A settembre, il dipartimento della giustizia ha pubblicato un rapporto sull’efficacia di queste videocamere. Lungi dall’avere un effetto disciplinante sugli agenti, le videocamere incentivano la prepotenza. Lo sceriffo Douglas Gillespie commenta così:

Durante l’esperimento [con le videocamere], alcuni poliziotti di carriera hanno voluto indossare le videocamere per provarle, e la loro reazione è stata molto positiva. Dicono cose come: “È incredibile come le persone rigano dritto quando gli dici che questa è una videocamera, anche quando sono ubriachi.” Sappiamo anche che la stragrande maggioranza dei nostri agenti fanno un buon lavoro, e le videocamere lo dimostrano. ~ Douglas Gillespie, Sceriffo, Dipartimento di Polizia Metropolitana di Las Vegas.

Secondo questa analisi, involontariamente foucaltiana, dal punto di vista dell’agente il cittadino “riga dritto” quando è sorvegliato.

Da notare l’espressione “dal punto di vista dell’agente”. Ciò che non viene preso in considerazione, mai, è il punto di vista del cittadino. Il cittadino esiste come persona soggetta al potere del punto di vista dell’agente, perché il punto di vista dell’agente è considerato, in primo luogo, giusto. È il cittadino che dev’essere sorvegliato e tassato. Questa mossa serve a sorvegliare noi. È un sistema che parte dal principio secondo cui le istituzioni rappresentano il bene, e il cittadino che disobbedisce si oppone sempre a queste istituzioni. Obbedire alla polizia: esiste una descrizione più banale, più semplice dell’applicazione della legge? Loro sono gli agenti della legge, l’istituzione evidente della giustizia penale.

Si informa il cittadino della registrazione, e con questo semplice fatto l’agente impone il suo punto di vista su tutti quelli che poi rivedranno la scena. Ma chi la vedrà? Sempre che non venga distrutta, sempre che non scompaia miracolosamente, sarà il sistema della giustizia penale a vederla. Un uomo in stato di ubriachezza sta già violando la legge. Già questo lo condanna per oltraggio a pubblico ufficiale. Ciò che viene fuori dal video non è una prova neutrale. Non esistono prove neutrali quando il sistema indaga su uno dei suoi agenti. Non osserviamo lo svolgersi dei fatti da un punto di vista obiettivo e neutrale. Altrimenti non sarebbe possibile determinare la giustizia in un senso o nell’altro. Al contrario, noi osserviamo i fatti attraverso il resoconto che ci viene dato. Quello che è aggressione per uno, è difesa della legge per un altro. L’autodifesa di uno diventa la resistenza all’arresto dell’altro.

Quando diciamo che questa sorveglianza porterà gli agenti a comportarsi entro i limiti delle procedure legali, dobbiamo aggiungere che porterà anche i cittadini a comportarsi entro i limiti del comportamento così come permesso dalle leggi. Questa tecnologia può essere usata, e sarà sicuramente usata, per condannare persone colpevoli di crimini senza vittime. Sarà usata per controllare il nostro comportamento. La videocamera vede le cose in una sola direzione, sospetta preventivamente di noi, ci invita a vedere i fatti attraverso gli occhi dell’agente. Gli occhi dell’agente sono quelli della legge. Purtroppo per il cittadino, ciò che limita la sua libertà è la massiccia, smisurata opera della legge. Ciò che limita la libertà dell’agente, invece, è l’indagine interna, il pubblico ministero amico, i giurati, e la convinzione che, come è stato spesso dimostrato, la vita di tutti i giorni è diventata un’attività in gran parte criminale. Tutti corriamo il rischio di infrangere la legge perché la legge riguarda una grossa parte del nostro comportamento e perché è codificata in una montagna di libri che non abbiamo né il tempo né la pazienza di leggere. Alla fine, tutto ciò ci porterà ad interiorizzare il punto di vista del poliziotto. Saremo coscienti non solo di essere osservati, ma anche di essere osservati da un sistema che ha dichiarato illegale gran parte della nostra vita.

Io credo che il dipartimento della giustizia abbia visto correttamente. Le videocamere porteranno i cittadini all’obbedienza. Quei cittadini terrorizzati all’idea di infrangere la legge. Cosa accadrà ai video in cui sono ripresi gli atti violenti della polizia quando questi saranno resi pubblici? Accadrà che diventeranno parte del sistema, e da quest’ultimo saranno controllati e mediati. Diventeranno una nuova forma di spettacolo. Mostreranno cosa può accaderci in qualunque momento se non facciamo il nostro dovere. Man mano che la polizia sarà sempre più esonerata dalla necessità di fornire prove filmate, la gente capirà qual è il proprio ruolo: quello del sospettato, della minaccia, della prova.

Il mio non è un discorso contro la sorveglianza. È un discorso a favore della distruzione delle istituzioni che ci sorvegliano, e a favore di istituzioni nostre, di un nostro punto di vista. È la polizia che dev’essere sorvegliata: per chi fa parte del nostro movimento, niente potrebbe essere più chiaro. L’assassinio di Eric Garner, documentato da un cittadino giornalista, sollevò questioni diffuse su un inaccettabile abuso di potere. Non ci fu un filtro. Non come negli altri casi, almeno. Non fu affidato ai pubblici ministeri, ai giudici e altri sociopatici istituzionali, ma alla discussione pubblica. Il risultato fu la messa in discussione non solo del comportamento dell’agente, ma anche delle leggi meschine usate per giustificare l’aggressione. Certo i giurati sono protetti dall’influenza del pubblico perché il sistema vuole imporre solo il suo punto di vista. In teoria ci sarebbero due punti di vista, e qualcuno dovrebbe difendere i cittadini dagli agenti spietati. In pratica non è quasi mai così. Il sistema non ammette il sospetto che ci siano leggi considerate ingiuste nella vita reale. In un tribunale, la legge ha valore assoluto, almeno quando usata contro i cittadini.

Dobbiamo abbattere questa mediazione avvelenata. Le videocamere non lo fanno. Appartengono al dipartimento di polizia, e ciò che ritraggono è passato al setaccio di una versione dei fatti accuratamente di parte. Dobbiamo togliere potere alla polizia. Le videocamere non lo fanno. Queste servono solo a togliere il potere a chi disobbedisce, o si sospetta che possa disobbedire, alla legge. Dobbiamo sempre fare in modo che sia presentata la nostra versione dei fatti. Le videocamere non lo fanno. La nostra voce è ignorata, considerata ostile da un sistema giudiziario criminale, per il quale questa è l’unica cosa logica da fare.

Dobbiamo armare i cittadini di videocamere, di piattaforme proprie per la diffusione dei video, di argomenti critici che sfidino il potere dello stato. Queste risorse le abbiamo già. Sarebbe un errore dare milioni alla polizia per queste videocamere, che poi loro useranno per assolvere se stessi mentre ci controllano e ci impongono la loro disciplina. Che lo stato compri pure le videocamere, ma non pensate che siano uno strumento neutro. La legge non conosce neutralità. Puntate le vostre videocamere contro di loro. Puntate i vostri punti di vista contro di loro. Ora avete il potere di combattere lo stato di polizia, di sfidarlo secondo i vostri termini.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

In September, the DOJ released a report [PDF] on the effectiveness of police body cameras. Far from showing a disciplining effect for police officers, it presents evidence that it only further emboldens their disciplining power against us. Sheriff Douglas Gillespie comments

In the testing we did [of body-worn cameras], we had a number of tenured officers who wanted to wear the cameras and try them out, and their feedback was very positive. They said things like, “You’ll be amazed at how people stop acting badly when you say this is a camera, even if they’re intoxicated.” And we also know that the overwhelming majority of our officers are out there doing a very good job, and the cameras will show just that. –Douglas Gillespie, Sheriff, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department

This most likely unintentional Foucauldian analysis demonstrates to us that citizens engage in “good” behavior under surveillance from the perspective of the officer.

The last six words are very important, “from the perspective of the officer”. What is being left out, what has always been left out, is the perspective of the citizen. The citizen exists as a subject to the power of the officer’s perspective, because the officer’s perspective is treated, prima facie, as justified. It is the citizen being monitored, the citizen being assessed. This is a movement to surveil us. It is a system which assumes the justice of the established institutions, and the disobedient citizen is always in opposition to these institutions. Police are to be obeyed, is there a more banal and plain statement that can be made about law enforcement? They are the agents of law, they are the institution of criminal justice manifest.

The citizen is informed that he is being recorded and with this simple fact, the officer has imposed on him the perspectives of all who will see it. But who will see it? Assuming it is not disposed of or, otherwise, miraculously disappears, it is the criminal justice system that will view it. A man who is intoxicated is in fact in violation of the law. This itself is enough to condemn him to the ill treatment of the officer. What follows from this video is not neutral evidence. There is no such thing as neutral evidence within a system investigating one of its agents. We do not perceive the events unfolding from a removed, objective standpoint. If we did, no determination of justice and fairness could, in fact, be possible in any direction. We instead see it through the narratives we are given. One person’s assault is another person’s defense of law. One person’s self-defense is another person’s resisting of arrest.

When we say that this surveillance will lead to officers behaving within the confines of lawful police procedure we must also say that it will lead to citizens behaving within the confines of lawful citizen behavior. This technology can and will be used to convict people of victimless crimes. It will be used to monitor our behavior. The camera, through its direction, inherently suspects us and invites us to see things through the officer’s eyes. The officer’s eyes are that of the law. Unfortunately for the citizen, what confines him is massive, immeasurable decrees of law. What confines the officer is internal investigations, friendly prosecutors, jurors, and an understanding that, as has been demonstrated, everyday life has become a largely criminal activity. We are all in danger of breaking the law since the law covers so much of our behavior and appears before us as a stack of books we have not the time or patience to read. This will lead to an internalization of the cop’s perspective in all of us. We will know not only is he watching us, but so is a system which has declared much of our lives to be illegal.

I think the DOJ report is correct. This will lead to obedient citizens. Those citizens who remain in frightful bursts to be non-compliant. What might this do to publicly released video of cases of police brutality? It will turn them into another part of the system, controlled and mediated by it. It will become a new form of spectacle, of something we all know could come for us at anytime unless we remain dutiful subjects. As police are exonerated more and more from video evidence, people will more fully realize their place: as the suspect, the threat, the evidence.

This is not an argument against surveillance. It is an argument for the destruction of the institutions that surveil us in favor of our own spontaneous institutions, our own narratives. Police should be surveilled, for those of us in this movement there could be nothing more plain. The documented murder of Eric Garner, provided by a citizen journalist, raised massive awareness of an unacceptable abuse of power. It was not filtered, at least not as much. It was left up not to prosecutors, judges, and other institutionalized sociopaths, but to public discourse. As a result not only was the officer’s behavior called into question, but so was the petty law he was using as pretext to assault Garner. Jurors will be sheltered as much as possible from the public debate because the system only wants its perspective shown. Ideally there will be two perspectives, with someone defending citizens against ruthless officers of the law. In practice this is hardly ever the case. What the system also omits is the suspicion that certain laws are unfounded in any notion of fairness from people in the real world. In a court, the law is absolute, at least when used against the citizen.

We must tear down this poisonous mediation. Police body cameras will not do this. They will be the property of police departments and will be filtered through well-constructed narratives. We must disempower the police. Police body cameras will not do this. It only disempowers those normals disobeying the law or who are at least suspected of possibly breaking the law. We must always have our own narratives presented. Police body cameras will not do this. Our narratives are ignored and treated as hostile by the criminal justice system, and it is only rational for them to treat them that way.

We must arm the citizens with cameras, with their own media platforms, with critical narratives of state power. We have these resources already. It would be a mistake for us to treat the granting of millions to cop budgets for these cameras when they will so often be used to exonerate them while they monitor and discipline us. Let the state have their cameras, but do not imagine they will be neutral. There is no neutrality in law. Turn your own cameras on them, turn your own perspectives on them. The power is in your grasp now to fight the police state, to challenge it on your own terms.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Disciplina e Sorveglianza

Non avete letto male: istigavano al saccheggio. Secondo testimoni oculari che hanno filmato e pubblicato la manifestazione sui social media, i due agenti, fingendo di essere dimostranti, agivano da “istigatori al saccheggio” (Courtney Harrop, “Undercover Cops Outed and Pulled Guns on Crowd,” Storify, 11 dicembre 2013). Alcuni manifestanti li hanno individuati e hanno passato parola agli altri. Uno degli agenti, spaventato, è stato immortalato in una fotografia che ha fatto il giro del web mentre tira fuori la pistola e comincia a minacciare quelli che gli stanno attorno.

Quella dei poliziotti che provocano e istigano al crimine è una vecchia storia. Come disse Judi Bari, organizzatore di Earth First!, “chi offre la dinamite sono sempre gli agenti della Fbi.” Dalle proteste di Seattle a dicembre 1999 in poi, nel movimento anti-globalizzazione circolano voci di poliziotti sotto copertura che incitano i manifestanti a sfasciare le vetrine. E poi: Quasi tutte le “cellule terroristiche” scoperte dall’Fbi dall’undici settembre 2001 sono state messe in piedi passo dopo passo da agenti federali. Questi “terroristi” erano spesso così incompetenti che anche con l’assistenza dell’Fbi non sapevano darsi una mano.

Come Charles Foster Kane inventa la notizia laddove non c’è, così lo stato inventa il crimine che altrimenti non esisterebbe.

Lo fa, in primo luogo, per giustificare l’uso della violenza contro le voci critiche: chi protesta contro la globalizzazione corporativa, il movimento Occupy, chi marcia contro l’ingiustizia razziale. Lo stato cerca sempre di infangare ogni movimento che provi a diffondere il messaggio di “Un Altro Mondo Possibile”, o chiunque metta in dubbio la legittimità dell’attuale sistema di potere. Lo fa tacciandoli come “rossi”, “anarchici” e “agitatori esterni”, come avvenuto, se necessario inventando i crimini, durante la repressione post-Haymarket e durante il terrore rosso seguito alla seconda guerra mondiale.

Lo stato deve tenerci nel terrore, perché è così che accettiamo di cedere il potere. Una società composta da persone che si fidano, e non diffidano, l’uno dell’altro, che hanno fiducia nelle proprie possibilità di ottenere sicurezza tramite la cooperazione pacifica con i propri simili, è terreno sterile per il potere statale. Lo stato ha bisogno del crimine, anche se bisogna inventarlo.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

That’s right, attempting to instigate looting — you didn’t misread. According to eyewitnesses livetweeting from the demonstration, the two officers — posing as demonstrators — were would-be “instigators of looting” (Courtney Harrop, “Undercover Cops Outed and Pulled Guns on Crowd,” Storify, December 11, 2013). Protesters in the group they were attempting to infiltrate spotted them as fakes and outed them to the rest of the crowd. One of the panicked cops, captured in a photograph that immediately went viral, pulled his gun and began threatening the surrounding marchers.

Police provocateurs as instigators of crime is an old narrative. As Earth First! organizer Judi Bari famously said, “the person that offers to get the dynamite is always the FBI agent.” From the December 1999 Seattle protests on, the anti-globalization movement was rife with rumors of undercover cops always being the first to suggest smashing store windows. Nearly every “terror cell” busted by the FBI since 9/11 turned out to have been organized every step of the way by federal agents. Indeed the “terrorists” were usually so incompetent they could barely function even with FBI guidance.

Just as Charles Foster Kane manufactured news where there was none, the state manufactures crime where none would otherwise exist.

It does this, in the first instance, to create a pretext for using violence to suppress its immediate critics — the protesters against corporate globalization, the Occupiers, marchers outraged by racial injustice. The state always attempts to tarnish any movement circulating the message that “Another World is Possible” or casting doubt on the legitimacy of the existing system of power. It has done this by dismissing them as “reds,” “anarchists” and “outside agitators” — as in the post-Haymarket repression and the post-WWI Red Scare — and if necessary by simply fabricating crime.

But beyond that, the state needs us afraid so we’ll be willing to grant it power. A society made up of people who trust rather than fear each other, confident in their own ability to keep themselves safe through peaceful cooperation with their neighbors, is an inhospitable breeding ground for state power. The state needs crime — even if it has to invent it.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Lo Stato Ha Bisogno del Crimine

There has been from some corners of mainstream liberal opinion justified anger at the disproportionate behavior of the police towards minority populations. However, even this has been couched in terms assuming an overall legitimacy of the system that the victims live within. Consider the view expressed at Salon.com by Elias Isquith, in reaction to Rand Paul pointing out that the excuse used by the NYPD for the harassment and subsequent murder of Eric Garner was enforcement of cigarette taxes: he called this an example of “political narcissism,” unthinking attribution of anything that occurs as vindication of preexisting ideology.

I am not one to deny that such things occur, but to dismiss questions of which laws are enforced in the context of law enforcement — by deadly force, in this case — strikes me as absurd: if indeed the reason that Eric Garner was harassed and subsequently murdered was because of suspicion of circumventing New York City tobacco taxes, then how is that not a valid factor in his death? It is like dismissing the Georgia flashbang grenade maiming of 2 year old “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh — oddly enough, also covered at Salon — in a raid triggered by an alleged petty methamphetamine deal by a relative with “well, The Law is The Law.” Why is the law The Law though? Do outcomes not matter? Is the law a means to its own end of self perpetuation?

An implied reasoning is carried behind the respective mainstream ideologies of US politics, and has been from the beginning. The reasoning has been that there is, within a “representative” government, a range of responsibilities for those granted power of a force monopoly, as well as limits to what indeed can or should be done with such. There is within this an implication: If the responsibilities are unfulfilled, or the limits violated, that legitimacy of the granted force monopoly is void. In other words, the ideologies proposed within the respective wings of defense of “representative” government contain a claimed failsafe that if triggered would see revocation of authority — that is, anarchy — as better than continued recognition. This is to say that eventually everyone is an anarchist, it’s just a matter of when.

Consider the recent circumstances that have led to the administration and justification of deadly force by the State and its officers: Suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, jaywalking, buying pain medication without a prescription (Rumain Brisbon, in Phoenix), even merely existing in the toy section of a Wal-Mart with a toy gun in the case of John Crawford (in an open carry state, nonetheless).

Frankly, any ideology that can dismiss the laws that led to such harsh enforcement has no standing to even bother criticizing the enforcement itself in my opinion — when you state that an act is to be met with force, or allow some to be seen as threats for other than logical reasons, you essentially court violence for your preference — period.

To simultaneously defend taxation as a behavior modifier while decrying the result of its enforcement is hypocrisy. If you claim tobacco taxation as a justified use of force to maintain, the blood of Eric Garner is on your hands, like it or not. You can feel as bad as you wish, it doesn’t bring the Garner family back their father and husband. Government is a hammer, and it landed where it did.

If the anguish and outrage prompted by the murders committed by the enforcers of the State are to mean anything, they suggest something that is today seen as a bridge too far for those anointed as acceptable within the political sphere.

That suggestion is of the bankruptcy of the Government Is Us myth, leaving the reality that we are faced with an Us versus Them scenario, and we are, to the state, The Enemy. If now is not the time for a liberty or death moment, then when?

Whether or not Wilson shot Brown unjustifiably, and whether or not Brown provoked the shooting by grabbing for Wilson’s gun, the police — and the government officials who employ and arm them — are a big problem in this country. (The Eric Garner chokehold killing has none of the ambiguity of the Brown case.)

Unfortunately, it takes a shooting such as the one in Ferguson to spotlight the problem. And that presents its own problem. The claim that the police are routinely dangerous to innocent people — mostly blacks and Hispanics — appears to stand or fall with the headline case of the week. But that can’t be the correct way to judge the bigger issue. As Jason Lee Byas writes,

The way people are talking about this case seems to imply that if Wilson’s use of force was not in necessary self-defense, the police are out of control — and if it was, everything’s fine.…

Even if Darren Wilson turns out to be a near-perfect moral exemplar, the police are out of control.

Reuben Fischer-Baum writes that the shooting in Ferguson has “drawn attention to a remarkable lack of knowledge about a seemingly basic fact: how often people are killed by the police.”

The national government purports to keep count of “justifiable” police homicides, but that’s apparently all. “‘Unjustifiable homicide by police’ is not a classification,” Fischer-Baum notes.

Among the problems with the collection of data,” he writes, is that the “FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which compiles the SHR [Supplementary Homicide Report], relies on voluntary involvement of state and local police agencies — a fact that may raise some questions about the integrity of the data.”

Thus, he concludes, “the SHR’s ‘justifiable police homicide’ number [400] is not a useful approximation of how many people are killed by the police.”

The Wall Street Journal agrees:

A Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest data from 105 of the country’s largest police agencies found more than 550 police killings during those years were missing from the national tally or, in a few dozen cases, not attributed to the agency involved. The result: It is nearly impossible to determine how many people are killed by the police each year.

The Journal quotes Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan: “When cops are killed, there is a very careful account and there’s a national database. Why not the other side of the ledger?”

Data do show that blacks are more likely than whites to fall into police clutches for drug and gunoffenses, even though whites are more likely to commit these victimless so-called crimes. Does anyone doubt that young black males walking down the street are more likely to have a police encounter than young white males are? If you doubt this, you’re not paying attention.

The ultimate cause of this problem is that the police are the domestic armed troops of America’s rulers — falsely called “representatives” — and the rest of us are the ruled. They know it, and we are increasingly coming to know it. Most of the “laws” they enforce against us violate our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The chasm between rulers and ruled exists everywhere in the country, but it exists on a spectrum from the barely noticeable to the extreme. Obviously, it’s most extreme in poorer black communities, where race and class prejudice sit atop the general disdain for the ruled. (St. Louis County, MO, has gone to outrageous lengths, as Radley Balko shows.)

Some critics of police brutality and racism assume that ending prohibitions on drugs and guns — both worthy ends, of course — would eliminate or reduce police abuse. I’m not convinced. Too many young blacks have been harassed or worse by cops claiming that the “suspects” appeared to be casing a store or engaging in some other suspicious activity having nothing to do with drugs or guns.

Repealing victimless-“crime” statutes is imperative, but we also must rethink the top-down model of policing. After all, London didn’t get a police force until 1829. We could declare the experiment a flop and move on.

Rumors, audios, and videos were widely shared though WhatsApp and Facebook while the executions happened, showing what was happening on the outskirts of Belem. There was an unofficial curfew in several places on the periphery, given the expectation that there would be a violent retaliation to the death of the policeman and that the death squads that was wreaking havoc (presumably made up of military policemen) did not intend to take any prisoners. This group supposedly was covered by the official Rotam operation and they intended to kill any suspects.

It is important to highlight here that the deaths did not occur due to gunfights or resisting arrest. They were outright murders. The state government itself recognizes in an official statement that they were homicides, even though it does not conclude that the Military Police took part in them. Luiz Fernandes, Secretary of Public Security of Para, also admits that investigators are working on the hypothesis that death squads were acting there.

However, the sequence of events cannot be understood unless we comprehend their context: The local drug war dynamics.

In Belem, 66% of the population live in irregular buildings, favelas (slums) or the like, which, first, sprouted up near the center of the city (such as neighborhoods Guama, Jurunas, and Terra Firme — the last one being the stage of the murders) and, more recently, in the suburbs. They are very dense areas, with very little space between houses, allowing for the settlement of a large number of migrants from the state’s countryside and from the neighboring state Maranhao.

These areas, however, not unlike many others in Brazil, are marked by precarious access to basic utilities, like sewage disposal, and poor protection of the dwellers’ property rights (despite expropriations and evictions being uncommon in Belem). Moreover, as a result of drug prohibition, they end up under the rule of violent dealers.

Some time ago, it became known that the drug warlords were financing the militias. According to a report from the beginning of the year about the actions of militias in Guama and Terra Firme, these groups were formed by criminals and policemen (generally who are no longer formally affiliated with the Police) for the protection of drug dealers against other dealers and the police. They also regularly extort the local population. According to a Terra Firme dweller, who was quoted on the above report:

They ask people for money and kill whoever gets in their way. It is criminals killing criminals, but there are several honest citizens who are victims as well. When they are bothered by someone, they create a situation for a crime to happen.

The group which acts in the Guama neighborhood, made up mainly by retired police officers, is supposedly involved in the murder of young people, those “who walk around the streets at the wrong time, thieves and drug users,” as a local put it. Out of fear, silence prevails.

The story also tells that the police usually work on the hypothesis that these are hired gunmen, who are paid to enforce debts or murder the borrowers, denying the existence of militias and death squads that are financed by stolen money from the local populations. The events of the 4th seem to have changed that perception, since the government itself has admitted that death squads have been involved.

The general fear after the death of Corporal Figueiredo illustrates how real police, militia, and drug violence is in these areas. This fear has, for the first time, reached the richer areas of Belem, areas unfamiliar with the day to day uneasiness that the poor suffer through. Like never before, the night of November 4th made people, from very different social backgrounds, share the same fear.

Therefore, the murders were not a simple “isolated case,” but a perennial reality for the poor people of Belem, many of whom know or are related to someone who was murdered, were evicted from their homes by drug dealers, or just generally avoid staying out late (always!), afraid of what might happen to them.

These people, who suffer in every imaginable way, are denied the most basic and elementary way to reduce violent crime in Brazil: the end of the war on drugs. There is no reason, at all, that Brazilian cities should top the rankings for “most murders” in the world besides the failure of prohibition. Many cities are even more dangerous than Belem, but the causes of violence are similar. Most murders in Belem and elsewhere are related to drug feuds.

One of the main libertarian causes is the end of this abhorrent policy that takes away individual rights, puts behind bars many thousands of peaceful people and kills more than any substance addiction.

People who live in poor areas (and in other places, naturally) are sold the idea that only more repression will be able to solve the problem of public security. The drug user is the scapegoat and their frequent summary executions by the police are often welcomed.

Due legal process seems to be a burden to the police in Brazil, and its very existence seems to provide them with an even broader license to kill. We lose sight of the deep connections between the police, drug dealers and militias. The poor are the ones most exposed to the resulting police state, and the naive faith in the police as a guardian of order can only worsen their condition.

Belem shows vividly the monstrosity that the war on drugs is and its consequences to the urban dynamics in poor areas, marked by violence everywhere.

The main cause of all these deaths is not the lack of police repression or more executions, but the state itself and its criminalizing impetus, that enriches warlords and makes peripheral communities ever more vulnerable.

Translated by Erick Vasconcelos.

I lived near Ferguson for 12 years. I drove an ice cream truck up and down its streets for two summers. I seriously considered renting an apartment in Canfield Green, the complex Michael Brown lived in, in 2012. So I can say, on reasonable personal authority, that media portrayals of Ferguson as some kind of crime-plagued racial ghetto are baloney. Ferguson is, or at least was, an eminently peaceful community.

American “police forces” of today, on the other hand, are de facto military organizations, occupying the communities they claim to “protect and serve.” They are part and parcel of a political system which, by its very nature, evolves continuously toward complete control of everyone and everything – the exact opposite of anything having to do with “peace.”

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
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The most obvious statement to make at the outset is that neither jaywalking nor suspicion of petty theft nor running away from cops are crimes punishable by death anywhere in the United States. The fact that Mike Brown was killed for one of those three things is outrageous, and people were rightfully angry about it. But that isn’t everything at work in Ferguson. The demography of the town is telling.

According to data taken from the US Census Bureau and a handful of news reports, roughly 64 percent of Ferguson’s population of 21,203 – 14,290 people – are black, yet its mayor, James Knowles, is white; five members of its six-person City Council are white; six of its seven school board officials are white; and out of the 53 sworn officers on the Ferguson Police Department, three – three! – are black.

There’s more. According to the Missouri Attorney General’s office, even though white people in Ferguson are statistically more likely to be found carrying “contraband” on their persons during police searches than black people, the latter are six times more likely to be stopped in their vehicles by local PD, 11 times more likely to be searched and 12 times more likely to be arrested.

Mike Brown’s murder served as a catalyst for an extensively racially profiled, harassed and disenfranchised population to attempt to fight back.

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Historian and political scientist Mark Neocleous explains that the “term Polizeistaat, usually translated as ‘police state,’ came into general English usage in the 1930s,” increasingly used at that time to describe totalitarian governments such as those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Still, Neocleous is quick to clarify that, notwithstanding this popular twentieth century usage, it presents a “historical problem” to the extent that it suggests a certain inappropriate picture of “the original ‘police states.’” Those original police states were, rather than brutal, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, early predecessors to the modern welfare state, or Wohlfahrtsstaat.

Given these historical connections between the welfare state and the police state, we might revise our understanding beyond the twentieth century definition, broadening the concept to include not only the most extreme and draconian twentieth century tyrannies, but most, if not all, contemporary “administrative” states. Once we begin to understand these connections and the growth and development of the total state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, phenomena such as the murder of Michael Brown become easier to understand. Whether we call it the welfare state or the police state, the reality is that we live in an environment completely dominated by regimentation — coercive control over and regulation of almost every aspect of our lives

Feed 44:

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• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
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• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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