Today, many protests and marches feature marshalls to keep the crowd safe. Marshalls are not the police, but they do engage in policing that benefits and protects the participants from the police, as well as right-wing agitators. PACA does not want to control the police, but we assert the right of every community to self-defense, which is often a form of policing.
Reply to Our Critics
Now that we’re clear on what CCOP is and isn’t, we answer our critics.
Hood Communist has featured a number of articles addressing CCOP, including an article by Dubian Ade entitled “The Argument Against Community Control of the Police” and another by Nnennaya Amuchie called “Community Control of Police v Defunding Police: Addressing the Patriarchal Roots of Policing.” Both give well thought out critiques in the spirit of serious debate.
Ade says, accurately, that proponents of community control over police (CCOP) “do not understand their position as inherently against the projects of defunding or abolition.” But Ade nevertheless suggests that CCOP activists “tend to pit their position against calls for defunding, often linking them to corporate opportunism, non-profit schemes, and Black Lives Matter.”
But in Chicago, as we mentioned before, movements pushed both defund and CCOP together. In Minneapolis, the movement added CCOP to Defund after the defund demand. For the record, PACA has never accused Defund advocates of corporate opportunism or non-profit schemes. There are important differences in emphasis and tactics between CCOP and Defund, but we can, and do, defend them on their merits – not on baseless accusations about other organizations.
In the second critique, Amuchie argues against CCOP by saying “policing is inherently violent and always patriarchal,” adding later that this is so “even if the people who make up the policing or accountability board represent marginalized genders.” In the same essay, Amuchie writes, “I believe in revolutionary violence…We must build a mass movement and organizations to see the success of revolutionary violence.” Amuchie then asserts, “we should push towards community self-determination and defense, particularly for those along the margins of the Black community. Our communities need skills and resources to prevent, intervene, and heal from violence. The more skills, resources, and relationships we have, the more Black communities will divest from policing and invest in community networks of care.”
Yet Amuchie simultaneously argues against CCOP because it is violent and patriarchal (even when it is representative) – before proceeding to offer an alternative that is violent and must be representative. Amuchie also argues that given skills and resources, Black communities will redefine policing itself, which is precisely PACA’s central point. Amuchie argues against Community Control Over Police by arguing forcefully for what one might call Community Control Over Violent Defense, all while deploying the language and imagery of CCOP.
Ade makes two similar charges as well: first, that “the function of property protection by law enforcement since its inception has always been a classed and racialized antagonism. It is not merely property police are tasked to protect, but white property”; and second, that “[c]ommunity control proponents make a strange assumption that the police can be made accountable to Black people, can serve Black people, and somehow cede control to Black people. Yet police fail the Black community everyday.”
PACA contends that who is in control of policing determines the behavior of the police. We agree with Ade and Amuchie that this system is working as designed to protect who and what it was designed to protect. But that is a function of who is in control. As Ade puts it: “The white settler exercises control over police.” Unless and until actions to secure public safety are guided by our goals and definitions of it, rather than the white settler state’s command structure, this will continue to be the reality.
Another criticism by Ricardo Levins Morales, Zola Richardson, Jonathan Stegall, and Woods Ervin ran in Forge Organizing entitled “The Fantasy of Community Control Of The Police.” Their essay begins with a litany of accusations, ranging from the view that community control is “ahistorical” and premised on a “misunderstanding of the structure and nature of modern policing” to the accusation that CCOP is “bureaucratic.”
The authors claim that “instead of struggling to take over and redirect the master’s tool, we call for investing the resources now poured into policing directly into community initiatives whose core missions are about helping, healing, and sustaining people, not controlling them.” The authors have resisted the “fantasy” of CCOP by adopting it! We invite readers to simply compare this claim to the previous section of this article, which is just an elaboration CCOP’s program: a community initiative whose mission is about helping, healing, and empowering Black people. The progress made in Seattle shows us a model for pursuing CCOP goals in concert with Defund goals.
While rejecting CCOP, the authors claim major victories for efforts to defund the police, such as cuts to police budgets in multiple cities. Upon closer examination, however, the celebration appears misplaced. The defunding of the $559 million budget for the Washington, DC Metro Police Department was “accomplished” by transferring the public school security contract from the DC police to the DC Public School System police, with zero dollars reprogrammed for social services. We strongly suspect similar schemes were used in most, if not all, of the examples lauded as successful Defund campaigns. To reiterate: defunding the police will only move those in power to change the definition of, or privatize, the police.