25 million in cop abuse suits, and 1500 untested rape kits: Minneapolis

Very Serious People are coming out with the column headline: Defunding the police is crazy!

So perhaps we should talk first about funding the police. What are we funding?

Let’s take Minneapolis, the unexpected center of our disorder. I don’t have a breakdown of how much the Minneapolis department spent on tear gas and the latest military equipment. But we do have stats on how much the city spent on civil suit claims for police abuse: from 2003-2019 the cost was  25 million dollars.

I thought about this timeline and this figure after reading Pagan Kennedy’samazing and wrenching article about the invention and history of the rape kit. 

 In 2019, the Minneapolis police announced a non-fun fact: in the police storage unit they had discovered around 1500 untested rape kits, spanning thirty years. Definitely a bad moment for the chief, who had to explain how he had previously reported that there were around 200 untested kits.

Kennedy reports that there are huge cultural problems with cops and rape investigations. One of those problems is the persistent refusal of the city to shoulder the cost of the testing of rape kits, which comes to about 1500 dollars per kit. Astonishingly, this cost is often borne by third parties – nonprofit feminist groups making money from cake sales and the like.

So we have at least one metric for what police funding is about, and its priorities. Evidently, testing those kits would have cost 2,250,00 dollars. Apparently, the city’s thinking was: we can either check these kits and catch rapists, or for ten times that amount, we can pay for abusive cops.

They chose the latter path. And that made all the difference.

Law and order in the U.S. is not only racist and oppressive, but it doesn’t even keep law and order. It stores the evidence in the storage facility and goes out there and fights the real crime – falling asleep in a car at Wendy’s, passing, perhaps, a phony twenty dollar bill, selling cigs on the sidewalk without a license.

Perhaps policing in the U.S. isn’t very good? A question from a friend.

Police and the "whitening" of Americans

There is an important, but under-discussed part of police history is that is also the history of the "whitening" of immigrant groups that came to the United States.

In the early 19th century, American cities didn't have police departments. Boston was one of the first. At the same time that Boston was constructing a police department specifically to control the less well off or immigrant areas in town, New England and America in general was receiving an enormous influx of Catholic Irish, fleeing the famine and oppression. Famously, what they met on the white Protestant shores of the New World was, at first, No Irish need apply signs. The Irish were considered sub-English - in England especially, but as well in the U.S. Although Germans were also migrating, on the whole, they were protestant. The combination of religious prejudice plus the aura of prejudice against the Irish in England put them into the class of the "not-quite white".

In the U.S., the rituals of becoming white have been explored for the last twenty years by many scholars. Here's an overview of the field.

What interests me is the way police work acted as a vector into whiteness, partly because police work allowed for the direct targeting of black subjects. To become white in the white settler state, a common strategy was to distance oneself from, and stigmatize, black people.
I'm not aware of any borrowing in this field from Rene Girard's theory of negative mimesis. In simple terms, Girard hypothesizes that the social order is built around a fundamental violence: the targeting and expulsion of a scapegoat. In order to not be the scapegoat, one engages in negative mimeses - trying to become the scapegoat's Other.

I have many criticisms of Girard's total explanation of the social order, but the scapegoating and negative mimesis process does work well with the becoming-white of various ethnic groups - the Irish and the Italian-Americans in particular - and the way that policing played a symbolically central role. One that carries over today. The police enact the neurosis of whiteness, to put it in sharp and exaggerated terms.

The meatmarkets I have seen

The meatmarkets I have seen

- Karen Chamisso

Birdsong pulled a labyrinth from my ear.

The birds have their nests, the foxes their holes

who will live with me

in the maze?

Wind and unwind, turn and turn back.

The heroes were netted and dispatched.

I stepped on a crack and a dynasty died.

Their ghosts follow me to this address.

A centerfold is at the center of it all.

O land of cockayne, free drinks and pussy!

To every sailor and peasant, tonight:

Tenderloin, tenderloin, the sirens sing.

‘The gates and yssues of this town are kept with watch and wards.”

Ariadne’s blues echo in the common pissoir.

My tears, my tears flow riverwards.

Jack comes to my  bed to bone ce soir.

The Flaubert-Sand letters: part one

George Sand came in for a pummeling from several of the leading lights of modernism. Proust, for instance, told his friends that he disliked Sand, and that Flaubert, who he revered, must have been “insincere” when he praised her in his letters. Baudelaire was much more venomous. Sand was the perfect opposite of Baudelaire: liberal when he was illiberal, a lover of nature when nature, to him, was irradiated with symbols of its fallen state, and in no way an adherent of his own peculiar Sadian Christianity. In the wake of the controversy raised, in 1862, by her anti-clerical novel, Mademoiselle la Quintinie, he wrote a series of notes comparing her to a latrine (because she fucked who she wanted to and didn’t make any bones about it) and compared her to a concierge and a kept woman. He found her the very type of positivist bourgeois he couldn’t stand: why, in her novel, she even dismissed hell! Hell was as necessary to Baudelaire as it was to Dante. Nietzsche, who read the version of the Flaubert-Sand correspondence edited by Maupassant, attacked her in his usual oblique way in Twilight of the Idols:

George Sand. - I read the first Lettres d’un voyageur: like everything deriving from Rousseau, false, artificial, gassy, exaggerated. I cannot endure this multicolored wallpaper style; as little as I can the plebian-ambition for generous feelings. The worst is the womanly coquettishness with masculinity, with the manners of an undeveloped youth – how cold must she have been by all of this, this insufferable artist! She winds herself up like a clock – and writes. Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the romantics, as soon as they begin to compose. And how self-pleased she must have been, this fruitful writing-cow, who had something German about her in the worst sense of the word, like Rousseau himself, her master, becoming possible only because of the decline of French taste! – But Renan adores her…”

As always with Nietzsche, there are catches and turns in the vituperation that make it seem unconsciously respectful. One could imagine this inverted. When I first read this, I thought the 'writing – cow' crack was typical Fritz misogyny. But later, reading her letters, I see that Sand uses that phrase about herself, or rather, often compares herself to a cow.

Nietzsche was as well a critic of Flaubert and his theory of impersonality ( behind his visceral dismissal of Sand is that he shares her criticism of that theory - nothing disturbs Nietzsche like the touch of an unwanted ally), and this is why he wants to speak of her coldness, and the coldness of the romantics, whose cult of the self was not, Nietzsche hoped, similar to the beyond-human of his own invention.

Proust, though, admired Flaubert, as did almost all the modernists. This made it puzzling to them that Flaubert clearly thinks of Sand, who from one point of view was the very opposite of the modernists, as a great figure. He even praises her writing and – more than that – has the discernment to mention the novels that, according to today’s Sand-ians, are the height of her art: Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.

I’ve been reading the correspondence with a lot of admiration, and want to say a few things about it. So I’m going to amuse myself this week, taking a break from the protests, by saying them.

the dystopia of police unions

The question of the police and policing is confused at the outset by the terminology of the tool, the instrument. Even those criticizing the police – such as myself – have a tendency to portray them as the tool of the upper class. In a sense, the tool image is ingrained deeply into the discourse the police have woven about themselves, the discourse of serving the public, or protecting the public.

This misses the crucial political agency and power of the police. It is not simply the selectivity of enforcing the law, the choice made to, say, arrest the black consumers and sellers of illicit drugs and to let white prosperous neighborhoods slide, although it is easy to imagine the police pulling no knock searches on penthouses and mansions in Beverly Hills or NYC’s West side and finding hella cocaine to rock those people to pleas in court. It is also the pressure put by police and their unions to pass certain laws, to create certain immunities, to imagine the community according to police interests. In Minneapolis, a midsized Midwestern town, one can trace a history from Charles Stenvig in the sixties to  Rich Stanek in 2018 to Bob Kroll, the current head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis.

This is Bob Kroll:

IN AN INTERVIEW in April, Lt. Bob Kroll, head of Minneapolis’s police union, said that he and a majority of the Minneapolis Police Officers’ Federation’s board have been involved in police shootings. Kroll said that he and the officers on the union’s board were not bothered by the shootings, comparing themselves favorably to other officers.

“There’s been a big influx of PTSD,” Kroll said. “But I’ve been involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me. Maybe I’m different.” 

 Or in Philadelphia, from Frank Rizzo to John McNesby, the current head of the Fraternal order of the Police in Philadelphia, who made headlines in 2017:

“… local protesters had employed a new tactic, turning up atthe home of a Philly cop who in June had fatally shot a fleeing black man inthe back.

There had been just 10 or so protesters, one wielding a megaphone, but it was enough to disrupt an otherwise quiet Bustleton neighborhood and rattle police, who’d never been confronted at their homes before. Now McNesby was getting his turn at the podium. A measured approach could have smothered the smoldering tension in the room; instead, McNesby doused it with gasoline. “When you go work each day,” he spat into the microphone, “you shouldn’t have to worry that a pack of rabid animals will suddenly show up at your home. … ” 

The Phillymag article is one of the rare ones that actually focus on the driver of police activity and politics, instead of on the windowdressing of police commissions. Here’s another graf:

“Some greatest hits here locally: In June 2010, McNesby declared stringent new rules regarding police misconduct “would be at the bottom of a litter box pretty soon,” then successfully challenged them before the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board. In 2012, McNesby mocked the civilian-run Police Advisory Commission, stating: “No one pays any attention to them.” And in 2015, McNesby declared the mayoral candidacy of former DA Lynne Abraham — a longtime tough-on-crime, pro-cop politician — to be over after she spoke to FOP members about pension changes and progressive reforms.”

Because the discussion about “ending policing” is probably not going to result in “ending policing”, I would think a better direction to take would be – curbing police unions. For instance, making sure that policemen who shoot or taser or maim and then cost the city’s thousands in civil suit damages are fired. Simply that. Why should cities be drained to support employees who wild? But even something as simple as that is not going to happen as long as police unions, interlocked with the Republican party and various rightwing organizations, have the upper hand.

It is rather amazing that the dream of a society in which the worker, through unions, has parity with Capital was only realized by… the police. But here we are, in the era in which past utopias are transformed into dystopias right before our eyes. This doesn’t have to be like this.  

another desperate spring

Broken at the waist by revolution
or vandal, a figure in excelsius deo
waits a stony resurrection flanking
the portal of the priory. The church trembles
in its long malaria of ghosts and smog.
Late spring. Already summer’s heat.

I walk up narrow Rue Gravilliers
past where a tagged mirror salutes
propped upright against a mildewed wall
waiting for collection, too.
A beggar mumbles bien bien
- this is the poetry of presque rien

channeling the oral tumult of my brain
which like yours is all worries and sex.
I pass the goddess in her natural human size
at the street crossing where the shadow
of a sparrow pursues presque rien
and its me mumbling bien, bien.

- Karen Chamisso

The birth of the police union out of the destruction of American apartheid

Robert Sobel’s biography of Calvin Coolidge contains background on the event that catapulted Coolidge into celebrity: his attempt to bust the Boston Police Union. Coolidge was the governor of Massachusetts in 1919, and Boston was a hotbed of political activity – two anarchists from the region, Sacco and Vanzetti, would later impress themselves – their trial for armed robbery and murder, their execution - on the whole decade, creating a cause that brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets throughout the globe. In 1919, the AFL had been busy unionizing police departments. ”… thirty seven cities, including Washington D.C., Los Angeles, St. Paul,  and Vicksburg had police unions, most of them affiliated with the AFL.”

Coolidge, to tell a long story short, busted the Boston police union when they staged a walkout. It was a thorough victory. The AFL stopped trying to unionize police departments. Various Senators, Democratic and Republic, indicated that the threat of imminent Bolshevism was terminated.

That wasn’t the end of the police union, however. It is generally agreed that the next step came in the sixties. As described by Charles Salerno in Police at the Bargaining Table, the civil rights era jumpstarted police unions for two reasons: a., civil disobedience and protest showed police that there was a greater space for union activity than in the past; and b., the police responded to protests on campus and the struggle for civil rights by a sort of institution-wide panic. Policing had meant enforcing the bounds of apartheid, and upholding a white bourgeois social order. As apartheid began to crumble and the student movement made the white bourgeois social order seem weak and perverted, police unionization was  forged in opposition to these things. Salerno goes into a sort of cop romantic revery about the whole thing:

“To witness the wanton destruction and disruption of the schools, not by people unable to attend them, but by those who were fortunate enoghyt to be students, showed the police that nothing was held to be sacred anymore. The police were called onto campuses to restore order and suppress unruly crowds. They witnessed acts of vandalism, disrespect for authority, a severe lack of discipline, open defamation of the American flag, total disregard for law, open profanity, widespread usage of drugs, and physical attacks upon the police.”

Salerno’s narrative is suffused with the cop self-pity and thinly disguised white nationalist sentiment, but it probably accurately reflects the feelings and recollections of the almost all white urban police force:

“All these events had a traumatic effect on the police psyche. They would no longer sit in a corner and lick their wounds. They began to strike back and to take the offensive in an attempt to salvage their dignity and their pride. The Civil Rights Movement and the gains made by minority groups through civil disobedience served as examples to the police. Since they were an occupational minority and an extremely visible one as well, they began to organize into militant or semimilitant groups.”

And thus, out of a highly politicized reaction to the threat to the white order, the police union received its jolt of life – sorta like Frankenstein’s monster, made out of a grotesque hodgepodge of sentiment and organized power. The point is that racism is not just accidental to modern policing, but the glue that held together the unionization of police forces throughout the country.

This is a small but significant footnote in the rightward drift of American society since the sixties and seventies.