Thoughts on Two Marches and Community Policing in Tucson

Two marches took place this past week on occupied Tohono O’odham land, Tucson, AZ, both of which began with different tones and stated intentions and which met different responses on the part of the police. This piece hopes to look at these marches and the police interventions they faced through a lens examining the current state of policing, particularly “community policing,” both here in Tucson and nationally. We hope that these beginning reflections and thoughts can be useful for those interested in working against the police as an institution, and for those aspiring to escalate street actions in the city generally.

A note: This was written fairly hastily, as it seems like this is an important local moment to collectively delve into community policing, street actions, and moving forward. Much of it based on years’ long conversations and unfinished writings on community policing and counterinsurgency in Tucson. Some parts are not fully fleshed out, or not perfectly articulated, but it seemed timely to get it out quickly.

***

On Thursday, February 16th, a rally was called for by Lucha Unida de Padres y Estudiantes (LUPE) in response to the recent wave of ICE raids across the country. Meeting at the Federal Courthouse downtown, the group eventually began to march east on Congress Ave., taking the street. Nearly immediately, police drove an SUV into the roadway in order to force marchers back onto the sidewalk. A bicycle cop accused a marcher of touching him and immediately initiated an arrest.

At that point a section of the crowd remained around the police cruiser, some with arms locked together, chanting, “Let him go!” as the detained person continued to address the crowd: “”Que viva La Raza!” Those who remained in the street were quickly met with heightened aggression as more officers arrived and began throwing people to the ground and pepper spraying numerous individuals. Three more arrests were made amid this violence, and police physically attacked a number of elderly participants (as well as those attempting to assist them off the ground), and also exposed several young children to pepper spray.

It is important to note that, in a racially mixed crowd, three of the four arrestees were people of color. Those present attest that police deliberately targeted POC for arrest and mostly chose not to arrest white people who were occupying the same space. Rebellious whites were generally subject to violence when they were perceived to be obstacles to the brutalization and incarceration of rebellious people of color.

TPD nearly immediately went into damage control mode, going so far as to make “Office of Professional Standards investigators” available on the scene to “speak with any arrestees or demonstrators who wished to make a complaint about police actions.”

The initial police statement on the events continued:

The Tucson Police Department fully supports the free speech of all community members and groups. We ask that anyone participating in future speeches, marches, rallies, protests etcetera, to work with us and to conduct themselves in a peaceful manner to ensure these events and activities can be as safe as possible for everyone.

***

The following day, Friday the 17th, a march had been called for 6PM in downtown Tucson. In contrast to the LUPE march the day before, this march had explicitly stated intentions of disruption and mutual defense from police violence. The initial call proposed an aspiration “to disrupt in whatever ways we can the smooth functioning of the systems of domination we find ourselves surrounded by. This can be a railroad blockaded, a freeway shut down, a police vehicle overturned, a neighborhood barricaded to prevent ICE or BP [Border Patrol] from so much as entering, a caregivers’ strike, or a baseball bat to a klansman or rapist’s kneecap.” Participants were invited to use black bloc tactics, wearing all black and covering one’s face. This tactic is used to conceal identities from the police, employers, parole officers, fascists, and others who pose a threat to our well being, organizing, autonomy and survival. Ideally, coming as a bloc also empowers people to take risks to defend each other — risks one might not feel as confident taking as an easily identifiable and arrestable individual.

Following the police attack on Thursday, those involved in planning the action on the 17th hoped to act in solidarity with those attacked and make it clear that rebels in Tucson will continue to take streets without police permission in defiance of their violence.

The march was predominately anarchist, and much smaller than the LUPE event. This march also had a much higher proportion of white participants. Perhaps 12 people in bloc were joined by roughly 25 others behind banners reading “No Bans, Walls, Raids – NO BORDERS” and “Be the Fist You Want to See In a Fascist’s Face.” As the group assembled, TPD Sgt. Al Baca, a Community Resource officer who has been present at many demonstrations and who has tried interrogating arrestees in the past regarding political affiliations, attempted to talk to our side. He offered the usual platitudes about being “a reasonable guy” and wanting to “work together,” and was immediately met with open hostility. This included people who had been present on Thursday shouting him down that “pepper spray is not working together” and generally told that this crowd had no desire to collaborate with or speak with police at all.

After a short rally, a sound system started playing primarily anti-police songs and the crowd took the streets. It was clear from the beginning that the cops remained in damage control mode, with no efforts made to stop the march from being in the roadway. Notably, there were no police cruisers near the march. Normally, unpermitted marches in the city are surrounded by cruisers behind and in front, with bike cops and officers on foot at the sides. In this case, the cruisers were replaced by a line of officers on foot following the march. Presumably, this was an attempt to create less of a policing spectacle in the wake of their PR disaster the day before. (There were, however, SWAT police staging near the I-10, just west on Congress from where the march began.)

Shortly after beginning, as the march wound east on Broadway, Police Chief Chris Magnus was spotted conferring with police on the sidewalk. Marchers told him to fuck off by name as well as shouting “Fuck Community Policing!” and listing the names of people killed by police during his time as chief in Tucson as well as in Richmond, CA, where he headed the police department before coming here just over one year ago.

His presence seems to further indicate that the department was seriously concerned about both public perception of how protests are policed and that individual officers might not be trusted to adhere to departmental PR strategy. More on this later.

The march held the streets for roughly an hour and a half, shutting down the streetcar for nearly the entire duration. At several points, people spontaneously joined the march as it passed – this seemed to happen most often while explicitly anti-police chants were going. At points the march swelled to 50-60 participants.

Despite the opening provided by the very hands-off approach of the police, there were no attempts by the bloc to escalate. In the recent past, this has generally looked like putting barricade materials in the street to impede police, and very occasionally some targeted attacks on property. When the march returned to the central downtown area, we took the intersection of Congress and 6th, had a small dance party, and a confederate flag was lit on fire in front of police lines. “KKK and TPD – K-I-S-S-I-N-G” was again chanted as this took place.

The crowd dispersed with no arrests or injuries. So, why the difference here?

***

It is certainly true that the march on the 17th was whiter than the LUPE march, and with TPD (like all police forces) being a fundamentally white supremacist organization, they’re less inclined to use open violence against a crowd with that composition.

That said, the tone of this march was much more openly combative, and with very little support from local liberals and progressives. There was substantial internet chatter in the days before about how this was a bad, violent march, and those organizing and participating in such actions are at best irresponsible and counterproductive and at the worst actual police or far-right provocateurs. So this march was very much made up of the “bad protesters” who police often single out for violence once they’re sufficiently divided from the “good protesters” whose designation legitimizes that violence. Denunciations of more confrontational tactics play into this narrative and actively open up space for police violence. (These dynamics are explored in greater depth here, here and here.)

Still, the combative nature of the call along with the presence of a black bloc, however small, may have signaled to the police that attempts to interfere with the march would be met with more resistance than at events where people are not actively prepared to fight back. Most of the bloc were carrying black flags on fairly thick poles, and even recently in Tucson, blocs have successfully de-arrested people when the cops would try and take someone. The call specifically emphasized that some would be prepared to physically defend anyone targeted by police, and encouraged others to do the same.

A crowd with the willingness and capacity to meet a fight is likely not something that TPD is especially prepared for or wants to deal with. Contrary to liberal arguments that more militant language and tactics actively provoke the police, it is feasible that police aggression is often actually dissuaded when people make it clear that police escalation will be met with our own. However, we were also a smaller crowd, and it’s not as though our physical force could have outstripped theirs. Another factor, then, is that the police had almost certainly learned that efforts to herd a group with a more confrontational, abolitionist orientation onto the sidewalk would not be met with cooperation from participants; it was also an anarchist march and as such there were no leaders or identifiable organizers for the police to co-opt. After the mess the day before, they didn’t seem willing to antagonize this crowd.

More central than this, though, and more than the whiter composition of the crowd, is the police PR strategy, specifically in the context of their “community policing” strategy. However, this is a strategy that is breaking down nationally in the Trump era.

***

Community Policing is a police strategy that emphasizes building trust and communication with the communities they purport to serve. At its most banal, this looks like police participation in neighborhood events, fundraising things, really any chance they have to look friendly in public. Coffee With a Cop events are an example of this. On the other hand, this also involves building relationships with individuals who they believe will provide information on criminal activity, cultivating snitches under the guise of problem-solving. In some cases, this sort of process is especially clearly based on racial and class affinity with the police on the part of white gentrifiers, as described by Chicago’s We Charge Genocide in their report Counter-CAPS: The Community Engagement Arm of the Police State.

Particularly since the uprising in Ferguson, MO, in 2014, community policing has been proposed as an alternative to its alleged counterpart “militarized policing.” This is reflected not only by liberal calls for better community policing, yearning for a return to a better kind of policing which has never actually existed, but also at much higher, structural levels including the federal 21st Century Policing Task Force and many individual departments.

The problem here is that community policing and militarized policing are not in conflict or competition with each other. They are two carefully and intentionally crafted parts of a broader policing model called counterinsurgency. This model’s implementation began in the 1970’s, based on military counterinsurgency strategy being used at the time in the Vietnam War. The first community policing programs were initiated by the Los Angeles Police Department at roughly the same time that the same department created the very first SWAT team.

All this is to say that community policing and militarized policing are part of the same strategy. For more in-depth exploration of this, we recommend the anthology Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, as well as the essay The Other Side of the COIN: Counterinsurgency and Community Policing, which reads in part:

The advantages the state receives from each aspect are fairly clear: Militarization increases available force, but as important, it also provides increased discipline and command and control. It re-orders the police agency to allow for better coordination and teamwork, while also opening space for local initiative and officer discretion.

Community policing, meanwhile, helps to legitimize police efforts by presenting cops as problem-solvers. It forms police-driven partnerships that put additional resources at their disposal and win the cooperation of community leaders. And, by increasing daily, friendly contacts with people in neighborhood, community policing provides a direct supply of low-level information. These are not incidental features of community policing; these aspects speak to the real purpose.

We Charge Genocide’s report describes community policing in the national and local context as:

…a key pillar of the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. President Obama has advocated for community policing in a series of highly publicized speeches in Camden, NJ, and more recently at the meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago, IL.

…’community policing’ is the superficial involvement of select community members in providing police with legitimacy. ‘Community policing’ acts as a shield for police. A self-selecting group of empowered community members, who are frequently gentrifiers, work with police to deflect criticism and build local support for policing.

Partisans of community policing do not seek a freer world, an end to racist police violence, or to any police violence. These are, after all, inherently colonial institutions whose existence is based entirely on the maintenance of white supremacy, colonialism, imperial power, hetero-patriarchy, ableism and class rule. This is true from their inception as slave patrols to today. This is the core function of policing, whether they prioritize legitimacy over brute force or not. It is also important to recognize that advocates of community policing, including Chief Magnus, will often focus on police violence exclusively through the lens of how many people the police actually murder – this ignores the violence of arrest, incarceration, and the broader costs to families and friends of incarcerated persons and the communities targeted.

And the purpose of every Coffee With a Cop, every expression of concern by a police PR liaison or sorry-not-sorry chief over their most recent victim, is precisely to legitimize the outright violence and terror that their social role requires. Counterinsurgency policing seeks only to more efficiently manage this system of domination.

Here in Tucson, police chief Chris Magnus, and Jose Villasenor before him, have been outspoken proponents of an emphasis on community policing. Both have served on the federal 21st Century Policing Task Force. This makes perfect sense in a city like Tucson, where we have astronomical levels of poverty across racial and citizenship lines, along with an undocumented community which is large, heavily targeted by multiple cooperating law enforcement agencies (TPD, South Tucson Police, Border Patrol, ICE, Pima County Sheriff’s Department and state police), but which is also extraordinarily organized. This past year, Tucson ranked 10th in the country for the number of people killed by police, with a racial disparity in arrests which similar to that in Ferguson, MO.

Tucson is a powder keg with a burning fuse of poverty and state violence. Community Policing is the water putting out the spark over and over before it ignites. This is what allows state and capitalist oppression to continue nearly uninterrupted despite what ought to be a relatively high capacity and desire to rebel.

***

Even in their press release on the attack on the 16th, TPD stated:

We respect the right of the public to engage in this sort of expressive activity and routinely work with interest groups to protect the safety of the participants as well as the general public. As you know, this collaborative process has allowed us to assist dozens of groups in successfully and safely expressing their views. We remain committed to this cooperative approach since it has generally resulted in safe outcomes for our community.

Our officers continued to communicate with the group and spoke directly with group leaders who also directed demonstrators back to the sidewalk. Although the leaders were successful in getting some of the group off the roadway, other demonstrators began to block the patrol vehicle from leaving the area by locking their arms together.

While the veracity of the allegations about “group leaders” cooperating are as suspect as anything any cops says ever, these statements demonstrate that collaboration between law enforcement and activists is viewed by the police as a central part of the resulting “safe outcomes for our community.” What they mean by this is the stability of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism. More immediately, they view activist “leaders” as potential partners in making sure that the processes of policing are not interrupted. This means arrests, incarceration, assaults, and murders.

This is counterinsurgency.

***

Yet, if TPD is committed to a counterinsurgency strategy, emphasizing collaboration and containment over immediate, physically violent repression, why the sudden attack at the LUPE march? It is counter both to their strategy, which has been remarkably effective at maintaining the dominant social order so far, and to how they’ve generally dealt with less disruptive protests for years. (The exceptions have typically been during efforts to immediately, physically interfere with law enforcement operations.)

What we saw on Thursday may partly be the tensions between different factions of police, fault lines which are likely to tremble ever more violently under the Trump administration. The conflict is on one level between more forward-thinking cops, such as Chris Magnus, who have a very good strategy for maintaining control, and more rank-and-file officers and more aggressive police officials who feel stifled by a soft approach, would prefer to be cracking heads, and who are represented by powerful police unions. Local police unions and associations overwhelmingly opposed Magnus’ appointment as chief based in large part on his approach. (He is also gay-married and once held a Black Lives Matter sign, so surely a large number of straight-forwardly homophobic and racist officers took issue with these two points alone.)

These same local unions, along with national law enforcement unions including the national border patrol union and the ICE union, unanimously endorsed Trump, presumably believing he would let them off the leash based on his level of law and order rhetoric. His victory has allowed even those cops working for departments “still committed to [a] cooperative approach” to break free from their leashes. We saw this both on Thursday, and at the attempted railroad blockade on inauguration day. (Ironically, one of the people pepper sprayed and arrested at the LUPE event was also present at the J20 action on inauguration day and insisted that the crowd abandon the young POC who was pepper sprayed and arrested at that moment in order to march to the federal courthouse. Hopefully they’ll think better of this in the future). In both instances, individual officers quickly escalated, used pepper spray, and made notably violent arrests, despite the fact that such actions run counter to perceived and stated departmental strategies for dealing with these sorts of events.

It seems that this division is severe enough that Magnus felt the need to be personally present at the Friday march, possibly not even believing that officers could be trusted not to defy orders and escalate against the demo. While Magnus has stated that, upon reviewing footage from Thursday, “by and large, our officers handled Thursday’s situation well,” this may just be the closing of ranks that police do any time they come under criticism.

This could be a local manifestation of a national breakdown between those invested in counterinsurgency strategies, and their less astute and strategic colleagues represented best by the police unions and figures like recently deposed Sheriff Joe Arpaio or Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

***

So, what do we do in this situation? How can we actively exploit the conflicts within law enforcement, locally and nationally, to move towards liberation and a world without police, prisons or borders?

Initially, we must relentlessly assert that the police are the absolute enemy; that all policing is authoritarian violence, and that in our context, on this land, it is inherently colonial and white supremacist. There will be, already are, really, many who want to push a narrative that the attacks on Thursday are a fundamental departure from how police in Tucson interact with city residents. While it’s true that they broke with their general tactics for policing public protests, TPD routinely uses extraordinary violence against many of us in our daily lives. An older white woman at the Friday march remarked that she hadn’t seen TPD behave that way ever, to which someone responded, “That’s what they do on my block every week.” Others told her, “Well, it probably helps to be white.” It’s crucial not to conflate protest policing tactics with how TPD behaves outside of situations where media, “legitimate” activists, lawyers and organized rebels are present.

Further, we cannot allow space for arguments that what is desirable is a return to softer policing practices, as these are still fundamentally based in the threat of real violence, and still function to maintain the status quo. This runs parallel to liberal opposition to Donald Trump that pines for a return to the Obama era – that is, extraordinary violence in the pursuit of racist, imperialist, colonial ends, but dressed up in softer language, and deftly performed in a way that doesn’t make liberals feel too bad.

Part of this will look like constantly addressing the community policing model as what it is – a policing model, to be resisted and destroyed. This will entail tons of outreach and propaganda efforts on the racist history of policing and real goals of community policing.

This means showing up when Magnus, or Baca, or any other TPD functionary shows up at a nominally progressive event and shutting them down. An effort in this vein was undertaken by queer anarchists when Magnus was invited to speak at a vigil following the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Following this event however, Magnus was invited to speak at a screening of the police brutality documentary Do Not Resist on a panel with representatives of the ACLU and NAACP; he made an appearance at a recent fundraiser for Syrian refugees in the city, and a YWCA series on incarceration has relentlessly included representatives of the police department and county attorney’s office.

In permitted march situations, organizers often speak of police presence as a positive feature of the demo rather than an unfortunate necessity to make a potentially safer, less conflictual space. While we certainly have differences about whether or not police presence ever makes anything safer or less conflictual, at the very least, police presence is never something to celebrate or invite. These sorts of organizers are also often inclined to loudly thank police during and after these events – please, stop.

Organizations and individuals who continue to provide a platform for police propaganda and outreach efforts need to be called on this, and if or when they continue to collaborate with slave catchers, they need to be cut out from our movements and spaces, and treated as enemy collaborators. Rather than hoping that enough workshops or documentary screenings will meaningfully influence liberals, those on the side of liberation need to actually believe them when they assert their allegiance to the police, to the state, to domination.

We need to, as individuals and culturally, get over the awkwardness and fear of stepping on others’ toes when police presence is being facilitated by organizers. We need to remind ourselves that we do this to keep each other safe, and that this rocking of the boat is out of compassion and is part of our commitment to defending each other from state violence.

***

Over the weekend, LUPE held a press conference denouncing the police violence at their march and issuing the following demands:

1. AN END TO POLICE VIOLENCE AND BRUTALITY FROM TUCSON POLICE DEPARTMENT
2. THE STOP OF THE CRIMINALIZATION OF PEOPLE OF COLOR
3. END THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN LAW ENFORCEMENT AND BORDER PATROL
4. CONCRETE LEGISLATION THAT PROTECTS AND DEFENDS OUR IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY
5. A COMMUNITY LED INTERNAL INVESTIGATION ON THE ASSAULT BY TPD ON THOSE INVOLVED AND THE IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF THE OFFICERS INVOLVED (in particular Officer Green.)
6. DROP THE FABRICATED CHARGES AGAINST THOSE UNJUSTLY ARRESTED BY TPD
The next day, a small group anarchists dropped a banner off an overpass on the outskirts of downtown which simply read: FUCK THE POLICE.

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