Police as Colonial Force: Fanon and the Racial Logic of State Violence

Me tryna be philosophical

This piece is an analysis of the works of Franz Fanon in conjunction with what we know of the modern US police state, diving into how the US police force exists as a colonial tool to subjugate. We are situated in a system of forced dependency, shackled within a social structure that wants us dead— one enforced by police who terrorize the colonized; one with vicious cycles of systemic violence; one with the colonized turning that trauma inward, perpetuating violence within our communities.
As posited in Jean Paul Sartre’s preface of Fanon's Magnum Opus “The Wretched of the Earth”:
The colonized live within a dialectic of the colonizer and the colonized with the history of the colonized being derivative of the dialectic. All history and outcomes that do not break the dialectic are then forced into its constraints, the colonized existing within logic, trapped within the dialectic.
Satre says, “She has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time.”
Within the dialectic of the colonizer and the colonized, the colonized are trapped within a state of extraction, the colonized only existing due to the colonizer, and vice versa. Within this exploitation and permanent state of extraction, there is a dehumanization of the colonized being
Within “blackness” or black being, there is a lack of ontology. The relationship between blackness and nothingness is interesting, The Inquiry of who we are, or what the black worldview is.

An excerpt that speaks on this phenomenon:

"As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man"

“Personhood” is the privilege of the white man alone. Therefore, blackness is “sealed into thingness,” writes Fanon. He recognizes and articulates this relationship between blackness and nothingness and asserts that this lack of ontology is tangential to our condition as colonized. “He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me”, writes Fanon, within this Dialectic, the history of the police as a tool of the colonizer can be explained, Policing within the US started in the 1600’s based on the England model, in this time period, policing was modeled as a night watch, This informal system of policing more communal and decentralized, This “Night Watch” system originating in Boston in 1636, Then New York in 1658, and Philadelphia in the 1700
In the southern colonies, this system developed differently, A less industrialized south, who’s main imports were slaves, The main tool for developing the mass swathes of underdeveloped land being slavery, The North and South having separate material conditions, The policing system starting as a parallel development, with its Night Watch model, But diverging to match the needs of these slave states in the south, In 1968 South Carolina law, allowed slave owners to apprehend, chastise, and bring back any slave found off their plantation, All Slave states had distinct slave codes, to dictate what could be done to restrict the autonomy of slaves and regulate slavery, and In the urban south, policing still followed along this Night Watch model as settlers were the majority in these areas, but in the rural south, this situation was reversed, Therefore the first formal slave patrol being created in the Carolina colonies was in 1704, Militia captains were to select ten men from their companies to form special patrols.

“muster all the men under his command, and with them ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation, within the limits or precincts, as the General shall think fit, and take up all slaves which they shall meet without their master's plantation which have not a permit or ticket from their masters, and the same punish” (From the Statutes at large of South Carolina, Vol. 2. Pg 255)

The Carolinas split in 1712, and in 1734, in South Carolina, the patrol split off from the Military. South Carolina had one patrol each for its 33 districts. Companies of 5 men paid in wages and exemption from military service were given extensive privileges to search and detain and the right to administer up to 20 lashes to any runaway slave. Both male and female owners could procure any white man between 16 and 60 to ride patrol in search of a run away slave.
Slave patrols had three primary functions:
1.) to chase down, apprehend, and return runaway slaves;
2.) provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts;
3.) maintain a form of discipline for slaves if they violated any plantation rules.
As patrolling expanded, Authority shifted from the Military to the state governing bodies: Court, County Judges in North Carolina, Town Commissioners in Tennessee, Parish Judges in Louisiana, Justices of peace in Arkansas and Georgia, and County board supervisors in Mississippi. The Slave Patrols in the South were the modern precursor for policing in the South, similar to the Night Watches in the North, Despite time, place, and occasion these slave patrols had the right to search slave quarters, confiscate contraband, punish runaway slaves, and whip any slaves they deem as obstructing their duties.

As Fred Morten writes in “The Case Of Blackness”

“One way to investigate the lived experience of the black is to consider what it is to be the dangerous, because one is, because we are the constitutive supplement. [...] What is it to be an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the same time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form?”

A South Carolina act of 1740 exempted any townships from patrol requirement, where the white inhabitants were they were in "far superior" numbers to blacks (Cooper, 1838 b, p. 571)
The Police signify a “lack”, That the colonized lack “humanity” so they must be repressed, from its inception being a tool to repress the wretched. Colonialism negates the black ontology, excluded from the self-other dialectic primary to identity formation, “otherness” is a mode of entry into subjectivity and identity, as fanon puts it, “Crushing objecthood” and this same mentality is shown within the acts of police to this day, NYC is home to one of the most militarized police in the world, and the largest police force in America, the mentality of slave patrols fits one to one. In a 2016 dataset ( I would use more up to date information, but the NYPD has a tight lock on this information ) done by Alex Bell found that, Only 58 percent of NYPD officers live in New York City, with 26% of NYPD officers living in Long Island, 17% of NYPD officers living in Queens, 16% of NYPD officers living in Brooklyn, 13% of NYPD officers living in Approved Upstate NY Counties, 11% of NYPD officers living in the Bronx, 10% of NYPD officers living in Staten Island, and 4% of NYPD officers living in Manhattan, Now this information might not too alarming to the skeptic, but let's see what this information means in context, The areas in NYC with the highest reported crimes, are in Brooklyn and the Bronx,
In Brooklyn: Crown Heights, Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, East Flatbush, and Ocean Hill.
In the Bronx: Mott Haven, Tremont, Fordham, and Hunts Point,
All of these neighborhoods, being majority black and hispanic, and the poorest neighborhoods in the city. With majority of the populations living below the poverty line
It seems like only 42 percent of officers that live outside of nyc, but it's more accurate that around 78 percent of officers live outside of the neighborhoods they actually police. According to a 2014 piece from Five Thirty Eight, 77 percent of black New York police and 76 percent of Hispanic police live in the city, which points to the idea that these (most likely white) officers travel from to these areas they have no familiarity with to oppress poor and working class black people. It's almost as if policing in the city only exists for the colonized and racialized. When you look at the history of the police as a force in the colonial territory of the US, and and its modern day effects and duties, it has no bearing or job on reducing crime, with most of their work, being to this objective, as police don't ever reduce crime, so the question then becomes what is their purpose?