The car and the police state - 1

Sara E. Seo bookends her book, Policing the Road: How cars transformed American Freedom (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980860 ) between two cases. In one case, Wiley v. State (1916), a Police officer in a car – an unmarked car, as police cars weren’t “marked” until the 1940s – named Wiley called out to a car speeding by to stop. He and the police with him suspected that the car was speeding from a robbery. So, with instincts echoed by every officer related shooting since, they trained their guns on the car and shot it up, killing the passenger, a Mrs. Bates. The court decision in this case went against the police:

“In the case of Wiley v. State, which affirmed the guilt of Deputy Sheriff Johns, whose shot had killed Mrs. Bates, the Arizona Supreme Court maintained that even if the Bateses had heard the shouts and refused to stop, the officers’ manner of pursuit “was more suggestive of a holdup by highwaymen than an arrest by peace officers.”

At the other end of Seo’s history is the case of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was stopped because she failed to use a turn signal. From the moment the policeman pulled her over to the moment three days later when she supposedly hung herself in a cell, is the American nightmare that we see all around us.

Seo notices something crucial about Sandra Bland’s life:
The automobile appeared in nearly every significant setback in Bland’s life. Exorbitant traffic tickets that Bland paid for by “sitting out” in jail. Convictions for driving under the influence and arrest warrants for unpaid traffic fines that severely limited her employment options. Charges for possessing marijuana—her lawyer suspected that Bland was self-medicating—that the police discovered in her car.”

How did we go from Wiley v. State to Sandra Bland?
Seo’s story is not only focused on racism and the police, but more generally on how overpolicing and the automobile form a dyad in the United States. It is a topic that cries out for a Ballardian and/or Deleuzian treatment, but Seo remains a calm positivist about it all. Wondrously enough, her thesis has, I think, never really been explored in depth:

"Before cars, American police had more in common with their eighteenth-century forebears than with their twentieth-century successors. What revolutionized policing was a technological innovation that would come to define the new century. This is, therefore, a history about policing cars and, thus, about policing American society as it fast became an automotive society. It is thus also about the practical, theoretical, and legal problems of policing everybody who drove. "

To put this in a crude way that Seo herself would not countenance, the rise of the cop as overseer of traffic spelled the downfall of the 4th amendment to the constitution – the one about unreasonable searches and seizures. The one about having to have warrants. The fourth amendment never applied to slaves, whose own limited travels in the South were overseen by Slave Patrols. The Slave patrols, as Jim Crow kicked in with a vengeance at the turn of the century, were represented, mainly, by legislation degrading African-Americans on public transportation – the kind of legislation later copied by the Nazis and applied to Jews in Germany. The automobile appeared as, at first, a challenge to this.
W.E.B. Dubois, for instance, was an ardent car driver. He was proud of his cars. Since he traveled extensively in the South, being in a car kept him out of the reach of the Jim Crow laws attendant on trains and buses. Although as the history of police – and mob – interactions with black drivers shows, the Slave Patrol system was not that easy to slip.

Seo’s book – which everybody should read – overturns an old intellectual history of jurisprudence that attributes to the Warren court the new enforcement of prohibitions on police abuse – a new national standard for all states concerning the fourth amendment – by showing that the courts, in reality, were instrumental throughout the twentieth century in increasing police power, based in “reasonable” standards of policing automobiles that increasingly made the cops the judge of when and when not to search, when and when not to stop – basically giving them unlimited powers of harassment. And it is a pretty simple matter to see that in an unequal society, the people who would bear the brunt of harassment would be those who were people of color, those who were poorer, those who the respectable – the white bourgeoisie – were most afraid of.

The possible life - Karen Chamisso

Born gangster from the fist of her momma’s belly

she grew up rolling on her jams and jelly

Two loaded dice were found in her baby hands

The odds were in her favor. Everything was grand

Love money attention and all the last chances

Went up her nose in cold white prances

Cars were totaled, parents were called

Bounced from all the clubs, while police were stalled

The predictions about her in circulation

Always pictured her ODed, or in rehabilitation.

on funding the police: what is Milwaukee getting?

There should be a police union spotlight every day, to sort of show where our police funding is going. For instance, Milwaukee. Milwaukee was the proud city in which two police officers, called by two black women, roundly scolded those black women for dissing fine upstanding citizen Jeffrey Dahmer. Then the police escorted Dahmer's victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, back to Dahmer's apartment and left him to Dahmer's care - the torture, murder and cannibal session of the night. One of those policeman made howlingly funny jokes about gays after having helped Dahmer - and, of course, after threatening to take the black women downtown for interfering with the cops. Later, that policeman, John Balcerzak, suffered the indignity of being fired from the force for criminal incompetence. Such injustice couldn't stand, with a strong union behind him, and a likely judge ordered him rehired. Balcerzak went on to become the police union head of the Milwaukee police - a position that meant he essentially ran the force.

An investigation last year found the force operating at peak Blacerzakian levels: 

At least 93 Milwaukee police officers — ranking from street cop to captain — have been disciplined for violating the laws and ordinances they were sworn to uphold, a Journal Sentinel investigation found.

Their offenses range from sexual assault and domestic violence to drunken driving and shoplifting, according to internal affairs records. All still work for the Police Department, where they have the authority to make arrests, testify in court and patrol neighborhoods.

Officers who run afoul of the law often aren't fired or prosecuted, the newspaper found. Consider:

At least six officers disciplined by the department for illegal behavior suffered no legal consequences whatsoever.

Sexual assault - no problem/ Shoplifting? No problem? Drunken driving? No problem.
And so it goes. It is like a mirror image of the victims of police brutality - the POC victims. From shooting dead black people in domestic disputes to shooting dead drunk and asleep people in cars, the police are there.

By 2015-2017, the forked over 21 million in civil suit losses due to cops. 

Police misconduct has cost Milwaukee taxpayers at least $17.5 million in legal settlements since 2015, forcing the city to borrow money to make the payouts amid an ever-tightening budget. 

That amount jumps to at least $21.4 million when interest paid on the borrowing and fees paid to outside attorneys are factored in, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found.  

In some cases, the costs pile up as the city continues to fight the cases for months or years, even after officers have been fired or criminally convicted in the same misconduct case. The costs far outstrip the $1.2 million the city sets aside each year for settling all of the claims it faces. 

So we know something about what the good communities of Milwaukee are getting in terms of supporting their men in blue through thick and thin. Sometimes what with returning victims to serial killers and shoplfiting, the Milwaukee police do confront rape. Luckily, the cop atmoshere definitely puts rape well below stopping black motorists. The PD discovered - or was forced to discover by pressure groups - that it had at least 6,000 untested rape kits in its storage. After "thousands" were tested, the Milwaukee cops arrested a grand total of 9 rapists from those kits in 2019. The union must have hated this: just think, that money could go to vacation homes for police officers! Which is why the department of Justice did the majority of the testing. Milwaukee's own police department apparently had other prioritiies.

So it goes with Milwaukee's crime wave situation. 

Funding the police - what, exactly, are we getting?

25 million in cop abuse suits, and 1500 untested rape kits: Minneapolis

Very Serious People are coming out with the column headline: Defunding the police is crazy!

So perhaps we should talk first about funding the police. What are we funding?

Let’s take Minneapolis, the unexpected center of our disorder. I don’t have a breakdown of how much the Minneapolis department spent on tear gas and the latest military equipment. But we do have stats on how much the city spent on civil suit claims for police abuse: from 2003-2019 the cost was  25 million dollars.

I thought about this timeline and this figure after reading Pagan Kennedy’samazing and wrenching article about the invention and history of the rape kit. 

 In 2019, the Minneapolis police announced a non-fun fact: in the police storage unit they had discovered around 1500 untested rape kits, spanning thirty years. Definitely a bad moment for the chief, who had to explain how he had previously reported that there were around 200 untested kits.

Kennedy reports that there are huge cultural problems with cops and rape investigations. One of those problems is the persistent refusal of the city to shoulder the cost of the testing of rape kits, which comes to about 1500 dollars per kit. Astonishingly, this cost is often borne by third parties – nonprofit feminist groups making money from cake sales and the like.

So we have at least one metric for what police funding is about, and its priorities. Evidently, testing those kits would have cost 2,250,00 dollars. Apparently, the city’s thinking was: we can either check these kits and catch rapists, or for ten times that amount, we can pay for abusive cops.

They chose the latter path. And that made all the difference.

Law and order in the U.S. is not only racist and oppressive, but it doesn’t even keep law and order. It stores the evidence in the storage facility and goes out there and fights the real crime – falling asleep in a car at Wendy’s, passing, perhaps, a phony twenty dollar bill, selling cigs on the sidewalk without a license.

Perhaps policing in the U.S. isn’t very good? A question from a friend.

Police and the "whitening" of Americans

There is an important, but under-discussed part of police history is that is also the history of the "whitening" of immigrant groups that came to the United States.

In the early 19th century, American cities didn't have police departments. Boston was one of the first. At the same time that Boston was constructing a police department specifically to control the less well off or immigrant areas in town, New England and America in general was receiving an enormous influx of Catholic Irish, fleeing the famine and oppression. Famously, what they met on the white Protestant shores of the New World was, at first, No Irish need apply signs. The Irish were considered sub-English - in England especially, but as well in the U.S. Although Germans were also migrating, on the whole, they were protestant. The combination of religious prejudice plus the aura of prejudice against the Irish in England put them into the class of the "not-quite white".

In the U.S., the rituals of becoming white have been explored for the last twenty years by many scholars. Here's an overview of the field.

What interests me is the way police work acted as a vector into whiteness, partly because police work allowed for the direct targeting of black subjects. To become white in the white settler state, a common strategy was to distance oneself from, and stigmatize, black people.
I'm not aware of any borrowing in this field from Rene Girard's theory of negative mimesis. In simple terms, Girard hypothesizes that the social order is built around a fundamental violence: the targeting and expulsion of a scapegoat. In order to not be the scapegoat, one engages in negative mimeses - trying to become the scapegoat's Other.

I have many criticisms of Girard's total explanation of the social order, but the scapegoating and negative mimesis process does work well with the becoming-white of various ethnic groups - the Irish and the Italian-Americans in particular - and the way that policing played a symbolically central role. One that carries over today. The police enact the neurosis of whiteness, to put it in sharp and exaggerated terms.

The meatmarkets I have seen

The meatmarkets I have seen

- Karen Chamisso

Birdsong pulled a labyrinth from my ear.

The birds have their nests, the foxes their holes

who will live with me

in the maze?

Wind and unwind, turn and turn back.

The heroes were netted and dispatched.

I stepped on a crack and a dynasty died.

Their ghosts follow me to this address.

A centerfold is at the center of it all.

O land of cockayne, free drinks and pussy!

To every sailor and peasant, tonight:

Tenderloin, tenderloin, the sirens sing.

‘The gates and yssues of this town are kept with watch and wards.”

Ariadne’s blues echo in the common pissoir.

My tears, my tears flow riverwards.

Jack comes to my  bed to bone ce soir.

The Flaubert-Sand letters: part one

George Sand came in for a pummeling from several of the leading lights of modernism. Proust, for instance, told his friends that he disliked Sand, and that Flaubert, who he revered, must have been “insincere” when he praised her in his letters. Baudelaire was much more venomous. Sand was the perfect opposite of Baudelaire: liberal when he was illiberal, a lover of nature when nature, to him, was irradiated with symbols of its fallen state, and in no way an adherent of his own peculiar Sadian Christianity. In the wake of the controversy raised, in 1862, by her anti-clerical novel, Mademoiselle la Quintinie, he wrote a series of notes comparing her to a latrine (because she fucked who she wanted to and didn’t make any bones about it) and compared her to a concierge and a kept woman. He found her the very type of positivist bourgeois he couldn’t stand: why, in her novel, she even dismissed hell! Hell was as necessary to Baudelaire as it was to Dante. Nietzsche, who read the version of the Flaubert-Sand correspondence edited by Maupassant, attacked her in his usual oblique way in Twilight of the Idols:

George Sand. - I read the first Lettres d’un voyageur: like everything deriving from Rousseau, false, artificial, gassy, exaggerated. I cannot endure this multicolored wallpaper style; as little as I can the plebian-ambition for generous feelings. The worst is the womanly coquettishness with masculinity, with the manners of an undeveloped youth – how cold must she have been by all of this, this insufferable artist! She winds herself up like a clock – and writes. Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the romantics, as soon as they begin to compose. And how self-pleased she must have been, this fruitful writing-cow, who had something German about her in the worst sense of the word, like Rousseau himself, her master, becoming possible only because of the decline of French taste! – But Renan adores her…”

As always with Nietzsche, there are catches and turns in the vituperation that make it seem unconsciously respectful. One could imagine this inverted. When I first read this, I thought the 'writing – cow' crack was typical Fritz misogyny. But later, reading her letters, I see that Sand uses that phrase about herself, or rather, often compares herself to a cow.

Nietzsche was as well a critic of Flaubert and his theory of impersonality ( behind his visceral dismissal of Sand is that he shares her criticism of that theory - nothing disturbs Nietzsche like the touch of an unwanted ally), and this is why he wants to speak of her coldness, and the coldness of the romantics, whose cult of the self was not, Nietzsche hoped, similar to the beyond-human of his own invention.

Proust, though, admired Flaubert, as did almost all the modernists. This made it puzzling to them that Flaubert clearly thinks of Sand, who from one point of view was the very opposite of the modernists, as a great figure. He even praises her writing and – more than that – has the discernment to mention the novels that, according to today’s Sand-ians, are the height of her art: Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.

I’ve been reading the correspondence with a lot of admiration, and want to say a few things about it. So I’m going to amuse myself this week, taking a break from the protests, by saying them.