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<address class="hide-on-small-only flow-text"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/climate-apartheid-is-the-coming-police-violence-crisis">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/climate-apartheid-is-the-coming-police-violence-crisis</a><br>
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<h1 class="hide-on-small-only flow-text">Climate Apartheid Is the
Coming Police Violence Crisis </h1>
<div class="excerpt-tag">
<p>Unless we win serious changes now, the worst is yet to come.</p>
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<aside class="article-meta"> <span class="author url fn">Olúfẹ́mi
O. Táíwò</span> ▪ August 12, 2020 </aside>
<figure class="article-image"> <img
src="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1597247464666_GettyImages1227887567copy2.jpeg"
width="428" height="196"> <figcaption
class="article-image-caption"> Incarcerated firefighters
arriving at the Water fire near Whitewater, California on
August 2, 2020 (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images) </figcaption>
</figure>
</header>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Such crises are already here—and they are hitting us with
increasing frequency. Researchers say that we can expect more
climate change<span>–</span>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.<br>
</p>
<div style="margin-top:24px;"> </div>
<br>
<strong>What Yesterday’s Crises Tell Us About Climate Crisis</strong>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div style="margin-top:24px;"> </div>
<br>
<strong>What Today’s Crises Tell Us About Climate Crisis</strong>
<p><img
src="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2020-08-12-at-11.28.17-AM-603x305.png"
alt="" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-71145" width="603"
height="305"><br>
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Likely upcoming climate hazards
during the COVID-19 pandemic, from “Compound climate risks in
the COVID-19 pandemic.”</span></p>
<p>A recent study published in the <em>Nature Climate Change</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div style="margin-top:24px;"> </div>
<p><strong>What We Should Do</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p><b>Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò</b> 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.</p>
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