As I write this, civilians in dozens of American cities are mounting protests against police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd. Those who experience American society as a liberal democracy have taken these protests as an opportunity to pursue a favorite question: How would we survive without the police?
The American liberal poses this question rhetorically. The very point in asking it is to imply that nobody could imagine this country without its police force, and by extension without the “rule of law.”
At this moment, the White liberal can be heard repeating conspiracy theories intended to question the sincerity of the demonstrations alongside pleas for the same demonstrators to save their political will for the ballot box. These responses, I argue, do not simply show that the liberal is out of touch, that he enjoys a faith in electoral politics and law enforcement that rings hollow for poor and Black Americans. They reveal a desire to uphold the American “rule of law” not despite but because of its failure to extend beyond White property owners.
Those who ask “How would we survive without the police?” wilfully ignore the fact that Black Americans cannot survive with the police. The truth is that a world without violence is by necessity a world without the police. Unfortunately, this world is bad for business — the business of the cops, the business of White property owners, and the business of both political parties, Republican and Democratic.
The police are a racket. We can only survive without them, and we have an excellent model for how to do so. Here is the story of its architect, who strove to realize a just, police-free city before he was assassinated by the FBI, the police, and the Chicago Democratic Party machine.
Confronting the Henchmen of American Capitalism
Fred Hampton was 20 years old when he became the chair of the Illinois Black Panthers Party. Hampton was brilliant, remembered at that age for his profound academic and social gifts. As a pre-law student at Triton Junior College, he hoped to enter legal practice, believing it would enable him to take on the systemic brutality of the Chicago police.
Hampton cut his teeth organizing with the youth wing of the NAACP, expanding its membership roster by over 500 people. Then he read the Black Panther Party’s 10 Point Program, moved to Chicago, and joined the party. It is easy enough to see why the program changed the course of Hampton’s life, and why it radically altered his approach to the dismantling of the police state.
Material needs — enumerated in the program as “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace” — provide a concrete foundation for the Panthers’ critique of American political and economic structures. The state methodically withholds these items from the Black community with an array of operatives: the White landlord, the White employer, the White policeman. When the Panthers declare that “We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community,” they reveal the uniform political agenda of those who confront Black people in their struggle for survival. Land, bread, housing, justice — these demands are not leveled in many directions, at thousands of individual landlords and policemen, but in a single direction: at the henchmen of American capitalism. The survival of that system depends upon the extraction of Black labor at no cost to the capitalist. All those who profit from the products of stolen Black labor must work in lockstep to preserve that profit.
How to break their stride? Hampton found an answer to this question within the ideological framework and methodology of the Panthers. In its critique of capitalism, the party identified various goals shared across the multiracial working class. The decommodification of housing, for example, demands the downfall of landlords, and not merely the installation of non-White landlords. The tactic of coalition-building — uniting separate groups under a shared vision or agenda — stood out to the Panthers, and to Hampton, as a means of consolidating the multiracial working class against its common capitalist foes.
A “Poor People’s Army”
In 1969, according to the South Side Weekly, Fred Hampton read a newspaper article about an occupation of Chicago’s 18th District police station led by the Young Lords. The group had started in 1960 as a gang and soon developed into a civil rights organization; their takeover of the 18th, with the police commander and the media as captive audience, was the latest effort in their campaign to challenge police brutality against the Chicago Latinx community.
The article inspired Hampton to make a trip to Lincoln Park, where he found José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez, leader of the Young Lords. Jiménez shared Hampton’s belief that the formation of a “poor people’s army” was the most effective strategy to demobilize the police state. At the same time, it also presented a promising approach to ending gang violence. The campaign of terror waged by Chicago police officers upon non-White communities found a parallel in the activity of White street gangs, whose brutality served to enforce segregation between low-income neighborhoods.
Under the banner of their Rainbow Coalition, Hampton and Jimenez united the Black Panthers and the Young Lords with the Young Patriots, a youth organization from low-income White communities around Uptown Chicago. The grouping was unprecedented; organizers with the Panthers and Lords were disturbed by the Patriots’ use of Confederate iconography to invoke their heritage in working-class White Appalachian communities. Hampton maintained that the coalition was essential. The Patriots were uniquely poised to organize among low-income White Chicagoans, training their peers to abandon violent racism in favor of class solidarity and opposition to the police state.
“We’re gonna fight with all of us people getting together and having an international proletariat revolution,” said Hampton in 1969, and that fight materialized in the Survival Programs. Organizers from the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots mobilized health care clinics, breakfast programs, and day care centers across the city’s low-income neighborhoods. Women’s activist groups, including Mothers and Others and the Young Lordettes, expanded these programs within their own networks.
Who kept the peace? While the Chicago police terrorized low-income civilians and intensified street violence, their targets — working-class young people — built the organizing infrastructure to bring their communities together in solidarity and to address the injustices those communities faced under capitalism. Hampton summed up the coalition’s tactics simply: “We’re gonna fight fire with water.” Mobilizing entire communities of organizers who were accountable to one another and to the greater project of overcoming capitalism, the Panthers, Lords, and Patriots created a public safety model to replace policing and restore peace.
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?
The police did not keep the peace. They were never supposed to. Then, as now, they served a different purpose, and they served it well. Under the administration of Democratic Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Chicago Police Department was accountable to party elites and to their profit motives.
The truth is that ending gang violence in Chicago would have been contrary to the very mission of the Chicago police. It would have challenged the power of the Democratic Party machine. Under the Daley administration, that machine exploited narratives of rampant crime and street violence in low-income neighborhoods of the city. These narratives shored up support for Daley, entrenching his power; that power translated to security for the Daley henchmen controlling the police department. The role of the CPD became the perpetuation of street violence, all in the name of party victory. A further incentive for the terrorizing of non-White and working-class communities came directly from the prison-industrial complex. Totally isolated from the framework of justice, the practice of incarcerating civilians provided the state with cheap labor. To whom could the incarcerated appeal? To whom could the survivors of the dead appeal?
Fred Hampton kept the peace, and the police state killed him for it. Teen Vogue recalls the night of December 3, 1969, when he fell asleep on the phone to his mother, his fiancée beside him. By 4:45 a.m., he was dead: The Cook County police fired over a hundred rounds through his apartment before shooting him point-blank in the head.
Cha-Cha Jiménez heard about it in jail. The warden approached him as he sat in solitary confinement. “He came up gloating,” Jimenez remembered later. “He came up and said, ‘They killed your punk leader.’”
The Black Panthers were right, and the police had not acted independently; they acted, as always, in service of the greater interests of capitalism. Yet the extent to which this was true only became clear in 1971, with a break-in at an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Two professors, a day care provider, and a cab driver took and released over 1000 classified papers, enough to flesh out the workings of a covert FBI program called COINTELPRO. The documents detailed COINTELPRO operatives’ efforts to infiltrate and undermine political movements that challenged the American capitalist state.
Among these efforts were the murders of over 30 Black Panthers, as well as evidence that the government played a role in the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The FBI has dismissed these allegations in all cases but one. It could not evade responsibility for the assassination of Fred Hampton. It had planted an informant, William O’Neal, as Hampton’s bodyguard, enabling O’Neal to report on Hampton’s whereabouts and to drug him on the night of December 3 so that he would not be roused by the gunfire.
We Keep Each Other Safe
We who support police and prison abolition are not facing individual opponents. It will not do to create standards for “bad” police deserving punishment, in the same way that it would not do to create standards for a “good” or “just” military occupation. We begin with the principle that the police are paid against peacekeeping. Fewer dead bodies equals a smaller profit margin — for cops, for party elites, for the capitalist state itself.
We continue with the understanding that we keep each other safe, and that jointly, capitalism and racism make us perpetually unsafe. They operate through a complex of police and prisons that expends human lives for profit and stokes internal conflict within the multiracial proletariat. Police lack accountability to and personal investment in the communities that they occupy. They do the bidding of political elites who entrench their power by manufacturing narratives of violence and responding with solutions that are intended to fail. The deaths of our comrades become material for a re-election campaign.
By committing ourselves to Survival Programs in our own communities — to the feeding of children, the nursing of the sick — we will keep each other safe. We will build the anti-racist solidarity that makes peace possible, directing our efforts toward the ultimate conflict between humanity and capital. Violence between working people serves the interests of the capitalists, and they will go to any lengths to serve their own interests. It is in our shared interest to remember Fred Hampton, to save lives, and to abolish the police.
Image source: Flickr / Tripp