Who's in Charge of the American City
Power mapping over-policing and police violence in America tells an untold but familiar story at the cross-section of wealth, power, and racism.
There’s an exercise community organizers engage in all the time called “power mapping” which is essentially a tool for making a political strategy. There are many ways to do this, but the gist is basically:
Identify the problem (be specific!)
Identify the change(s) that can be made to address that problem
Identify the individual people or institutions who have the power to make that change
Identify the pressure points you can push to move those people or institutions to do what you want
Choose the strategy that lets you create the most possible pressure on those points within your capacity and keep fighting!
There’s a reason this is such a critical practice to community organizers: we’re all pretty good at finding the source of individual problems in our lives, but for some reason when we deal with bigger social problems, the complexity of the situation leads us to confusion and wasted efforts at best, and frustrated inaction at worst.
The problem of police violence - both racist violence against black people - and police violence more generally, is not a new problem. This article won’t go too deep into the history of American policing, but an overview is important for the point I want to make here, so the cliff’s notes go something like this (for a good primer on this, start here):
Early Americans, like their British counterparts, were wary of standing police forces - typically justice was done by communities, judges, and temporarily deputized townsfolk.
The first standing police forces were all oriented around “labor control” - in the American South in the 17th century, this took the form of organized slave patrols who roamed communities catching black people who escaped slavery (and sometimes catching free black people and selling them into slavery). In the industrial north in the 19th century, these were hired muscle to put down protesters and break strikes of the emerging labor movement trying to win things like weekends, 40-hour work weeks, workplace safety, and an end to child labor.
The first official public police force was established in Boston in 1838, with other major east coast cities and then cities around the country following suit soon after. Modern policing as we’d begin to recognize it now - powerful police chief, robust, bureaucratic departments, city-wide purview —emerges around 1900.
Responses to the civil rights movement with regressive municipal governments begging for state dollars to expand police forces to put down civil rights protests bloated police forces in the 1950’s and 60’s. The “War on Drugs” and Reagan’s federal spending in the 80’s made serious changes to the way federal funding works to cities which ended up drastically increasing police funding (this is a whole article in itself). The 1994 Crime Bill opened up the spigots of federal funding to municipal police like never before, and then the “War on Terror” did so over again, not only moving mountains of money to local police, but also authorizing the DOD to sell surplus military equipment to local police.
This bloat has only continued - for example, NYC’s police budget is $6 billion, and between 2014 and 2019, the city spent 4x more on police than on housing and homeless services combined (and I don’t have to tell you housing in NYC is fucking expensive). This isn’t just NYC - Justice Policy Institute reports that nationally, police spending has increased a staggering 445% in the last 30 years. Minneapolis today spends 41.2% of the city budget on policing. Oakland spends 35.8%.
So, police forces are rooted in controlling black people and poor people and maintaining the social order through violence and incarceration, and for various reasons has grown in scope, scale, and power disproportionate to almost any other public line item. However, this is largely to the benefit of the white middle and upper class who remained blissfully ignorant (or uncaring) of this issue. The advent of television and video recording finally showed Americans racist police violence against black people in vivid detail in the 60’s, the stark and horrifying images of which contributed to the success of the civil rights movement. Later, with the increase in mass media and the access to home video recording, the images of the brutal beating of Rodney King lead to another massive wave of public awareness during the LA uprising in the 90’s. This only increases today in our completely saturated media environment - everyone with the capacity to record and share images of police violence with the world in real time.
I walk through all of this to illustrate a simple but oft forgotten fact: the idea of standing, armed police forces in our cities is a relatively new one in American society, and emerged because specific groups of people (in this case, wealthy plantation owners in the south and factory owners in the north) needed to control their labor force via violence. The point being, like most other things in our society, police are an emergent function of powerful interests looking to protect their wealth and socialize the cost of that protection if they can. I want to spend the rest of this article power mapping the American police force of today and looking at where our current racist, bloated, violent police forces come from, why they’re maintained, and how we can change it.
Your Landlord Runs Everything
Let’s power map police violence in the American city.
Nominally, city governments control the police (more on that in a minute). Property developers control the governments of the American city.
This isn’t a super controversial statement if you ask anyone involved in municipal government, but it’s not really something widely discussed. From a municipal government perspective, developers bring in millions in outside investment, create shiny new buildings that make the city look good and give Mayors ribbons to cut. Developers need cities to give tax breaks, make allowances, and clear red tape so they can make millions for their investors, and Mayors and City Councils need new development projects to point to, headlines to grab, and pretty, shiny streetscapes to attract new residents, investors, and tourists.
It’s no surprise then that property management companies and property developers are among the largest contributors to municipal political campaigns and why corruption is so common in local government. There’s a shitload of money to be made by building a new housing complexes and shopping centers, but a lot of people need to say yes for that to happen, and it’s not uncommon for pockets to get lined — you’d be surprised how cheap you can buy a mayor or city council person.
Why does this matter? In the same sense that American policing emerged from wealthy people needing muscle to control labor and protect their profits, so too does the modern American city and modern policing serve that function. Property developers and property management companies, though wealthy themselves, are conduits for investment from still wealthier people. Downtown real estate in major American cities (and in smaller cities to a lesser degree) is among the safest and most anonymous ways to stash large sums of money at a good return for the super rich, especially internationally.
Global real estate investment markets is its own post and probably its own library of books, but in short, investing in a large building or development in New York, LA, or even your bustling upper-class suburb, is a safe investment that A.) is likely to hold or increase in value, B.) Can be owned anonymously though series of shell companies and holding companies and other entities, C.) is difficult to seize and the value can be fudged for tax purposes and most importantly D.) returns a high rate passive income on your investment in the form of rents that can really only be beat through much riskier and more speculative financial investments. A quick Google search will show you article after article of new luxury apartment blocks being constructed even when the market won’t bear them and they sit sometimes 50-60% unoccupied but no one seems to mind, least of all their shady investors (in the case of major cities like NYC, often wealthy internationals such as Chinese and Russian billionaires who need a place to hide wealth from their own governments).
So - developers control the American city, and developers (and the investors behind them) have a vested interest in rents and land values remaining high. If we ID the problem as violent, racist, bloated police forces, and then we ask ourselves who is the powerful interest that continues to make it that way, we can look to city government. But cities are not simply arbitrarily maintaining these expensive and sometimes politically difficult behemoths in their budgets. They are attuned to the desires of the developers who support them.
And what are their interests? Not just more police downtown, but extensive, over-policing of black communities with the specific just-barely-under-the-surface goal of keeping black and brown people where they can’t scare away white folks and thus lower rents and land values. That place being either in their own ghettoized and disinvested communities, or in the rapidly expanding prison industrial complex via mass incarceration.
The result is the same: the people and businesses that can afford to pay land rents to the developers (and thus provide a return to their investors) get to ignore the struggles of out-of-sight, out-of-mind working class people while police violently hem them in to smaller and smaller areas of concentrated poverty, itself returning trauma, pain, struggle, and eventually crime and violence. The Mayor cuts a ribbon downtown, crime stats go down, all the rich folks get a little richer, and the city council gets re-elected.
If we wonder why cops are willing to use violence to protect property, this analysis makes a little clearer that it is precisely what they are employed to do. This is about the alignment of incentives from the top down. There’s a reason why we link racism to capitalism, and it isn’t because all wealthy people are racist, but simply because like everything else in society, capitalism aligns interests to serve the wealthiest people, and it’s important to understand that those wealthy people don’t even necessarily have to be racist themselves for things to go this way. Mr. Moneybags might personally sympathize with the Black Lives Matter movement, but he sees his business to be a sort of separate sphere - of course he will push for more policing in the name of public safety, that’s what protects his business, and what could be wrong with that?
It isn’t at all uncommon for people to understand 1. racism is wrong but also 2. when black folks live near my new apartment complex, my ROI goes down, and that’s just the market speaking, so even though I’m not racist, we definitely need to widen the road between my development and the black community next door and ensure there are constant police patrols and good arrest numbers to show for it because after all people just want to feel safe, right? What a shame about the racism, though. That has to stop.
So where can we push? I want to close out by talking about pressure points and where we can take this fight next:
Keep the protests going, and keep them in downtowns and wealthy neighborhoods. This is literally hitting them where it hurts. Looks how many changes we’ve won already. They created dubiously constitutional curfews not because protests were violent, but specifically because they were peaceful and cops needed a reason to arrest and do violence to protesters to clear them out.
Build people power via strong racial-justice oriented organizations. If candidates for local office are supported by strong organizations devoted to racial and social justice who can hold them accountable, then they won’t need the money and prestige that comes from the developer-class to keep their campaigns afloat. If I know the voters who will keep me in office will reward me for greater social services and higher standard of living (rather than for ribbon cuttings and tourism dollars), I have more degrees of freedom as a politician to push back against powerful interests who want to control my city. We then have to hold those politicans accountable, like this absolutely INCREDIBLE scene where the young Mayor of Minneapolis basically is forced to take a Cersei Lannister walk of shame away from a rally:
Accountability for more than just politicians - we have to pay attention and make the connections between the profits of developers and how our cities orient themselves to accommodate those profits. The anonymity afforded to those profiting from police violence is exactly what’s attractive to them about their investment. Never underestimate the power of naming and shaming the people who profit from others misery. For all its flaws, America loves to chase a Marie Antoinette out of town.
This also includes unions. Police unions hold incredible sway over city governments and sometimes even over the physical safety of Mayors and Council members. It is an open secret that police unions have threatened (and some say more than threatened) Mayors and other government officials in the past. They hold incredible power politically and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that some Mayors genuinely fear holding the police accountable. And with good reason - 6 leaders of the Ferguson, MO protests have died under mysterious circumstances in the years following the uprising there. We can push in two ways here: first, as we stated above, creating alternative sources of political power from which progressive candidates for often can emerge and can then rely on to back them when they take on the power structure. Second, many police unions are certified through groups like the AFL-CIO. There is already an active movement to push the AFL-CIO to decertify all of the police unions organized under their banner - protesters in Washington D.C. set fire to the AFL-CIO offices last week.
Black leaders and revolutionaries have argued since the 60’s that capitalism and racism are brothers, feeding off of one another, each requiring the other to survive. Capitalism needs an underclass to do its dirty work, racism needs a scape goat to blame for society’s ills so people don’t blame capitalists. Again, this requires no shadowy cabal of racist rich people, only a society set up to align its interests to the most powerful - in this way we end up calling oppression order and calling violence “keeping the peace”, but order for whom, and peace for whom, and at what cost? You don’t need to be anti capitalist to be anti-racist, but if you see the incentives that prop up racist police systems, I’d encourage you to think about how the two are related and who that really serves.