Police, Poverty & Social Order

• Police and police power are central to the fabrication of bourgeois social order, which relies on a class structure
• Historical and dialectical materialism posits that social change is driven by responses to tensions in material conditions
• Capital is constituted through internal contradictions such as capital vs. labor, technology vs. human disposability, private wealth vs. common good, and endless growth vs. finite ecological systems; these contradictions can only be managed, not resolved
• Stagnant wages, rising living costs, evaporating social supports, swelling prisons, and growing wealth inequality all contribute to manufactured insecurity

(In)Security, Police, Poverty/Unfreedom

• "Police" involves state actions to fabricate social order and administer civil society for security; it's a process necessary due to the insecurity inherent in private property systems, rather than just an institution
• Poverty isn't just the absence of wealth but a condition imposed on the poor, the opposite of freedom
• Police power's critical theory emphasizes discretionary sovereign power and refuses the war power vs. police power binary, viewing crime as an alibi for police power

Capitalist Mode of Production

• Private enterprise produces commodities for market exchange, generating surplus value (profit)
• Wage labor, private property, and a bank-credit money system are key features
• The state plays a distinctive role in each feature
• Force is needed to connect human needs with human capacities to satisfy those needs; this force is the police power
• Modes of capitalist violence include dispossession, proletarianization & class stratification, exploitation, and alienation

Dispossession

• Land dispossession involves appropriating and consolidating class monopoly in the relationship between humanity and productive resources of the earth, separating people from their connection to the land

Proletarianization

• The historical creation of the working class involves stripping people of the ability to produce for themselves, forcing them to sell their labor for wages, leading to exploitation and alienation

Private Property

• Private property is a relationship between people concerning things, not just ownership
• It includes the right to exclude, enjoy, and alienate
• Capitalism requires private property
• Private property creates scarcity and political enemies, necessitating enforcement

Police and Dispossession

• Police power is essential to the violence inherent in establishing private property
• The enclosure of the commons transformed common lands into private property (1750-1860)
• The Black Act imposed the death penalty for poaching on Crown and private land
• Between 15,000 - 50,000 people were hanged at Tyburn’s Tree for crimes against property, mainly the laboring poor, with the message to respect property rights

Contradiction and Crises

• Free competition can produce wealth without producing well-being
• The Gordon Riots (1780) and the Swing Riots (1830) illustrate social unrest
• There was a shift from sovereign power to police and discipline to manage working-class discontent

Vagrancy and Poor Laws

• Vagrancy law allows the prosecution of people based on status or condition, often targeting Roma, Jews, the unemployed, and the propertyless
• Policing indigence focuses on tracing crime origins from poverty
• New Poor Laws viewed indigence, not poverty, as the evil to remove, as poverty was viewed as a source for labour
• The Victorian Workhouse was part of the poor laws system (1837-1901), designed to instill labor discipline through brutal conditions and limited freedom

Criminalizing Customary Appropriation

• Customary appropriation is viewed as inefficient waste, a transaction cost, or a crime, leading to a war against the working class
• Private property is used to control access to necessities, offering only wages in return
• Police and police power fabricate bourgeois social order by enforcing wage labor

State, Capital and organzied Abandoment

• Police power and the carceral system expand as the state responds to social wreckage from neoliberalization
• Arrest is the political art of individualizing disorder
• Police and police power were and continue to be central to the fabrication of the bourgeois social order
• Hierarchical class stratified society where political power, wealth, and control of the means of production are concentrated in the hands
• Organised abandonment results social wreckage

Critical Theory of Police Power

• Police power is not just repressive but productive, vital for creating bourgeois social order and capitalism
• Police were central to fabricating the working class and an economy based on private property
• The police mandate was to fabricate an order of wage labor and private property, and administer the class of poverty thereafter, administering insecurities produced through this system
• Societies structured in dominance create the conditions of their own insecurity
• Capitalism requires scarcity and deep material inequalities
• The material interests of dominant classes exist in contradiction with those of subordinate classes

What is Settler Colonialism

• Settler colonialism involves colonizers striving to dissolve pre-existing Indigenous societies to build a new colonial society on expropriated land
• Settler colonialism's central objective is acquiring and controlling territory
• It is ongoing and structurally committed to Indigenous dispossession
• States secure capital circulation on Indigenous land, with Canada being a resource nation, where land and water are integral to Indigenous governance and economies

Aboriginal Title and Indigenous Law

• A key contradiction in Canadian political economy is providing certainty for resource extraction versus Indigenous rights and relations to the land
• Capitalization involves selling shares in future revenue, requiring financial, legal/regulatory, and political certainty
• Indigenous law and inherent rights persist in unceded territories, shaping treaty obligations
• Criminal law was used to domesticate Indigenous nations into the settler state
• Colonial criminal law and the construction of Indigenous criminality was a means of usurping Indigenous sovereign political authority and domesticating Indigenous nations into the settler state

Westward Expansion Frog Lake Resistance

• Colonial authorities recast Indigenous resistance as criminal activities
• The Northwest Resistance of 1885 led to arrests and hangings of Cree and Assiniboine leaders for treason, domesticating the struggle by sending police

FABRICATING OF SETTLER: COLONIAL ORDER

• Police and police power manage contradictions of settler colonialism
• There are contradictions between settler vs. Indigenous sovereignty, settler capital's material interests vs. Indigenous economies, and meanings of land conflicts

Flashpoint 1: Anicinabe Park and the Native People’s Caravan

• Anicinabe Park is located on Treaty 3 Territory (signed 1873)
• Grassy Narrows poisoning (1962) highlighted ongoing jurisdictional issues
• "Canada’s first civil rights march” 1965 protesting poverty, police violence, poisoning, poor education, and racism
• Ojibwe Warrior Society (OWS) formed in 1972
• Late July 1974, OWS helped organize a pan-Indigenous conference leading to a 40-day land reclamation action
• OWS issued 24 demands regarding investigations, land claims, funding, housing, poisoning, police brutality, and the return of Anicinabe Park
• Tensions escalated due to a lack of serious engagement
• Media Coverage showed anti-Indigenous racism and used colonial tropes
• There wa salignment of media, police, government, and white residents with “law and order” rhetoric
• The Native People’s Caravan was a pan-Indigenous caravan from Vancouver to Ottawa listing grievances
• They held teach-ins and the march on Parliament was met with violence by the RCMP, Ottawa Police, and the military

Security Preparations for Caravan’s Arrival

• RCMP surveillance framed the Caravan as a militant threat
• The RCMP's riot on Parliament Hill involved inaugural deployment of the RCMP “Riot Squad”
• False stories to press about weapons and bomb plots reinforced colonial anxiety and aimed to divide support for Indigenous people
• The RCMP framed the Caravan as a militant threat
• The actions and propaganda portrayed the Caravan as Criminalized/racialized and a Colonial anxiety: Invasion and a red scare

Flashpoint 2: Kanehsatà:ke Resistance (Oka Crisis) July 11, 1990 – September 26, 1990

• Mohawk fought for return of lands for two centuries.
• Development of luxury condos and a golf course on the Sacred Pines was announced in 1989
• Weeks of peaceful protest, prior to the mayor backing down to development
• First police assault, July 11th, 1990, approx. Sûreté du Québec SWAT team
• Mohawk women drove police back
• Kahnawà:erect blockades on highway and the Mercier Bridge
• Second assault, fire-fight, police officer dies
• Media presence radically changed landscape of struggle
• Sûreté du Québec blockaded blockade
• Nation-wide solidarity protests
• Quebec’s Premier asked for Military intervention and failed negotiations occur
• Canadians supported the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance and wanted Canada to settle land claims honorably
• Seen as Mohawk victory inspires land defence and land reclamation organizing
• The Royal Commission pushed Canada to take steps toward reconciliation

Flashpoint 3: Ts’ Peten (Gustafsen Lake) Standoff

• Secwepemc Nation never ceded or surrendered territory
• Sundance Ceremony was held on private ranch land
• Rancher chose to exercise his property rights and kick the Sun-dancers off their land and Secwepemc refused
• RCMP established a no-go zone for the media controlling narrative through media exclusion zones (MEZ) to avoid solidarity
• RCMP exaggerated threat posed by Ts’Peten Defenders to DND to access hardware
• The RCMP smear campaign portrayed defenders as heavily armed terrorists and rigging perimeter with explosives because Indigenous resurgence indexes the failure of settler colonialism

Critical theory of Police Power

• Police power is a condition of possibility to the fabrication of ‘bourgeois’ social order that creates inequality, scarcity, conflict, and insecurity
• Police power is how states manage the structural insecurities and recurrent crises of the capitalist system, resulting from the tension between security and insecurity
• Police power demonstrates the means of governing security/insecurity, the production of race, racial capitalism, and black liberation struggles, as well as territoriality and Indigenous resistance to settler colonization

Police Power

• Is an analytic concept, it is not only ‘the police’
• It's a mode of governance (continuation of soverign power)
• It has discretionary, unenumerated power to address every-changing threats to order and security through coercion, prohibition, and regulations
• It is justified in the name of peace, order, and prosperity

Review: governmnetality and police power

• Governemntality is an analytic concept that maximizes the welfare and productivity of a population
• Governance occurs through freedom by structuring the field of potential action rather than outright prohibition