Klown Kar Killers

The name of the game in the US, as elsewhere, is wealth distribution — as in, don’t distribute the wealth in any form that is different from the current system of extraction. The name of the game is All Wealth And Power To The Rich, and the US has been very, very successful at this game.

None of that is new news, but some analyses have become clearer to me, as I consider US society from the perspective of a month spent in Mexico. For example, we have to stop thinking of our municipal police departments as “police.” That word has a meaning in the dictionary sense, and the militarily-armed, interconnected ideological and economic repression force that rolls down our streets in 600-horsepower clown cars is not police.

We need a word or words for it, words that to not bring up false concepts like “peace” or “aid” or “security,” because when our police engage in such activities it is an accident — so much so, that when they can, they go to their propaganda auxiliaries at the local television broadcast news studios, and present some rescued-a-puppy story, intended to be the talk of the day. That is not the American society’s true experience of its police. We need new words like “Intimidators” or “Status Enforcers” — these are clumsy first attempts, forgive me, but they already bear more truth than the word “police.”

Tied up with the false word, police, is the mythology of a thousand thousand dramatic stories presented as novels, television serials, movies, video games, et cetera. These stories are powerful, a I discovered a few years ago, as an easily clockable transwoman working with the public. I was a bus driver, and my life was a constant barrage of abuse, until some soap-opera writer decided to include a sympathetic transwoman character in the daily dramas. This was shortly after the turn of the century, and I wish I remembered the details better, but I do remember the near-total change in my work environment; suddenly and powerfully, the abuse became the exception rather than the rule.

Stories have power.

The more so, police stories that are repeated ceaselessly for decades, in such abundance that they are unavoidable and instantly recognizable in their variants: e.g., the buddy-cop saga, or the cop who is brave enough to expose corruption in his own department (which almost never happens), or the cop who has seen too much and is now violently bitter, or the woman cop or rookie cop who must prove their worth, or the not-a-White cop who must prove their worth, or the cop with a magic car or exoskeleton or gun, or the cop who is smarter than the other cops and has to show them the error of their ways, or the dashing cop with special status who has license to shoot people to death without trial, ad nauseam. If you’re American, you know all these stories. They are so familiar, they can be used as a sleep aid.

But in all these stories, the function of the police is to keep the peace, to keep things fair, to rescue the powerless, to set things right. Compare this with what you know to expect in any encounter with them. Call for police, and expect mayhem, from a radio- and computer-connected soldier for the elites, who much prefers to be let alone to his personal agenda of collecting huge salaries and petit bourgeois objects.

Don’t bother him, he’s busy. Has your car been stolen? File a form, they’ll say. Someone missing? File a form. And really, if you value your safety — don’t bother him.

However, there is a category that will instantly galvanize them to action, and that is a report of ongoing difficulties with any person who is not of the elite class — and even so, that only works if that person is currently engaged in some transgressive activity. They love roaring around in their cruisers, and shouting, and shooting their guns. We all know that sort of person, who sadistically enjoys using the power of the police to terrorize and/or kill others, and who do they want targeted? A person of color, of course. They know they can count on the police to act to violently enforce racist and classist hierarchy. This also goes, to a lesser extent, to anyone with less status than a wealthy, conformist White person.

So, as I am a transwoman and therefore out of the range of a person considered “normal” and “acceptable” to this military gang, I avoid police at nearly all costs. If my car should break down on city streets, I push it out of the way as quickly as I can and get away from it. If my car should break down on the highway, I know that the clock is ticking, and unless I can get it re-started immediately or roll it off the highway, it is time to grab my essential possessions and get out of the car and away from the freeway.

The armed sharks that show up at that scene of highway distress are not there to help a person like me. They are likely to inspect, to search, to plow through old computer records, and to do whatever it takes to make an arrest. They feel their time has been wasted if no one is arrested, and you can be sure they will find a way to make an arrest happen. If there is no one around to arrest, they will have the car towed off and impounded by their allies at the wrecking yard, and no amount of pleading nor excuses will retrieve the car without a steep fee.

I use the car example here because it is so common — even if you don’t own a car in the US, you are likely to travel in one from time to time (and for foreign travelers who accept a ride in a car, please heed my warning!). It shows the economic enforcement aspect of US police — because these actions of inspecting, arresting, and charging do not apply to relatively wealthy, cis White Christians. Even if some exception is made, and their car is towed, the fee is but a fraction of their monthly income. But BIPOC people and trans people and low-wage workers do not, by and large, have the wealth to roll down the road in an acceptably new and expensive car, to hire an attorney, nor even to pay impound fees. Their interactions with the US municipal official gangsters are likely to be fraught with danger, to result in impoverishment, humiliation, injury, imprisonment, and/or death.

“But these rules apply to all!” — says the conservative cis White Christian male. He is not subject to the terror, and can safely ignore it, or pretend to ignore it, while voting to protect his semi-special status (“Well, that dog didn’t bite me.”). This goes doubly for people who are wealthy enough to live in gated communities, ride in private aircraft, or float along in yachts; the jails are not for them. They do not interact with police. They are unlikely to ever be confronted by them; they rarely see them.

Here in Mexico, I can do what in the US would be utterly stupid: I can go up to a uniformed cop and ask for help (and yes, I am allowing for my White privilege here). “Good morning, how are you? Do you know if I am near the river district?” In Mexico, this would result in, well, getting directions. In the US, there is no guarantee I would ever get where I intend to go. Asking a US cop for help is like kicking the Devil: don’t do it. Nothing good will come of it.

Is this really how we want to live? In light of our level of police terror, and given our internal refugee crisis, our expulsion of foreign refugees, and our acceptance of widespread poverty, I have to ask: do we have any fellow-feeling at all, in the USA?

So if we are honest about what US “police” are and about what they do, we see that we cannot “reform” them, least of all by giving them more money. They are an army here to keep most of the population down, and only rich and powerful people (like President Joe Biden) will benefit by giving them even more resources. Already they take the lion’s share of municipal budgets across the US. Offering more money to police is a way of saying that there should be even worse maldistribution of wealth and power. It is, in fact, a way of saying “White Power!” without saying it.

Both political parties in the US love to do this. It’s sweet, how well it works: it crushes BIPOC and GLBTQ, while allowing the powerful to calmly smile in their pretended even-handedness and benevolence. No amount of statistics and historic data will ever be enough to shake them from their insistence that the System is fair and democratically accessible to all.

It’s an assertion that is ridiculous on its face, but that is also part of Fascist power — the ability to lie with ease and grace, while enjoying the frustration of those excluded from power. For, after all, if the System is indeed fair, and we live in a meritocracy, then it follows there must be something superior about the elites, and something inferior, indeed degraded, about everyone else.

Meritocracy is such a huge and essential lie that it is effectively blasphemous to counter it. For this reason, the police have a special fury for protesters against injustice, and also against all unions. (When convenient they can claim to be in a “union” themselves, but unions are for the collective power of the individually powerless, and not for untouchables with a social franchise for deadly violence.)

But we want something better, I think. We want a planet we can live on, and a fair portion of the trillions hoarded by the rich, which is to say, we want socialism, even if we call it something else — we want to stop the flow of the value of our labor into the vast unseen pools of the parasite class. And part of the labor of accomplishing this change is destroying the false glamour of the police.

Police, indeed. As if they would ever act for justice! But we should have some sympathy for them, too — after all, they are only acting on the insistence of our leaders, and on our deluded Hollywood vision of them as saviors. They are also miserable; their suicide rate is tremendous. On occasion, they can even act heroically and with self-sacrifice, as if to remind us all that given the chance, they would not suffer such a deformation of their humanity.

But if police act for justice and peace, it follows that they are not police. We need new words.

They have long been called pigs, but that is only a word of anger — it does not describe them. And it’s a worse trap than that, because they are merely people who have been molded into a certain set of attitudes to express the power of the State. And you must beware their power, for once they charge you with a crime, all that matters is how much money you have for attorneys.

This is part of why we have, by the prisoner numbers and firearm mortality statistics, the worst police state in the world. Very few people can afford attorneys, especially once they have been jailed, and thereby generally stripped of their employment and residual wealth.

US police are not here for freedom, nor for peace, nor to protect and serve, except for the parasite class.

They are occupiers, race enforcers, guards for the rich. They are the terror soldiers endlessly targeting the working class, and the poor, and the houseless.

They’re the Klown Kar Killers. Let’s defund them.