Our Enemies in Blue

Citation

Williams, Kristian. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. AK Press, 2015. Google Books Link

Excerpts

Page	Quote	Notes
31	”We ask ourselves, always, ‘what went wrong?’ and for answers we look to the seconds, minutes, or hours before the incident.”	Unravel_History
59		”Bobbies” in the UK were called this in reference to their creator, Robert Peel (London Home Secretary)
105	”As long as the community was small there were sanctions more powerful than law.”
128	”the work of Florida Highway Patrol Officer, and later Volusia County Sheriff, Bob Vogel. Vogel formulated a list of ‘cumulative similarities’ that he used in deciding whether to search a vehicle. These included factors like demeanor, discrepancies in the vehicle’s paperwork, over-cautious driving, the model of the car, and the time of the trip. In the mid-1980s, after Vogel made several particularly impressive arrests, the DEA adopted similar techniques in its training of local law enforcement.”
165	Citation: William Y. Chin, “Law and Order and White Power: White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement and the Need to Eliminate Racism in the Ranks”, Law and Social Deviance, 2013.
169	Two days into the disaster [Hurricane_Katrina], on August 31, Mayor Nagin ordered police to cease rescue operations and concentrate on ending looting — in effect, announcing that private property was a higher priority than human life.”
179	Pennsylvania coal companies created “an industry police of their own, the ‘Coal and Iron Police’. For a fee of $1 per officer, the state conferred police powers upon these company-controlled guards. […] clothed, by the process of deputization, with arbitrary power and relieved of criminal liability for their acts.”
182	”The law creating the Pennsylvania State Constabulary intended the new body ‘as far as possible, to take the place of the police now appointed at the request of various companies‘“
231	”Organizations and power networks win influence over the state according to their ability to aid or impede its operation”. Citation: Smith, Power, Pressure, and Policy.
240	Haymarket affair: “State’s Attorney Julius Grinnell urged the cops, ‘Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards’“. In the subsequent trial: “Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of them and you save our institutions, our society”
246	”the head of the Los Angeles red squad, Captain Earl Kynette, was convicted and imprisoned in connection with a 1938 car bomb”
260	Citation: Ben Jacklet, “It Should Be Noted…” (Portland police files leak)
292	”When reinforcements arrived [in Pittsburgh/Western PA], they sided with the crowds and threatened their colleagues, ‘if you fire at the mob, we’ll fire at you.‘“
312	”Strategic incapacitation emphasizes the application of selectivity whereby police distinguish between two categories of protestors — ‘contained’ and ‘transgressive’.“
324	The National Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997 (Bill Clinton) authorized “transfer of military equipment to local police for ‘counterdrug and counterterrorism activities’.“
497	”About half (46 percent) of police paramilitary units receive training directly from the military. One SWAT officer brags, ‘we’ve had special forces folks who have come right out of the jungles of Central America and South America. These guys get into the real shit… We’ve had teams of Navy Seals and Army Rangers come here and teach us everything.‘“
497	”One Fresno cop explained the intended scope of these [gang database] files: ‘If you’re twenty-one, male, living in one of these neighborhoods, been in Fresno for ten years and you’re not in our computer — then there’s definitely a problem” Citation: Parenti, Lockdown America
328	”Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces sergeant and SWAT trainer, says that he teaches cops to ‘Look at hands. If there’s a weapon in their hands during a dynamic entry, it does not matter what that weapon is doing. If there’s a weapon in their hands, that person dies. It’s automatic.‘“
329	”Sometimes these raids go wrong before they even begin. Walter and Rose MArtin, a perfectly innocent couple, both in their eighties, had their home raided by New York Police more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. It turned out that their address had been entered as the default in the police database.”
504	The original “Broken Windows” article (in the Atlantic): “a quiet, well-tended suburb may need almost no visible police presence […] the ratio of respectable to disreputable people is ordinarily so high as to make informal social control effective”. Wilson and Kelling, “Broken Windows”
345	Also from original “Broken Windows” article: “‘Rights’ were something enjoyed by decent folk”
358	Citation: Julie Watson, “Cops Show Marines How to Take On the Taliban”, NBC Los Angeles, July 12 2010

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Abstract

Let’s begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.Using media reports alone, the Cato Institute’s last annual study listed nearly seven thousand victims of police “misconduct” in the United States. But such stories of police brutality only scratch the surface of a national epidemic. Every year, tens of thousands are framed, blackmailed, beaten, sexually assaulted, or killed by cops. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on civil judgments and settlements annually. Individual lives, families, and communities are destroyed.In this extensively revised and updated edition of his seminal study of policing in the United States, Kristian Williams shows that police brutality isn’t an anomaly, but is built into the very meaning of law enforcement in the United States. From antebellum slave patrols to today’s unarmed youth being gunned down in the streets, “peace keepers” have always used force to shape behavior, repress dissent, and defend the powerful. Our Enemies in Blue is a well-researched page-turner that both makes historical sense of this legalized social pathology and maps out possible alternatives.Kristian Williams is the author of several books, including American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination. He co-edited Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Metadata

FirstAuthor:: Williams, Kristian
Title:: Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America ShortTitle:: Our Enemies in Blue Year:: 2015
Citekey:: williams_our_2015
itemType:: book
Publisher:: AK Press
ISBN:: 978-1-84935-216-1