as sole or even primary means of defense against surveillance and police power, is a politically counterproductive. Consider the stance of the premier civil liberties organization, the ACLU, toward fusion centers. In 2008, they identified a series of problems with fusion centers-ambiguous lines of authority, private sector and military participation, and wholesale datamining and excessive secrecy. They recommended that US Congress and state legislatures work to increase oversight of fusion centers, regulate the flow of information between fusion centers and the private sector, clarify "how and when" military personnel can collect intelligence for law enforcement purposes, and strengthen open records laws. The ACLU did not demand an end to these problematic practices. Instead, they sought to regulate and, thus, codify them. Challenging intelligence fusion on these terms will, at best, produce limited public oversight (an ACLU representative on the fusion center's executive board) and some modest restrictions on intelligence gathering (three month retention periods for certain kinds of data), which would only be contravened in exceptional circumstances (an emergency warrant or administrative subpoena).
Getting back to intelligence fusion. In what manner has it shaped a key ritual of the police power, the power of the manhunt in capturing, documenting, and dominating the enemies of capital? Who are these enemies, or "terror identities," that garner the most attention from intelligence analysts?
The order of capital is predicated on the imposition of the necessity of a particular kind of work, work for the wage. In a capitalist economy, you're not offered a great job. Instead, you're denied access to the means of subsistence and forced to find some way to survive. The first proletarians resisted the imposition of work. They clung to the last vestiges of the feudal economy or tried to find some way to survive beyond submitting to new regime of labor. For their refusal to work, they were criminalized as vagabonds and forced to labor through by a series of state interventions that Marx famously described as "grotesquely terroristic laws" that imposed "the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour."
In other words, capital was formed through a manhunt for pliant laborers and it was the police powers of the state that organized this hunt. It's not just manhunts against vagabonds in this early moment. It's the witch hunts in both Europe and Americas that Silva Federici wrote about, the slave trade (and the attempts to re-capture runaways and destroy maroon societies) and the lynch mobs and pogroms that historically have kept marginalized groups at the bottom of different societies. It's the perpetual police-war against "the criminal element." Today, the newest enemies are so-called terrorist, migrants, and refugees.
In many ways, intelligence fusion just puts a high-tech gloss over this old conflict. The main target of fusion centers are poor people, just like the main target of policing remains poor people. Plain and simple. Intelligence fusion is not about fighting terrorism, whatever that even means, and it's only about combating drugs insofar as the so-called "war on drugs" is just the contemporary manifestation of capital's police-war against labor. As a project of police power, intelligence fusion is about terrorizing the population into accepting the conditions of wage labor. This is the main claim of Pacifying the Homeland. The book details the particulars of today's intelligence-led manhunts: compliance checks, warrants weeps, chronic offender initiatives, and saturation patrols. All of these are police operations that begin with intelligence analysis and end with teams of police hunting the population that lives of the borders of the formal and informal economies and bounces back and forth between sites of imprisonment and disinvested, hyper-policed communities.
The poor may be the main subject of intelligence fusion but they're not the only ones. Fusion centers are mixed up in political policing but not in the way that many people imagine. Fusion centers aren't the center of a new COINTELPRO, an aggressive and centrally coordinated crackdown on dissent. The attack on dissent in the US today is no were near what happened in the 1960s and 1970s and it's not possible for someone to step in and play the role of a 21st century J. Edgar Hoover.
Of course, there is political policing happening the US today. The book traces the evolution of political policing. It starts with this new concern with "terrorism" that first became salient not after 9/11 but in the 1980s. The opening act was the FBI's creation of the Joint Terrorist Task Forces to go after the ultra-left splinters of the mass movements of the long 1960s, the urban guerilla movements like May 19th communist organization. Also immediately, the JTTFs targeted non-violent movements like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Witness for Peace, and AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power. In the 1990s, the big concern was eco-terrorists. In the last two decades, more "terror identities" have proliferated: anarchist extremists, black identity extremists and the like.
Most of what's happening is surveillance and reporting. There haven't been too many examples of active counter-subversion, where infiltrators sow discord and do everything they can to destroy movements and organizations. There have dramatic confrontations like the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown at Standing Rock, but even these are organized through different means. Rather than J. Edgar Hoover's centrally directed countersubversion campaign, we have a complicated patchwork. Political policing operates through overlapping interagency intelligence networks, including the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. This decentralized model is more permeable to local political pressures. Indeed, private interests-not politicians or government officials-appear to have been the leading actors during the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown over the Dakota Access Pipeline. In many other cases, secrecy and organizational complexity complicate a clear parsing of events and actors. This decentralized system produces diverse outcomes. It is also harder to expose and redress than the highly centralized COINTELPRO program and, as a more supple system, may be a more effective means to pacify class struggle.
In any case, what we often talk about as "political policing" only targets the self-conscious mobilization of a class-for-itself, the efforts of organized movements. Intelligence fusion-and police power in general-also attends to less explicit manifestations of class struggle: the ill-understood and often illegible survival strategies of disarticulated segments of the working class. These practices are usually dismissed as the moral failings of the "criminal element." The varied genres of the prose of pacification code it as "crime" or "the street economy." Sometimes, it explodes as a "riot." Here, we find the surplus populations who are not (fully) incorporated within capitalist social relations, the structurally excluded people whose needs and desires cannot be (fully) satisfied within the constraints of capitalist social relations. This social space is privileged domain of police power, where the state's role in producing and maintaining the most basic social relations that define capitalism are laid bare. I think this is one of central contradiction of capitalist civilization and I try to discuss and develop in terms a dialectic between police power and moral economies of poverty.
Would you elaborate upon this central contradiction of capital that exists between the police power and the moral economies of poverty it targets under the aegis of the war on drugs? What is the moral economy of poverty and what does this tension illustrate about not only state formation, but the state's active engagement in the (re)production of the working class?
I use the concept of moral economy to try to understand "crime" without reproducing the class biases of security. I ended up here to make sense of the war on drugs. From the outside and from a certain class position, the drug trade might looks like pathological violence that is so harmful to poor communities. Today, the illegal trade in drugs is huge business that provides real incomes for a lot people. This means there are entire communities where the drug trade is tacitly accommodated because it's understood as some of the best work available. The book opens with the example of Camden, NJ, a city where a third of population lives below the poverty line and, at one point, there was one open air drug market for every 440 residents. The violence of drug trade, paradoxically, produces a particular kind of social order, it's a moral economy of poverty. A lot of Camden residents don't like but many still recognize that the drug trade helps keep the city afloat.
The moral economies are dialectically related to police power. The prose of pacification codes the unauthorized violence of moral economies as pathological violence-"bad neighborhoods filled with bad people"-and invites a security response. As always, the politics of security erases the history that produced problem. Scholars have long established that segregation and discrimination first and later the uneven impacts of deindustrialization and welfare state retrenchment produced the de-facto apartheid boundaries of American city but we ignore all that and reduce it down to a simple problem for the cops and courts to manage. The police can't resolve these social problems but that's not the point. Instead, the current police-war against them provides legitimacy to police-"they're protecting us from violent drug traffickers"-and organizes how the state administers the working class.
The war on drugs is a mechanism to regulate and tax criminalized labor in an era where inequality is increasing and huge swaths of population participate in informal economies. Asset forfeiture laws allow police to tax these illicit economies. Money and property seized in criminal investigations can be expropriated by police agencies. For example, police in New York State, from 1990 to 2010, seized nearly $244 million in cash alone and distributed over $88 million of these assets to police agencies. In some jurisdictions, the conflict of interest generated by this for-profit policing is blatant. In New York's Nassau County, the intelligence center, the Lead Development Center (LDC), sits under the Asset Forfeiture and Intelligence Unit of the Nassau County Police. The LDC operates at no budgetary cost for the department. It is funded exclusively through asset seizures and grants. This is an extreme example but it underscores the role drug operations play in regulating a criminalized market that cannot be suppressed.
The deeper issue here, however, is a structural one: the administration of particular form of the working class. The war on drugs isn't about stopping drugs. It's about regulating criminalized labor. We have all these people who are involved in the accumulation of capital and circulation of goods but it's happening outside of legal channels. When the police arrest people for drugs they impose legal forms of subjectivity on surplus populations that are weakly connected to formal labor markets. Historically, the recognition of organized labor pacified the working class by incorporating them within capitalist states. This administrative subsumption of labor is one the primary ways state administration continually (re)produces capitalist social relations. Policing accomplishes this same process for the criminalized workers of the drug economy. Instead of subsuming legal labor within the confines of "labor law," it envelopes criminalized labor within the "drug war." Police surveillance and intelligence gathering track the drug trade and identify its key players. Arrest and prosecution imposes legal subjectivities on both individual and collective actors: people involved in the drug economy and the "criminal conspiracies" they create. The prohibition of drugs creates a caste of criminalized labor that policing regulates and taxes. Cumulatively, these efforts pacify class struggle by dividing the working class into a profaned "criminal element" and "decent" people.
Returning to your comments on the extent of contemporary political policing -or lack thereof- through intelligence fusion, can you speak to any scenarios where fusion center staff took a noninterventionist, hands-off approach toward a political movement and/or protest in conflict with local law enforcement?
During Occupy, some fusion centers did want anything to do with monitoring the protest. They viewed it as political speech and steered clear. During fight over Dakota Access Pipeline, some local law enforcement agencies wouldn't arrest people for trespassing, which bothered the private sector company that had been hired to crush the protests. The reasons for these incidents, and several others which the book also details, is a shift in the nature of political policing.
After the exposure of COINTELPRO and Watergate, there were investigations and some reforms. The investigations paradoxically re-legitimized security agencies by demonstrating their apparent accountability, while simultaneously allowing controversial practices to continue by covering them with a patina of legality. The result was a seemingly limited version of human rights compliant political policing, a strategy that endeavors to protect political rights and facilitate peaceful protest, while still combating "extremism."
As I mentioned earlier, we don't see the aggressive infiltration and active countersubversion that characterized COINTELPRO. However, we do see wholesale surveillance and intelligence gathering, including the use of informants (who often work to entrap people in manufactured terrorism plots). I fear all of this may be more subtle and effective mode of political policing. Instead heavy headed repression-the whip of the counterrevolution that polarizes and escalates the struggle-we have a more subtle repression-accommodation dialectic. A certain amount of protest is allowed and even encouraged. The police are here to help you exercise your rights and weed out the troublemakers who may be planning more militant action that can be criminalized as terrorism or violence.
Just by way of an anecdote: In 2017, Los Angeles Police Department was revealed to have spied on the anti-Trump group Refuse Fascism with an informant attending meetings ostensibly to gather intelligence that would tip authorities off to any upcoming freeway shutdowns. No violent, far-right groups were spied on by LAPD during this time. Granted, we know little to the extent of fusion center involvement in this particular instance, but it wouldn't surprise me given the numerous cases of law enforcement collaborating with neo-Nazis and white nationalist types.
Have fusion centers taken the threat of far-right violence seriously (given that the FBI seems more predisposed to spy on Black Lives Matter, "Black Identity Extremists," anarchists and other leftist persuasions than neo-Nazis)? How aware and/or vigilant are they of this threat in the age of Trump and a resurgent white nationalism?
This is a difficult question to answer because events are still unfolding and information is spotty. I think there is an important political struggle happening within the security apparatus over the status of white supremacists and other extreme right formations. My sense is that the liberal reformers-the professionalizers, people who want "better" policing-are losing power to fascists or proto-fascists-the people who to hunt for enemies.
Before we get into the specifics of any example, however, it should go without saying that the police are the police. They're the physical embodiment of the state's monopoly on violence. As an institution, there's a baseline conservativism that's ingrained in the police. In more conventional sociological terms, they're a hierarchy-reinforcing institution. We should never expect the police to be anything but enemies of the project revolutionary social transformation. It should never surprise us when the individual police officers or whole departments become surveillance and disrupt social movements. It should never surprise us when individual officers or departments conspire with individuals or groups on the extreme right. These are expected.
At the same time, the specificities of how these dynamics occur matter tremendously. We can't just string together the crimes of the state and assume that it all means that it's a seamless machinery of oppression and that is ready to squelch all political challenges. We're talking about many headed administrative apparatus that's often beset by organizational pathologies and riven by internal conflicts. How the state really operates and this more specific question about the position of the security apparatus toward the extreme right is tremendously very important because it gets at two important points: a theoretical one about the nature of state apparatus and political one about the strategic alignment of power. What's at stake is our understanding of social power and change and how assess the political opportunities of the moment. That said, there are two dynamics that explain much of what we're seeing: the constraints of human rights compliant political policing, and the internal struggle within state around the far right and their efforts to infiltrate the security apparatus.
First, human right's compliant political policing. This what liberals and politics of privacy and legality gets you. If we look at policing in relation to the rest of security apparatus and not just prisons, then, we see that the period of mass incarceration is also this post-Watergate, post-Vietnam period, where liberal professionalizes sought to legitimate the security apparatus through reform. This reform current extended into policing with measures like the Handschu guidelines, which constrained political policing in New York City. Later, it became generalized as response to police brutality in the 1990s, when the DOJ began taking over police departments and overseeing reforms to eliminate racial profiling and police brutality. It continues with calls for procedural reforms and technocratic solutions like body cameras. A lot of the people involved may be earnest and some of these policy changes may blunt some of the sharper edges of oppression but they're structural effect is to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state security and preserve its power and discretion.
So let's get into specifics, human rights compliant political policing, as a general rule, treats all political activity the same, regardless of its content. White supremacists advocating genocide and an ethnostate have the same rights to freedom of speech and assembly as leftist calling for a borderless world and a transition to socialism. This ethos is entrenched in police agencies. It was even put forward as official policy, when I observed a Fusion Liaison Officer training conducted by one of the senior managers at New Jersey's fusion center. The section of the training on civil liberties demonstrated showed a high degree of self-awareness. The officer explained many of the concerns with fusion centers, citing the 2007 ACLU report on the subject. He then discussed how the fusion center dealt with large protest actions. He referenced their monitoring of Occupy to show how limited reporting for situational awareness and officer safety was appropriate but anything more would have violated constitutional rights and ROIC's privacy policy. He also brought up a 2011 Neo-Nazi rally in Trenton as an example. While the trooper presented Occupy in a neutral tone, he described Neo-Nazis as "scum" and "the worst people you can possibly imagine." However, he noted that their protest was permitted and, even though the rally was advocating odious positions, the fusion center could only take the same limited measures they took toward Occupy. With both examples, the intended point was that investigation required a "nexus" to crime or terrorism.
This dynamic provides perspective on recent clashes between Antifascists and far right groups. When left counter-protesters disrupt a white supremacist rally, this registers as an attack on white supremacists right of assembly. After all, the title of the controversial intelligence report on "anarchist extremists" released days before the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville was "Domestic Terrorist Violence at Lawfully Permitted White Supremacists Rallies Likely to Continue." In short, humans compliant political policing is real. It's a different form of CONTELPRO-era countersubversion and it can help explain why police tolerated both Occupy encampments and Neo-Nazi rallies.
At the same time, there is also a political struggle within the state around the far-right. Throughout the Obama Administration, the status of far-right movements as domestic terrorists was point of bitter controversy. In April 2009, DHS predicted an increase in far-right violence and identified four causes: prolonged economic downturn, the election of a Black president, renewed debates over gun control and the return of military veterans to civilian life. The report was leaked to the press and right-wing media had a field day. Eventually, then-DHS secretary Janet Napolitano shut down the unit that produced the report, leaving DHS with no analysts focusing on the far-right. Primary author of report eventually went public. Some Congressional Representatives pressured the Obama Administration to do more and they threw some money at counter-radicalization but did not re-commit DHS to reporting on the far right. As expected, the Trump Administration quickly rolled back this half measure.
That said, DHS-the federal agency-has no or at least very few analysts reporting on the far right but the fusion centers, which are run by state and local law enforcement, still are reporting on neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and other far right groups. The FBI is also still actively investigating the far right. There's lots of documents that journalist have obtained through FIOA that show this and the book gets into some of these examples and finer detail.
What these episodes underscore, however, is that there is a real battle happening within the state over the meaning of "domestic terrorism." There's plenty of people in law enforcement who want and are going after the far right but there's probably just as many or even more that sympathize with the far right. In 2006, the FBI produced an internal intelligence assessment document concerning the far-right's attempts to infiltrate police agencies and influence officers. While almost nothing is known about the FBI's efforts to address this issue, it is apparently a cause of some concern.
The limitations of human rights compliant political policing and efforts of the far-right to infiltrate law enforcement cast an ominous shadow over the violence in Charlottesville and similar clashes. Although there is no evidence that white supremacist infiltrated the Charlottesville Police or the Virginia State Police, the lead agency at the Virginia Fusion Center, an independent review of the response to the Unite the Right Rally by a former federal attorney shows that police downplayed the white supremacist threat. The report documents several intelligence analyses received by the Charlottesville Police that predicted violence from far-right militants. It also provides some anecdotes of individual law enforcement officers downplaying the threat from the far-right and positioning left counter-protestors as more problematic.
These battles are important because help us understand the political dynamics of our moment. To return to an earlier point, the implication for our understanding of the state is that the state is arena of this struggle but it's not the agent of the struggle in any direct and simple way. The institutional condensation of political power. It's continually reshaped by struggles within and outside the state apparatus to define policy and distribute resources. It's also shaped by larger forces, as I tried to explain in my comments on authoritarian statism and globalization. In short, the state is neither a thing to be seized nor smashed. It's an institutional condensation of power to approached, politically, at the level of strategy. This returns me to my other point about the strategic alignment of power. These battles of over status of white supremacists within the security apparatus and related questions of police collaboration with far-right groups speaks to wider political process. The balance of social forces since the 1970s-call it neoliberalism, the carceral state, whatever-is clearly unraveling. There's a three-way fight going on right now between the collapsing neoliberal center, the fascist right and the nascent left. We need to think about the security apparatus, we confront hard questions. The left position isn't to demand the police go after the fascists. Both the police and the fascists need to be defeated politically.
To conclude, one overarching imperative I noticed while reading your book -one the key struggles abolitionists must surmount- is to abolish not only the police, but the police power. How might we challenge a purposefully vague, capillary, patriarchal power that occupies nearly every nook and cranny of the state and that permeates the broader society down to the level of individual subjectivity?
To come up with solutions, it necessary to understand the specific nature of the problem and Pacifying the Homeland is my effort to name some the very particular problems of our times. You're right that one of the main problems the book names is police power. It's not just the police, the bodies of armed men in squad cars and frisking black and brown people on street corners. It's the way the police powers of the state administer our lives in ways to the benefit of capital. I think taking this expanded concept of police power expands the horizon of abolitionist politics.
Consider the divest-reinvest strategy toward abolition that came out The Vision for Black Lives policy report and was endorsed by the Democratic Socialist of America. Divesting from the police and the military and reinvesting in education and social services sounds great but I think it could be easily co-opted. Reinvest into what exactly? Social services as they currently exist? Shrink the armed uniformed police and expand soft social police? While such efforts certainly would make a meaningful difference in the lives of those most victimized by police, it would hardly challenge the rule of capital and the modern state. Instead, abolishing police power requires rethinking "social services" on terms that explicitly challenge the basic social relations that police power, in its myriad forms, maintains: private property, the commodity form, and the wage relation. In other words, the positive project of abolition would require a "reinvestment" in care and reconstruction the commons.
From this perspective, Medicare for All should be advanced as an abolitionist demand. By de-commodifying healthcare and transforming into a universal public good it could be part of reinvigorated social democratic commons Left organizations could organize political power to redirect resources from police, prisons, and the security apparatus and reinvestment in a series of socialist programs, a "common" decency that should afforded to all by virtue of their inalienable humanity: universal right to cradle-to-grave care (universal healthcare, free education, etc.), and basic right to life (housing, a job or basic income guarantee).
The horizons of what we could call "abolition socialism" could also help confront other difficult questions that historically have plagued socialist movements. The reconstitution of the commons would also require requires a reckoning with histories of colonial violence and dispossession. Capital emerged through the disproportionate destruction of particular cultures. It created hierarchy of peoples. The modern capitalist world-system created through various the projects of policing and pacification is also and always racial capitalism. In other words, a meaningfully abolishing police power and recreating the commons would also require addressing historic injustices that divided the global working class into mutually antagonistic nations and races. In this way, reparations for slavery, for colonial dispossession, and for unequal North-South relations can be thought of as necessary part of both the transition to socialism and abolition of police power.
