Peter Frase

(A version of this article was originally published in Jacobin in 2020.)

In August of 2020, as uprisings continued to sweep the United States in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Virginia state Senator Louise Lucas found herself charged with a felony, in connection with damage to a Confederate monument in the city of Portsmouth. The police cited a rarely used law against damaging war memorials, and went so far as to name the city's elected Commonwealth Attorney, Stephanie Morales, as a potential witness, in an apparent attempt to force her to recuse herself from the case.

The audacity of this story, featuring the targeting of two Black elected officials by mostly white cops, made national headlines. But it highlighted a much more widespread problem: the willingness of police departments to interfere in local politics, sometimes with apparent indifference to the elected officials who are, in theory, their bosses. In a period of insurgent electoral socialism, as well as growing criticism of the carceral state, these dynamics present the Left with some difficult questions.

The problem is not new, and it's not even just liberals or Black elected officials who face this threat. Journalist Jake Blumgart spoke to elected officials around the country who described acts of intimidation against those who would challenge their power. In the city of Costa Mesa, California, for example, conservative Republican council member Jim Righeimer described being followed home by a private investigator during union contract negotiations.

If anything, the uprisings of 2020, along with the general atmosphere of Trump-era America, have only emboldened this kind of activity. In Utah, a state senator was investigated for allegedly helping pay for paint used by protesters on the street in front of a District Attorney's office.

District Attorneys have, until recently, largely been pro-police, and generally come from backgrounds as prosecutors. But in cases where more progressive prosecutors have been elected, the police will turn their hostility on them as well. In Portland, a recent nexus of protest activity and state repression, police expressed their anger at newly elected DA Mike Schmidt for insufficient willingness to prosecute protestors, with one reportedly calling him "antifa" and "George Soros-backed."

Other tactics are less flashy but perhaps more powerful. In Minneapolis, Steve Fletcher, a city council member who has supported defunding police, accuses the police of targeting his ward for slowdowns, delaying response times to citizen calls. Similar slowdowns have been deployed repeatedly in New York City, as part of pressure tactics on the mayor.

In some cases, the police will attempt to leverage their (presumed) public support to undermine the legitimacy of public officials who criticize them. In one case in New York state that I happen to be aware of because it happened nearby and involved a comrade, a Poughkeepsie city council member was attacked by a police union that called for the governor to remove them from their seat due to alleged bias against the police. The source of this alleged bias was that the councilperson, Sarah Salem, had made critical statements while also having past run-ins with police. By this logic, being subject to police power, in itself, makes one unfit to oversee the police---a logic that pervades the ranks of police themselves as well as the larger right-wing culture in which they are embedded.

All of this raises an unsettling question for those of us arguing for the defunding and dismantling of police in our local contexts. Our demands are directed at mayors, city councils, and legislators, the ostensible bosses of the police. But this nominal relation of authority often turns out, in practice, not to be the real one, as elected officials either act as though their position is actually subordinate to that of the police, or face reprisals for attempting to exercise oversight.

In any given case, it may be hard to decipher whether the police are exercising independent power over elected governments, or simply providing politicians with cover for things they would have done anyway. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, has insisted on sheltering the NYPD from taking cuts in his post-pandemic austerity budgets. This is despite their sometimes outlandish public attacks on him, including even releasing internal arrest reports on his 25 year old daughter. Is this because he is afraid of the police, or because the police are a necessary component of the governing strategy preferred by his big donors, especially real estate developers?

Perhaps it is more useful to think of the police as a particularly visible, relatively autonomous component of capitalist rule in its local form. In the Trump era, right-wing conspiracy theories involving a "deep state" have come to prominence. These posit a network of nefarious actors within the permanent government bureaucracy, working to undermine the work of the President. But if the lurid fantasies of Trumpists are easy to dismiss, the idea of some kind of institutional structure that persists across elected governments is a common and reasonable one.

This actually existing deep state exists not just in the shadowy back corridors of the federal government, but also--perhaps especially---in local government, where voter engagement is lesser and press scrutiny, particularly outside of the biggest cities, is scant. And the police, along with other government staffers and local business interests, should be understood as a critical part of its apparatus.

The connections between local police and local capitalists are often noted in the literature of radical urban theory. In particular, Marxist analysts of gentrification have shown how policing tends to follow the flows of real estate capital, with the cops serving to make the city appear safe for the kinds of gentrifying residents that landlords seek to attract.

This dimension of police power appeared in the now infamous case of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police in a no-knock raid. Taylor's family filed a lawsuit that alleged that the operation that ultimately killed her was linked to a drive to clear residents from an area that was slated for a redevelopment project.

What does this all mean for the Left as it attempts to win power, particularly at the local level?

Debates on socialist strategy often turn on the question of how, and whether, to engage with the state, particularly through the vehicle of electoral politics. These debates often stipulate, or simply presume, that a clear distinction can be made between situations in which bourgeois electoral democracy exists, and those where it does not. In the former, electorally oriented socialists will generally argue that the left should run candidates and attempt to take power in this way, although with many disagreements over the degree to which substantive socialist reforms are possible in a system that has not fundamentally uprooted capitalist property relations.

The existence of the "deep police state" complicates this narrative somewhat. What are we to do if there exists an institution that not only is not answerable to elected authority, but also commands the support of local capitalists and holds a monopoly on the state-sanctioned use of violence? Abandoning the electoral terrain is hardly advisable, since a purely extra-parliamentary strategy will be heavily out-gunned and easily isolated. Yet we must be prepared for the possibility that socialism at the ballot box can be turned back not only by big, national level coups like the one that took down Salvador Allende in Chile, but by dozens of less noticed mini-Pinochets, backed by local capitalists taking down mayors, city councils, or legislatures that stray too far from conventional pro-police wisdom.

Reducing police power has, rightly, moved to the center of the agenda for many Left electoral and legislative projects. The call to defund the police is important because it is so explicit about directly attacking the material basis of police power. It gives movements against police repression a clear orientation that is hard to divert into various police "reforms" (body cameras, sensitivity training, and so on) that tend only to direct more resources to the police without altering their basic nature and function.

But as the examples above show, winning elections isn't necessarily enough to dislodge local authorities that are committed to undermining democracy. This is why continued direct resistance, through street protest and other non-electoral organizing, is so important. Not because the police can be "defeated" in a military sense, but because their power stems not only from their guns but also from their popular legitimacy. In the months after George Floyd's killing, polls showed dramatic shifts in public opinion, with large majorities saying that Floyd's death was indicative of broader problems with law enforcement. This was a minority position as recently as 2014, after Mike Brown and Eric Garner were killed. And while polling on this and related questions has fluctuated over the course of 2020, the volatility of opinion at least shows that police legitimacy can be undermined by movements, and should not be taken for granted as an unchangeable fact.

As I write this, the uncertainty around the 2020 elections makes the task of confronting police power all the more urgent. As the Right attempts to sow uncertainty about the legitimacy of a possible Trump loss, the possibility looms that mass resistance will be needed simply to force the ordinary electoral transfer of power. The police, many of whose unions have endorsed Trump, will be important in any reactionary strategy to hold onto power, particularly given their increasingly open coordination with private far-right militias. Combating their power, by all means available, is not a substitute for seizing elected offices where possible, or for making fundamental changes to capitalist property relations. But it may be a necessary condition for achieving either goal.