A World Without Police

welcome to the analysis.news i'm greg wilpert today i'll be talking to geo mayher the author of the just released book a world without police how strong communities make cops obsolete published by versa books with the coronavirus pandemic in the middle of its second year now there are increasing signs that people are thinking about how we ought to reorganize social institutions once we get out of this mess one of the many movements that are formulating demands in this regard is the movement against the police this movement which gained momentum last year in the wake of the police murders of george floyd and brianna taylor has been expressed in the slogan of defund the police another slogan that is gradually gaining ground is police abolition the call for police abolitionist taken up in geo mayor's new book a world without police the book outlines the pivotal role that the police play in u.s society for maintaining the existence of the existing order of capitalism inequality and white supremacy and it goes on to point out how we might overcome our perceived need for the police gio mayer is a professor of political science at vassar college and the author of several other books including we created chavez decolonizing dialectics and building the community coming thanks for joining me today geo i'm so glad to be here greg so in my intro i argue that many are currently thinking about how we might build a better world given the upheaval that the pandemic has caused but let's start so let's start there um why did you decide to write this book now so you know for more than a decade now i've been involved in community organizing from the bay area to philadelphia and nationwide around police violence police brutality and so there's been a question that i've been working on for a long time and yet over the past few years what we've seen is that these questions have really left into mainstream consciousness i argue that the reason that we're talking about these things has everything to do with movements in the streets this is why the narrative has shifted so dramatically in recent years around the police it's you know been not uh you know people asking nicely asking the police to change themselves asking them to behave better it's been people taking to the streets in ferguson and baltimore and more recently in minneapolis and and really demanding that and really insisting that they're not going anywhere until something is done uh with the police now um i want to go through uh your book marla systematically and one of the first chapters basically talks about how it is that um the police has really basically taken something that we take for granted uh and just wanted to so so let's focus on that first i mean um uh what is it uh exactly that um we're taking for granted and and why uh in terms of the police why do we need the police or do we think we need the police so a fundamental starting point when it comes to thinking about all you know social and political institutions is the fact that these are not eternal right they were created at a certain moment in time and this applies perfectly well to the police police have not always existed and one of the questions we need to grapple with is why is it that not only the police were created invented what is the origin story of those police but what is the society that we live in in relation to how the police function when we look at the origins of the police first of all we see that globally as well as in the united states you have a combination of policing you know as a mechanism for on the one hand upholding wealth upholding capital accumulation and the capitalist mode of production and on the other hand policing so-called dangerous populations usually racialized populations people of color colonized people across the world and in the united states in particular slaves and then later former slaves these are the you know this is what the police do from the very beginning particularly in the united states is to police wealth and to police whiteness um once we understand that we begin to understand in a much clearer way um why it is that the police continue to do the same things today um otherwise this seems you know inexplicable to a lot of people why are the police so violent why do they systematically brutalize certain communities when they're here to keep us safe so you know in the in the you know the mainstream narrative it really takes realizing that that has never been the function of the police the police were not invented and created to keep people safe um they were not invented and created for public safety in any sense of the word um they were created to uphold certain rights certain freedoms and the wealth and the privileges of certain populations this is where the police come from what happens over time and i think this is an increasingly important piece of the equation is that not only do the police continue to do the same thing throughout history in other words in the united states for the past 150 years um but they do more than that they recreate society they reshape society in their image and so when you know in what i argue in the book is that we need to understand this political function as the police as actively recreating american society making it more of what i call a world with police a world of police what does that mean every day it means that increasingly our society is one in which we're taught that the police are the solution to every problem right uh whether social welfare poverty poor housing uh lack of opportunities um you know lack of schools lack of after school activities you send the police mental health crises send the police and this is how our society has been built we live in a society that's increasingly built on this assumption that the police are the only solution and the part of what that means for the task of police abolitionist to really rethink uh what a new society would look like um and here you know borrowing of course the the phrase from angela davis who speaks of prisons becoming obsolete we're talking about what kind of a society would be required for the police to be obsolete once we think about it that way we begin to understand that what is the police uphold again whiteness wealth um privileges inequalities whether racial gendered economic um in a world in which those inequalities were not so prevalent and did not exist would be a world that would not require the police in the same way would be a world in which the police would literally serve no function whatsoever and so this is the horizon of thinking beyond the police it means thinking about on a micro level who it is that we can call to negotiate conflicts within a community instead of the police who can we call when a neighbor or a family member finds themselves in a in a mental health crisis the police are of course not mental health professionals of any kind they're violence professionals and so why would we be calling them to deal with this question and it's building outward from this sort of micro level and thinking about confronting and breaking as i argue police power the power of police unions that we can begin to envision a new kind of horizon a different kind of society [Music] now the point that you make about how police as an institution recreate the society i think is a really important point because i mean that's one of the things you know as a sociologist that we learned in sociology essentially that most of the institutions if not all of them basically recreate the institutions and the society on a daily level and so by pointing out the uh institution of the police uh as being part of that is uh is to point out something that we tend to overlook i would say because we think that it's so necessary because we kind of grow up in this kind of for granted taken-ness of uh of the police now you use the term actually in that chapter the first chapter of the pig majority in which i i guess you mean the police majority i pulled that the police in a sense constitute a majority can you explain a little bit more as to what you mean how you mean that i i mean in what sense uh do the police or do does the support for the police constitute a majority what does that mean i think we need to understand on the one hand that policing is far beyond the police themselves and that's what i try to argue in that chapter um this is on some levels very obvious right technically speaking uh trayvon martin was not killed by the police ahmed arbury who was sort of hunted and lynched in georgia you know and last year was not killed by the police um you know you can think of many cases in which people were killed by white vigilantes um in which white bystanders or those fearful called 9-1-1 resulting in someone's death you can think of the uh you know the judicial apparatus you think of district attorneys you can have judges you can think of juries and grand juries which refuse to charge darren wilson uh you know for killing mike brown for example and when we start to understand this we begin to realize that the pick majority is far bigger than the police themselves and as an institution now the institution of the police plays a crucial role in upholding expanding police power but it's also uh supported by this far broader um policing structure um that is in many ways um co-terminus with whiteness uh it's you know this is what w.e.b du bois

recognized nearly 100 years ago when he was writing about the reconstruction era you know he said police and white vigilantes have been almost the same thing from day one policing and lynch mobs have been almost the same thing and the historic complicity of the two is is really undeniable and what we've got today is this broad policing apparatus which um is anchored in whiteness which is anchored in upholding wealth and whiteness um as you know as i said and then also you know even expands beyond that and so you know i also you know talk about the ways in which you know and we know this story very well um in which many black elected politicians and political leaders were conscripted into this policing structure into supporting it into the war on drugs into harsher sentencing measures in the in the 1990s and this is a global phenomenon as well we're talking about policing as as firmly interlocked with u.s imperialism abroad with global wars um you know with whether it's supporting local police in mexico or the actual counter insurgency warfare that is being wrought on the you know on a worldwide scale this is part of a broader policing structure and so we need to understand this in its broadest terms before we can really confront it and push back on it now that's actually also the kind of the that leads to the next chapter really in the sense that um the question of what do the police actually do and you make the connection i think very which is also very interesting and very important for people to understand i think this connection this historical connection to on the the the policing of or i'm policing i mean this was before there was a police but the policing of slavery essentially um and and this kind of continuity but nowadays everybody takes for granted that they're supposed to quote unquote protect and serve now um outline a little bit as to well to what extent do they or don't they actually do that it's it's really ironic especially in light of what i've just said about this vast policing apparatus the vast structure in the vast um sector of the population in the united states in particular that supports and upholds and participates in and is complicit in policing on a daily basis and the fact that the police protect very few people right despite the claims to protect and serve this has always been a very selective um process of uh you know of protecting and and and the question of who do they serve is is a good one um and you know i think as we as we know the police are most likely to protect and systematically do most protect um those who are already protected right they protect the whitest the wealthiest those with the privileges that need to be defended whether they're racial privileges whether they're uh you know economic privileges um and when you begin to do a a sort of deductive you know uh process of taking away those who are systematically left unprotected by the police you're actually left with very few people um the police are not particularly good at protecting or serving people of color we know this the you know the rates of police murder against people of color are you know vastly outstrip uh you know the the rates in which this violence is inflicted on the white population women are subject to more violence from the police than the police actually prevent and this is you know i mean these are statistically really incontrovertible things uh you know police violence against women whether it's you know uh sex workers women of color whether it's their own partners in the home um it vastly outstrips the tiny minuscule fraction of uh you know of uh for example sexual assaults that the police actually prosecute and that's based on the assumption that that prosecution somehow makes people safer which it does not either when you add into the fact that people having you know people who are homeless uh people having mental health crises all you know all of these people are at a systematically higher uh you know uh you know rate of police violence of police murder much more likely to be killed much more likely to be brutalized and when you add up all those populations you're really not left with many right and even when you take the the most privileged populations right white rich men uh how many of them have uh you know have children who are for example queer or trans people who may be homeless for a period of their lives who may have a mental health crisis you realize that policing really doesn't offer protection it simply doesn't this is again these are these are facts um they've been born out by statistics um they uh you know these are things that the police don't want to talk about and it's sort of the dirty secret of policing is that there's really no um statistical reason to believe that policing makes us any safer what it does is it soaks up huge amounts of resources we're talking in the billions the many many billions of dollars annually that could be dedicated to actually making our society more safe if anything policing by seizing people out of communities tearing communities and families apart locking them up and making it impossible for people to reintegrate in a healthy way just into society make societies and communities far more dangerous and create the sort of situation that we live in today what the police do though through their unions through their political lobbying capacity is then to extort more money every time the police fail to make us safer they tell us they just need more money they just need more funding they need more technology and then maybe they'll be able to make us safer um but the reality is that uh you know that that doesn't happen the answer we get from the right and the you know the the sort of boogeyman of chicago is this incredibly dangerous place and well what would you do without police in chicago chicago is the most over-policed city in the country and yet the police have not made that city any safer right what does that tell us about what we're told about policing and the reality now of course one of the things that uh comes up over and over again is that every time there's an abuse of police power which happens all the time is uh that uh well we just need to reform the police we need to uh somehow fix it you know we still need it i mean this this notion that uh this taken for granted notion that that the police are absolutely essential is is cannot be touched basically um so the only solution then would seem to be police reform now um you argue in the book that uh police reform is basically useless why is that i mean the simple fact is that the police have been reformed ever since they were founded it's been one constant never-ending process of reform which creates this sort of loop where there's this promise that the police will get better more effective more professional less violent less racist all of these things um and you saw you talk about waves of reform from the 1880s 1890s to the 1920s and 30s to the 1960s after the you know mass you know rebellions demanding again civil rights black power you see these waves of demands for reform the menu of reforms offered is always the same and when you break those down whether it's community policing so-called community policing which destroys communities rather than strengthening them whether it's a technological fix whether it's a new kind of chokehold that is allegedly safer but which we then find out later is killing people as well whether it's new kinds of weaponry all of these reforms end up feeding into the same system and the whole loop provides cover for the fact that um that you know we're attempting to fix problems that are systemic we're attempting to reform away problems that cannot be reformed away because they're baked into the structure of what the police do again if your starting assumption is the police are there to protect and serve why are they not doing it correctly let's see if we can reform in a way that will you know allow them to perform that function you've misunderstood the problem from the beginning because once you understand that the police exist to protect certain privileges then you wouldn't even be asking the question well why are they violent in particular toward poor people of color because it's built right into what it is that the police do in american society and also on a global scale you mentioned earlier that uh the the um the police unions uh or as one should say probably so-called unions because i think you make the important the crucial point in your book that they're not really unions um uh that that these are being used to maintain police power and that we basically need to break those unions now there's two questions i have about this i mean first of all um one of the points first of all i guess we need to explain you know exactly why they're not unions and how do they function but the other point i want to ask about is um you also make the argument that uh while most unions have gotten weaker over the years which is no doubt true if you look at unionization rates across the united states they've been going down but uh police unions have actually only gotten stronger over the years so the other question is well why is that so first what is it about police unions that makes them not really unions how are they different in other words and secondly how did they get stronger i think this is a really important question uh it's important in part because debates on the left have not been clear enough about this question of these so-called police unions and what to do with them the concern is this the fundamental concern is if we adopt a position that weakens any public sector union meaning the police um or you know for example ice border patrol these you know these unions we're providing leverage to then uh be used against other unions this is the concern and and we should admit it's a real concern um the problem is that you know there are there are several problems uh one is that you know as as you mentioned these are not unions um in the sense that they don't actually and can't be understood as actually representing workers against bosses against capital um and this gets you know this is played out precisely in the history of these unions you know they developed along a different trajectory from other unions they were developed in a situation in which um you know they at the moment that police began to unionize began to organize um they immediately uh replaced and moved beyond other unions as i put in the book they sort of leap frog them gaining privileges demanding special privileges and that they did so primarily by making deals with uh you know with their apparent uh bosses um technically these are not unions because they're associations they're whatever benevolent associations and this is uh you know and this question has everything to do with the substantive point because they you know these are so-called unions that gave up the right to strike um in order to be stable partners in the governing process with city officials with you know the powers that be of white supremacy uh and capitalism they do not protect workers they do not support workers in other you know instead systematically they oppress and brutalize the poorest the most unprotected workers um and you know again on the economic side you can say from the very beginning and look at the role of police as strike breakers in in the most important waves of union activity and economic strikes in the country and at the same time this dovetails with their role as upholders of white supremacy of destroying black movements of destroying movements of people of color insurgent movements in uh in the united states and when you look at the actual process of the consolidation of police power through these so-called unions you realize that they do it through provoking panic about uh about you know communities of color in new york uh you know a very famous you know riot undertaken by the police white supremacist riot against a black mayor is part of what propels the police union into a position of authority and power it is by leveraging fear of workers on the one hand and fear of people of color black people in particular that these unions begin to consolidate their power now what do you see today so-called police unions are the political spearhead of police power uh on the local level they negotiate these binding contracts which are absolutely ludicrous and if anyone you know if most people knew how these contracts worked um they would be scandalized because it is on these this level of local contracts that it becomes nearly impossible to even question discipline file charges against a police officer accused of misconduct um whether it's the limitations on the fact that charges have to be you know and grievances have to be filed immediately um but that you know even within a few months to a couple of years after uh complaints being filed they're scrubbed from their records entirely which is why we see cops moving from different abusive cops moving from different uh you know agencies to others with and you know with no one realizing that they have a systematic history of uh you know of abuse so you know on the on the local level they negotiate on the state level they push what are so-called law enforcement officer bill of rights which are special rights for police not just rights like everyone else special rights that make it again harder for police to be held accountable and when you realize that the fundamental question in all of this in the negotiations of so-called police unions is not the for example the economic stability or solidarity of police as workers with other workers but its special privileges economically and its impunity on a political level that is the fundamental demand and the police more often than not are willing to forego their wages and their wage increases if it means that there will be less accountability for when they you know inflict violence onto other workers which is what they do every day and there's simply no way to deal with the police without confronting destroying police unions uh you know i would love to hear a suggestion from the left on how to actually confront police power without you know dismantling uh these these sort of spearhead of police you know what i argue a fascistic police power but there's simply no way to do it because they are the fundamental mechanism for not only upholding but expanding police power today i think that's also a really really important insight and and i guess the the question though is why is it though and i'm not sure i mean i think you partially answered that question but i want to get a little bit deeper as to why it is that uh that at a time when unions have gotten weaker why is it that the police unions or the benevolent associations have actually gotten stronger i want to throw out one hypothesis um maybe could it have something to do with the fact that they have the weapons yes no certainly and it's you know the the you know the main the phrase that's often used for this is the carve out right um when uh political leaders are attacking uh union protections weakening unions uh you know breaking their you know political power and you know and basically scrapping whatever agreements they have with them the police get a carve out right they are exempted this is what happened in wisconsin you know with scott walker you know you've got the the police you know essentially uh claiming a privileged position that prevents them from being treated like workers so on the one hand they want to say yes these are unions yes we are workers on the other hand whenever the anti-union train comes through town they want to be exempted right they want special protections and they demand those protections again they traded away their right to strike they don't really strike but they engage in a whole other range of political lobbying protest and outright sabotage you know in cities across the country of political leaders if they feel like those privileges are threatened police do not show union solidarity with workers we know this this is 100 true you even have a case in in texas recently where uh even public so sorry public safety workers meaning police and firefighters were trying to equalize their wages and the police said no we don't want to even have the firefighters on our level we want to be the most privileged sector um you know and we want to claim these privileges for ourselves that's not a workers movement that's not a solidarity you know movement that's a movement for the privileges of a certain sector and precisely because it's a sector that the state needs to function and is willing to buy off and you know and make into a mechanism and a weapon to use against the poor now we spent a fair amount of time talking about what's wrong with the police and how they maintain their power of course this leads to the big question as to well you know uh what would happen if we just got rid of the police um how would we maintain safe public safety for example which is after all supposedly the main function of police they obviously do much more than that and don't even do that as as you've outlined but but still the question of public safety remains so what's the alternative absolutely and again you know you're right the fundamental starting point has to be recognition that the police do not provide public safety if we don't understand that accept it you know as the basis for our analysis then we've started on the wrong foot in terms of even grasping what you know what is next because otherwise the conversations are the conversations we're having today right um you know in in light of a an increase uh in you know the murder rate you know in certain places i don't know i don't want to overstate what's happening today but an increase in certain kinds of violent crimes in philadelphia you know homicide is increasing um and then the question is well why would we how could we defund the police at this you know at this point when uh when homicides are increasing the assumption the fundamental assumption of the question is that the police prevent homicides from happening when we know that that's not uh you know that that's not true now the more important question is what is this alternative world that we're trying to build um you know and police abolition draws upon a tradition of abolitionist organizing um that goes back you know you know decades to the origins of the prison abolition movement um but it goes back even further of course to the fundamental reference point of abolition which is the abolition of slavery the first wave of abolition but in all of these cases what's really important to understand is that despite the name of abolition this is not simply about dismantling political institutions it's about creating alternatives and one of the uh main failings of the first wave the abolition of slavery um was precisely that while slavery was abolished nothing was created in its place you had experiments with the freedmen's bureau under reconstruction there were the experiments in building a different kind of society a different kind of economy making sure that former slaves had the social fabric to exist on the same level and in a position of on a footing of equality but that was destroyed systematically by white terror by the ku klux klan um and and so what we got instead was the police what we got instead was the racialization of crime and mass incarceration and that's the reality that you know that abolitionists are confronting today but from the same position namely um again you abolish institutions in part at least by rendering those institutions obsolete um in part by uh making in creating a kind of society that doesn't require police that doesn't require uh you know prisons now the two pieces right the the destroying and the dismantling of the existing world and the creation of the new world don't always go um and move at the same pace last year the rebellions and the resistance not only in minneapolis but worldwide sparked by the murders of of not only george floyd but brianna taylor up at aubry created a situation in which there was active talk for the first time of dismantling the minneapolis police now that experiment has stalled but the bottom up experiment of creating alternatives which was happening on the ground in minneapolis through uh local you know committee for safety in the you know in basically the protest park area of minneapolis is one that we've also seen nationwide there is an entire fabric of grassroots abolitionist organizing that exists across the country and across the world and that's part of what i try to draw out in the book there are anti-violence organizations there are organizations that exist in almost every city to intervene in community conflict before the police get involved to prevent the police from getting involved there are efforts to divert 9-1-1 calls particularly for mental health emergencies to non-police actors that's a crucial one because it takes hundreds of thousands of people out of that interaction daily with the police which is a deadly um interaction you've got community organizations that are attempting to build local police-free zones where the neighbors helped to resolve conflicts with one you know in conversation with one another and what i you know what i'd like to point out in the book is that we all know what this looks like it seems like such a distant world but you know we don't always call the police when we have a conflict with family members we don't always call the police when there's a conflict on our block that requires neighbors to get together come to some kind of decision and manage you know manage that conflict defuse it um and you know and create a non-violent outcome for that situation we know what that looks like it's a question of scaling that up and doing so with the existing organizations that again exist in almost any city you know these experiments have been growing and developing and deepening for decades and no one has really been paying much attention to them and yet they all contribute to building this world without police which already exists which is growing which exists alongside the world of police and increasingly in conflict with it um i mean this is uh i mean it's to people that uh who aren't familiar with the idea of police abolition this still can sound kind of um i have to say uh very difficult to achieve at very at the very least uh even though what you're saying i think is very very important point i mean i i liked especially this one quote that you had i i i'm just going to paraphrase it right now but where somebody says basically that an organizer says that uh well we would never call the police anyway uh since we know we can't uh rely on them uh and i think that's a that's a crucial point but on the other hand i i mean there's also the issue perhaps that community organizations and this uh particularly and i think you briefly addressed this in your book as well but still community organizations can sometimes actually serve to reproduce existing inequalities and inequities and how do we make sure that doesn't happen we might wouldn't be perhaps just getting rid of uh the police for or couldn't we just perhaps be getting rid of the getting rid of the police in favor of some other institution that perhaps doesn't function as violently but still in some way maintains inequality absolutely this is a this is a danger that you know there's no foolproof way to prevent this from happening but it's certainly something we need to be uh you know alert to we need to prevent community organizations for safety and security and you know local uh you know self-control from devolving into what we know as you know as neighborhood watch right the difference of course being that you know that these sort of quasi policing organizations you know including things like the guardian angels and other things like that um they exist to uphold uh the inequalities of society what does a neighborhood watch do it keeps an eye out in in a generally more affluent neighborhood for anyone who looks as if they don't belong right our community organizations cannot reproduce that logic of ostracizing of identifying those who don't belong of identifying outsiders and pushing them further out um and instead need to be up need to operate on the basis of understanding the ways in which a community involved and includes those people right those who are maybe involved in dangerous activity or criminal activity or violence are relatives often of members of that community but we've been told for decades that they're you know that they're super predators we've been indoctrinating this idea that they need to be systematically excluded thrown in prison locked up warehoused away was you know outside of and away from society instead of realizing that they are you know people's children their people's nephews and nieces they are involved in communities and need to be treated as such it's a difficult task but it also points toward the fact that um again this is a long-term horizon that requires the construction of a new kind of society um you know of course you wouldn't be able to identify um and you know you know and ostracize the poor if people are not living on the street if people are not poor if we have a society of equals if we begin to build that kind of society and this is where um the question of defunding is really essential because of course defunding is not abolition but defunding if done correctly and not simply symbolically is a mechanism for beginning to expand that society without the police what does it mean it means taking resources away from the police in the millions of dollars if not billions nationwide and dedicating those resources toward building really and truly safe communities how do you build safe communities again it's not by creating a different kind of police force it's by building a society of equals it's by overcoming um the you know economic you know inequalities that rack our communities the racial you know inequalities of you know uh pervasive white supremacy the gendered inequalities that make certain people targets in communities for violence this is the kind of society that needs to be built and of course until that begins to expand in a systematic way there's always going to be a heightened risk that anything we do risks in a way reproducing the logic of the police now towards the end of the book uh you uh get into the international dimension and talk specifically about the role of borders and of border protection uh talk about a little bit about how this uh the issue of borders and border protection and of course of the immigration and customs enforcement how the ice or ice how is that related to police abolition yeah i think i mean this is a piece that i think needs to be more front center of many abolitionist movements namely the fact that policing is a global apparatus it's an apparatus that is indistinguishable in many ways from u.s imperialism from global empire from global capitalism as a broader structure and again from that militarized armed force that upholds global inequalities right again domestically we call that the police internationally we call it the military imperialism but they do often uh the same kind of work the same kind of upholding of whiteness and the same kind of upholding of uh you know of economic privilege and the this is why it should be no surprise to us for example uh when we find out that you know police you know in ferguson were being trained in settler colonial israel or when we see that u.s uh you know interventions abroad like the vietnam war are called police actions right or peacekeeping missions it's the same logic and it's all built on the underlying colonial logic which says that poor communities of color on the global scale are incapable of taking care of themselves and what we mean by that is that they're not happy with their inequality they're not happy you know with the condition that global imperialism has left them in a great deal of scholarship and organizing has increasingly recognized this tight intertwining of imperialism with policing and that's something that our movements need to reflect now the border sits in many ways right at the intersection of the two uh it's no surprise that the ice you know you know that ice that border patrol and the police unions the fraternal order of the police have exactly the same fascistic political outlook they all wholeheartedly endorse donald trump for presidency for re-election they all have a uniformly right-wing and fascistic political perspective because they are effectively the same kind of force and here we see very clearly the ways in which policing on the one hand and imperialism on the other are bound up together and it's that the u.s border has been an ex it's itself an expanding uh force right manifest destiny the moving of the u.s border through the imperial control of you know in seizure of uh native territory indigenous genocide you know seizure of mexican territory this is all part of a global policing paramilitary you know structure um that we see you know expanding even further today the good thing about this you know this is it's incredibly daunting to think about all these things together but you know the good thing about you know about adopting a kind of global framework is the realization that you know on a global level you know we can talk about broad vast global majority that can be involved in this struggle against policing against global imperialism against white supremacy as a structuring premise of global order this is a global majority for the world without police um and it's very very different from the pig majority one of the points that you make i think is absolutely crucial in the book which is basically the the point about the uh or the counter argument to the uh mainstream argument that that uh migrants uh to the united states lower wages and basically compete for u.s

wages and um that uh that we did and that's basically one of the main arguments in favor of uh of of uh border patrol and of uh of the policing of the border but you completely debunk that describe exactly how how it is that the uh that uh that migration does not contribute to lower wages if anything it's actually the other way around that it's uh the policing of the borders that does that no there's this there's this argument that's been weaponized by by the right weaponized by trump and trump trump advisers um and even taken up by sectors of the of the so-called left that claims that um open borders is not a progressive you know uh you know policy proposal that claims that um open borders hurts workers that workers find their wages to be driven down by migration it's in it's a systematic lie it's a lot that's very easily debunked but like all lies it's the kind of thing that's repeated so often that people don't question it right what drives down wages is not migration what drives down wages is the border itself what drives down wages is the fact that capitalists can leverage what are called kind of differentials within the working class um to weaken certain sectors at the expense you know toward the privilege of the benefit of others if you eliminated the border wages would increase it's precisely the fact that many migrants arrive in the united states without protection without papers without you know benefits without health insurance often paying into these things regardless of the fact that they can't actually benefit from them that creates a situation in which um they were able to be paid less right if the existence of the border that allows undocumented people to be not only paid less but politically docile to be forced to behave to be unwilling to resist the boss to be unwilling to claim the wages that they are owed this is to the detriment of uh of all workers and drives down wages systematically uh across the board what's really interesting and and unsurprising when you think about it again and shows the deep similarities between black and brown struggles um you know when it comes to policing border policing internal u.s policing is the fact that this is exactly the same kind of lie that was told about slavery um you know workers in the north were told that if slavery were abolished they would be suddenly competing with a bunch of freed slaves and their wages would go down when the reality is that what hurt the wages of northern workers was above all the system of slavery in other words that the legal structure that prevented owners of slaves in the south from having to pay their workers anything at all sucked all wages you know to you know to the lowest uh possible level um they were against and they should have been against the system of slavery as opposed to the individual slaves that they saw as competition same thing today the system of border policing is what lowers wages is what hurts all workers and workers themselves should be opposed to that system instead of seeing those migrants as competitors as somehow harming their uh their economic condition last year i um interviewed william robinson about his book the global police state where he basically refers to the idea that capitalists development is constantly creating ever greater inequalities and that these can only be maintained with the global police and that that's why you know his book is called the global police state now um to me it seems like this is um i don't know if you if there's something you want to add to that i mean in terms of what the connection is between the existence of the u.s police and this global police state i mean it seems to me that the uh that the idea that uh that um the police and the military serve a very similar function in this and you mentioned that before already that they serve a very similar function uh uh in terms of maintaining the system that we have uh and therefore they become sort of to speak a uh a pivot so to speak for a transition to a different system uh that is an absolutely crucial one that it seems uh hasn't been paid enough attention to i mean when i look for example at the activism going on in the united states it happens on all kinds of different issues but there's relatively little i'm not saying not to diminish the activism you know for peace and for international solidarity but it's relatively small compared to all the other activism that's going on and you'd think if it's so central that is the police violence and the military violence around the world it's so central to maintaining the system shouldn't that be a little bit more central to the building of a different world absolutely it needs to be and movements need to take this kind of global vision and understand these solidarities as being far broader than we're then we're often told of course what what u.s political culture does is to attempt to isolate these things we know even in the united states the attempts to distinguish black lives matter from movements around socioeconomic inequality or you know or other questions as though these were not all very much tied up with each other and and you know as if we couldn't build solidarity around sort of migrant movement and policing when these are very much the same thing you know at the same time that bill clinton is you know uh you know signing nafta uh militarizing the southern u.s border um

and you know signing repressive border legislation like the the era era he's also signing a brutal uh you know omnibus crime bill which criminalizes uh you know and you know in mass incarcerates hundreds of thousands of people it's the same move right the same thing happening to you know you know largely black residents of of uh you know of cities is the same thing that's happening on the border is the same thing that's happening to to mexican and central american migrants and it's absolutely true you know when you know your global policy is to extract wealth from you know other countries which involves extracting the labor and the resources of some of the poorest people in the world people will resist that and what we've seen in a global wave of struggles over the past 30 or 40 years now across the global south our attempts to struggle against you know you know u.s imperialism against interventions and against the economic basis for those interventions that's the same process that we're seeing in the us when we're talking about austerity we're talking about budget cuts when we're talking about right wing you know movements for you know to uphold white supremacy and white privilege um in you know in the present um and the police play a central role in that it's no accident that the united states while it's trying to sort of like jockey for uh control over somewhere like mexico insists that you know a certain amount of this foreign aid be dedicated to domestic domestic policing operations because they have an economic interest as well in making sure you know that that the most oppressed don't have the space to actually build resistance movements against them and that's why the same exact people who support uh wars abroad who support the police and you know so-called blue lives matter uh domestically are also the same ones who are so frightened of any examples of solidarity abroad whether it's the pink tide in latin america resistance movements in bolivia venezuela and elsewhere or the waves of migrants being displaced by u.s policy if you look at the you know the border crisis the so-called border crisis of today it's easily traceable to u.s policy whether it's the in creation of the mata the ms-13 you know organization through the deportation machinery of the united states under clinton or whether it's the u.s support under obama and hillary clinton of aku in honduras that led to the proliferation of death squads driving many people out of that country we're looking at a globally interlocked you know not only police state but network of resistance against that you know against that apparatus and that's something we need to as u.s organizers in particular uh you know always be conscious of okay well on that note we're gonna have to leave it there um i was speaking to geo mayher author of the book a world without police published by verso books i highly recommend this book especially for people who aren't that familiar but actually with the abolition police abolition movement but i think everybody can learn something from it so i really recommend it thanks again geo for having joined me today thank you so much greg it was it was great to have a conversation with you today and thanks to our viewers and listeners for joining the analysis.news please

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2021-08-29 09:30

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