[D66] Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis

[R.O.]

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/climate-apartheid-is-the-coming-police-violence-crisis


  Climate Apartheid Is the Coming Police Violence Crisis

Unless we win serious changes now, the worst is yet to come.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò ▪ August 12, 2020

Incarcerated firefighters arriving at the Water fire near Whitewater, 
California on August 2, 2020 (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

In a 2019 report, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme 
poverty and human rights warned about the possibility of climate 
apartheid: a world in which only elites are able to access basic forms 
of social protection while everyone else faces the devastating effects 
of climate crises.

Such crises are already here—and they are hitting us with increasing 
frequency. Researchers say that we can expect more climate 
change–related wildfires, heat waves, and floods before the end of the 
year, all of which will compound the economic damage done by the 
COVID-19 pandemic. Yet how all this destruction will affect us has less 
to do with the wind, rain, or sea levels and more to do with our 
institutions, a simple question of whom and what the political system 
chooses to protect. Whether ecological crises leads to a bleak future of 
climate apartheid or something more just depends on the politics of 
prisons and police.


*What Yesterday’s Crises Tell Us About Climate Crisis*

Modern policing in the United States evolved from institutions created 
to manage perceived crises of social control. In the sixteenth century, 
Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonizers of the Caribbean and South 
America formed patrols and legal systems to manage colonized 
populations. These strategies were inherited by the southern British 
colonies in North America. Slave patrols became the basis for modern 
police departments in the U.S. South. In the North, police departments 
were developed to break strikes. Businessmen had keys to special alarm 
boxes, which they could use to alert the police at the first sign of 
worker unrest.

In both the South and the North, the purpose of police departments was 
fundamentally the same: to secure, within the settled frontier, the 
social order on which profit-making activities depended. Subsequent 
developments in policing reveal similar priorities. Historian Elizabeth 
Hinton’s work, for example, shows how the pivot to mass incarceration 
and federalized, militarized policing was a direct response to the 
political crisis created by the tumultuous race riots of the 1960s.

In the 1980s, police departments around the country tried a new approach 
to the war on drugs, focusing on street-level offenses. In one operation 
spearheaded by the NYPD, “Operation Pressure Point,” police blanketed an 
open-air drug market with hundreds of plain clothes officers, arresting 
sixty-five people per day for six weeks. The drug trade didn’t stop as a 
result—it just moved away from the places where the busts were 
happening. But, from the point of view of real estate developers, 
landlords, and others with a financial or political stake in housing 
markets or store-front commercial ventures, that was good enough. Even 
if police departments couldn’t stop the crime, they could shape where 
and to whom it happened. This kind of selective logic is what we can 
expect under climate apartheid: policing will not be aimed at preventing 
climate crises from harming everyone, but instead police will be tasked 
with protecting elites from its downsides.

A growing literature by political scientists suggests that the activity 
of today’s police departments is already oriented around securing 
particular spaces for particular classes of people—that is to say, 
controlling the spatial and social distribution of crime rather than its 
incidence. Elaine B. Sharp argues that postindustrial cities use 
policing oriented around “order maintenance” to make areas hospitable 
for creative-class residents, a strategy she and others call 
“postindustrial policing.” City-level police expenditures tend to 
increase when housing prices increase, even while crime rates decline. 
Ayobami Laniyonu’s spatial study of New York found that the 
neighborhoods surrounding the gentrifying ones had the highest 
stop-and-frisk rates, particularly when those neighborhoods had high 
percentages of Black and brown families.

This scheme is an antagonistic security strategy: the safety and 
stability of spaces for affluent residents is generated from the very 
insecurity that their policing creates for others. The decade between 
2006 and 2016 saw the fastest increases of legal ordinances 
criminalizing poverty and homelessness in U.S. history, including a 52 
percent increase in bans on sitting and lying, an 88 percent increase in 
prohibitions on loitering and “loafing,” and a 143 percent increase in 
bans on living in vehicles. Empowered by these ordinances, police 
departments nationwide get to work harassing people who look out of 
place and dispersing homeless encampments.

In short, crises of political economy are often managed with prisons and 
policing. Whether responding to the crises of slave rebellion, worker 
unrest, cuts to social services, or income inequality, politicians look 
at prisons and police as one of their top go-to tools when things get 
out of hand. In the current activities of police and law enforcement, we 
can see the seeds of the response to climate crises.


*What Today’s Crises Tell Us About Climate Crisis*


Likely upcoming climate hazards during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 
“Compound climate risks in the COVID-19 pandemic.”

A recent study published in the /Nature Climate Change/ research journal 
predicts that the socioeconomic fallout of COVID-19 will exacerbate the 
destruction caused by climate crises. This year, scientists expect that 
the United States will be hit with more hurricanes, wildfires, and 
floods. As these compound crises accelerate, they will, inevitably, 
present problems in excess of policing capacity. The state and its 
police will have to decide who and what to protect.

When deemed useful, the incarcerated represent a hyper-exploitable 
population, which can be pressed into service for pittance. In recent 
years, California has relied on thousands of incarcerated firefighters 
to quell wildfires. They risk their lives for very little pay—between $2 
and $5 a day—both because they are exempt from minimum wage laws and 
legally prevented from unionizing. Incarcerated firefighters are 
compensated with minor reprieves from the harshest versions of prison 
life, including sentence reductions and opportunities to visit with 
their children.

When not deemed useful, the incarcerated represent a hyper-disposable 
population. During Hurricane Katrina in 2006, the city of New Orleans 
faced its first ever mandatory evacuation. Yet evacuation was not 
possible for those imprisoned in Orleans Parish Prison, as Sheriff 
Marlin Gusman assured the public that the incarcerated would stay “where 
they belong.” Where they belonged, apparently, was crowded in a large 
gymnasium without food. Incarcerated people, including children as young 
as thirteen, were left for days in toxic water that rose as high as 
their chests. As one lawyer put it in the ACLU’s scathing report: “The 
Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals did more for 
its 263 stray pets than the sheriff did for the more than 6,500 men, 
women and children left in his care.”

Outside of the prison, the assumption of criminality also led people to 
become hyper-disposable—without a judge, jury, or official sentence. 
After Hurricane Katrina, many people took to the streets, looking for 
dry land, shelter, medical help, and essentials like food and water. But 
media circulated images labeling Black people as criminal “looters.” Law 
enforcement officials were given orders to shoot looters on sight; white 
vigilantes murdered Black people they deemed criminal with near-total 
impunity. The mayor of New Orleans baselessly told Oprah Winfrey that 
“hundreds of gang leaders” were ruling the Superdome, where about 9,000 
displaced residents took shelter from the storm.

At the peak of Hurricane Sandy, which struck New York in 2012 and whose 
intensity has been linked to climate change, the NYPD received emergency 
calls at a rate of 20,000 per hour. Yet even while the hurricane knocked 
out power in many of the city’s neighborhoods, they shone bright at 
Goldman Sachs. The day before the storm, the bank put 25,000 sandbags 
around the building, protecting it from the incoming floodwaters. The 
lights were courtesy of its own generator, which was set up as part of a 
disaster-preparedness plan set after 9/11. Another resource Goldman 
Sachs has in case of emergency is the NYPD, which is literally on its 
payroll. The police force guarantees the bank a “virtually instantaneous 
police response” in case of emergency.

While Goldman Sachs provides a particularly poetic example, the bank is 
not exceptional. LittleSis investigations found that a number of the 
world’s largest corporations bankroll U.S. police foundations, including 
tech companies like Facebook and Microsoft, and Goldman’s fellow 
financial sector powerhouses like Bank of America and Wells Fargo. This 
money allows local police departments to even further militarize with 
SWAT equipment and also to buy surveillance software and capacity 
without public scrutiny or oversight—even if activists succeed in their 
push for cities to “defund the police,” many departments will still 
receive this private funding. A second investigation reveals that links 
between private corporations and the police are particularly prominent 
in the fossil fuel industry. As executives make money from activity that 
pollutes Black and brown neighborhoods, they resist regulation by 
hijacking local politics. One Arkansas company even hired actors to 
feign grassroots support in a city council meeting. As the climate 
crisis accelerates, the police will likely continue to use military 
weapons and tactics to protect profiteering corporations from activists 
who seek to avert its worst effects, as they did at Standing Rock.

Meanwhile at the border, we are at the beginning of a Great Climate 
Migration, which will vastly reshuffle the distribution of the world’s 
population. The concentration camps on the southern border already 
detain climate refugees: many of those housed in detention facilities 
have moved from places where the crops no longer grow and water is 
harder and harder to come by. Rather than taking any steps to mitigate 
the devastation of climate change, the consistent response from the U.S. 
government has been to build walls and increase funding for its border 
guards. The COVID-19 crisis provided only a brief pause: immigration 
justice organizers say that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has 
restarted abductions in unmarked vans in Washington, D.C., despite the 
persistence of the pandemic. In Farmville, Virginia, over 70 percent of 
detainees have contracted COVID-19; in California’s Adelanto facility, 
protesting detainees have been violently subdued with pepper-ball rounds 
and tear gas—much like on the streets of the nation’s cities during the 
recent protests against police killings.

*What We Should Do*

Whether crises—in the form of a virus, ecological disaster, or an 
invading army—present opportunity or unmitigated calamity for a social 
system depends on what the system chooses to protect. So far, our system 
has chosen to protect large corporations, property, and racial hierarchy 
with militarized police. Meanwhile, the combined political and 
ecological stakes are rising most quickly and most dangerously for the 
most vulnerable among us: new research suggests that counties with high 
proportions of working-class African-American, Latinx, and Native 
American populations are the most vulnerable to flooding. These 
populations are more likely to be driven to bankruptcy by hurricanes, 
and more likely to experience difficulty accessing federal disaster 
assistance and loans. Shifting vulnerability toward those at the bottom 
is an example of the same “order maintenance” that Sharp argues is 
endemic to postindustrial policing. Those who lose their houses and are 
shut out of federal assistance will face greater exposure to harassment 
by police.

Radical proposals for dealing with police violence are beginning to 
circulate in response to the global uprising against police violence. 
Many now demand that we defund police departments and/or abolish them. 
The abolitionists arguing for these changes imagine a different response 
to disruptions to the social order, based on a collaborative model where 
we secure each other from harm. These imaginative projects are 
necessary. Police departments, from the Caribbean slave patrols to the 
present-day harassers of homeless people, are inextricably linked to an 
antagonistic security scheme, which aims to protect “us” from “them.” We 
need something else entirely.

But we cannot change the situation without first changing who is in the 
driver’s seat. If we want to change the size, scope, or priorities of 
policing in any lasting or meaningful fashion, we need to link 
abolitionist demands with the community control required to deliver on 
them: we need power over the police. The climate crises that are ahead 
of us only make this task more urgent. If we don’t win, we can expect 
the response to accelerating climate crises to look much like the 
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: with more and more of us scrambling for 
basic forms of security like shelter, medicine access, and water—while 
on the wrong side of the watchful gunsights of the police.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò* is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown 
University, where he focuses on social/political philosophy and ethics. 
He is also a member of Pan-African Community Action and an organizer of 
the Undercommons.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20200813/6afd5b1e/attachment-0001.html>