Jordan T. Camp - Policing The Planet - Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

E ric Garner lived on the brink of uncertainty. His death at the hands of New York City police officers in 2014 followed years of incessant harassment for small-scale infractions, including the sale of untaxed loose cigarettes. Garner was regularly stopped and searched, andas his 2007 civil rights lawsuit detailedhumiliated and sexually violated by police in public. Before he was slain on a Staten Island sidewalk, he pleaded with approaching officers, Every time you see me you arrest me. Im tired of it. It stops today. Garners murder, filmed on a phone by his friend Ramsey Orta, was viewed millions of times by people around the world. Garners final desperate words to the officers choking him, I cant breathe, became a rallying cry for organizers and activists fighting to end police violence and impunity. Similarly, his plea, This stops today was transformed into a demand to end the prosaic surveillance, arbitrary harassment, and intimate violationsthe daily life of policingthat led to Garners fatal assault. Protesters not only questioned how Eric Garner died; they also challenged the conditions under which he was forced to live.

Eric Garners name has joined a morbidly expanding roll call of the racialized poor killed by police and vigilante violence. Demonstrators have refused to let these premature deaths be explained away as mere excess or accident. They instead cast this violence as routinized and widespread. In so doing, they have called attention to the underlying material conditions that have preceded and ultimately enabled these killings. Rather than asking how the police can kill less, they have forced a broader set of questions: Why have the police been endowed with the arbitrary capacity to regulate the lives of the racialized poor in US cities? Why do they have expanding and unfettered access to the bodies of poor people in general and poor people of color routinely? How and why are poor people criminalized for occupying public space? Can the problem of police violence actually be solved with the addition of more police (even better trained, more diverse, or better monitored) as many police departments and federal proposals suggest? How have these issues been addressed in other global contexts? And finally, what alternate definitions of security might we imagine?

This book, Policing the Planet, is a collaborative effort between social movement organizers, scholar-activists, journalists, and artists to address these questions. Following the lead of social movements, it reassesses the policing philosophy known as broken windows theory. Praised as a comprehensive model of community policing, this doctrine has vastly broadened the capacities of police both nationally and globally. Through essays and interviews, the book explores the rise and spread of broken windows policing. In analyzing vengeful policing campaigns waged against the racialized poor, Native people, immigrant workers, Black and Brown youth, LGBTQI and gender-nonconforming people, the homeless, sex workers, and others, it demonstrates that broken windows policing emerged as an ideological and political project. In examining its spread throughout the United States and around the world, it explores how broken windows policing has become the political expression of neoliberalism at the urban scale. Racism, it argues, has sustained and naturalized these processes as inexorable and inevitable. The book therefore considers the struggle against racism, militarism, and capitalthe policing of the planetas a central political challenge of our times.