ACAB — The ABCs of ACAB: An Introduction to Police Work

Between 2004 and 2015 the city of Chicago disappeared and interrogated more than 7,000 Black and Latino men in a CIA-style "black site" at a West Side warehouse in Homan Square. A South Side police commander named Jon Burge—acquitted in the 80s of torture charges going back to the 70s—personally participated in or approved the torture of at least 118 people in order to force false confessions.

The majority of arrestees (that the public knows of) were brought in from over 2.5 miles away—i.e., the entire city—and held anywhere from several hours to several days. Nearly 6,000 were Black, only 68 of which were allowed access to their attorneys. No contemporaneous public records of anyone's presence exists—no booking records, no means for attorneys to reach their clients. There are no official records whatsoever (including coroner's report) concerning the death of 44-year-old John Hubbard in an interview room.

And the result of those 7,000+ disappearances? 5,386 charges for drug possession, mostly marijuana and heroin.²³

In 2015 Mayor Rahm Emanuel (currently serving as Ambassador to Japan) lied in defense of the torture, denying the reporting on Homan Square as "not true. We follow all the rules… Everything's done by the books."²⁴

And while the initial reporting on Homan Square as a "CIA-style black site" is accurate, that does not mean Homan Square should be considered unique, neither an isolated nor an extreme example of city-wide violence "as routine as traffic lights."²⁵

Chicago and Cook County have paid roughly 00 million in Burge-related settlements and verdicts. In 2015 the city passed the first municipal reparations ordinance for police violence in U.S. history, paying $5.5 million to 57 surviving torture victims.⁷⁵

Handcuffs are the first tool of custody—the moment a police encounter becomes an arrest, and the moment a civilian loses the use of their hands. They are marketed as safety equipment: a way to restrain a dangerous person without shooting them. In practice, handcuffs are often the beginning of the killing, not an alternative to it.

An Associated Press investigation documented 1,036 deaths from 2012 through 2021 after police used force that was not supposed to be lethal. At least 740 of those deaths involved prone restraint—holding someone face-down, often with body weight, frequently after handcuffs were already applied. In about half of those cases, officers failed to turn the person over promptly after cuffing, or did so only after they stopped responding.⁹³⁹⁴

The danger is not mysterious. Medical examiners and coroners cited prone restraint, positional asphyxia, or asphyxia due to restraint as a cause or contributing factor in dozens of cases AP identified—and training to avoid it has existed for decades.⁹³ In roughly 440 deaths, officers violated multiple safety guidelines at once.⁹⁴ The restraint position police use every day becomes lethal when combined with body weight, stress, drugs, obesity, or simply the panic of being pinned with your face in the pavement and your hands behind your back.

Handcuffs do not stop the violence—they enable the next stage of it. George Floyd was already cuffed when Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes; Floyd said "I can't breathe" at least 27 times before he died.⁸⁵ Freddie Gray was shackled at the wrists and ankles and thrown into a police van without a seatbelt; he died of a spinal injury after a "rough ride."⁸² Kathryn Johnston was handcuffed by Atlanta police as she lay dying from 39 gunshot wounds in a no-knock raid on the wrong house.⁵⁸

Federal data on arrest-related deaths routinely undercount what happens after cuffs go on. The Death in Custody Reporting Act requires states to report deaths during arrest and detention, but reporting is uneven and prone restraint is not tracked as its own category—deaths are lumped under homicide, accident, or "natural causes" depending on who writes the report.⁹⁶ What we know from independent investigations is enough: the tool sold as a humane alternative to the gun is, very often, the last thing a person feels before they cannot breathe.

The London Metropolitan Police was modeled after England's experience occupying colonial Ireland. The US followed the same template, transferring systems developed in the occupation of the Philippines for use in the first state police in Pennsylvania (which was itself designed to use violence against striking miners that the local police were unwilling to do).

In occupied Puerto Rico a marine named Frank Thacher organized the Insular Police to protect US sugar interests, a famously harsh crop to work. Concerned about the harsh working conditions of his countrymen, a Harvard Law graduate named Pedro Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico to advocate for self-determination via national independence, and, following involvement in an island-wide sugar strike (that more than tripled cane workers' daily wages), attracted the attention of the FBI.

The US installed a new governor, Blanton Winship, and put Albizu Campos under 30 years of surveillance. Slaughter ensued.

In 1935 the Insular Police massacred a student rally (the Rio Peidra Massacre), Chief of Police E. Francis Riggs warning Albizu Campos that if he didn't stop, "there will be war to the death against all Puerto Ricans." Albizu Campos was arrested for conspiracy to overthrow the US government in 1936 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Then again on Palm Sunday, 1937, while marching in Albizu Campos' home city of Ponce to protest his arrest (as well as commemorate the abolition of slavery), 19 protestors were killed and 235 wounded when the Insular Police, unprovoked, opened fire with a machine gun. They shot fleeing protestors in the back and executed men in alleys, lied in court about who shot first despite photographic evidence, and faced no charges.

Finally, on October 30, 1950, Albizu Campos led the Nationalist Party in revolution against the occupying US. Independent republics were declared, precincts burned down, and the Insular Police bombed two towns to ruins. Albizu Campos was arrested and allegedly tortured to death with experimental radiation poisoning in the infamous pits of La Princesa, in San Juan.²⁶

Governor Winship went on to serve in World War II, where he developed the military tribunals responsible for prosecuting Nazis. Fluctuating between around 8,000 members and 17,000 members, the Puerto Rico Police Department is one of the largest in the US.

"Uncle Sam Watches as the Goddess of Liberty heralds the day of Freedom for Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines." (1898)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is violence work at the border of citizenship. Like the police, ICE does not exist to keep anyone safe; it exists to enforce the state monopoly on movement and to protect the controlled flow of labor and capital across a line drawn on a map. The people it targets are overwhelmingly workers.

ICE is a young agency. It was created in 2003 and folded into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security after September 11th—a reorganization that recast immigration as national security. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm has since carried out millions of deportations,⁵⁰ separating children from families in facilities where members of Congress have been denied entry.⁵²

Detention is the business model. Taxpayers spend about 33 per person per night in a traditional ICE facility; holding children in emergency tent cities in the desert costs about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴ The beds are operated by private contractors who bill by the head—the same perverse incentive that drives mass incarceration everywhere. Intercept reporting documented hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse in ICE detention;⁵¹⁵⁵ in Arizona, DHS opened investigations into abuse at migrant detention centers while senators were turned away at the door.⁵³

The cruelty is policy, not accident. The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention capacity—larger than the entire federal prison system budget—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴ Detention has surged past 56,000 people, the highest on record, including tent cities and converted warehouses; Florida's Everglades facility cycled 22,000 people through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰

Street-level enforcement has followed. In January 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, during an immigration sweep—captured on bystander and agent phone footage. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist"; county prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹ Children have died in custody. Adults have died in custody. The agency responds the way every police force does: passive voice, internal review, no charges.

ICE is what the police look like when the "community" they answer to is the nation-state and the "disorder" they are sent to correct is a human being who crossed a line to work. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police.

Jailing people constitutes a significant aspect of violence work, and one of its most expensive. It costs Californians about 90 a night to incarcerate someone. Most of that is labor cost, and that's after offloading most of the labor (cooking, laundry, cleaning, maintenance) to the incarcerated themselves—at compensation of 8-37 cents per hour.²⁷

The costs are steep. Every person in jail is someone who can't work or provide for a family. They're forced to spend what money they have access to on commissary junk food and JPay email "stamps," and then some of them are forced to pay jail itself; in 2013 Utah's Davis County collected almost $370,000 from prisoners through its "pay-to-stay" policy, and waived another $858,000 in exchange for prisoner labor (at the rate of 0 per day, representing 85,800 hours of labor).²⁸

It is no wonder, then, that incarceration itself is criminogenic: the more time people spend in jail, the more likely they are to offend again.²⁹ Yet at midyear 2024, 69% of people in jail had not been convicted—nor were awaiting sentence on a conviction—and the majority of charges are for non-violent, drug-related offenses.⁶⁹

And that's if you survive the experience.

Many don't. There were 1,200 deaths in local jails in 2019 alone. Suicide has been the leading single cause of jail deaths every year since 2000, and of the more than 6,200 people who died by suicide in a jail cell between 2000 and 2019, more than three-quarters had never been convicted of the charge they were held on.⁷⁶

Gregory Edwards was arrested for a PTSD-related episode in a Wal-Mart. He was taken in by 7 deputies, beaten, sprayed with a chemical agent, strapped into a restraint chair with a "spit hood" on, and left unconscious; he died within 24 hours. A Naperville, Illinois-native named Sandra Bland was arrested from her car in Texas and found dead in a Waller County jail cell three days later. The state claims it was a suicide, but family maintains suspicions that she was killed.

In either case, it was jail that killed her.

Though culturally connected to the Cuban Bloodhounds trained by slavers in the antebellum US to pursue escaping enslaved people, the police dog as we know it today is a 20th-century phenomenon, tested for the first time around 1900 in New York City and widely popularized during the Civil Rights movement, such as with the use of "Canine Corps" against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham.

In addition to being psychologically traumatizing, dog attacks are nearly impossible to control, deeply painful, and often disfiguring. In the "use-of-force continuum" they're considered an "impact weapon," like a club, and, despite the fact that once the handler releases them it's almost impossible to stop a canine from killing a target should it choose to do so, courts have determined that intent of the handler is more important than what actually occurs—and therefore canines are not deadly weapons.

"Bite and hold" training teaches canines to attack the closest human being they can get hold of other than their handler, from women taking out the garbage in St. Paul to toddlers in cars in Nevada to fellow deputies in Georgia (in which case the dog gets shot, too). And it's not typically easy to convert a domesticated animal into an impact weapon; it takes prong collars, choke chains, and what's known as "testicular submission." Police have been caught on camera strangling and whipping dogs with their own leashes, and they routinely shoot their four-legged "partners" in the so-called line of duty.

American police dogs send an estimated 3,661 people to emergency rooms every year, and medical studies find K9 bites are categorically worse than ordinary dog bites—multiple wounds, more operations, longer hospital stays.⁷⁷ The training works as designed. When Los Angeles was forced to switch from "find and bite" to "bark and hold" in 1992, bites dropped from 639 in the preceding four years to 66 in the following four.⁷⁸

K9 units are abuses of both animal and human rights. They are also effective police propaganda; a company called Hero Industries, proudly affiliated with the FOP, sells departmental-customized "Hero K9" dolls for departments to give to children. Meanwhile, 25-500 family dogs (estimates vary—no one really knows) are shot to death by police every day.

The police are professional liars. They're trained in the art of "investigative lies" to say whatever it takes to make an arrest and extract a confession, with the full backing of the courts. Police would lose a majority of cases if they were not.

They don't have to tell you if they're police. They don't have to follow up on any promises they might make, nor even admit later on that they ever made any. They can lie about having your fingerprints. They can steal your DNA. They can administer fake polygraph/chemical tests and lie about the results. They can lie about having witnesses, they can lie about recording you, and they can lie about having confessions. They can lie about consequences, they can lie about helping you, and they can ignore your request for a lawyer under false pretenses.³⁰

And those are just the over-the-table, by-the-book, court-enshrined laws.

They will also lie to the court. There is the famous "blue wall of silence," the lies of perjury and omission told by police to protect other police under investigation. But they also famously lie on their reports, which then become the media's reports. When Ahmaud Arbery was arrested in a park, his entire body standing clearly outside of his car, the police reported that he "did not take his hands out of the vehicle." The report on Elijah Tufono's beating-by-police in Sacramento never mentioned any beating. The incident report for the murder of Breonna Taylor, shot at least 8 times in her bed, lists her injuries as "none."³¹

Of course if you "provide false information or documentation" to the police, you will be arrested.

"Militarization" is a misleading term because it suggests a distinction between the police and the military that was never tangible in the first place. Early state police were directly modeled after the counter-revolutionary Philippine Constabulary. Two of its most influential architects, August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson, were both military, and today every fifth officer is a veteran. They wore blue uniforms because they inherited postwar Union Army surplus.

As a domestic military, America's 920,000+ police outnumber the standing armies of Brazil 2:1, Germany 4:1, and Canada 11:1. They've used chemical weapons and armored war machines on civilians since tear gas was developed in 1919, but the trend has accelerated. The 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act gave police access to military bases and equipment; four years later police dropped a bomb on a neighborhood in West Philadelphia.³² 1997's National Defense Authorization Act created the "1033 program," transferring over $8.4 billion in surplus aircraft, watercraft, armored vehicles, grenade launchers, bayonets, and other armaments to at least 8,000 agencies (out of about 18,000 total).⁶⁷ The Department of Homeland Security has been equipping local police with LRADs—sound cannons—for almost 20 years.

If there is a significant difference between the actual military and the local police, it is that, between the two, the police have the loosest "rules of engagement." And unlike police, soldiers have neither qualified immunity nor an FOP to protect them.

After eight officers were caught assaulting Rodney King on handheld camera in 1991 (and were subsequently acquitted by a mostly white jury), it came to light that the Los Angeles justice system routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to cases involving Black men: "No Humans Involved."³³

The term was also used—like "misdemeanor murder"—to refer to the murder of sex workers.

"I haven't beat anyone this bad in a long time," joked police over official channels. "I'm sure the lizard didn't deserve it… HAHA."

"Shoot him twice for me," said another. "Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife."³⁴

The dehumanizing language of police work is not limited to individual police. It is not even limited to policing's role in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors for death-penalty cases against Black defendants in Georgia labeled prospective white jurors as "W" and prospective Black jurors as "N," describing the latter as "slow," "fat," "con-artist," etc. in order to stack the jury.³⁵ In 1989 the New York Times called the Central Park Five, falsely imprisoned for assaulting a woman, a "roving wolf pack." New York City settled with the five men for $41 million in 2014—roughly a million dollars per year of wrongful imprisonment—while admitting no wrongdoing.⁷⁹

And the result of this dehumanization is violence. As Sylvia Wynter writes: "The social effects to which this acronym, and its placing outside the 'sanctified universe of obligation,' of the category of young Black males to which it refers, leads, whilst not overtly genocidal, are clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal, and everyday means."

No community-based oversight committee in the United States has the authority to terminate or even discipline a police officer; reformist groups like Campaign Zero don't even call for it.

Oversight as-is doesn't start until a citizen initiates a formal complaint, in a system controlled by the police—and designed to be as frictive and intimidating as possible.

When civil advocates in Minneapolis tested the complaint system they were told untruths like you must file in the precinct the incident occurred in (you don't) or the printer was out of ink (it wasn't).

CBS4 in South Florida was unable to get hold of a complaint form whatsoever, and their lead investigator was repeatedly harassed, arrested, and even hospitalized. "Might not be a legitimate complaint," police will say. "Do you have an ID on you? Are you on any medications?"

To file a complaint in Chicago you need a signed affidavit, you need to disclose your full identity, and you need to disclose yourself to the officer involved before they can be questioned; about half of all allegations of misconduct are thrown away. City contracts literally prevent departments from promoting or otherwise recognizing officers who report misconduct of other officers.

And that's if you can identify the police in the first place, who are often less eager to disclose their identities than citizens are—a safety vest innocently covering a name badge, sunglasses on top of a face mask.

What does the absence of real oversight cost? The Washington Post documented nearly 40,000 misconduct payments at just 25 of the nation's largest departments between 2010 and 2020—more than $3.2 billion, paid by taxpayers. Nearly half of that money (.5 billion) went to claims involving the more than 7,600 officers who had been the subject of multiple payouts; over 1,200 officers had been the subject of at least five.⁸⁰

Both the apparent need for oversight and the failure to actually practice it demonstrate a fundamental dysfunction of police work.

One would be forgiven for thinking PredPol was short for "predatory policing," for it means almost the same thing: predictive policing.

Constitutionally, policing must be reactionary. This is a limitation of the system, similar to the logic of a high noon duel: if you draw first, you're the aggressor. Shoot first, but draw second. Police consider this constitutional limitation to be a bug, not a feature. Companies like the CIA-backed Geolitica—formerly called PredPol—promise to find a way around it. Operating under the belief that criminal activity follows the same natural patterns as both seismic activity (a series of crimes and smaller "aftercrimes") and epidemiology (crime is a "virus" whose "contagion" can be mapped), Geolitica sells "location-based proactive policing" technology to triangulate crime type, location, and time into so-called "hot spots," red grids on an interactive mobile map—the visible infection of potential future-crimes, to which police are supposed to devote 6 minutes an hour physically occupying.³⁶

Yet we know this data is corrupted. Chicago's predictive policing technology, in use since at least 2012, has been shown to use data "sullied by years of unconstitutional and racially biased stops, searches, and arrests" to determine the distribution of police resources. An unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy creates a dataset targeting Black men for marijuana at 5x the rate white men are targeted, even though usage rates are the same for both groups. A third-party black-box software extrapolates these arrests into a geographical "contagion" map that redistributes and concentrates police forces to arrest more Black men for weed while white people are left off the map entirely, literally magnifying racism. Lifetime likelihood of incarceration for Black men born in 2001: 1 in 3.

And it doesn't even work. When The Markup analyzed 23,631 Geolitica predictions generated for Plainfield, New Jersey in 2018, fewer than 100 lined up with a reported crime—a success rate under half a percent. Burglary predictions succeeded 0.1% of the time.⁸¹ "I don't believe we really used it that often, if at all," the department's captain admitted. "That's why we ended up getting rid of it."

Quotes will always exist. "It just means we can't put a definite number," explains one police. "But it doesn't mean we can't tell them to write more."³⁷

These quotas define crime rates, which in turn define future policing, which in turn defines crime rates. Career success depends on it. Police who refuse to fill these unofficial quotas are given undesirable posts, see their overtime hours cut, and are passed over for promotions. The result is a chain of negative utility for the citizens subjected to these systems.

Consider the following chain of events:

1. A Black man rides a bicycle without a helmet in New York City
2. He receives a "broken windows" civil summons to help a police reach their number
3. He can't afford to pay it immediately and his license is suspended
4. He drives to work anyway and is arrested for driving on a suspended license
5. New Yorkers spend more than ,500 a day to incarcerate him³⁸

Who benefits?

Small town police departments have added financial incentives. Fines and forfeitures account for over 10% of general fund revenues for nearly 600 jurisdictions. 51% of Palmer, Texas' .2 million budget comes from ticket and fine revenue. Buckholts, a town of 520 people, levied 82,569 (73% of the town's budget) in fines in 2018, or about $350 per resident. The town of Estelline collected a stunning $3,580 per resident, or enough to buy every resident a hot tub.³⁹

As a result, it is true, ticket writing coincides with departmental targets, seeing surges of at certain times of the month.⁴⁰

25-year-old Freddie Gray was walking through Baltimore one morning when an officer conducting "enhanced drug enforcement" caught his eye. Gray turned around and the officer chased, slamming his face into the asphalt and tying him up in a painful hold known as a "leg lace." Witnesses report that he had already stopped moving by the time Officer Caesar Goodson, a "good officer, a gentle man, a nice guy," dragged Gray face-first into the back of a white van.

During the ensuing 44-minute van ride the police blew through stop signs, took turns wide enough to cross lane boundaries, and repeatedly slammed their brakes. They made several stops, including at a grocery store and to take on a second victim, and by the time they arrived at the West District station Gray was in a coma, his spine severed from a "high-energy" impact (akin to diving in a shallow pool). He was charged with possessing an illegal switchblade (he wasn't) and, a week later, pronounced dead. Six officers were charged in his death; six officers were acquitted.⁴¹

In Baltimore it's known as a "rough ride." Philadelphia police call it a "nickle ride," as cheap as a 5-cent carnival ticket. Saskatchewan has the brutal "starlight tour," where Indigenous men are left to freeze in the hostile Canadian winter at night. "Screen tests" refer to slamming the victim against the metal barriers inside the van. Or, as the Mollen Commission described it, a police "bonding ritual." It happened to Christine Abbott in 2012. Dondi Johnson Sr. became quadriplegic after he was picked up for urinating in public in 2005. James McKenna broke his neck in Philadelphia in 2011, where the Philadelphia Inquirer documented 20 related injuries.

Baltimore paid Gray's family $6.4 million—more than the city had paid for all 102 police misconduct judgments and settlements combined over the preceding four years.⁸²

New York used to call gay bars "disorderly houses" (linking, like William Bratton, disorder with crime), allowing police to raid them. In 1966 a Genovese mobster named Fat Tony bought a failing straight bar called the Stonewall Inn and converted it into the hottest "disorderly house" in Greenwich Village.

Fat Tony made more money blackmailing closeted Wall Street financiers for negotiable bonds than he did selling drinks—enough money to pay the NYPD's Sixth Precinct ,200 a month to look the other way. But maybe he missed a payment, or maybe the police simply went back on their word, because at 1:20 a.m. on a Saturday in 1969's "Summer of Love" seven police barred the doors of the club and announced: "Police! We're taking the place!'

The 3-hour anti-police insurgency that followed—led by queer and transgender people of color, like the famous Marsha P. Johnson—was not the first violent confrontation between the queer community and the police (see Cooper's Donut Riots in 1959, Compton's Cafeteria Riot in 1966, or the Black Cat Riot of 1967), but it was the Black Panther-inspired methods of the Stonewall siege—trash can fires, overturned cars, power chants—that decidedly positioned gay rights as a national issue, giving rise to the gay rights movement.

The history of the Stonewall Uprising is one of the reasons why police have no place at Pride; Pride was a riot.

On June 12, 2020, after stealing an already-spent Taser and trying to flee, Rayshard Brooks was shot twice in the back in a Wendy's parking lot. Police apologists argue that the shooting was justified because Brooks, by pointing the spent Taser at an officer, tried to use "deadly force." Is that accurate?

If yes, then the initial officer should never have drawn and discharged their Taser on Brooks in the first place.

If no, then the officer should never have drawn their guns and shot Brooks in the back.

Physicist Jack Cover invented the Taser following the Watts Rebellion of 1965. It's an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle," after a sci-fi novel where a boy named Tom Swift rampages through Africa with an electric gun. Tasers are capable of delivering 50,000 volts of electricity from about 10 feet away, about as much power as a high-tension transmission line. Nicknamed "cattle prods," that's exactly what they replace: the police have been electrocuting citizens with cattle prods since at least the 1940s, from civil rights protests in Alabama to Jon Burge's interrogations at Homan Square.

Declared a tool of torture by the UN in 2007, Tasers are favored in the US as "less-lethal," a category of wordplay contingent on additional wordplay. Reuters documented at least 1,081 U.S. deaths following police Taser use through 2018—in nine of every ten cases the person was unarmed, and a quarter were in mental health crisis.⁸³ When people die from being tased the police will attribute the death to a pre-existing syndrome called "Excited Delirium Syndrome." Essentially, the only people who die from being tased are people who have the condition of dying from being tased.

19-year-old Jaylin Hughes was caught smoking pot in his Georgia apartment complex and, like most white teenagers caught in the same situation, decided to make a run for it. The police, unrepentant and dangerous predators, chased him into a corner, and when they caught him jumping a tall fence they shot him with a Taser and, losing control of his body, he severed his spinal cord when he fell back to the ground. He was charged with obstruction of justice and possession of marijuana, and today he is paralyzed from the shoulders down.⁴²

Black people are killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white people per capita.⁶⁵ In the 100 largest U.S. cities, 41% of people police killed while unarmed were Black—despite Black residents making up 19% of those cities' populations.⁶⁸

And that's if you can believe the official reports. A comatose Freddie Gray was charged as armed with an illegal switchblade for possessing something that was 1) not illegal, 2) not a switchblade, and 3) not discovered on his body until after his assault. A mentally ill man named James Boyd was "armed" with two rusty pocketknives when Albuquerque police used stun grenades, Taser shotguns, beanbag guns, and K9s against him, and then shot him three times in the back after he'd surrendered.

Police advocates will point to the population of gun-owners in the United States as the reason police must also be armed; they are dealing with an armed populace. But if one believes that the citizenry is armed, and that being armed is reason enough to be fired upon, then one concedes that the police have the right to execute any potential citizen. This enforces a feedback loop where everyone becomes an enemy, and thus everything in their hands becomes an armament—bicycle chains, sticks, Tamir Rice's toy gun. All Daniel Shaver did was reach towards his waistband and the police felt justified in executing him.

And then there are bodies themselves that are considered armaments. Darren Wilson's testimony in the murder of Michael Brown, for which Wilson was never charged, suggests Black men are by definition armed: "He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked."⁴³

Researchers find fewer than 2% of on-duty fatal shootings result in murder or manslaughter charges; of the 204 officers charged from 2005 through 2024, only 64 were convicted.¹¹

Police are violence workers.

That doesn't mean commit violence is all they do; violence may even occupy a statistically insignificant amount of their daily duties. But it means that violence is their essential function in society.

Though a century of reform has seen society layer additional responsibilities on the police, their essential duty—essential to their ability to protect the controlled movement of capital—is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence. They are empowered by the state to tackle us, punch us, bind us, digitally rape us, dose us, abduct us, and eventually shoot us in order to secure completely bodily submission. That is what they, specifically, do; everything else is PR and fundraising.

What is the place of violence work outside of protecting capital? Interpersonal violence begets violence. It is self-fulfilling; resisting the threat of police violence will guarantee that the police are violent with you, as with the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling (Graham v. Connor) that the police may use force against any resistance to arrest. Both statistically and narratively, the presence of a gun dramatically increases the odds of fatal injury. Why, then, must traffic police be armed, unless we want traffic violations to be violent occasions? Why do we have police in schools, bringing guns to fistfights? Police do not prevent violence—they commit it, and encourage their victims to commit it in self-defense.

The majority of police commute to work—they live outside the communities they patrol.⁴⁴ Armed outsiders assigned by the state to occupy and control poor and non-white neighborhoods with the constant application of violence.

In 1975 two men broke into a rooming house and assaulted a resident, whose screams alerted neighbors Warren and Taliaferro. Warren and Taliaferro hid in their room and called the police. Five minutes later the police showed up, knocked, received no answer, and left.

So Warren and Taliaferro placed a second call to 911. Unbeknownst to Warren and Taliaferro this second call was never even dispatched. Believing that the police had returned they came out of hiding and called out to the victim, which alerted the invader to their presence. He held all three women captive at knifepoint and abused them for hours.

The police never showed up.

All three women sued the Metropolitan Police Department for failing to follow procedure with the proper degree of urgency, including failure to dispatch, but the trial court dismissed the complaints, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal by holding "the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen; the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."⁴⁵

2005: Castle Rock vs. Gonzales holds that the police can't be sued for failing to enforce restraining orders.

2011: The NYPD conduct a manhunt on a knife-wielding murderer named Maksim Gelman. When Gelman attempts to enter the cab of a subway train where an officer named Terrence Howell is trying to hide, Howell locks the door and turns his back. A citizen named Joseph Lozito confronts and subdues Gelman instead, sustaining multiple stab wounds in his back and neck. On the police report Howell claims to have tackled Gelman himself, but then admits to a juror that he hid because he thought Gelman had a gun. Lozito sues (Lozito vs. New York City) and the suit is tossed out; the police had "no special duty" to protect Lozito or anyone else on the train that day. "Under well-established law, the police are not liable for such incidents," said a city lawyer.⁴⁶

2018: Sergeant Brian Miller hides behind his car while shots ring out at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed and 17 more injured. Miller is subsequently fired, his firing is ruled unconstitutional, and he is reinstated.

Through decades of reform the courts have consistently ruled that the LAPD's famous motto "To Protect and Serve" is nothing more than a legally non-binding slogan. The police have no obligation to help you—and the data suggest they rarely do: most violent victimizations are never reported to police,⁷⁰ and most reported violent crimes are never solved.⁵

In every state except California, however, it remains illegal to not help the police upon command—a charge called "refusing to assist a police officer."

In 1838 the city of Boston organized America's first police department as a response to the Battle of Broad Street, to control the "Irish problem," i.e., the influx of Irish-Catholic laborers fleeing English genocide.⁴⁷ 160 years later the NYPD's "intelligence division" tracked Muslim students across the country, monitoring emails, forums, and social media, even sending an undercover agent on a City College rafting trip.⁴⁸

Policing has always been about othering, and not just in international terms. The so-called "border zone" that defines the jurisdiction of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP—one of the world's largest police agencies, with more than 20,000 police and a budget of over 8 billion) includes everyone within 100 miles of any border—putting about 2 out of every 3 citizens under their jurisdiction.⁴⁹

Since 2002 the CBP has been part of the Department of Homeland Security, a police force created by George W. Bush that is now the third largest Cabinet department. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created at the same time, which has since performed "Enforcement and Removal Operations" on millions of people⁵⁰—separating children from families, torturing them, and sexually abusing them⁵¹ in facilities that not even state representatives are allowed to see the inside of.⁵² The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention centers—a detention budget larger than the entire federal prison system—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴

In 2020 these facilities were so crowded that Congress passed billions in emergency funding to erect soft-sided tent cities in the middle of the desert such as those in Yuma, Arizona, where dozens of children were sexually assaulted.⁵³ To pay for all this, taxpayers spend about 33 to lock someone in a traditional ICE facility; locking children away in tents in some of North America's harshest environments costs us about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴

Of over 1,200 sexual assault complaints while in immigration custody, only 2% have been investigated.⁵⁵

Detention has surged past 56,000—the highest since records began—with tent cities, converted warehouses, and Florida's Everglades facility "Alligator Alcatraz," where 22,000 people were cycled through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰ ICE agents now conduct street-level enforcement in American cities; in January 2026, agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, as she sat in her vehicle during an immigration sweep.⁸⁹

George Floyd (1973–May 25, 2020) was handcuffed face-down on a Minneapolis street while officer Derek Chauvin pressed a knee into his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd pleaded "I can't breathe" at least 27 times. Chauvin was convicted of murder; the city paid Floyd's family 7 million. His death sparked the largest protest movement in U.S. history.⁸⁵

Breonna Taylor (1993–March 13, 2020) was asleep in her Louisville apartment when police executed a no-knock warrant at midnight, firing 32 shots. Taylor was struck six times and died in her hallway. No officer was charged in her death. The city settled for 2 million.⁸⁶

Tyre Nichols (1993–January 10, 2023) was beaten for three minutes by Memphis Scorpion unit officers after a traffic stop a block from his home. He died three days later of blunt-force trauma. Five officers were fired; three were acquitted of state murder in 2025, though federal civil-rights convictions followed. The DOJ found Memphis PD "regularly used excessive force against Black residents."⁸⁷

Sonya Massey (1993–July 6, 2024) called 911 about a prowler outside her Springfield, Illinois home. Sangamon County deputy Sean Grayson entered her kitchen and shot her in the face after she moved a pot of water off the stove. Body camera footage shows Massey ducking and apologizing seconds before the shots. Grayson was convicted of first-degree murder in 2025; the county paid her family 0 million.⁸⁸

Renee Good (1988–January 7, 2026) was a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis when ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot her during a street-level immigration sweep. Bystanders and Ross's own phone footage captured the encounter; Good was in her vehicle. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist." Hennepin County prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹

Yassin Mohamed (1973–May 9, 2020) was walking down a rural road in Georgia around midnight on May 9, 2020 when someone called the Evans County sheriff. Police had been hassling him all night and he'd already been hospitalized once for mental health concerns. An "altercation ensued" when two officers attempted to "make contact," and Mohamed allegedly threw a rock at one of the officers before charging with a "larger rock." The officer, sustaining no injuries, shot Mohamed, who died at the scene. It was the 38th police shooting investigated this year by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; within a month they'd opened their 50th.⁵⁶

Pest control specialist Daniel Shaver (1990–January 18, 2016) was showing off the pellet gun that he used to exterminate birds in grocery stores to his friends in his room at the Mesa, Arizona La Quinta when someone called the police to report a rifle in the window. Six police surrounded the room. They yelled contradictory commands to a prone, sobbing Shaver. As he tried to crawl towards the police his waistband slipped and, when he reached to pull it up, 26-year-old Philip Brailsford shot Shaver five times with his AR-15 (engraved with "you're fucked" and "molon labe"), murdering him instantly. According to Brailsford, Shaver was "trying to gain a position of advantage in order to gain a better firing position on us;" he was fired, charged, acquitted, reinstated, compensated for PTSD, and allowed to retire on a pension of ,500 per month, or .5 million over the course of a lifetime. He currently works in a steel mill.⁵⁷

Plainclothed police cut off the burglar bars and broke down the door of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston's Atlanta home in a no-knock drug raid on the wrong house. Johnston (1914–November 21, 2006) fired a single shot from a rusty revolver over the heads of the police, injuring no one; the police fired 39 shots back, killing Johnston and injuring three of their own members. The police handcuffed Johnston as she was dying and planted three bags of weed in the house. They called an informant and had him say that he'd bought crack cocaine at Johnston's house to justify the raid occurring in the first place.⁵⁸

Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal (1998–May 23, 2020) was shot 20 times in the back at close range as he tried to flee from the Salt Lake City police. The police yelled "drop it" five times and "show us your fucking hands" to his dead body, which lay motionless on the ground. Mayor Erin Mendenhall said that video of the incident "disturbed and upset" her as a mother, but after weeks of protests, write-ins, and call-ins demanding at least $30 million in defunding and the arrest of Palacios-Carbajal's killers, Salt Lake City approved Mendenhall's proposed $84 million police budget, million more than last year. This money includes $322,800 for "training" and $687,000 to equip every police with a camera, with "data," and a Taser.⁵⁹

At 12:40 am on a Sunday in 2010 Joe Weekley of the Detroit PD Special Response Team fired a flash grenade through the front window of an East Side duplex, stormed his way in behind a ballistic riot shield, and then shot 7-year-old Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones (2002–May 16, 2010) in the head. Weekley claimed that it was actually Stanley-Jones' grandmother, Mertilla Jones, who killed the girl when she tried to slap the MP5 submachine gun out of Weekley's hands, but tests for her fingerprints on the gun came up negative. After two failed trials against him, Weekley cannot be tried a third time.⁶⁰

After leading them on a slow, meandering 4-mile "chase" in her flattened Buick Century, waitress and mother-of-2 Caroline Small (1975–June 18, 2010) was shot eight times in the face through her front windshield by two Glynn County, Georgia police. "I hit her right in the face, right on the bridge of the nose," they bragged. "Her head exploded." They went on to tell a jury that they'd feared for their lives because Small was using her car as a "deadly weapon," although dashcam footage shows that Small was motionless and boxed-in at the time. Small lost consciousness from her bullet wounds and died a week later. Local news ran the headline: "Woman shot trying to run down police."

A grand jury found the shooting justified, Small's family's federal civil rights lawsuit against the police was thrown out on two occasions, and both of the police that killed her are still working.⁶¹

James Boyd (1975–March 16, 2014) was sleeping alone in Albuquerque's Sandia foothills with two rusty pocketknives on him when 19 police surrounded him and demanded his surrender. James eventually complied, promising (after hours of harassment) to go with the police shortly after sunset, but as he bent over to pick up his belongings the police deployed a flash-bang grenade, a Taser shotgun, multiple beanbags, and a K9 unit. The K9 grabbed Boyd's bag and brought it back to its handler, who then ordered the K9 to return to Boyd—while yet another police shot him three times in the back. Boyd begged for his life as the dog chewed his calf off. He was dead by morning.

Nobody faced any consequences. It was the 47th APD shooting, and 32nd death, in 5 years. Despite increased funding for "training," New Mexico has the highest rate of police killings per capita, including 9 people in Albuquerque in 2018.

Few details are known about the murder of Tony McDade (1982–May 27, 2020) by police in Tallahassee, Florida. But according to the Human Rights Campaign, McDade was the twelfth transgender or gender non-conforming person to be shot or killed in 2020.

And because of laws meant to protect victims' privacy, the public still doesn't know who shot him—because the shooter is being considered a victim.⁶²

In 2018 Sean Bostwick was fired from the Detroit Police Department for posting a uniformed selfie on Snapchat with the following caption: "Another night to Rangel up these zoo animals"⁶³

Presumably he meant "wrangle," which the Oxford English Dictionary takes to mean "round up, herd, or take charge of livestock."

Such language isn't new. Nazis famously portrayed Jewish people as pests, normalizing associations that lead directly into the holocaust. American slavers depicted Black people as apes. Protestors in Hong Kong today are even called cockroaches. Nor is such language ineffective. Modern studies show that US citizens implicitly associated Black people with apes, which primes us to tolerate more violent policing actions when it comes to Black suspects. Comparing women to animals of prey spikes a sense of hostile sexism, and woman/animal associations have been strongly correlated with sexual harassment and assault.

The language of racist policing alters every police interaction, and it can escalate even the most routine traffic stops the moment an officer speaks. Research from Stanford indicates that police address white and Black people differently at traffic stops.⁶⁴ White victims receive apologies, full names and proper titles, gentle reassurances, and expressions of gratitude from the police. Black victims receive commands, first names and casual titles, and sharp questioning. If one believes that rhetoric has any real-world effect (which the police, with their so-called "attitude test," do), then one must concede that the police are more than predisposed to escalation via the language they use—that the language itself constitutes an escalation.

Especially with a word like "wrangle," which connotes either an exotic other—the zoo—or to livestock. The latter is part of a historical commitment to chattel slavery, in which not just one human is enslaved as property, but all of their descendants. Combined with the "one drop rule," wherein just "one drop" of color made a person legally Black, this incentivized systematic raping of enslaved women by both enslaved men and the slavers themselves, who controlled and profited from it all. Chattel conditions were bad enough that enslaved Black people routinely tried to rebel or run away, which is where the South's first organized police force comes from: the slavecatchers of the 18th and 19th century.

These proto-police, charged simply with "controlling the movements and behaviors of enslaved populations," could enter any property suspected of housing escapees and shoot any Black person. Louisiana privatized its state penitentiary in 1844 as a textile factory, and four years later decreed that all Black children born to parents serving life sentences would become state property. After the 13th amendment passed in 1865 the enslaved labor of Black men was moved from private plantations to public prisons (many of which, like Mississippi's Parchman Farm, were literal plantations) to manufacture things like military helmets and police uniforms, although in 1979 the US gave a little of that enslaved labor back to private hands: the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program permitted US companies to use prison labor, which most major corporations take advantage of either themselves or through subcontractors, including McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, and Verizon. Inmates in private prisons earn $0.12-0.40 per hour under optimal conditions; when overcrowding occurs, they're capped at $5.25 a month.

That is what police like Sean Bostwick are "wrangling" up: the forced labor that produces our war supplies, police gear, fast food, underwear, and coffee cups. They are wrangling capital.

Between 2004 and 2015 the city of Chicago disappeared and interrogated more than 7,000 Black and Latino men in a CIA-style "black site" at a West Side warehouse in Homan Square. A South Side police commander named Jon Burge—acquitted in the 80s of torture charges going back to the 70s—personally participated in or approved the torture of at least 118 people in order to force false confessions.

The majority of arrestees (that the public knows of) were brought in from over 2.5 miles away—i.e., the entire city—and held anywhere from several hours to several days. Nearly 6,000 were Black, only 68 of which were allowed access to their attorneys. No contemporaneous public records of anyone's presence exists—no booking records, no means for attorneys to reach their clients. There are no official records whatsoever (including coroner's report) concerning the death of 44-year-old John Hubbard in an interview room.

And the result of those 7,000+ disappearances? 5,386 charges for drug possession, mostly marijuana and heroin.²³

In 2015 Mayor Rahm Emanuel (currently serving as Ambassador to Japan) lied in defense of the torture, denying the reporting on Homan Square as "not true. We follow all the rules… Everything's done by the books."²⁴

And while the initial reporting on Homan Square as a "CIA-style black site" is accurate, that does not mean Homan Square should be considered unique, neither an isolated nor an extreme example of city-wide violence "as routine as traffic lights."²⁵

Chicago and Cook County have paid roughly 00 million in Burge-related settlements and verdicts. In 2015 the city passed the first municipal reparations ordinance for police violence in U.S. history, paying $5.5 million to 57 surviving torture victims.⁷⁵

Handcuffs are the first tool of custody—the moment a police encounter becomes an arrest, and the moment a civilian loses the use of their hands. They are marketed as safety equipment: a way to restrain a dangerous person without shooting them. In practice, handcuffs are often the beginning of the killing, not an alternative to it.

An Associated Press investigation documented 1,036 deaths from 2012 through 2021 after police used force that was not supposed to be lethal. At least 740 of those deaths involved prone restraint—holding someone face-down, often with body weight, frequently after handcuffs were already applied. In about half of those cases, officers failed to turn the person over promptly after cuffing, or did so only after they stopped responding.⁹³⁹⁴

The danger is not mysterious. Medical examiners and coroners cited prone restraint, positional asphyxia, or asphyxia due to restraint as a cause or contributing factor in dozens of cases AP identified—and training to avoid it has existed for decades.⁹³ In roughly 440 deaths, officers violated multiple safety guidelines at once.⁹⁴ The restraint position police use every day becomes lethal when combined with body weight, stress, drugs, obesity, or simply the panic of being pinned with your face in the pavement and your hands behind your back.

Handcuffs do not stop the violence—they enable the next stage of it. George Floyd was already cuffed when Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes; Floyd said "I can't breathe" at least 27 times before he died.⁸⁵ Freddie Gray was shackled at the wrists and ankles and thrown into a police van without a seatbelt; he died of a spinal injury after a "rough ride."⁸² Kathryn Johnston was handcuffed by Atlanta police as she lay dying from 39 gunshot wounds in a no-knock raid on the wrong house.⁵⁸

Federal data on arrest-related deaths routinely undercount what happens after cuffs go on. The Death in Custody Reporting Act requires states to report deaths during arrest and detention, but reporting is uneven and prone restraint is not tracked as its own category—deaths are lumped under homicide, accident, or "natural causes" depending on who writes the report.⁹⁶ What we know from independent investigations is enough: the tool sold as a humane alternative to the gun is, very often, the last thing a person feels before they cannot breathe.

The London Metropolitan Police was modeled after England's experience occupying colonial Ireland. The US followed the same template, transferring systems developed in the occupation of the Philippines for use in the first state police in Pennsylvania (which was itself designed to use violence against striking miners that the local police were unwilling to do).

In occupied Puerto Rico a marine named Frank Thacher organized the Insular Police to protect US sugar interests, a famously harsh crop to work. Concerned about the harsh working conditions of his countrymen, a Harvard Law graduate named Pedro Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico to advocate for self-determination via national independence, and, following involvement in an island-wide sugar strike (that more than tripled cane workers' daily wages), attracted the attention of the FBI.

The US installed a new governor, Blanton Winship, and put Albizu Campos under 30 years of surveillance. Slaughter ensued.

In 1935 the Insular Police massacred a student rally (the Rio Peidra Massacre), Chief of Police E. Francis Riggs warning Albizu Campos that if he didn't stop, "there will be war to the death against all Puerto Ricans." Albizu Campos was arrested for conspiracy to overthrow the US government in 1936 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Then again on Palm Sunday, 1937, while marching in Albizu Campos' home city of Ponce to protest his arrest (as well as commemorate the abolition of slavery), 19 protestors were killed and 235 wounded when the Insular Police, unprovoked, opened fire with a machine gun. They shot fleeing protestors in the back and executed men in alleys, lied in court about who shot first despite photographic evidence, and faced no charges.

Finally, on October 30, 1950, Albizu Campos led the Nationalist Party in revolution against the occupying US. Independent republics were declared, precincts burned down, and the Insular Police bombed two towns to ruins. Albizu Campos was arrested and allegedly tortured to death with experimental radiation poisoning in the infamous pits of La Princesa, in San Juan.²⁶

Governor Winship went on to serve in World War II, where he developed the military tribunals responsible for prosecuting Nazis. Fluctuating between around 8,000 members and 17,000 members, the Puerto Rico Police Department is one of the largest in the US.

"Uncle Sam Watches as the Goddess of Liberty heralds the day of Freedom for Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines." (1898)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is violence work at the border of citizenship. Like the police, ICE does not exist to keep anyone safe; it exists to enforce the state monopoly on movement and to protect the controlled flow of labor and capital across a line drawn on a map. The people it targets are overwhelmingly workers.

ICE is a young agency. It was created in 2003 and folded into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security after September 11th—a reorganization that recast immigration as national security. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm has since carried out millions of deportations,⁵⁰ separating children from families in facilities where members of Congress have been denied entry.⁵²

Detention is the business model. Taxpayers spend about 33 per person per night in a traditional ICE facility; holding children in emergency tent cities in the desert costs about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴ The beds are operated by private contractors who bill by the head—the same perverse incentive that drives mass incarceration everywhere. Intercept reporting documented hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse in ICE detention;⁵¹⁵⁵ in Arizona, DHS opened investigations into abuse at migrant detention centers while senators were turned away at the door.⁵³

The cruelty is policy, not accident. The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention capacity—larger than the entire federal prison system budget—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴ Detention has surged past 56,000 people, the highest on record, including tent cities and converted warehouses; Florida's Everglades facility cycled 22,000 people through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰

Street-level enforcement has followed. In January 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, during an immigration sweep—captured on bystander and agent phone footage. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist"; county prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹ Children have died in custody. Adults have died in custody. The agency responds the way every police force does: passive voice, internal review, no charges.

ICE is what the police look like when the "community" they answer to is the nation-state and the "disorder" they are sent to correct is a human being who crossed a line to work. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police.

Jailing people constitutes a significant aspect of violence work, and one of its most expensive. It costs Californians about 90 a night to incarcerate someone. Most of that is labor cost, and that's after offloading most of the labor (cooking, laundry, cleaning, maintenance) to the incarcerated themselves—at compensation of 8-37 cents per hour.²⁷

The costs are steep. Every person in jail is someone who can't work or provide for a family. They're forced to spend what money they have access to on commissary junk food and JPay email "stamps," and then some of them are forced to pay jail itself; in 2013 Utah's Davis County collected almost $370,000 from prisoners through its "pay-to-stay" policy, and waived another $858,000 in exchange for prisoner labor (at the rate of 0 per day, representing 85,800 hours of labor).²⁸

It is no wonder, then, that incarceration itself is criminogenic: the more time people spend in jail, the more likely they are to offend again.²⁹ Yet at midyear 2024, 69% of people in jail had not been convicted—nor were awaiting sentence on a conviction—and the majority of charges are for non-violent, drug-related offenses.⁶⁹

And that's if you survive the experience.

Many don't. There were 1,200 deaths in local jails in 2019 alone. Suicide has been the leading single cause of jail deaths every year since 2000, and of the more than 6,200 people who died by suicide in a jail cell between 2000 and 2019, more than three-quarters had never been convicted of the charge they were held on.⁷⁶

Gregory Edwards was arrested for a PTSD-related episode in a Wal-Mart. He was taken in by 7 deputies, beaten, sprayed with a chemical agent, strapped into a restraint chair with a "spit hood" on, and left unconscious; he died within 24 hours. A Naperville, Illinois-native named Sandra Bland was arrested from her car in Texas and found dead in a Waller County jail cell three days later. The state claims it was a suicide, but family maintains suspicions that she was killed.

In either case, it was jail that killed her.

Though culturally connected to the Cuban Bloodhounds trained by slavers in the antebellum US to pursue escaping enslaved people, the police dog as we know it today is a 20th-century phenomenon, tested for the first time around 1900 in New York City and widely popularized during the Civil Rights movement, such as with the use of "Canine Corps" against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham.

In addition to being psychologically traumatizing, dog attacks are nearly impossible to control, deeply painful, and often disfiguring. In the "use-of-force continuum" they're considered an "impact weapon," like a club, and, despite the fact that once the handler releases them it's almost impossible to stop a canine from killing a target should it choose to do so, courts have determined that intent of the handler is more important than what actually occurs—and therefore canines are not deadly weapons.

"Bite and hold" training teaches canines to attack the closest human being they can get hold of other than their handler, from women taking out the garbage in St. Paul to toddlers in cars in Nevada to fellow deputies in Georgia (in which case the dog gets shot, too). And it's not typically easy to convert a domesticated animal into an impact weapon; it takes prong collars, choke chains, and what's known as "testicular submission." Police have been caught on camera strangling and whipping dogs with their own leashes, and they routinely shoot their four-legged "partners" in the so-called line of duty.

American police dogs send an estimated 3,661 people to emergency rooms every year, and medical studies find K9 bites are categorically worse than ordinary dog bites—multiple wounds, more operations, longer hospital stays.⁷⁷ The training works as designed. When Los Angeles was forced to switch from "find and bite" to "bark and hold" in 1992, bites dropped from 639 in the preceding four years to 66 in the following four.⁷⁸

K9 units are abuses of both animal and human rights. They are also effective police propaganda; a company called Hero Industries, proudly affiliated with the FOP, sells departmental-customized "Hero K9" dolls for departments to give to children. Meanwhile, 25-500 family dogs (estimates vary—no one really knows) are shot to death by police every day.

The police are professional liars. They're trained in the art of "investigative lies" to say whatever it takes to make an arrest and extract a confession, with the full backing of the courts. Police would lose a majority of cases if they were not.

They don't have to tell you if they're police. They don't have to follow up on any promises they might make, nor even admit later on that they ever made any. They can lie about having your fingerprints. They can steal your DNA. They can administer fake polygraph/chemical tests and lie about the results. They can lie about having witnesses, they can lie about recording you, and they can lie about having confessions. They can lie about consequences, they can lie about helping you, and they can ignore your request for a lawyer under false pretenses.³⁰

And those are just the over-the-table, by-the-book, court-enshrined laws.

They will also lie to the court. There is the famous "blue wall of silence," the lies of perjury and omission told by police to protect other police under investigation. But they also famously lie on their reports, which then become the media's reports. When Ahmaud Arbery was arrested in a park, his entire body standing clearly outside of his car, the police reported that he "did not take his hands out of the vehicle." The report on Elijah Tufono's beating-by-police in Sacramento never mentioned any beating. The incident report for the murder of Breonna Taylor, shot at least 8 times in her bed, lists her injuries as "none."³¹

Of course if you "provide false information or documentation" to the police, you will be arrested.

"Militarization" is a misleading term because it suggests a distinction between the police and the military that was never tangible in the first place. Early state police were directly modeled after the counter-revolutionary Philippine Constabulary. Two of its most influential architects, August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson, were both military, and today every fifth officer is a veteran. They wore blue uniforms because they inherited postwar Union Army surplus.

As a domestic military, America's 920,000+ police outnumber the standing armies of Brazil 2:1, Germany 4:1, and Canada 11:1. They've used chemical weapons and armored war machines on civilians since tear gas was developed in 1919, but the trend has accelerated. The 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act gave police access to military bases and equipment; four years later police dropped a bomb on a neighborhood in West Philadelphia.³² 1997's National Defense Authorization Act created the "1033 program," transferring over $8.4 billion in surplus aircraft, watercraft, armored vehicles, grenade launchers, bayonets, and other armaments to at least 8,000 agencies (out of about 18,000 total).⁶⁷ The Department of Homeland Security has been equipping local police with LRADs—sound cannons—for almost 20 years.

If there is a significant difference between the actual military and the local police, it is that, between the two, the police have the loosest "rules of engagement." And unlike police, soldiers have neither qualified immunity nor an FOP to protect them.

After eight officers were caught assaulting Rodney King on handheld camera in 1991 (and were subsequently acquitted by a mostly white jury), it came to light that the Los Angeles justice system routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to cases involving Black men: "No Humans Involved."³³

The term was also used—like "misdemeanor murder"—to refer to the murder of sex workers.

"I haven't beat anyone this bad in a long time," joked police over official channels. "I'm sure the lizard didn't deserve it… HAHA."

"Shoot him twice for me," said another. "Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife."³⁴

The dehumanizing language of police work is not limited to individual police. It is not even limited to policing's role in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors for death-penalty cases against Black defendants in Georgia labeled prospective white jurors as "W" and prospective Black jurors as "N," describing the latter as "slow," "fat," "con-artist," etc. in order to stack the jury.³⁵ In 1989 the New York Times called the Central Park Five, falsely imprisoned for assaulting a woman, a "roving wolf pack." New York City settled with the five men for $41 million in 2014—roughly a million dollars per year of wrongful imprisonment—while admitting no wrongdoing.⁷⁹

And the result of this dehumanization is violence. As Sylvia Wynter writes: "The social effects to which this acronym, and its placing outside the 'sanctified universe of obligation,' of the category of young Black males to which it refers, leads, whilst not overtly genocidal, are clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal, and everyday means."

No community-based oversight committee in the United States has the authority to terminate or even discipline a police officer; reformist groups like Campaign Zero don't even call for it.

Oversight as-is doesn't start until a citizen initiates a formal complaint, in a system controlled by the police—and designed to be as frictive and intimidating as possible.

When civil advocates in Minneapolis tested the complaint system they were told untruths like you must file in the precinct the incident occurred in (you don't) or the printer was out of ink (it wasn't).

CBS4 in South Florida was unable to get hold of a complaint form whatsoever, and their lead investigator was repeatedly harassed, arrested, and even hospitalized. "Might not be a legitimate complaint," police will say. "Do you have an ID on you? Are you on any medications?"

To file a complaint in Chicago you need a signed affidavit, you need to disclose your full identity, and you need to disclose yourself to the officer involved before they can be questioned; about half of all allegations of misconduct are thrown away. City contracts literally prevent departments from promoting or otherwise recognizing officers who report misconduct of other officers.

And that's if you can identify the police in the first place, who are often less eager to disclose their identities than citizens are—a safety vest innocently covering a name badge, sunglasses on top of a face mask.

What does the absence of real oversight cost? The Washington Post documented nearly 40,000 misconduct payments at just 25 of the nation's largest departments between 2010 and 2020—more than $3.2 billion, paid by taxpayers. Nearly half of that money (.5 billion) went to claims involving the more than 7,600 officers who had been the subject of multiple payouts; over 1,200 officers had been the subject of at least five.⁸⁰

Both the apparent need for oversight and the failure to actually practice it demonstrate a fundamental dysfunction of police work.

One would be forgiven for thinking PredPol was short for "predatory policing," for it means almost the same thing: predictive policing.

Constitutionally, policing must be reactionary. This is a limitation of the system, similar to the logic of a high noon duel: if you draw first, you're the aggressor. Shoot first, but draw second. Police consider this constitutional limitation to be a bug, not a feature. Companies like the CIA-backed Geolitica—formerly called PredPol—promise to find a way around it. Operating under the belief that criminal activity follows the same natural patterns as both seismic activity (a series of crimes and smaller "aftercrimes") and epidemiology (crime is a "virus" whose "contagion" can be mapped), Geolitica sells "location-based proactive policing" technology to triangulate crime type, location, and time into so-called "hot spots," red grids on an interactive mobile map—the visible infection of potential future-crimes, to which police are supposed to devote 6 minutes an hour physically occupying.³⁶

Yet we know this data is corrupted. Chicago's predictive policing technology, in use since at least 2012, has been shown to use data "sullied by years of unconstitutional and racially biased stops, searches, and arrests" to determine the distribution of police resources. An unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy creates a dataset targeting Black men for marijuana at 5x the rate white men are targeted, even though usage rates are the same for both groups. A third-party black-box software extrapolates these arrests into a geographical "contagion" map that redistributes and concentrates police forces to arrest more Black men for weed while white people are left off the map entirely, literally magnifying racism. Lifetime likelihood of incarceration for Black men born in 2001: 1 in 3.

And it doesn't even work. When The Markup analyzed 23,631 Geolitica predictions generated for Plainfield, New Jersey in 2018, fewer than 100 lined up with a reported crime—a success rate under half a percent. Burglary predictions succeeded 0.1% of the time.⁸¹ "I don't believe we really used it that often, if at all," the department's captain admitted. "That's why we ended up getting rid of it."

Quotes will always exist. "It just means we can't put a definite number," explains one police. "But it doesn't mean we can't tell them to write more."³⁷

These quotas define crime rates, which in turn define future policing, which in turn defines crime rates. Career success depends on it. Police who refuse to fill these unofficial quotas are given undesirable posts, see their overtime hours cut, and are passed over for promotions. The result is a chain of negative utility for the citizens subjected to these systems.

Consider the following chain of events:

1. A Black man rides a bicycle without a helmet in New York City
2. He receives a "broken windows" civil summons to help a police reach their number
3. He can't afford to pay it immediately and his license is suspended
4. He drives to work anyway and is arrested for driving on a suspended license
5. New Yorkers spend more than ,500 a day to incarcerate him³⁸

Who benefits?

Small town police departments have added financial incentives. Fines and forfeitures account for over 10% of general fund revenues for nearly 600 jurisdictions. 51% of Palmer, Texas' .2 million budget comes from ticket and fine revenue. Buckholts, a town of 520 people, levied 82,569 (73% of the town's budget) in fines in 2018, or about $350 per resident. The town of Estelline collected a stunning $3,580 per resident, or enough to buy every resident a hot tub.³⁹

As a result, it is true, ticket writing coincides with departmental targets, seeing surges of at certain times of the month.⁴⁰

25-year-old Freddie Gray was walking through Baltimore one morning when an officer conducting "enhanced drug enforcement" caught his eye. Gray turned around and the officer chased, slamming his face into the asphalt and tying him up in a painful hold known as a "leg lace." Witnesses report that he had already stopped moving by the time Officer Caesar Goodson, a "good officer, a gentle man, a nice guy," dragged Gray face-first into the back of a white van.

During the ensuing 44-minute van ride the police blew through stop signs, took turns wide enough to cross lane boundaries, and repeatedly slammed their brakes. They made several stops, including at a grocery store and to take on a second victim, and by the time they arrived at the West District station Gray was in a coma, his spine severed from a "high-energy" impact (akin to diving in a shallow pool). He was charged with possessing an illegal switchblade (he wasn't) and, a week later, pronounced dead. Six officers were charged in his death; six officers were acquitted.⁴¹

In Baltimore it's known as a "rough ride." Philadelphia police call it a "nickle ride," as cheap as a 5-cent carnival ticket. Saskatchewan has the brutal "starlight tour," where Indigenous men are left to freeze in the hostile Canadian winter at night. "Screen tests" refer to slamming the victim against the metal barriers inside the van. Or, as the Mollen Commission described it, a police "bonding ritual." It happened to Christine Abbott in 2012. Dondi Johnson Sr. became quadriplegic after he was picked up for urinating in public in 2005. James McKenna broke his neck in Philadelphia in 2011, where the Philadelphia Inquirer documented 20 related injuries.

Baltimore paid Gray's family $6.4 million—more than the city had paid for all 102 police misconduct judgments and settlements combined over the preceding four years.⁸²

New York used to call gay bars "disorderly houses" (linking, like William Bratton, disorder with crime), allowing police to raid them. In 1966 a Genovese mobster named Fat Tony bought a failing straight bar called the Stonewall Inn and converted it into the hottest "disorderly house" in Greenwich Village.

Fat Tony made more money blackmailing closeted Wall Street financiers for negotiable bonds than he did selling drinks—enough money to pay the NYPD's Sixth Precinct ,200 a month to look the other way. But maybe he missed a payment, or maybe the police simply went back on their word, because at 1:20 a.m. on a Saturday in 1969's "Summer of Love" seven police barred the doors of the club and announced: "Police! We're taking the place!'

The 3-hour anti-police insurgency that followed—led by queer and transgender people of color, like the famous Marsha P. Johnson—was not the first violent confrontation between the queer community and the police (see Cooper's Donut Riots in 1959, Compton's Cafeteria Riot in 1966, or the Black Cat Riot of 1967), but it was the Black Panther-inspired methods of the Stonewall siege—trash can fires, overturned cars, power chants—that decidedly positioned gay rights as a national issue, giving rise to the gay rights movement.

The history of the Stonewall Uprising is one of the reasons why police have no place at Pride; Pride was a riot.

On June 12, 2020, after stealing an already-spent Taser and trying to flee, Rayshard Brooks was shot twice in the back in a Wendy's parking lot. Police apologists argue that the shooting was justified because Brooks, by pointing the spent Taser at an officer, tried to use "deadly force." Is that accurate?

If yes, then the initial officer should never have drawn and discharged their Taser on Brooks in the first place.

If no, then the officer should never have drawn their guns and shot Brooks in the back.

Physicist Jack Cover invented the Taser following the Watts Rebellion of 1965. It's an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle," after a sci-fi novel where a boy named Tom Swift rampages through Africa with an electric gun. Tasers are capable of delivering 50,000 volts of electricity from about 10 feet away, about as much power as a high-tension transmission line. Nicknamed "cattle prods," that's exactly what they replace: the police have been electrocuting citizens with cattle prods since at least the 1940s, from civil rights protests in Alabama to Jon Burge's interrogations at Homan Square.

Declared a tool of torture by the UN in 2007, Tasers are favored in the US as "less-lethal," a category of wordplay contingent on additional wordplay. Reuters documented at least 1,081 U.S. deaths following police Taser use through 2018—in nine of every ten cases the person was unarmed, and a quarter were in mental health crisis.⁸³ When people die from being tased the police will attribute the death to a pre-existing syndrome called "Excited Delirium Syndrome." Essentially, the only people who die from being tased are people who have the condition of dying from being tased.

19-year-old Jaylin Hughes was caught smoking pot in his Georgia apartment complex and, like most white teenagers caught in the same situation, decided to make a run for it. The police, unrepentant and dangerous predators, chased him into a corner, and when they caught him jumping a tall fence they shot him with a Taser and, losing control of his body, he severed his spinal cord when he fell back to the ground. He was charged with obstruction of justice and possession of marijuana, and today he is paralyzed from the shoulders down.⁴²

Black people are killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white people per capita.⁶⁵ In the 100 largest U.S. cities, 41% of people police killed while unarmed were Black—despite Black residents making up 19% of those cities' populations.⁶⁸

And that's if you can believe the official reports. A comatose Freddie Gray was charged as armed with an illegal switchblade for possessing something that was 1) not illegal, 2) not a switchblade, and 3) not discovered on his body until after his assault. A mentally ill man named James Boyd was "armed" with two rusty pocketknives when Albuquerque police used stun grenades, Taser shotguns, beanbag guns, and K9s against him, and then shot him three times in the back after he'd surrendered.

Police advocates will point to the population of gun-owners in the United States as the reason police must also be armed; they are dealing with an armed populace. But if one believes that the citizenry is armed, and that being armed is reason enough to be fired upon, then one concedes that the police have the right to execute any potential citizen. This enforces a feedback loop where everyone becomes an enemy, and thus everything in their hands becomes an armament—bicycle chains, sticks, Tamir Rice's toy gun. All Daniel Shaver did was reach towards his waistband and the police felt justified in executing him.

And then there are bodies themselves that are considered armaments. Darren Wilson's testimony in the murder of Michael Brown, for which Wilson was never charged, suggests Black men are by definition armed: "He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked."⁴³

Researchers find fewer than 2% of on-duty fatal shootings result in murder or manslaughter charges; of the 204 officers charged from 2005 through 2024, only 64 were convicted.¹¹

Police are violence workers.

That doesn't mean commit violence is all they do; violence may even occupy a statistically insignificant amount of their daily duties. But it means that violence is their essential function in society.

Though a century of reform has seen society layer additional responsibilities on the police, their essential duty—essential to their ability to protect the controlled movement of capital—is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence. They are empowered by the state to tackle us, punch us, bind us, digitally rape us, dose us, abduct us, and eventually shoot us in order to secure completely bodily submission. That is what they, specifically, do; everything else is PR and fundraising.

What is the place of violence work outside of protecting capital? Interpersonal violence begets violence. It is self-fulfilling; resisting the threat of police violence will guarantee that the police are violent with you, as with the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling (Graham v. Connor) that the police may use force against any resistance to arrest. Both statistically and narratively, the presence of a gun dramatically increases the odds of fatal injury. Why, then, must traffic police be armed, unless we want traffic violations to be violent occasions? Why do we have police in schools, bringing guns to fistfights? Police do not prevent violence—they commit it, and encourage their victims to commit it in self-defense.

The majority of police commute to work—they live outside the communities they patrol.⁴⁴ Armed outsiders assigned by the state to occupy and control poor and non-white neighborhoods with the constant application of violence.

In 1975 two men broke into a rooming house and assaulted a resident, whose screams alerted neighbors Warren and Taliaferro. Warren and Taliaferro hid in their room and called the police. Five minutes later the police showed up, knocked, received no answer, and left.

So Warren and Taliaferro placed a second call to 911. Unbeknownst to Warren and Taliaferro this second call was never even dispatched. Believing that the police had returned they came out of hiding and called out to the victim, which alerted the invader to their presence. He held all three women captive at knifepoint and abused them for hours.

The police never showed up.

All three women sued the Metropolitan Police Department for failing to follow procedure with the proper degree of urgency, including failure to dispatch, but the trial court dismissed the complaints, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal by holding "the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen; the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."⁴⁵

2005: Castle Rock vs. Gonzales holds that the police can't be sued for failing to enforce restraining orders.

2011: The NYPD conduct a manhunt on a knife-wielding murderer named Maksim Gelman. When Gelman attempts to enter the cab of a subway train where an officer named Terrence Howell is trying to hide, Howell locks the door and turns his back. A citizen named Joseph Lozito confronts and subdues Gelman instead, sustaining multiple stab wounds in his back and neck. On the police report Howell claims to have tackled Gelman himself, but then admits to a juror that he hid because he thought Gelman had a gun. Lozito sues (Lozito vs. New York City) and the suit is tossed out; the police had "no special duty" to protect Lozito or anyone else on the train that day. "Under well-established law, the police are not liable for such incidents," said a city lawyer.⁴⁶

2018: Sergeant Brian Miller hides behind his car while shots ring out at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed and 17 more injured. Miller is subsequently fired, his firing is ruled unconstitutional, and he is reinstated.

Through decades of reform the courts have consistently ruled that the LAPD's famous motto "To Protect and Serve" is nothing more than a legally non-binding slogan. The police have no obligation to help you—and the data suggest they rarely do: most violent victimizations are never reported to police,⁷⁰ and most reported violent crimes are never solved.⁵

In every state except California, however, it remains illegal to not help the police upon command—a charge called "refusing to assist a police officer."

In 1838 the city of Boston organized America's first police department as a response to the Battle of Broad Street, to control the "Irish problem," i.e., the influx of Irish-Catholic laborers fleeing English genocide.⁴⁷ 160 years later the NYPD's "intelligence division" tracked Muslim students across the country, monitoring emails, forums, and social media, even sending an undercover agent on a City College rafting trip.⁴⁸

Policing has always been about othering, and not just in international terms. The so-called "border zone" that defines the jurisdiction of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP—one of the world's largest police agencies, with more than 20,000 police and a budget of over 8 billion) includes everyone within 100 miles of any border—putting about 2 out of every 3 citizens under their jurisdiction.⁴⁹

Since 2002 the CBP has been part of the Department of Homeland Security, a police force created by George W. Bush that is now the third largest Cabinet department. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created at the same time, which has since performed "Enforcement and Removal Operations" on millions of people⁵⁰—separating children from families, torturing them, and sexually abusing them⁵¹ in facilities that not even state representatives are allowed to see the inside of.⁵² The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention centers—a detention budget larger than the entire federal prison system—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴

In 2020 these facilities were so crowded that Congress passed billions in emergency funding to erect soft-sided tent cities in the middle of the desert such as those in Yuma, Arizona, where dozens of children were sexually assaulted.⁵³ To pay for all this, taxpayers spend about 33 to lock someone in a traditional ICE facility; locking children away in tents in some of North America's harshest environments costs us about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴

Of over 1,200 sexual assault complaints while in immigration custody, only 2% have been investigated.⁵⁵

Detention has surged past 56,000—the highest since records began—with tent cities, converted warehouses, and Florida's Everglades facility "Alligator Alcatraz," where 22,000 people were cycled through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰ ICE agents now conduct street-level enforcement in American cities; in January 2026, agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, as she sat in her vehicle during an immigration sweep.⁸⁹

George Floyd (1973–May 25, 2020) was handcuffed face-down on a Minneapolis street while officer Derek Chauvin pressed a knee into his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd pleaded "I can't breathe" at least 27 times. Chauvin was convicted of murder; the city paid Floyd's family 7 million. His death sparked the largest protest movement in U.S. history.⁸⁵

Breonna Taylor (1993–March 13, 2020) was asleep in her Louisville apartment when police executed a no-knock warrant at midnight, firing 32 shots. Taylor was struck six times and died in her hallway. No officer was charged in her death. The city settled for 2 million.⁸⁶

Tyre Nichols (1993–January 10, 2023) was beaten for three minutes by Memphis Scorpion unit officers after a traffic stop a block from his home. He died three days later of blunt-force trauma. Five officers were fired; three were acquitted of state murder in 2025, though federal civil-rights convictions followed. The DOJ found Memphis PD "regularly used excessive force against Black residents."⁸⁷

Sonya Massey (1993–July 6, 2024) called 911 about a prowler outside her Springfield, Illinois home. Sangamon County deputy Sean Grayson entered her kitchen and shot her in the face after she moved a pot of water off the stove. Body camera footage shows Massey ducking and apologizing seconds before the shots. Grayson was convicted of first-degree murder in 2025; the county paid her family 0 million.⁸⁸

Renee Good (1988–January 7, 2026) was a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis when ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot her during a street-level immigration sweep. Bystanders and Ross's own phone footage captured the encounter; Good was in her vehicle. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist." Hennepin County prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹

Yassin Mohamed (1973–May 9, 2020) was walking down a rural road in Georgia around midnight on May 9, 2020 when someone called the Evans County sheriff. Police had been hassling him all night and he'd already been hospitalized once for mental health concerns. An "altercation ensued" when two officers attempted to "make contact," and Mohamed allegedly threw a rock at one of the officers before charging with a "larger rock." The officer, sustaining no injuries, shot Mohamed, who died at the scene. It was the 38th police shooting investigated this year by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; within a month they'd opened their 50th.⁵⁶

Pest control specialist Daniel Shaver (1990–January 18, 2016) was showing off the pellet gun that he used to exterminate birds in grocery stores to his friends in his room at the Mesa, Arizona La Quinta when someone called the police to report a rifle in the window. Six police surrounded the room. They yelled contradictory commands to a prone, sobbing Shaver. As he tried to crawl towards the police his waistband slipped and, when he reached to pull it up, 26-year-old Philip Brailsford shot Shaver five times with his AR-15 (engraved with "you're fucked" and "molon labe"), murdering him instantly. According to Brailsford, Shaver was "trying to gain a position of advantage in order to gain a better firing position on us;" he was fired, charged, acquitted, reinstated, compensated for PTSD, and allowed to retire on a pension of ,500 per month, or .5 million over the course of a lifetime. He currently works in a steel mill.⁵⁷

Plainclothed police cut off the burglar bars and broke down the door of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston's Atlanta home in a no-knock drug raid on the wrong house. Johnston (1914–November 21, 2006) fired a single shot from a rusty revolver over the heads of the police, injuring no one; the police fired 39 shots back, killing Johnston and injuring three of their own members. The police handcuffed Johnston as she was dying and planted three bags of weed in the house. They called an informant and had him say that he'd bought crack cocaine at Johnston's house to justify the raid occurring in the first place.⁵⁸

Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal (1998–May 23, 2020) was shot 20 times in the back at close range as he tried to flee from the Salt Lake City police. The police yelled "drop it" five times and "show us your fucking hands" to his dead body, which lay motionless on the ground. Mayor Erin Mendenhall said that video of the incident "disturbed and upset" her as a mother, but after weeks of protests, write-ins, and call-ins demanding at least $30 million in defunding and the arrest of Palacios-Carbajal's killers, Salt Lake City approved Mendenhall's proposed $84 million police budget, million more than last year. This money includes $322,800 for "training" and $687,000 to equip every police with a camera, with "data," and a Taser.⁵⁹

At 12:40 am on a Sunday in 2010 Joe Weekley of the Detroit PD Special Response Team fired a flash grenade through the front window of an East Side duplex, stormed his way in behind a ballistic riot shield, and then shot 7-year-old Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones (2002–May 16, 2010) in the head. Weekley claimed that it was actually Stanley-Jones' grandmother, Mertilla Jones, who killed the girl when she tried to slap the MP5 submachine gun out of Weekley's hands, but tests for her fingerprints on the gun came up negative. After two failed trials against him, Weekley cannot be tried a third time.⁶⁰

After leading them on a slow, meandering 4-mile "chase" in her flattened Buick Century, waitress and mother-of-2 Caroline Small (1975–June 18, 2010) was shot eight times in the face through her front windshield by two Glynn County, Georgia police. "I hit her right in the face, right on the bridge of the nose," they bragged. "Her head exploded." They went on to tell a jury that they'd feared for their lives because Small was using her car as a "deadly weapon," although dashcam footage shows that Small was motionless and boxed-in at the time. Small lost consciousness from her bullet wounds and died a week later. Local news ran the headline: "Woman shot trying to run down police."

A grand jury found the shooting justified, Small's family's federal civil rights lawsuit against the police was thrown out on two occasions, and both of the police that killed her are still working.⁶¹

James Boyd (1975–March 16, 2014) was sleeping alone in Albuquerque's Sandia foothills with two rusty pocketknives on him when 19 police surrounded him and demanded his surrender. James eventually complied, promising (after hours of harassment) to go with the police shortly after sunset, but as he bent over to pick up his belongings the police deployed a flash-bang grenade, a Taser shotgun, multiple beanbags, and a K9 unit. The K9 grabbed Boyd's bag and brought it back to its handler, who then ordered the K9 to return to Boyd—while yet another police shot him three times in the back. Boyd begged for his life as the dog chewed his calf off. He was dead by morning.

Nobody faced any consequences. It was the 47th APD shooting, and 32nd death, in 5 years. Despite increased funding for "training," New Mexico has the highest rate of police killings per capita, including 9 people in Albuquerque in 2018.

Few details are known about the murder of Tony McDade (1982–May 27, 2020) by police in Tallahassee, Florida. But according to the Human Rights Campaign, McDade was the twelfth transgender or gender non-conforming person to be shot or killed in 2020.

And because of laws meant to protect victims' privacy, the public still doesn't know who shot him—because the shooter is being considered a victim.⁶²

In 2018 Sean Bostwick was fired from the Detroit Police Department for posting a uniformed selfie on Snapchat with the following caption: "Another night to Rangel up these zoo animals"⁶³

Presumably he meant "wrangle," which the Oxford English Dictionary takes to mean "round up, herd, or take charge of livestock."

Such language isn't new. Nazis famously portrayed Jewish people as pests, normalizing associations that lead directly into the holocaust. American slavers depicted Black people as apes. Protestors in Hong Kong today are even called cockroaches. Nor is such language ineffective. Modern studies show that US citizens implicitly associated Black people with apes, which primes us to tolerate more violent policing actions when it comes to Black suspects. Comparing women to animals of prey spikes a sense of hostile sexism, and woman/animal associations have been strongly correlated with sexual harassment and assault.

The language of racist policing alters every police interaction, and it can escalate even the most routine traffic stops the moment an officer speaks. Research from Stanford indicates that police address white and Black people differently at traffic stops.⁶⁴ White victims receive apologies, full names and proper titles, gentle reassurances, and expressions of gratitude from the police. Black victims receive commands, first names and casual titles, and sharp questioning. If one believes that rhetoric has any real-world effect (which the police, with their so-called "attitude test," do), then one must concede that the police are more than predisposed to escalation via the language they use—that the language itself constitutes an escalation.

Especially with a word like "wrangle," which connotes either an exotic other—the zoo—or to livestock. The latter is part of a historical commitment to chattel slavery, in which not just one human is enslaved as property, but all of their descendants. Combined with the "one drop rule," wherein just "one drop" of color made a person legally Black, this incentivized systematic raping of enslaved women by both enslaved men and the slavers themselves, who controlled and profited from it all. Chattel conditions were bad enough that enslaved Black people routinely tried to rebel or run away, which is where the South's first organized police force comes from: the slavecatchers of the 18th and 19th century.

These proto-police, charged simply with "controlling the movements and behaviors of enslaved populations," could enter any property suspected of housing escapees and shoot any Black person. Louisiana privatized its state penitentiary in 1844 as a textile factory, and four years later decreed that all Black children born to parents serving life sentences would become state property. After the 13th amendment passed in 1865 the enslaved labor of Black men was moved from private plantations to public prisons (many of which, like Mississippi's Parchman Farm, were literal plantations) to manufacture things like military helmets and police uniforms, although in 1979 the US gave a little of that enslaved labor back to private hands: the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program permitted US companies to use prison labor, which most major corporations take advantage of either themselves or through subcontractors, including McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, and Verizon. Inmates in private prisons earn $0.12-0.40 per hour under optimal conditions; when overcrowding occurs, they're capped at $5.25 a month.

That is what police like Sean Bostwick are "wrangling" up: the forced labor that produces our war supplies, police gear, fast food, underwear, and coffee cups. They are wrangling capital.

Between 2004 and 2015 the city of Chicago disappeared and interrogated more than 7,000 Black and Latino men in a CIA-style "black site" at a West Side warehouse in Homan Square. A South Side police commander named Jon Burge—acquitted in the 80s of torture charges going back to the 70s—personally participated in or approved the torture of at least 118 people in order to force false confessions.

The majority of arrestees (that the public knows of) were brought in from over 2.5 miles away—i.e., the entire city—and held anywhere from several hours to several days. Nearly 6,000 were Black, only 68 of which were allowed access to their attorneys. No contemporaneous public records of anyone's presence exists—no booking records, no means for attorneys to reach their clients. There are no official records whatsoever (including coroner's report) concerning the death of 44-year-old John Hubbard in an interview room.

And the result of those 7,000+ disappearances? 5,386 charges for drug possession, mostly marijuana and heroin.²³

In 2015 Mayor Rahm Emanuel (currently serving as Ambassador to Japan) lied in defense of the torture, denying the reporting on Homan Square as "not true. We follow all the rules… Everything's done by the books."²⁴

And while the initial reporting on Homan Square as a "CIA-style black site" is accurate, that does not mean Homan Square should be considered unique, neither an isolated nor an extreme example of city-wide violence "as routine as traffic lights."²⁵

Chicago and Cook County have paid roughly 00 million in Burge-related settlements and verdicts. In 2015 the city passed the first municipal reparations ordinance for police violence in U.S. history, paying $5.5 million to 57 surviving torture victims.⁷⁵

Handcuffs are the first tool of custody—the moment a police encounter becomes an arrest, and the moment a civilian loses the use of their hands. They are marketed as safety equipment: a way to restrain a dangerous person without shooting them. In practice, handcuffs are often the beginning of the killing, not an alternative to it.

An Associated Press investigation documented 1,036 deaths from 2012 through 2021 after police used force that was not supposed to be lethal. At least 740 of those deaths involved prone restraint—holding someone face-down, often with body weight, frequently after handcuffs were already applied. In about half of those cases, officers failed to turn the person over promptly after cuffing, or did so only after they stopped responding.⁹³⁹⁴

The danger is not mysterious. Medical examiners and coroners cited prone restraint, positional asphyxia, or asphyxia due to restraint as a cause or contributing factor in dozens of cases AP identified—and training to avoid it has existed for decades.⁹³ In roughly 440 deaths, officers violated multiple safety guidelines at once.⁹⁴ The restraint position police use every day becomes lethal when combined with body weight, stress, drugs, obesity, or simply the panic of being pinned with your face in the pavement and your hands behind your back.

Handcuffs do not stop the violence—they enable the next stage of it. George Floyd was already cuffed when Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes; Floyd said "I can't breathe" at least 27 times before he died.⁸⁵ Freddie Gray was shackled at the wrists and ankles and thrown into a police van without a seatbelt; he died of a spinal injury after a "rough ride."⁸² Kathryn Johnston was handcuffed by Atlanta police as she lay dying from 39 gunshot wounds in a no-knock raid on the wrong house.⁵⁸

Federal data on arrest-related deaths routinely undercount what happens after cuffs go on. The Death in Custody Reporting Act requires states to report deaths during arrest and detention, but reporting is uneven and prone restraint is not tracked as its own category—deaths are lumped under homicide, accident, or "natural causes" depending on who writes the report.⁹⁶ What we know from independent investigations is enough: the tool sold as a humane alternative to the gun is, very often, the last thing a person feels before they cannot breathe.

The London Metropolitan Police was modeled after England's experience occupying colonial Ireland. The US followed the same template, transferring systems developed in the occupation of the Philippines for use in the first state police in Pennsylvania (which was itself designed to use violence against striking miners that the local police were unwilling to do).

In occupied Puerto Rico a marine named Frank Thacher organized the Insular Police to protect US sugar interests, a famously harsh crop to work. Concerned about the harsh working conditions of his countrymen, a Harvard Law graduate named Pedro Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico to advocate for self-determination via national independence, and, following involvement in an island-wide sugar strike (that more than tripled cane workers' daily wages), attracted the attention of the FBI.

The US installed a new governor, Blanton Winship, and put Albizu Campos under 30 years of surveillance. Slaughter ensued.

In 1935 the Insular Police massacred a student rally (the Rio Peidra Massacre), Chief of Police E. Francis Riggs warning Albizu Campos that if he didn't stop, "there will be war to the death against all Puerto Ricans." Albizu Campos was arrested for conspiracy to overthrow the US government in 1936 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Then again on Palm Sunday, 1937, while marching in Albizu Campos' home city of Ponce to protest his arrest (as well as commemorate the abolition of slavery), 19 protestors were killed and 235 wounded when the Insular Police, unprovoked, opened fire with a machine gun. They shot fleeing protestors in the back and executed men in alleys, lied in court about who shot first despite photographic evidence, and faced no charges.

Finally, on October 30, 1950, Albizu Campos led the Nationalist Party in revolution against the occupying US. Independent republics were declared, precincts burned down, and the Insular Police bombed two towns to ruins. Albizu Campos was arrested and allegedly tortured to death with experimental radiation poisoning in the infamous pits of La Princesa, in San Juan.²⁶

Governor Winship went on to serve in World War II, where he developed the military tribunals responsible for prosecuting Nazis. Fluctuating between around 8,000 members and 17,000 members, the Puerto Rico Police Department is one of the largest in the US.

"Uncle Sam Watches as the Goddess of Liberty heralds the day of Freedom for Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines." (1898)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is violence work at the border of citizenship. Like the police, ICE does not exist to keep anyone safe; it exists to enforce the state monopoly on movement and to protect the controlled flow of labor and capital across a line drawn on a map. The people it targets are overwhelmingly workers.

ICE is a young agency. It was created in 2003 and folded into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security after September 11th—a reorganization that recast immigration as national security. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm has since carried out millions of deportations,⁵⁰ separating children from families in facilities where members of Congress have been denied entry.⁵²

Detention is the business model. Taxpayers spend about 33 per person per night in a traditional ICE facility; holding children in emergency tent cities in the desert costs about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴ The beds are operated by private contractors who bill by the head—the same perverse incentive that drives mass incarceration everywhere. Intercept reporting documented hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse in ICE detention;⁵¹⁵⁵ in Arizona, DHS opened investigations into abuse at migrant detention centers while senators were turned away at the door.⁵³

The cruelty is policy, not accident. The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention capacity—larger than the entire federal prison system budget—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴ Detention has surged past 56,000 people, the highest on record, including tent cities and converted warehouses; Florida's Everglades facility cycled 22,000 people through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰

Street-level enforcement has followed. In January 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, during an immigration sweep—captured on bystander and agent phone footage. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist"; county prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹ Children have died in custody. Adults have died in custody. The agency responds the way every police force does: passive voice, internal review, no charges.

ICE is what the police look like when the "community" they answer to is the nation-state and the "disorder" they are sent to correct is a human being who crossed a line to work. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police.

Jailing people constitutes a significant aspect of violence work, and one of its most expensive. It costs Californians about 90 a night to incarcerate someone. Most of that is labor cost, and that's after offloading most of the labor (cooking, laundry, cleaning, maintenance) to the incarcerated themselves—at compensation of 8-37 cents per hour.²⁷

The costs are steep. Every person in jail is someone who can't work or provide for a family. They're forced to spend what money they have access to on commissary junk food and JPay email "stamps," and then some of them are forced to pay jail itself; in 2013 Utah's Davis County collected almost $370,000 from prisoners through its "pay-to-stay" policy, and waived another $858,000 in exchange for prisoner labor (at the rate of 0 per day, representing 85,800 hours of labor).²⁸

It is no wonder, then, that incarceration itself is criminogenic: the more time people spend in jail, the more likely they are to offend again.²⁹ Yet at midyear 2024, 69% of people in jail had not been convicted—nor were awaiting sentence on a conviction—and the majority of charges are for non-violent, drug-related offenses.⁶⁹

And that's if you survive the experience.

Many don't. There were 1,200 deaths in local jails in 2019 alone. Suicide has been the leading single cause of jail deaths every year since 2000, and of the more than 6,200 people who died by suicide in a jail cell between 2000 and 2019, more than three-quarters had never been convicted of the charge they were held on.⁷⁶

Gregory Edwards was arrested for a PTSD-related episode in a Wal-Mart. He was taken in by 7 deputies, beaten, sprayed with a chemical agent, strapped into a restraint chair with a "spit hood" on, and left unconscious; he died within 24 hours. A Naperville, Illinois-native named Sandra Bland was arrested from her car in Texas and found dead in a Waller County jail cell three days later. The state claims it was a suicide, but family maintains suspicions that she was killed.

In either case, it was jail that killed her.

Though culturally connected to the Cuban Bloodhounds trained by slavers in the antebellum US to pursue escaping enslaved people, the police dog as we know it today is a 20th-century phenomenon, tested for the first time around 1900 in New York City and widely popularized during the Civil Rights movement, such as with the use of "Canine Corps" against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham.

In addition to being psychologically traumatizing, dog attacks are nearly impossible to control, deeply painful, and often disfiguring. In the "use-of-force continuum" they're considered an "impact weapon," like a club, and, despite the fact that once the handler releases them it's almost impossible to stop a canine from killing a target should it choose to do so, courts have determined that intent of the handler is more important than what actually occurs—and therefore canines are not deadly weapons.

"Bite and hold" training teaches canines to attack the closest human being they can get hold of other than their handler, from women taking out the garbage in St. Paul to toddlers in cars in Nevada to fellow deputies in Georgia (in which case the dog gets shot, too). And it's not typically easy to convert a domesticated animal into an impact weapon; it takes prong collars, choke chains, and what's known as "testicular submission." Police have been caught on camera strangling and whipping dogs with their own leashes, and they routinely shoot their four-legged "partners" in the so-called line of duty.

American police dogs send an estimated 3,661 people to emergency rooms every year, and medical studies find K9 bites are categorically worse than ordinary dog bites—multiple wounds, more operations, longer hospital stays.⁷⁷ The training works as designed. When Los Angeles was forced to switch from "find and bite" to "bark and hold" in 1992, bites dropped from 639 in the preceding four years to 66 in the following four.⁷⁸

K9 units are abuses of both animal and human rights. They are also effective police propaganda; a company called Hero Industries, proudly affiliated with the FOP, sells departmental-customized "Hero K9" dolls for departments to give to children. Meanwhile, 25-500 family dogs (estimates vary—no one really knows) are shot to death by police every day.

The police are professional liars. They're trained in the art of "investigative lies" to say whatever it takes to make an arrest and extract a confession, with the full backing of the courts. Police would lose a majority of cases if they were not.

They don't have to tell you if they're police. They don't have to follow up on any promises they might make, nor even admit later on that they ever made any. They can lie about having your fingerprints. They can steal your DNA. They can administer fake polygraph/chemical tests and lie about the results. They can lie about having witnesses, they can lie about recording you, and they can lie about having confessions. They can lie about consequences, they can lie about helping you, and they can ignore your request for a lawyer under false pretenses.³⁰

And those are just the over-the-table, by-the-book, court-enshrined laws.

They will also lie to the court. There is the famous "blue wall of silence," the lies of perjury and omission told by police to protect other police under investigation. But they also famously lie on their reports, which then become the media's reports. When Ahmaud Arbery was arrested in a park, his entire body standing clearly outside of his car, the police reported that he "did not take his hands out of the vehicle." The report on Elijah Tufono's beating-by-police in Sacramento never mentioned any beating. The incident report for the murder of Breonna Taylor, shot at least 8 times in her bed, lists her injuries as "none."³¹

Of course if you "provide false information or documentation" to the police, you will be arrested.

"Militarization" is a misleading term because it suggests a distinction between the police and the military that was never tangible in the first place. Early state police were directly modeled after the counter-revolutionary Philippine Constabulary. Two of its most influential architects, August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson, were both military, and today every fifth officer is a veteran. They wore blue uniforms because they inherited postwar Union Army surplus.

As a domestic military, America's 920,000+ police outnumber the standing armies of Brazil 2:1, Germany 4:1, and Canada 11:1. They've used chemical weapons and armored war machines on civilians since tear gas was developed in 1919, but the trend has accelerated. The 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act gave police access to military bases and equipment; four years later police dropped a bomb on a neighborhood in West Philadelphia.³² 1997's National Defense Authorization Act created the "1033 program," transferring over $8.4 billion in surplus aircraft, watercraft, armored vehicles, grenade launchers, bayonets, and other armaments to at least 8,000 agencies (out of about 18,000 total).⁶⁷ The Department of Homeland Security has been equipping local police with LRADs—sound cannons—for almost 20 years.

If there is a significant difference between the actual military and the local police, it is that, between the two, the police have the loosest "rules of engagement." And unlike police, soldiers have neither qualified immunity nor an FOP to protect them.

After eight officers were caught assaulting Rodney King on handheld camera in 1991 (and were subsequently acquitted by a mostly white jury), it came to light that the Los Angeles justice system routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to cases involving Black men: "No Humans Involved."³³

The term was also used—like "misdemeanor murder"—to refer to the murder of sex workers.

"I haven't beat anyone this bad in a long time," joked police over official channels. "I'm sure the lizard didn't deserve it… HAHA."

"Shoot him twice for me," said another. "Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife."³⁴

The dehumanizing language of police work is not limited to individual police. It is not even limited to policing's role in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors for death-penalty cases against Black defendants in Georgia labeled prospective white jurors as "W" and prospective Black jurors as "N," describing the latter as "slow," "fat," "con-artist," etc. in order to stack the jury.³⁵ In 1989 the New York Times called the Central Park Five, falsely imprisoned for assaulting a woman, a "roving wolf pack." New York City settled with the five men for $41 million in 2014—roughly a million dollars per year of wrongful imprisonment—while admitting no wrongdoing.⁷⁹

And the result of this dehumanization is violence. As Sylvia Wynter writes: "The social effects to which this acronym, and its placing outside the 'sanctified universe of obligation,' of the category of young Black males to which it refers, leads, whilst not overtly genocidal, are clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal, and everyday means."

No community-based oversight committee in the United States has the authority to terminate or even discipline a police officer; reformist groups like Campaign Zero don't even call for it.

Oversight as-is doesn't start until a citizen initiates a formal complaint, in a system controlled by the police—and designed to be as frictive and intimidating as possible.

When civil advocates in Minneapolis tested the complaint system they were told untruths like you must file in the precinct the incident occurred in (you don't) or the printer was out of ink (it wasn't).

CBS4 in South Florida was unable to get hold of a complaint form whatsoever, and their lead investigator was repeatedly harassed, arrested, and even hospitalized. "Might not be a legitimate complaint," police will say. "Do you have an ID on you? Are you on any medications?"

To file a complaint in Chicago you need a signed affidavit, you need to disclose your full identity, and you need to disclose yourself to the officer involved before they can be questioned; about half of all allegations of misconduct are thrown away. City contracts literally prevent departments from promoting or otherwise recognizing officers who report misconduct of other officers.

And that's if you can identify the police in the first place, who are often less eager to disclose their identities than citizens are—a safety vest innocently covering a name badge, sunglasses on top of a face mask.

What does the absence of real oversight cost? The Washington Post documented nearly 40,000 misconduct payments at just 25 of the nation's largest departments between 2010 and 2020—more than $3.2 billion, paid by taxpayers. Nearly half of that money (.5 billion) went to claims involving the more than 7,600 officers who had been the subject of multiple payouts; over 1,200 officers had been the subject of at least five.⁸⁰

Both the apparent need for oversight and the failure to actually practice it demonstrate a fundamental dysfunction of police work.

One would be forgiven for thinking PredPol was short for "predatory policing," for it means almost the same thing: predictive policing.

Constitutionally, policing must be reactionary. This is a limitation of the system, similar to the logic of a high noon duel: if you draw first, you're the aggressor. Shoot first, but draw second. Police consider this constitutional limitation to be a bug, not a feature. Companies like the CIA-backed Geolitica—formerly called PredPol—promise to find a way around it. Operating under the belief that criminal activity follows the same natural patterns as both seismic activity (a series of crimes and smaller "aftercrimes") and epidemiology (crime is a "virus" whose "contagion" can be mapped), Geolitica sells "location-based proactive policing" technology to triangulate crime type, location, and time into so-called "hot spots," red grids on an interactive mobile map—the visible infection of potential future-crimes, to which police are supposed to devote 6 minutes an hour physically occupying.³⁶

Yet we know this data is corrupted. Chicago's predictive policing technology, in use since at least 2012, has been shown to use data "sullied by years of unconstitutional and racially biased stops, searches, and arrests" to determine the distribution of police resources. An unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy creates a dataset targeting Black men for marijuana at 5x the rate white men are targeted, even though usage rates are the same for both groups. A third-party black-box software extrapolates these arrests into a geographical "contagion" map that redistributes and concentrates police forces to arrest more Black men for weed while white people are left off the map entirely, literally magnifying racism. Lifetime likelihood of incarceration for Black men born in 2001: 1 in 3.

And it doesn't even work. When The Markup analyzed 23,631 Geolitica predictions generated for Plainfield, New Jersey in 2018, fewer than 100 lined up with a reported crime—a success rate under half a percent. Burglary predictions succeeded 0.1% of the time.⁸¹ "I don't believe we really used it that often, if at all," the department's captain admitted. "That's why we ended up getting rid of it."

Quotes will always exist. "It just means we can't put a definite number," explains one police. "But it doesn't mean we can't tell them to write more."³⁷

These quotas define crime rates, which in turn define future policing, which in turn defines crime rates. Career success depends on it. Police who refuse to fill these unofficial quotas are given undesirable posts, see their overtime hours cut, and are passed over for promotions. The result is a chain of negative utility for the citizens subjected to these systems.

Consider the following chain of events:

1. A Black man rides a bicycle without a helmet in New York City
2. He receives a "broken windows" civil summons to help a police reach their number
3. He can't afford to pay it immediately and his license is suspended
4. He drives to work anyway and is arrested for driving on a suspended license
5. New Yorkers spend more than ,500 a day to incarcerate him³⁸

Who benefits?

Small town police departments have added financial incentives. Fines and forfeitures account for over 10% of general fund revenues for nearly 600 jurisdictions. 51% of Palmer, Texas' .2 million budget comes from ticket and fine revenue. Buckholts, a town of 520 people, levied 82,569 (73% of the town's budget) in fines in 2018, or about $350 per resident. The town of Estelline collected a stunning $3,580 per resident, or enough to buy every resident a hot tub.³⁹

As a result, it is true, ticket writing coincides with departmental targets, seeing surges of at certain times of the month.⁴⁰

25-year-old Freddie Gray was walking through Baltimore one morning when an officer conducting "enhanced drug enforcement" caught his eye. Gray turned around and the officer chased, slamming his face into the asphalt and tying him up in a painful hold known as a "leg lace." Witnesses report that he had already stopped moving by the time Officer Caesar Goodson, a "good officer, a gentle man, a nice guy," dragged Gray face-first into the back of a white van.

During the ensuing 44-minute van ride the police blew through stop signs, took turns wide enough to cross lane boundaries, and repeatedly slammed their brakes. They made several stops, including at a grocery store and to take on a second victim, and by the time they arrived at the West District station Gray was in a coma, his spine severed from a "high-energy" impact (akin to diving in a shallow pool). He was charged with possessing an illegal switchblade (he wasn't) and, a week later, pronounced dead. Six officers were charged in his death; six officers were acquitted.⁴¹

In Baltimore it's known as a "rough ride." Philadelphia police call it a "nickle ride," as cheap as a 5-cent carnival ticket. Saskatchewan has the brutal "starlight tour," where Indigenous men are left to freeze in the hostile Canadian winter at night. "Screen tests" refer to slamming the victim against the metal barriers inside the van. Or, as the Mollen Commission described it, a police "bonding ritual." It happened to Christine Abbott in 2012. Dondi Johnson Sr. became quadriplegic after he was picked up for urinating in public in 2005. James McKenna broke his neck in Philadelphia in 2011, where the Philadelphia Inquirer documented 20 related injuries.

Baltimore paid Gray's family $6.4 million—more than the city had paid for all 102 police misconduct judgments and settlements combined over the preceding four years.⁸²

New York used to call gay bars "disorderly houses" (linking, like William Bratton, disorder with crime), allowing police to raid them. In 1966 a Genovese mobster named Fat Tony bought a failing straight bar called the Stonewall Inn and converted it into the hottest "disorderly house" in Greenwich Village.

Fat Tony made more money blackmailing closeted Wall Street financiers for negotiable bonds than he did selling drinks—enough money to pay the NYPD's Sixth Precinct ,200 a month to look the other way. But maybe he missed a payment, or maybe the police simply went back on their word, because at 1:20 a.m. on a Saturday in 1969's "Summer of Love" seven police barred the doors of the club and announced: "Police! We're taking the place!'

The 3-hour anti-police insurgency that followed—led by queer and transgender people of color, like the famous Marsha P. Johnson—was not the first violent confrontation between the queer community and the police (see Cooper's Donut Riots in 1959, Compton's Cafeteria Riot in 1966, or the Black Cat Riot of 1967), but it was the Black Panther-inspired methods of the Stonewall siege—trash can fires, overturned cars, power chants—that decidedly positioned gay rights as a national issue, giving rise to the gay rights movement.

The history of the Stonewall Uprising is one of the reasons why police have no place at Pride; Pride was a riot.

On June 12, 2020, after stealing an already-spent Taser and trying to flee, Rayshard Brooks was shot twice in the back in a Wendy's parking lot. Police apologists argue that the shooting was justified because Brooks, by pointing the spent Taser at an officer, tried to use "deadly force." Is that accurate?

If yes, then the initial officer should never have drawn and discharged their Taser on Brooks in the first place.

If no, then the officer should never have drawn their guns and shot Brooks in the back.

Physicist Jack Cover invented the Taser following the Watts Rebellion of 1965. It's an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle," after a sci-fi novel where a boy named Tom Swift rampages through Africa with an electric gun. Tasers are capable of delivering 50,000 volts of electricity from about 10 feet away, about as much power as a high-tension transmission line. Nicknamed "cattle prods," that's exactly what they replace: the police have been electrocuting citizens with cattle prods since at least the 1940s, from civil rights protests in Alabama to Jon Burge's interrogations at Homan Square.

Declared a tool of torture by the UN in 2007, Tasers are favored in the US as "less-lethal," a category of wordplay contingent on additional wordplay. Reuters documented at least 1,081 U.S. deaths following police Taser use through 2018—in nine of every ten cases the person was unarmed, and a quarter were in mental health crisis.⁸³ When people die from being tased the police will attribute the death to a pre-existing syndrome called "Excited Delirium Syndrome." Essentially, the only people who die from being tased are people who have the condition of dying from being tased.

19-year-old Jaylin Hughes was caught smoking pot in his Georgia apartment complex and, like most white teenagers caught in the same situation, decided to make a run for it. The police, unrepentant and dangerous predators, chased him into a corner, and when they caught him jumping a tall fence they shot him with a Taser and, losing control of his body, he severed his spinal cord when he fell back to the ground. He was charged with obstruction of justice and possession of marijuana, and today he is paralyzed from the shoulders down.⁴²

Black people are killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white people per capita.⁶⁵ In the 100 largest U.S. cities, 41% of people police killed while unarmed were Black—despite Black residents making up 19% of those cities' populations.⁶⁸

And that's if you can believe the official reports. A comatose Freddie Gray was charged as armed with an illegal switchblade for possessing something that was 1) not illegal, 2) not a switchblade, and 3) not discovered on his body until after his assault. A mentally ill man named James Boyd was "armed" with two rusty pocketknives when Albuquerque police used stun grenades, Taser shotguns, beanbag guns, and K9s against him, and then shot him three times in the back after he'd surrendered.

Police advocates will point to the population of gun-owners in the United States as the reason police must also be armed; they are dealing with an armed populace. But if one believes that the citizenry is armed, and that being armed is reason enough to be fired upon, then one concedes that the police have the right to execute any potential citizen. This enforces a feedback loop where everyone becomes an enemy, and thus everything in their hands becomes an armament—bicycle chains, sticks, Tamir Rice's toy gun. All Daniel Shaver did was reach towards his waistband and the police felt justified in executing him.

And then there are bodies themselves that are considered armaments. Darren Wilson's testimony in the murder of Michael Brown, for which Wilson was never charged, suggests Black men are by definition armed: "He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked."⁴³

Researchers find fewer than 2% of on-duty fatal shootings result in murder or manslaughter charges; of the 204 officers charged from 2005 through 2024, only 64 were convicted.¹¹

Police are violence workers.

That doesn't mean commit violence is all they do; violence may even occupy a statistically insignificant amount of their daily duties. But it means that violence is their essential function in society.

Though a century of reform has seen society layer additional responsibilities on the police, their essential duty—essential to their ability to protect the controlled movement of capital—is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence. They are empowered by the state to tackle us, punch us, bind us, digitally rape us, dose us, abduct us, and eventually shoot us in order to secure completely bodily submission. That is what they, specifically, do; everything else is PR and fundraising.

What is the place of violence work outside of protecting capital? Interpersonal violence begets violence. It is self-fulfilling; resisting the threat of police violence will guarantee that the police are violent with you, as with the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling (Graham v. Connor) that the police may use force against any resistance to arrest. Both statistically and narratively, the presence of a gun dramatically increases the odds of fatal injury. Why, then, must traffic police be armed, unless we want traffic violations to be violent occasions? Why do we have police in schools, bringing guns to fistfights? Police do not prevent violence—they commit it, and encourage their victims to commit it in self-defense.

The majority of police commute to work—they live outside the communities they patrol.⁴⁴ Armed outsiders assigned by the state to occupy and control poor and non-white neighborhoods with the constant application of violence.

In 1975 two men broke into a rooming house and assaulted a resident, whose screams alerted neighbors Warren and Taliaferro. Warren and Taliaferro hid in their room and called the police. Five minutes later the police showed up, knocked, received no answer, and left.

So Warren and Taliaferro placed a second call to 911. Unbeknownst to Warren and Taliaferro this second call was never even dispatched. Believing that the police had returned they came out of hiding and called out to the victim, which alerted the invader to their presence. He held all three women captive at knifepoint and abused them for hours.

The police never showed up.

All three women sued the Metropolitan Police Department for failing to follow procedure with the proper degree of urgency, including failure to dispatch, but the trial court dismissed the complaints, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal by holding "the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen; the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."⁴⁵

2005: Castle Rock vs. Gonzales holds that the police can't be sued for failing to enforce restraining orders.

2011: The NYPD conduct a manhunt on a knife-wielding murderer named Maksim Gelman. When Gelman attempts to enter the cab of a subway train where an officer named Terrence Howell is trying to hide, Howell locks the door and turns his back. A citizen named Joseph Lozito confronts and subdues Gelman instead, sustaining multiple stab wounds in his back and neck. On the police report Howell claims to have tackled Gelman himself, but then admits to a juror that he hid because he thought Gelman had a gun. Lozito sues (Lozito vs. New York City) and the suit is tossed out; the police had "no special duty" to protect Lozito or anyone else on the train that day. "Under well-established law, the police are not liable for such incidents," said a city lawyer.⁴⁶

2018: Sergeant Brian Miller hides behind his car while shots ring out at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed and 17 more injured. Miller is subsequently fired, his firing is ruled unconstitutional, and he is reinstated.

Through decades of reform the courts have consistently ruled that the LAPD's famous motto "To Protect and Serve" is nothing more than a legally non-binding slogan. The police have no obligation to help you—and the data suggest they rarely do: most violent victimizations are never reported to police,⁷⁰ and most reported violent crimes are never solved.⁵

In every state except California, however, it remains illegal to not help the police upon command—a charge called "refusing to assist a police officer."

In 1838 the city of Boston organized America's first police department as a response to the Battle of Broad Street, to control the "Irish problem," i.e., the influx of Irish-Catholic laborers fleeing English genocide.⁴⁷ 160 years later the NYPD's "intelligence division" tracked Muslim students across the country, monitoring emails, forums, and social media, even sending an undercover agent on a City College rafting trip.⁴⁸

Policing has always been about othering, and not just in international terms. The so-called "border zone" that defines the jurisdiction of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP—one of the world's largest police agencies, with more than 20,000 police and a budget of over 8 billion) includes everyone within 100 miles of any border—putting about 2 out of every 3 citizens under their jurisdiction.⁴⁹

Since 2002 the CBP has been part of the Department of Homeland Security, a police force created by George W. Bush that is now the third largest Cabinet department. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created at the same time, which has since performed "Enforcement and Removal Operations" on millions of people⁵⁰—separating children from families, torturing them, and sexually abusing them⁵¹ in facilities that not even state representatives are allowed to see the inside of.⁵² The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention centers—a detention budget larger than the entire federal prison system—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴

In 2020 these facilities were so crowded that Congress passed billions in emergency funding to erect soft-sided tent cities in the middle of the desert such as those in Yuma, Arizona, where dozens of children were sexually assaulted.⁵³ To pay for all this, taxpayers spend about 33 to lock someone in a traditional ICE facility; locking children away in tents in some of North America's harshest environments costs us about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴

Of over 1,200 sexual assault complaints while in immigration custody, only 2% have been investigated.⁵⁵

Detention has surged past 56,000—the highest since records began—with tent cities, converted warehouses, and Florida's Everglades facility "Alligator Alcatraz," where 22,000 people were cycled through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰ ICE agents now conduct street-level enforcement in American cities; in January 2026, agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, as she sat in her vehicle during an immigration sweep.⁸⁹

George Floyd (1973–May 25, 2020) was handcuffed face-down on a Minneapolis street while officer Derek Chauvin pressed a knee into his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd pleaded "I can't breathe" at least 27 times. Chauvin was convicted of murder; the city paid Floyd's family 7 million. His death sparked the largest protest movement in U.S. history.⁸⁵

Breonna Taylor (1993–March 13, 2020) was asleep in her Louisville apartment when police executed a no-knock warrant at midnight, firing 32 shots. Taylor was struck six times and died in her hallway. No officer was charged in her death. The city settled for 2 million.⁸⁶

Tyre Nichols (1993–January 10, 2023) was beaten for three minutes by Memphis Scorpion unit officers after a traffic stop a block from his home. He died three days later of blunt-force trauma. Five officers were fired; three were acquitted of state murder in 2025, though federal civil-rights convictions followed. The DOJ found Memphis PD "regularly used excessive force against Black residents."⁸⁷

Sonya Massey (1993–July 6, 2024) called 911 about a prowler outside her Springfield, Illinois home. Sangamon County deputy Sean Grayson entered her kitchen and shot her in the face after she moved a pot of water off the stove. Body camera footage shows Massey ducking and apologizing seconds before the shots. Grayson was convicted of first-degree murder in 2025; the county paid her family 0 million.⁸⁸

Renee Good (1988–January 7, 2026) was a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis when ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot her during a street-level immigration sweep. Bystanders and Ross's own phone footage captured the encounter; Good was in her vehicle. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist." Hennepin County prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹

Yassin Mohamed (1973–May 9, 2020) was walking down a rural road in Georgia around midnight on May 9, 2020 when someone called the Evans County sheriff. Police had been hassling him all night and he'd already been hospitalized once for mental health concerns. An "altercation ensued" when two officers attempted to "make contact," and Mohamed allegedly threw a rock at one of the officers before charging with a "larger rock." The officer, sustaining no injuries, shot Mohamed, who died at the scene. It was the 38th police shooting investigated this year by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; within a month they'd opened their 50th.⁵⁶

Pest control specialist Daniel Shaver (1990–January 18, 2016) was showing off the pellet gun that he used to exterminate birds in grocery stores to his friends in his room at the Mesa, Arizona La Quinta when someone called the police to report a rifle in the window. Six police surrounded the room. They yelled contradictory commands to a prone, sobbing Shaver. As he tried to crawl towards the police his waistband slipped and, when he reached to pull it up, 26-year-old Philip Brailsford shot Shaver five times with his AR-15 (engraved with "you're fucked" and "molon labe"), murdering him instantly. According to Brailsford, Shaver was "trying to gain a position of advantage in order to gain a better firing position on us;" he was fired, charged, acquitted, reinstated, compensated for PTSD, and allowed to retire on a pension of ,500 per month, or .5 million over the course of a lifetime. He currently works in a steel mill.⁵⁷

Plainclothed police cut off the burglar bars and broke down the door of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston's Atlanta home in a no-knock drug raid on the wrong house. Johnston (1914–November 21, 2006) fired a single shot from a rusty revolver over the heads of the police, injuring no one; the police fired 39 shots back, killing Johnston and injuring three of their own members. The police handcuffed Johnston as she was dying and planted three bags of weed in the house. They called an informant and had him say that he'd bought crack cocaine at Johnston's house to justify the raid occurring in the first place.⁵⁸

Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal (1998–May 23, 2020) was shot 20 times in the back at close range as he tried to flee from the Salt Lake City police. The police yelled "drop it" five times and "show us your fucking hands" to his dead body, which lay motionless on the ground. Mayor Erin Mendenhall said that video of the incident "disturbed and upset" her as a mother, but after weeks of protests, write-ins, and call-ins demanding at least $30 million in defunding and the arrest of Palacios-Carbajal's killers, Salt Lake City approved Mendenhall's proposed $84 million police budget, million more than last year. This money includes $322,800 for "training" and $687,000 to equip every police with a camera, with "data," and a Taser.⁵⁹

At 12:40 am on a Sunday in 2010 Joe Weekley of the Detroit PD Special Response Team fired a flash grenade through the front window of an East Side duplex, stormed his way in behind a ballistic riot shield, and then shot 7-year-old Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones (2002–May 16, 2010) in the head. Weekley claimed that it was actually Stanley-Jones' grandmother, Mertilla Jones, who killed the girl when she tried to slap the MP5 submachine gun out of Weekley's hands, but tests for her fingerprints on the gun came up negative. After two failed trials against him, Weekley cannot be tried a third time.⁶⁰

After leading them on a slow, meandering 4-mile "chase" in her flattened Buick Century, waitress and mother-of-2 Caroline Small (1975–June 18, 2010) was shot eight times in the face through her front windshield by two Glynn County, Georgia police. "I hit her right in the face, right on the bridge of the nose," they bragged. "Her head exploded." They went on to tell a jury that they'd feared for their lives because Small was using her car as a "deadly weapon," although dashcam footage shows that Small was motionless and boxed-in at the time. Small lost consciousness from her bullet wounds and died a week later. Local news ran the headline: "Woman shot trying to run down police."

A grand jury found the shooting justified, Small's family's federal civil rights lawsuit against the police was thrown out on two occasions, and both of the police that killed her are still working.⁶¹

James Boyd (1975–March 16, 2014) was sleeping alone in Albuquerque's Sandia foothills with two rusty pocketknives on him when 19 police surrounded him and demanded his surrender. James eventually complied, promising (after hours of harassment) to go with the police shortly after sunset, but as he bent over to pick up his belongings the police deployed a flash-bang grenade, a Taser shotgun, multiple beanbags, and a K9 unit. The K9 grabbed Boyd's bag and brought it back to its handler, who then ordered the K9 to return to Boyd—while yet another police shot him three times in the back. Boyd begged for his life as the dog chewed his calf off. He was dead by morning.

Nobody faced any consequences. It was the 47th APD shooting, and 32nd death, in 5 years. Despite increased funding for "training," New Mexico has the highest rate of police killings per capita, including 9 people in Albuquerque in 2018.

Few details are known about the murder of Tony McDade (1982–May 27, 2020) by police in Tallahassee, Florida. But according to the Human Rights Campaign, McDade was the twelfth transgender or gender non-conforming person to be shot or killed in 2020.

And because of laws meant to protect victims' privacy, the public still doesn't know who shot him—because the shooter is being considered a victim.⁶²

In 2018 Sean Bostwick was fired from the Detroit Police Department for posting a uniformed selfie on Snapchat with the following caption: "Another night to Rangel up these zoo animals"⁶³

Presumably he meant "wrangle," which the Oxford English Dictionary takes to mean "round up, herd, or take charge of livestock."

Such language isn't new. Nazis famously portrayed Jewish people as pests, normalizing associations that lead directly into the holocaust. American slavers depicted Black people as apes. Protestors in Hong Kong today are even called cockroaches. Nor is such language ineffective. Modern studies show that US citizens implicitly associated Black people with apes, which primes us to tolerate more violent policing actions when it comes to Black suspects. Comparing women to animals of prey spikes a sense of hostile sexism, and woman/animal associations have been strongly correlated with sexual harassment and assault.

The language of racist policing alters every police interaction, and it can escalate even the most routine traffic stops the moment an officer speaks. Research from Stanford indicates that police address white and Black people differently at traffic stops.⁶⁴ White victims receive apologies, full names and proper titles, gentle reassurances, and expressions of gratitude from the police. Black victims receive commands, first names and casual titles, and sharp questioning. If one believes that rhetoric has any real-world effect (which the police, with their so-called "attitude test," do), then one must concede that the police are more than predisposed to escalation via the language they use—that the language itself constitutes an escalation.

Especially with a word like "wrangle," which connotes either an exotic other—the zoo—or to livestock. The latter is part of a historical commitment to chattel slavery, in which not just one human is enslaved as property, but all of their descendants. Combined with the "one drop rule," wherein just "one drop" of color made a person legally Black, this incentivized systematic raping of enslaved women by both enslaved men and the slavers themselves, who controlled and profited from it all. Chattel conditions were bad enough that enslaved Black people routinely tried to rebel or run away, which is where the South's first organized police force comes from: the slavecatchers of the 18th and 19th century.

These proto-police, charged simply with "controlling the movements and behaviors of enslaved populations," could enter any property suspected of housing escapees and shoot any Black person. Louisiana privatized its state penitentiary in 1844 as a textile factory, and four years later decreed that all Black children born to parents serving life sentences would become state property. After the 13th amendment passed in 1865 the enslaved labor of Black men was moved from private plantations to public prisons (many of which, like Mississippi's Parchman Farm, were literal plantations) to manufacture things like military helmets and police uniforms, although in 1979 the US gave a little of that enslaved labor back to private hands: the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program permitted US companies to use prison labor, which most major corporations take advantage of either themselves or through subcontractors, including McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, and Verizon. Inmates in private prisons earn $0.12-0.40 per hour under optimal conditions; when overcrowding occurs, they're capped at $5.25 a month.

That is what police like Sean Bostwick are "wrangling" up: the forced labor that produces our war supplies, police gear, fast food, underwear, and coffee cups. They are wrangling capital.

Between 2004 and 2015 the city of Chicago disappeared and interrogated more than 7,000 Black and Latino men in a CIA-style "black site" at a West Side warehouse in Homan Square. A South Side police commander named Jon Burge—acquitted in the 80s of torture charges going back to the 70s—personally participated in or approved the torture of at least 118 people in order to force false confessions.

The majority of arrestees (that the public knows of) were brought in from over 2.5 miles away—i.e., the entire city—and held anywhere from several hours to several days. Nearly 6,000 were Black, only 68 of which were allowed access to their attorneys. No contemporaneous public records of anyone's presence exists—no booking records, no means for attorneys to reach their clients. There are no official records whatsoever (including coroner's report) concerning the death of 44-year-old John Hubbard in an interview room.

And the result of those 7,000+ disappearances? 5,386 charges for drug possession, mostly marijuana and heroin.²³

In 2015 Mayor Rahm Emanuel (currently serving as Ambassador to Japan) lied in defense of the torture, denying the reporting on Homan Square as "not true. We follow all the rules… Everything's done by the books."²⁴

And while the initial reporting on Homan Square as a "CIA-style black site" is accurate, that does not mean Homan Square should be considered unique, neither an isolated nor an extreme example of city-wide violence "as routine as traffic lights."²⁵

Chicago and Cook County have paid roughly 00 million in Burge-related settlements and verdicts. In 2015 the city passed the first municipal reparations ordinance for police violence in U.S. history, paying $5.5 million to 57 surviving torture victims.⁷⁵

Handcuffs are the first tool of custody—the moment a police encounter becomes an arrest, and the moment a civilian loses the use of their hands. They are marketed as safety equipment: a way to restrain a dangerous person without shooting them. In practice, handcuffs are often the beginning of the killing, not an alternative to it.

An Associated Press investigation documented 1,036 deaths from 2012 through 2021 after police used force that was not supposed to be lethal. At least 740 of those deaths involved prone restraint—holding someone face-down, often with body weight, frequently after handcuffs were already applied. In about half of those cases, officers failed to turn the person over promptly after cuffing, or did so only after they stopped responding.⁹³⁹⁴

The danger is not mysterious. Medical examiners and coroners cited prone restraint, positional asphyxia, or asphyxia due to restraint as a cause or contributing factor in dozens of cases AP identified—and training to avoid it has existed for decades.⁹³ In roughly 440 deaths, officers violated multiple safety guidelines at once.⁹⁴ The restraint position police use every day becomes lethal when combined with body weight, stress, drugs, obesity, or simply the panic of being pinned with your face in the pavement and your hands behind your back.

Handcuffs do not stop the violence—they enable the next stage of it. George Floyd was already cuffed when Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes; Floyd said "I can't breathe" at least 27 times before he died.⁸⁵ Freddie Gray was shackled at the wrists and ankles and thrown into a police van without a seatbelt; he died of a spinal injury after a "rough ride."⁸² Kathryn Johnston was handcuffed by Atlanta police as she lay dying from 39 gunshot wounds in a no-knock raid on the wrong house.⁵⁸

Federal data on arrest-related deaths routinely undercount what happens after cuffs go on. The Death in Custody Reporting Act requires states to report deaths during arrest and detention, but reporting is uneven and prone restraint is not tracked as its own category—deaths are lumped under homicide, accident, or "natural causes" depending on who writes the report.⁹⁶ What we know from independent investigations is enough: the tool sold as a humane alternative to the gun is, very often, the last thing a person feels before they cannot breathe.

The London Metropolitan Police was modeled after England's experience occupying colonial Ireland. The US followed the same template, transferring systems developed in the occupation of the Philippines for use in the first state police in Pennsylvania (which was itself designed to use violence against striking miners that the local police were unwilling to do).

In occupied Puerto Rico a marine named Frank Thacher organized the Insular Police to protect US sugar interests, a famously harsh crop to work. Concerned about the harsh working conditions of his countrymen, a Harvard Law graduate named Pedro Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico to advocate for self-determination via national independence, and, following involvement in an island-wide sugar strike (that more than tripled cane workers' daily wages), attracted the attention of the FBI.

The US installed a new governor, Blanton Winship, and put Albizu Campos under 30 years of surveillance. Slaughter ensued.

In 1935 the Insular Police massacred a student rally (the Rio Peidra Massacre), Chief of Police E. Francis Riggs warning Albizu Campos that if he didn't stop, "there will be war to the death against all Puerto Ricans." Albizu Campos was arrested for conspiracy to overthrow the US government in 1936 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Then again on Palm Sunday, 1937, while marching in Albizu Campos' home city of Ponce to protest his arrest (as well as commemorate the abolition of slavery), 19 protestors were killed and 235 wounded when the Insular Police, unprovoked, opened fire with a machine gun. They shot fleeing protestors in the back and executed men in alleys, lied in court about who shot first despite photographic evidence, and faced no charges.

Finally, on October 30, 1950, Albizu Campos led the Nationalist Party in revolution against the occupying US. Independent republics were declared, precincts burned down, and the Insular Police bombed two towns to ruins. Albizu Campos was arrested and allegedly tortured to death with experimental radiation poisoning in the infamous pits of La Princesa, in San Juan.²⁶

Governor Winship went on to serve in World War II, where he developed the military tribunals responsible for prosecuting Nazis. Fluctuating between around 8,000 members and 17,000 members, the Puerto Rico Police Department is one of the largest in the US.

"Uncle Sam Watches as the Goddess of Liberty heralds the day of Freedom for Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines." (1898)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is violence work at the border of citizenship. Like the police, ICE does not exist to keep anyone safe; it exists to enforce the state monopoly on movement and to protect the controlled flow of labor and capital across a line drawn on a map. The people it targets are overwhelmingly workers.

ICE is a young agency. It was created in 2003 and folded into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security after September 11th—a reorganization that recast immigration as national security. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm has since carried out millions of deportations,⁵⁰ separating children from families in facilities where members of Congress have been denied entry.⁵²

Detention is the business model. Taxpayers spend about 33 per person per night in a traditional ICE facility; holding children in emergency tent cities in the desert costs about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴ The beds are operated by private contractors who bill by the head—the same perverse incentive that drives mass incarceration everywhere. Intercept reporting documented hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse in ICE detention;⁵¹⁵⁵ in Arizona, DHS opened investigations into abuse at migrant detention centers while senators were turned away at the door.⁵³

The cruelty is policy, not accident. The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention capacity—larger than the entire federal prison system budget—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴ Detention has surged past 56,000 people, the highest on record, including tent cities and converted warehouses; Florida's Everglades facility cycled 22,000 people through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰

Street-level enforcement has followed. In January 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, during an immigration sweep—captured on bystander and agent phone footage. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist"; county prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹ Children have died in custody. Adults have died in custody. The agency responds the way every police force does: passive voice, internal review, no charges.

ICE is what the police look like when the "community" they answer to is the nation-state and the "disorder" they are sent to correct is a human being who crossed a line to work. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police.

Jailing people constitutes a significant aspect of violence work, and one of its most expensive. It costs Californians about 90 a night to incarcerate someone. Most of that is labor cost, and that's after offloading most of the labor (cooking, laundry, cleaning, maintenance) to the incarcerated themselves—at compensation of 8-37 cents per hour.²⁷

The costs are steep. Every person in jail is someone who can't work or provide for a family. They're forced to spend what money they have access to on commissary junk food and JPay email "stamps," and then some of them are forced to pay jail itself; in 2013 Utah's Davis County collected almost $370,000 from prisoners through its "pay-to-stay" policy, and waived another $858,000 in exchange for prisoner labor (at the rate of 0 per day, representing 85,800 hours of labor).²⁸

It is no wonder, then, that incarceration itself is criminogenic: the more time people spend in jail, the more likely they are to offend again.²⁹ Yet at midyear 2024, 69% of people in jail had not been convicted—nor were awaiting sentence on a conviction—and the majority of charges are for non-violent, drug-related offenses.⁶⁹

And that's if you survive the experience.

Many don't. There were 1,200 deaths in local jails in 2019 alone. Suicide has been the leading single cause of jail deaths every year since 2000, and of the more than 6,200 people who died by suicide in a jail cell between 2000 and 2019, more than three-quarters had never been convicted of the charge they were held on.⁷⁶

Gregory Edwards was arrested for a PTSD-related episode in a Wal-Mart. He was taken in by 7 deputies, beaten, sprayed with a chemical agent, strapped into a restraint chair with a "spit hood" on, and left unconscious; he died within 24 hours. A Naperville, Illinois-native named Sandra Bland was arrested from her car in Texas and found dead in a Waller County jail cell three days later. The state claims it was a suicide, but family maintains suspicions that she was killed.

In either case, it was jail that killed her.

Though culturally connected to the Cuban Bloodhounds trained by slavers in the antebellum US to pursue escaping enslaved people, the police dog as we know it today is a 20th-century phenomenon, tested for the first time around 1900 in New York City and widely popularized during the Civil Rights movement, such as with the use of "Canine Corps" against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham.

In addition to being psychologically traumatizing, dog attacks are nearly impossible to control, deeply painful, and often disfiguring. In the "use-of-force continuum" they're considered an "impact weapon," like a club, and, despite the fact that once the handler releases them it's almost impossible to stop a canine from killing a target should it choose to do so, courts have determined that intent of the handler is more important than what actually occurs—and therefore canines are not deadly weapons.

"Bite and hold" training teaches canines to attack the closest human being they can get hold of other than their handler, from women taking out the garbage in St. Paul to toddlers in cars in Nevada to fellow deputies in Georgia (in which case the dog gets shot, too). And it's not typically easy to convert a domesticated animal into an impact weapon; it takes prong collars, choke chains, and what's known as "testicular submission." Police have been caught on camera strangling and whipping dogs with their own leashes, and they routinely shoot their four-legged "partners" in the so-called line of duty.

American police dogs send an estimated 3,661 people to emergency rooms every year, and medical studies find K9 bites are categorically worse than ordinary dog bites—multiple wounds, more operations, longer hospital stays.⁷⁷ The training works as designed. When Los Angeles was forced to switch from "find and bite" to "bark and hold" in 1992, bites dropped from 639 in the preceding four years to 66 in the following four.⁷⁸

K9 units are abuses of both animal and human rights. They are also effective police propaganda; a company called Hero Industries, proudly affiliated with the FOP, sells departmental-customized "Hero K9" dolls for departments to give to children. Meanwhile, 25-500 family dogs (estimates vary—no one really knows) are shot to death by police every day.

The police are professional liars. They're trained in the art of "investigative lies" to say whatever it takes to make an arrest and extract a confession, with the full backing of the courts. Police would lose a majority of cases if they were not.

They don't have to tell you if they're police. They don't have to follow up on any promises they might make, nor even admit later on that they ever made any. They can lie about having your fingerprints. They can steal your DNA. They can administer fake polygraph/chemical tests and lie about the results. They can lie about having witnesses, they can lie about recording you, and they can lie about having confessions. They can lie about consequences, they can lie about helping you, and they can ignore your request for a lawyer under false pretenses.³⁰

And those are just the over-the-table, by-the-book, court-enshrined laws.

They will also lie to the court. There is the famous "blue wall of silence," the lies of perjury and omission told by police to protect other police under investigation. But they also famously lie on their reports, which then become the media's reports. When Ahmaud Arbery was arrested in a park, his entire body standing clearly outside of his car, the police reported that he "did not take his hands out of the vehicle." The report on Elijah Tufono's beating-by-police in Sacramento never mentioned any beating. The incident report for the murder of Breonna Taylor, shot at least 8 times in her bed, lists her injuries as "none."³¹

Of course if you "provide false information or documentation" to the police, you will be arrested.

"Militarization" is a misleading term because it suggests a distinction between the police and the military that was never tangible in the first place. Early state police were directly modeled after the counter-revolutionary Philippine Constabulary. Two of its most influential architects, August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson, were both military, and today every fifth officer is a veteran. They wore blue uniforms because they inherited postwar Union Army surplus.

As a domestic military, America's 920,000+ police outnumber the standing armies of Brazil 2:1, Germany 4:1, and Canada 11:1. They've used chemical weapons and armored war machines on civilians since tear gas was developed in 1919, but the trend has accelerated. The 1981 Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act gave police access to military bases and equipment; four years later police dropped a bomb on a neighborhood in West Philadelphia.³² 1997's National Defense Authorization Act created the "1033 program," transferring over $8.4 billion in surplus aircraft, watercraft, armored vehicles, grenade launchers, bayonets, and other armaments to at least 8,000 agencies (out of about 18,000 total).⁶⁷ The Department of Homeland Security has been equipping local police with LRADs—sound cannons—for almost 20 years.

If there is a significant difference between the actual military and the local police, it is that, between the two, the police have the loosest "rules of engagement." And unlike police, soldiers have neither qualified immunity nor an FOP to protect them.

After eight officers were caught assaulting Rodney King on handheld camera in 1991 (and were subsequently acquitted by a mostly white jury), it came to light that the Los Angeles justice system routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to cases involving Black men: "No Humans Involved."³³

The term was also used—like "misdemeanor murder"—to refer to the murder of sex workers.

"I haven't beat anyone this bad in a long time," joked police over official channels. "I'm sure the lizard didn't deserve it… HAHA."

"Shoot him twice for me," said another. "Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife."³⁴

The dehumanizing language of police work is not limited to individual police. It is not even limited to policing's role in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors for death-penalty cases against Black defendants in Georgia labeled prospective white jurors as "W" and prospective Black jurors as "N," describing the latter as "slow," "fat," "con-artist," etc. in order to stack the jury.³⁵ In 1989 the New York Times called the Central Park Five, falsely imprisoned for assaulting a woman, a "roving wolf pack." New York City settled with the five men for $41 million in 2014—roughly a million dollars per year of wrongful imprisonment—while admitting no wrongdoing.⁷⁹

And the result of this dehumanization is violence. As Sylvia Wynter writes: "The social effects to which this acronym, and its placing outside the 'sanctified universe of obligation,' of the category of young Black males to which it refers, leads, whilst not overtly genocidal, are clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal, and everyday means."

No community-based oversight committee in the United States has the authority to terminate or even discipline a police officer; reformist groups like Campaign Zero don't even call for it.

Oversight as-is doesn't start until a citizen initiates a formal complaint, in a system controlled by the police—and designed to be as frictive and intimidating as possible.

When civil advocates in Minneapolis tested the complaint system they were told untruths like you must file in the precinct the incident occurred in (you don't) or the printer was out of ink (it wasn't).

CBS4 in South Florida was unable to get hold of a complaint form whatsoever, and their lead investigator was repeatedly harassed, arrested, and even hospitalized. "Might not be a legitimate complaint," police will say. "Do you have an ID on you? Are you on any medications?"

To file a complaint in Chicago you need a signed affidavit, you need to disclose your full identity, and you need to disclose yourself to the officer involved before they can be questioned; about half of all allegations of misconduct are thrown away. City contracts literally prevent departments from promoting or otherwise recognizing officers who report misconduct of other officers.

And that's if you can identify the police in the first place, who are often less eager to disclose their identities than citizens are—a safety vest innocently covering a name badge, sunglasses on top of a face mask.

What does the absence of real oversight cost? The Washington Post documented nearly 40,000 misconduct payments at just 25 of the nation's largest departments between 2010 and 2020—more than $3.2 billion, paid by taxpayers. Nearly half of that money (.5 billion) went to claims involving the more than 7,600 officers who had been the subject of multiple payouts; over 1,200 officers had been the subject of at least five.⁸⁰

Both the apparent need for oversight and the failure to actually practice it demonstrate a fundamental dysfunction of police work.

One would be forgiven for thinking PredPol was short for "predatory policing," for it means almost the same thing: predictive policing.

Constitutionally, policing must be reactionary. This is a limitation of the system, similar to the logic of a high noon duel: if you draw first, you're the aggressor. Shoot first, but draw second. Police consider this constitutional limitation to be a bug, not a feature. Companies like the CIA-backed Geolitica—formerly called PredPol—promise to find a way around it. Operating under the belief that criminal activity follows the same natural patterns as both seismic activity (a series of crimes and smaller "aftercrimes") and epidemiology (crime is a "virus" whose "contagion" can be mapped), Geolitica sells "location-based proactive policing" technology to triangulate crime type, location, and time into so-called "hot spots," red grids on an interactive mobile map—the visible infection of potential future-crimes, to which police are supposed to devote 6 minutes an hour physically occupying.³⁶

Yet we know this data is corrupted. Chicago's predictive policing technology, in use since at least 2012, has been shown to use data "sullied by years of unconstitutional and racially biased stops, searches, and arrests" to determine the distribution of police resources. An unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy creates a dataset targeting Black men for marijuana at 5x the rate white men are targeted, even though usage rates are the same for both groups. A third-party black-box software extrapolates these arrests into a geographical "contagion" map that redistributes and concentrates police forces to arrest more Black men for weed while white people are left off the map entirely, literally magnifying racism. Lifetime likelihood of incarceration for Black men born in 2001: 1 in 3.

And it doesn't even work. When The Markup analyzed 23,631 Geolitica predictions generated for Plainfield, New Jersey in 2018, fewer than 100 lined up with a reported crime—a success rate under half a percent. Burglary predictions succeeded 0.1% of the time.⁸¹ "I don't believe we really used it that often, if at all," the department's captain admitted. "That's why we ended up getting rid of it."

Quotes will always exist. "It just means we can't put a definite number," explains one police. "But it doesn't mean we can't tell them to write more."³⁷

These quotas define crime rates, which in turn define future policing, which in turn defines crime rates. Career success depends on it. Police who refuse to fill these unofficial quotas are given undesirable posts, see their overtime hours cut, and are passed over for promotions. The result is a chain of negative utility for the citizens subjected to these systems.

Consider the following chain of events:

1. A Black man rides a bicycle without a helmet in New York City
2. He receives a "broken windows" civil summons to help a police reach their number
3. He can't afford to pay it immediately and his license is suspended
4. He drives to work anyway and is arrested for driving on a suspended license
5. New Yorkers spend more than ,500 a day to incarcerate him³⁸

Who benefits?

Small town police departments have added financial incentives. Fines and forfeitures account for over 10% of general fund revenues for nearly 600 jurisdictions. 51% of Palmer, Texas' .2 million budget comes from ticket and fine revenue. Buckholts, a town of 520 people, levied 82,569 (73% of the town's budget) in fines in 2018, or about $350 per resident. The town of Estelline collected a stunning $3,580 per resident, or enough to buy every resident a hot tub.³⁹

As a result, it is true, ticket writing coincides with departmental targets, seeing surges of at certain times of the month.⁴⁰

25-year-old Freddie Gray was walking through Baltimore one morning when an officer conducting "enhanced drug enforcement" caught his eye. Gray turned around and the officer chased, slamming his face into the asphalt and tying him up in a painful hold known as a "leg lace." Witnesses report that he had already stopped moving by the time Officer Caesar Goodson, a "good officer, a gentle man, a nice guy," dragged Gray face-first into the back of a white van.

During the ensuing 44-minute van ride the police blew through stop signs, took turns wide enough to cross lane boundaries, and repeatedly slammed their brakes. They made several stops, including at a grocery store and to take on a second victim, and by the time they arrived at the West District station Gray was in a coma, his spine severed from a "high-energy" impact (akin to diving in a shallow pool). He was charged with possessing an illegal switchblade (he wasn't) and, a week later, pronounced dead. Six officers were charged in his death; six officers were acquitted.⁴¹

In Baltimore it's known as a "rough ride." Philadelphia police call it a "nickle ride," as cheap as a 5-cent carnival ticket. Saskatchewan has the brutal "starlight tour," where Indigenous men are left to freeze in the hostile Canadian winter at night. "Screen tests" refer to slamming the victim against the metal barriers inside the van. Or, as the Mollen Commission described it, a police "bonding ritual." It happened to Christine Abbott in 2012. Dondi Johnson Sr. became quadriplegic after he was picked up for urinating in public in 2005. James McKenna broke his neck in Philadelphia in 2011, where the Philadelphia Inquirer documented 20 related injuries.

Baltimore paid Gray's family $6.4 million—more than the city had paid for all 102 police misconduct judgments and settlements combined over the preceding four years.⁸²

New York used to call gay bars "disorderly houses" (linking, like William Bratton, disorder with crime), allowing police to raid them. In 1966 a Genovese mobster named Fat Tony bought a failing straight bar called the Stonewall Inn and converted it into the hottest "disorderly house" in Greenwich Village.

Fat Tony made more money blackmailing closeted Wall Street financiers for negotiable bonds than he did selling drinks—enough money to pay the NYPD's Sixth Precinct ,200 a month to look the other way. But maybe he missed a payment, or maybe the police simply went back on their word, because at 1:20 a.m. on a Saturday in 1969's "Summer of Love" seven police barred the doors of the club and announced: "Police! We're taking the place!'

The 3-hour anti-police insurgency that followed—led by queer and transgender people of color, like the famous Marsha P. Johnson—was not the first violent confrontation between the queer community and the police (see Cooper's Donut Riots in 1959, Compton's Cafeteria Riot in 1966, or the Black Cat Riot of 1967), but it was the Black Panther-inspired methods of the Stonewall siege—trash can fires, overturned cars, power chants—that decidedly positioned gay rights as a national issue, giving rise to the gay rights movement.

The history of the Stonewall Uprising is one of the reasons why police have no place at Pride; Pride was a riot.

On June 12, 2020, after stealing an already-spent Taser and trying to flee, Rayshard Brooks was shot twice in the back in a Wendy's parking lot. Police apologists argue that the shooting was justified because Brooks, by pointing the spent Taser at an officer, tried to use "deadly force." Is that accurate?

If yes, then the initial officer should never have drawn and discharged their Taser on Brooks in the first place.

If no, then the officer should never have drawn their guns and shot Brooks in the back.

Physicist Jack Cover invented the Taser following the Watts Rebellion of 1965. It's an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle," after a sci-fi novel where a boy named Tom Swift rampages through Africa with an electric gun. Tasers are capable of delivering 50,000 volts of electricity from about 10 feet away, about as much power as a high-tension transmission line. Nicknamed "cattle prods," that's exactly what they replace: the police have been electrocuting citizens with cattle prods since at least the 1940s, from civil rights protests in Alabama to Jon Burge's interrogations at Homan Square.

Declared a tool of torture by the UN in 2007, Tasers are favored in the US as "less-lethal," a category of wordplay contingent on additional wordplay. Reuters documented at least 1,081 U.S. deaths following police Taser use through 2018—in nine of every ten cases the person was unarmed, and a quarter were in mental health crisis.⁸³ When people die from being tased the police will attribute the death to a pre-existing syndrome called "Excited Delirium Syndrome." Essentially, the only people who die from being tased are people who have the condition of dying from being tased.

19-year-old Jaylin Hughes was caught smoking pot in his Georgia apartment complex and, like most white teenagers caught in the same situation, decided to make a run for it. The police, unrepentant and dangerous predators, chased him into a corner, and when they caught him jumping a tall fence they shot him with a Taser and, losing control of his body, he severed his spinal cord when he fell back to the ground. He was charged with obstruction of justice and possession of marijuana, and today he is paralyzed from the shoulders down.⁴²

Black people are killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white people per capita.⁶⁵ In the 100 largest U.S. cities, 41% of people police killed while unarmed were Black—despite Black residents making up 19% of those cities' populations.⁶⁸

And that's if you can believe the official reports. A comatose Freddie Gray was charged as armed with an illegal switchblade for possessing something that was 1) not illegal, 2) not a switchblade, and 3) not discovered on his body until after his assault. A mentally ill man named James Boyd was "armed" with two rusty pocketknives when Albuquerque police used stun grenades, Taser shotguns, beanbag guns, and K9s against him, and then shot him three times in the back after he'd surrendered.

Police advocates will point to the population of gun-owners in the United States as the reason police must also be armed; they are dealing with an armed populace. But if one believes that the citizenry is armed, and that being armed is reason enough to be fired upon, then one concedes that the police have the right to execute any potential citizen. This enforces a feedback loop where everyone becomes an enemy, and thus everything in their hands becomes an armament—bicycle chains, sticks, Tamir Rice's toy gun. All Daniel Shaver did was reach towards his waistband and the police felt justified in executing him.

And then there are bodies themselves that are considered armaments. Darren Wilson's testimony in the murder of Michael Brown, for which Wilson was never charged, suggests Black men are by definition armed: "He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked."⁴³

Researchers find fewer than 2% of on-duty fatal shootings result in murder or manslaughter charges; of the 204 officers charged from 2005 through 2024, only 64 were convicted.¹¹

Police are violence workers.

That doesn't mean commit violence is all they do; violence may even occupy a statistically insignificant amount of their daily duties. But it means that violence is their essential function in society.

Though a century of reform has seen society layer additional responsibilities on the police, their essential duty—essential to their ability to protect the controlled movement of capital—is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence. They are empowered by the state to tackle us, punch us, bind us, digitally rape us, dose us, abduct us, and eventually shoot us in order to secure completely bodily submission. That is what they, specifically, do; everything else is PR and fundraising.

What is the place of violence work outside of protecting capital? Interpersonal violence begets violence. It is self-fulfilling; resisting the threat of police violence will guarantee that the police are violent with you, as with the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling (Graham v. Connor) that the police may use force against any resistance to arrest. Both statistically and narratively, the presence of a gun dramatically increases the odds of fatal injury. Why, then, must traffic police be armed, unless we want traffic violations to be violent occasions? Why do we have police in schools, bringing guns to fistfights? Police do not prevent violence—they commit it, and encourage their victims to commit it in self-defense.

The majority of police commute to work—they live outside the communities they patrol.⁴⁴ Armed outsiders assigned by the state to occupy and control poor and non-white neighborhoods with the constant application of violence.

In 1975 two men broke into a rooming house and assaulted a resident, whose screams alerted neighbors Warren and Taliaferro. Warren and Taliaferro hid in their room and called the police. Five minutes later the police showed up, knocked, received no answer, and left.

So Warren and Taliaferro placed a second call to 911. Unbeknownst to Warren and Taliaferro this second call was never even dispatched. Believing that the police had returned they came out of hiding and called out to the victim, which alerted the invader to their presence. He held all three women captive at knifepoint and abused them for hours.

The police never showed up.

All three women sued the Metropolitan Police Department for failing to follow procedure with the proper degree of urgency, including failure to dispatch, but the trial court dismissed the complaints, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal by holding "the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen; the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists."⁴⁵

2005: Castle Rock vs. Gonzales holds that the police can't be sued for failing to enforce restraining orders.

2011: The NYPD conduct a manhunt on a knife-wielding murderer named Maksim Gelman. When Gelman attempts to enter the cab of a subway train where an officer named Terrence Howell is trying to hide, Howell locks the door and turns his back. A citizen named Joseph Lozito confronts and subdues Gelman instead, sustaining multiple stab wounds in his back and neck. On the police report Howell claims to have tackled Gelman himself, but then admits to a juror that he hid because he thought Gelman had a gun. Lozito sues (Lozito vs. New York City) and the suit is tossed out; the police had "no special duty" to protect Lozito or anyone else on the train that day. "Under well-established law, the police are not liable for such incidents," said a city lawyer.⁴⁶

2018: Sergeant Brian Miller hides behind his car while shots ring out at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed and 17 more injured. Miller is subsequently fired, his firing is ruled unconstitutional, and he is reinstated.

Through decades of reform the courts have consistently ruled that the LAPD's famous motto "To Protect and Serve" is nothing more than a legally non-binding slogan. The police have no obligation to help you—and the data suggest they rarely do: most violent victimizations are never reported to police,⁷⁰ and most reported violent crimes are never solved.⁵

In every state except California, however, it remains illegal to not help the police upon command—a charge called "refusing to assist a police officer."

In 1838 the city of Boston organized America's first police department as a response to the Battle of Broad Street, to control the "Irish problem," i.e., the influx of Irish-Catholic laborers fleeing English genocide.⁴⁷ 160 years later the NYPD's "intelligence division" tracked Muslim students across the country, monitoring emails, forums, and social media, even sending an undercover agent on a City College rafting trip.⁴⁸

Policing has always been about othering, and not just in international terms. The so-called "border zone" that defines the jurisdiction of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP—one of the world's largest police agencies, with more than 20,000 police and a budget of over 8 billion) includes everyone within 100 miles of any border—putting about 2 out of every 3 citizens under their jurisdiction.⁴⁹

Since 2002 the CBP has been part of the Department of Homeland Security, a police force created by George W. Bush that is now the third largest Cabinet department. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created at the same time, which has since performed "Enforcement and Removal Operations" on millions of people⁵⁰—separating children from families, torturing them, and sexually abusing them⁵¹ in facilities that not even state representatives are allowed to see the inside of.⁵² The July 2025 budget reconciliation bill handed ICE $45 billion for new detention centers—a detention budget larger than the entire federal prison system—plus 9.9 billion more for enforcement and deportation operations.⁸⁴

In 2020 these facilities were so crowded that Congress passed billions in emergency funding to erect soft-sided tent cities in the middle of the desert such as those in Yuma, Arizona, where dozens of children were sexually assaulted.⁵³ To pay for all this, taxpayers spend about 33 to lock someone in a traditional ICE facility; locking children away in tents in some of North America's harshest environments costs us about $775 per child per night.⁵⁴

Of over 1,200 sexual assault complaints while in immigration custody, only 2% have been investigated.⁵⁵

Detention has surged past 56,000—the highest since records began—with tent cities, converted warehouses, and Florida's Everglades facility "Alligator Alcatraz," where 22,000 people were cycled through at up to $860 per detainee per day before it closed in June 2026.⁹⁰ ICE agents now conduct street-level enforcement in American cities; in January 2026, agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, as she sat in her vehicle during an immigration sweep.⁸⁹

George Floyd (1973–May 25, 2020) was handcuffed face-down on a Minneapolis street while officer Derek Chauvin pressed a knee into his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd pleaded "I can't breathe" at least 27 times. Chauvin was convicted of murder; the city paid Floyd's family 7 million. His death sparked the largest protest movement in U.S. history.⁸⁵

Breonna Taylor (1993–March 13, 2020) was asleep in her Louisville apartment when police executed a no-knock warrant at midnight, firing 32 shots. Taylor was struck six times and died in her hallway. No officer was charged in her death. The city settled for 2 million.⁸⁶

Tyre Nichols (1993–January 10, 2023) was beaten for three minutes by Memphis Scorpion unit officers after a traffic stop a block from his home. He died three days later of blunt-force trauma. Five officers were fired; three were acquitted of state murder in 2025, though federal civil-rights convictions followed. The DOJ found Memphis PD "regularly used excessive force against Black residents."⁸⁷

Sonya Massey (1993–July 6, 2024) called 911 about a prowler outside her Springfield, Illinois home. Sangamon County deputy Sean Grayson entered her kitchen and shot her in the face after she moved a pot of water off the stove. Body camera footage shows Massey ducking and apologizing seconds before the shots. Grayson was convicted of first-degree murder in 2025; the county paid her family 0 million.⁸⁸

Renee Good (1988–January 7, 2026) was a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis when ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot her during a street-level immigration sweep. Bystanders and Ross's own phone footage captured the encounter; Good was in her vehicle. DHS called it self-defense and labeled her a "domestic terrorist." Hennepin County prosecutors opened an independent investigation.⁸⁹

Yassin Mohamed (1973–May 9, 2020) was walking down a rural road in Georgia around midnight on May 9, 2020 when someone called the Evans County sheriff. Police had been hassling him all night and he'd already been hospitalized once for mental health concerns. An "altercation ensued" when two officers attempted to "make contact," and Mohamed allegedly threw a rock at one of the officers before charging with a "larger rock." The officer, sustaining no injuries, shot Mohamed, who died at the scene. It was the 38th police shooting investigated this year by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; within a month they'd opened their 50th.⁵⁶

Pest control specialist Daniel Shaver (1990–January 18, 2016) was showing off the pellet gun that he used to exterminate birds in grocery stores to his friends in his room at the Mesa, Arizona La Quinta when someone called the police to report a rifle in the window. Six police surrounded the room. They yelled contradictory commands to a prone, sobbing Shaver. As he tried to crawl towards the police his waistband slipped and, when he reached to pull it up, 26-year-old Philip Brailsford shot Shaver five times with his AR-15 (engraved with "you're fucked" and "molon labe"), murdering him instantly. According to Brailsford, Shaver was "trying to gain a position of advantage in order to gain a better firing position on us;" he was fired, charged, acquitted, reinstated, compensated for PTSD, and allowed to retire on a pension of ,500 per month, or .5 million over the course of a lifetime. He currently works in a steel mill.⁵⁷

Plainclothed police cut off the burglar bars and broke down the door of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston's Atlanta home in a no-knock drug raid on the wrong house. Johnston (1914–November 21, 2006) fired a single shot from a rusty revolver over the heads of the police, injuring no one; the police fired 39 shots back, killing Johnston and injuring three of their own members. The police handcuffed Johnston as she was dying and planted three bags of weed in the house. They called an informant and had him say that he'd bought crack cocaine at Johnston's house to justify the raid occurring in the first place.⁵⁸

Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal (1998–May 23, 2020) was shot 20 times in the back at close range as he tried to flee from the Salt Lake City police. The police yelled "drop it" five times and "show us your fucking hands" to his dead body, which lay motionless on the ground. Mayor Erin Mendenhall said that video of the incident "disturbed and upset" her as a mother, but after weeks of protests, write-ins, and call-ins demanding at least $30 million in defunding and the arrest of Palacios-Carbajal's killers, Salt Lake City approved Mendenhall's proposed $84 million police budget, million more than last year. This money includes $322,800 for "training" and $687,000 to equip every police with a camera, with "data," and a Taser.⁵⁹

At 12:40 am on a Sunday in 2010 Joe Weekley of the Detroit PD Special Response Team fired a flash grenade through the front window of an East Side duplex, stormed his way in behind a ballistic riot shield, and then shot 7-year-old Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones (2002–May 16, 2010) in the head. Weekley claimed that it was actually Stanley-Jones' grandmother, Mertilla Jones, who killed the girl when she tried to slap the MP5 submachine gun out of Weekley's hands, but tests for her fingerprints on the gun came up negative. After two failed trials against him, Weekley cannot be tried a third time.⁶⁰

After leading them on a slow, meandering 4-mile "chase" in her flattened Buick Century, waitress and mother-of-2 Caroline Small (1975–June 18, 2010) was shot eight times in the face through her front windshield by two Glynn County, Georgia police. "I hit her right in the face, right on the bridge of the nose," they bragged. "Her head exploded." They went on to tell a jury that they'd feared for their lives because Small was using her car as a "deadly weapon," although dashcam footage shows that Small was motionless and boxed-in at the time. Small lost consciousness from her bullet wounds and died a week later. Local news ran the headline: "Woman shot trying to run down police."

A grand jury found the shooting justified, Small's family's federal civil rights lawsuit against the police was thrown out on two occasions, and both of the police that killed her are still working.⁶¹

James Boyd (1975–March 16, 2014) was sleeping alone in Albuquerque's Sandia foothills with two rusty pocketknives on him when 19 police surrounded him and demanded his surrender. James eventually complied, promising (after hours of harassment) to go with the police shortly after sunset, but as he bent over to pick up his belongings the police deployed a flash-bang grenade, a Taser shotgun, multiple beanbags, and a K9 unit. The K9 grabbed Boyd's bag and brought it back to its handler, who then ordered the K9 to return to Boyd—while yet another police shot him three times in the back. Boyd begged for his life as the dog chewed his calf off. He was dead by morning.

Nobody faced any consequences. It was the 47th APD shooting, and 32nd death, in 5 years. Despite increased funding for "training," New Mexico has the highest rate of police killings per capita, including 9 people in Albuquerque in 2018.

Few details are known about the murder of Tony McDade (1982–May 27, 2020) by police in Tallahassee, Florida. But according to the Human Rights Campaign, McDade was the twelfth transgender or gender non-conforming person to be shot or killed in 2020.

And because of laws meant to protect victims' privacy, the public still doesn't know who shot him—because the shooter is being considered a victim.⁶²

In 2018 Sean Bostwick was fired from the Detroit Police Department for posting a uniformed selfie on Snapchat with the following caption: "Another night to Rangel up these zoo animals"⁶³

Presumably he meant "wrangle," which the Oxford English Dictionary takes to mean "round up, herd, or take charge of livestock."

Such language isn't new. Nazis famously portrayed Jewish people as pests, normalizing associations that lead directly into the holocaust. American slavers depicted Black people as apes. Protestors in Hong Kong today are even called cockroaches. Nor is such language ineffective. Modern studies show that US citizens implicitly associated Black people with apes, which primes us to tolerate more violent policing actions when it comes to Black suspects. Comparing women to animals of prey spikes a sense of hostile sexism, and woman/animal associations have been strongly correlated with sexual harassment and assault.

The language of racist policing alters every police interaction, and it can escalate even the most routine traffic stops the moment an officer speaks. Research from Stanford indicates that police address white and Black people differently at traffic stops.⁶⁴ White victims receive apologies, full names and proper titles, gentle reassurances, and expressions of gratitude from the police. Black victims receive commands, first names and casual titles, and sharp questioning. If one believes that rhetoric has any real-world effect (which the police, with their so-called "attitude test," do), then one must concede that the police are more than predisposed to escalation via the language they use—that the language itself constitutes an escalation.

Especially with a word like "wrangle," which connotes either an exotic other—the zoo—or to livestock. The latter is part of a historical commitment to chattel slavery, in which not just one human is enslaved as property, but all of their descendants. Combined with the "one drop rule," wherein just "one drop" of color made a person legally Black, this incentivized systematic raping of enslaved women by both enslaved men and the slavers themselves, who controlled and profited from it all. Chattel conditions were bad enough that enslaved Black people routinely tried to rebel or run away, which is where the South's first organized police force comes from: the slavecatchers of the 18th and 19th century.

These proto-police, charged simply with "controlling the movements and behaviors of enslaved populations," could enter any property suspected of housing escapees and shoot any Black person. Louisiana privatized its state penitentiary in 1844 as a textile factory, and four years later decreed that all Black children born to parents serving life sentences would become state property. After the 13th amendment passed in 1865 the enslaved labor of Black men was moved from private plantations to public prisons (many of which, like Mississippi's Parchman Farm, were literal plantations) to manufacture things like military helmets and police uniforms, although in 1979 the US gave a little of that enslaved labor back to private hands: the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program permitted US companies to use prison labor, which most major corporations take advantage of either themselves or through subcontractors, including McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, and Verizon. Inmates in private prisons earn $0.12-0.40 per hour under optimal conditions; when overcrowding occurs, they're capped at $5.25 a month.

That is what police like Sean Bostwick are "wrangling" up: the forced labor that produces our war supplies, police gear, fast food, underwear, and coffee cups. They are wrangling capital.