A Culture of Control
The Problems with Border Patrol, Policing, and Elections Are Connected by a History of Internal Occupation
Photos and video captured last month of border patrol agents on horseback corralling Black asylum seekers like cattle were shocking to many, recalling stories of slave patrols and Jim Crow lynching parties, and eliciting rebukes from elected officials.
This is not who we are, the Biden administration proclaimed, as officials promised an investigation and reform at the Customs and Border Protection agency.
But reforms are unlikely to fix the problem because, despite our protestations to he contrary, this is exactly who we are. These images, the complaints from asylum seekers, Black and Brown residents of American cities and towns, and the civilian populations where our military is engaged are of a piece. They are examples of both the corrupting influence of power and of the way embedded racial attitudes and white supremacy is embedded in our systems of control, which have been in place to varying degrees since the nation’s founding.
James Baldwin likened it to an “occupation.” In a 1966 essay in The Nation, he linked segregation in housing and employment, which existed not just in the South but across the North, as well, to the use of state violence as tool to manage the Black population in Harlem, but also in “Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco” and “every Northern city with a large Negro population.” The police, he said, “are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.”
This may seem simplistic to some, but one can find this kind of language being used by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and other Black leaders in the 1960s, all the way up to the Black Lives Matter protests today.
But rather than attempt to address the larger systemic issues, we treat each case of abuse — whether it be an officer squeezing the life out of a citizen, an immigration agent on horseback, or voting restrictions in Texas — as if it is an individual act taken by a rogue entity, a bad apple, and not part of the broader structure of control that has long been the central feature of our policing and governing strategies.
The most recent evidence comes with the release of a trove of reports outlining abuse by immigration agents at the border. As The New York Times reports, the “160 reports filed by federal asylum officers from 2016 to 2021” and released to Human Rights Watch under a public records request recount the “details of abuse that asylum seekers described experiencing during interactions with border officials and while in U.S. custody.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement to the Times on Wednesday that said DHS “does not tolerate any form of abuse or misconduct.” It went on to say the department was “conducting internal reviews ‘to identify and terminate intolerable prejudice and reform its policies and training,’ and on the use of force,” the Times reported.
This response would appear to point toward change, if for no other reason than it is different in tone and content than what we might have expected from the Trump administration. But its impact is likely to be limited, mirroring the failure of so many police reform proposals tied to training and the isolation of “bad apple” cops. It’s a reform that ignores the larger systemic problems, which go beyond just the CPB and infect law enforcement as a whole, and bleed into the social welfare arena and into the debate over drugs, over women’s rights and abortion, labor rights and workplace democracy, and that is central to the voting rights debate being waged in Congress as I write this. Who gets to vote has always been contested territory, and the efforts to restrict the vote have always been about power. Restrictive voting laws, which have been passed in numerous Republican states, are being sold as “protecting the integrity of the vote,” a sales pitch meant to sound legitimate and to obscure the racism at the center of these efforts. They are about power — White power and White supremacy, and preserving the prerogatives of the groups who have held power for most of our history. The same goes for laws constraining protest, which like voting restrictions are meant to silence critics of the powerful.
Policing historically has served the same function. I’ve written about this before:
But American law enforcement began not with the goal of protecting and serving, but to police boundaries and maintain order. Local police forces in the early days of the republic were used to keep poverty-stricken locals away from the rich, while in the South they served as the protectors of the slave system, as slave catchers and enforcers. Later, the growing capitalist class — i.e., the owners of mines and factories — turned to private policing to keep workers from banding together into unions, to shut down strikes, and quiet agitators. These private policemen were supported by the new local police departments and often the federal government, with presidents calling in the military to quell labor unrest.
Our history is littered with law-enforcement overreach of this sort. COINTELPRO, the 1968 police riot against a Yippie protest in Lincoln Park in Chicago, the MOVE bombing by Philadephia police, the aggressive response over the last decade to anti-police brutality protests — all were part of a larger government effort to silence criticism.
The police response to the protests that followed the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor last year are consistent with this approach. They were often met with force by police in anti-riot gear, relying on military-style weapons, using tactics that were ultimately deemed by local governments and international observers as excessive and unnecessary force, especially because they were used in response to political speech.
A study conducted by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which receives federal funding for its research of political violence around the globe, found that as the largely peaceful protests would come to be met by “a heavy-handed approach to the growing protest movement” by government forces.
In demonstrations where authorities are present, they use force more often than not. Data show that they have disproportionately used force while intervening in demonstrations associated with the BLM movement, relative to other types of demonstrations.
Despite the fact that demonstrations associated with the BLM movement have been overwhelmingly peaceful, more than 9% — or nearly one in 10 — have been met with government intervention, compared to 3% of all other demonstrations.
The use of force included the use of “tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray or beating demonstrators with batons — in over 54% of the demonstrations in which they have engaged.”
The point here is not to blame or bad mouth police or individual members of the law enforcement community. That police, as representatives of the state, ultimately resorted to violence in defense of the status quote should not be seen as a shock. The state, which is supposed to represent all of us equally, historically has not.
And the tendency to see this issue through the prism of good cops and bad cops misses the point, as well. There are good cops and bad cops, good border agents and bad border agents, and so on. This seems a given. But the argument that the bad ones are “just a few bad apples” does nothing more than make us feel good about ourselves, and obscure the real systemic baked into the whole. To think we can just punish the handful of bad cops or the border agents on horseback acting like slave-catchers and that in doing so all will be fine is to allow the abuses to continue, and in turn to further erode trust in law enforcement. As Merriam-Webster reminds us, the “bad apple” argument is often used “interpreted erroneously by implying that a bad apple is not representative of the whole, when in fact the term stems from the larger phrase ‘one bad apple can spoil the barrel,’ which suggests that the negativity is not an isolated incident.”
The fact that it happens over and over, in place after place, and across all agencies should tell us that we need to address it in a much more broad and comprehensive way that goes beyond just looking at law enforcement and considers the punitive culture we allow to exist and that we impose mostly on communities of color, poor whites, women, religious and other minorities. This is about power, plain and simple.
And, as Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
This is not going to be easy, and it will not fit into neat little slogan that we can paint on a placard or use in a political campaign. It means going to the root of it, to the inequities created by capitalism and power structures created early in our history that were designed with White men in mind.
The images of uniformed men on horseback wrangling Black migrants, of Black men being assaulted by police, being killed by them, the stories of immigrant children being housed in cages, of police punching protesters or driving their squad cars through crowds — these should not be seen as rarities anymore than the efforts of the GOP to strip thousands, perhaps millions of their vote. This, despite what Joe Biden has said, is who we are. But it doesn’t have to be.