Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
Camden’s excesses” and cut $445 million in state aid to the city. The city immediately laid off 168 of its 368 police officers. The remaining cops responded by “calling in sick in record numbers, with absenteeism rates rising as high as 30 percent over the rest of 2011.” The next year, a record sixty-seven homicides officially gave Camden the highest murder rate in the country. The state’s withdrawal of funds was part of Christie’s larger effort to break the back of public sector unions and, where possible, privatize public services. While these efforts met stiff resistance in the education system, the gambit succeeded in law enforcement. In May 2013, the city disbanded the municipal police and replaced them with reformed Camden County Police, which, despite its name, only has jurisdiction in the City of Camden. While reformers envisioned consolidation, none of the surrounding suburban municipalities merged with the new “county” force. Even without consolidation, the reform accomplished its goal. It cut the average cost per officer from $182,168 to $99,605, reductions achieved through a 65 percent cut to “fringe pay,” which included pensions and health care. Camden County estimated it would save the city between $14 million and $16 million. By August 2013, Christie was holding up the Camden County Police Force as “a model” and calling on Trenton and Mercer County to follow suit.26
While Camden struggled with fiscal shock therapy, the NJSP sent a “surge” of troopers to join a contingent that had been deployed to the city since the 2002 state takeover.27 The surge included the deployment of the fusion center’s Intelligence Collection Cell, a small team of state troopers that, in the words of the senior supervisor at the ROIC, “are in the midst of daily operations and sort of embed[ded] . . . with these folks. . . . We’re actually going to ride along with you and, when you lock up somebody in Camden, we’re going to debrief them and interview them.”28 These increased efforts to collect “human intelligence”—information gleaned from interpersonal relations—took place in a city transformed by surveillance systems: 121 cameras watching “virtually every inch of sidewalk”; thirty-five SpotShotter microphones to detect gunshots; new scanners to read license plates; and SkyPatrol, a mobile observation post that can scan six square blocks with thermal-imaging equipment.29
At the time, much of this data was filtered back to the ROIC to the analysts working under the portly detective sergeant. While I was doing interviews at the ROIC, they had recently finished work on Operation Padlock. After nine months of investigative and analytic work, the ROIC provided the beleaguered Camden Police Department, NJSP and Camden County Prosecutor with the intelligence to launch a series of police operations targeting Camden’s prodigious drug economy. In seven weeks in August and September of 2012, the multiagency group undertook ninety-three targeted operations, resulting in 535 arrests for offenses including drug possession, weapons possession, and active warrants. The operation also led to the confiscation of $35,535 in cash and drugs with a street value of $44,300, the towing of nearly seventy vehicles, and the closure of a Chinese restaurant for health code violations.30
This early interview with the detective sergeant offered a glimpse into a different reality that was not acknowledged in varied conversations on fusion centers. My original questions concerning surveillance, civil liberties, and public-private partnerships felt quaint. It recast “privacy” as a pedantic concern, an abstract formalism. I wanted to understand how massive investment in the name of security and counterterrorism produced a system of ubiquitous surveillance and aggressive policing that managed the social problems expressed so dramatically in Camden’s crisis. The intelligence gathering and related policing practices that were remaking Camden were not simply enforcing law and order. They were attempting to create a new city. The police operation and wider government austerity project were complementary state strategies to manage the long-term decline of Camden—and places like it. Making sense of this situation required a broader perspective that could hold policing, poverty, and political authority within one frame of vision.
PACIFICATION AND ITS PROSE
I conceptualize intelligence fusion and related practices as an example of what Mark Neocleous, George Rigakos, and other scholars call pacification, or the systemic fabrication of capitalist forms of order. The volatility and dynamism that define capitalism creates much insecurity: the vulnerability of the ever-growing masses of proletarianized workers (like the redundant, racially devalued labor warehoused in Camden); the vicissitudes of politics (revolt from below, machinations of elite factions); market shifts (the ebb and flow of business cycles, the movement of capital); and, most importantly, the fundamental structural precariousness of capitalist social relations (the silent compulsion of the market, which privatizes the means of subsistence and inscribes “insecurity” into commodified social relations with the demand that one must sell their labor for their life). The order of capital must be secured against these various risks. As an effort to critique security, Neocleous concludes that the modern world is an “order of social insecurity,” which “gives rise to a politics of security.”31
“Security” is a euphemism that obscures the political work of organizing and maintaining a social reality based on individualism, market relations, and the commodity form in the face of the “insecurities” produced by capital accumulation. It is, crudely, the way the routine work of policing maintains particular social property relations, even in the context of the most absurd inequalities. In Camden, for example, 15 percent of all buildings, some thirty-five hundred structures, are vacant. Meanwhile, there are nearly six hundred homeless people in the city.32 The plainly obvious solution—providing the surplus housing to homeless people—is politically impossible, unimaginable even. Instead, our self-evident norm is to use the most basic power of the state, bodies of armed men, to prevent unofficial access to private property. These perverse arrangements can only be naturalized as “common sense” because, as Rigakos contends, “security is hegemony,” or as Marx wrote in 1844, “Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.”33
The critique of security is the effort to unsettle this hegemony and analyze security without being subsumed by it. In his reading of classic liberals, Neocleous notes that the “liberty” that is said to define liberalism presupposes security:
We are often and rightly told that security is intimately associated with the rise of the modern state. But we also need to note that it is equally intimately bound up with the rise of bourgeois property rights. . . . [L]iberalism’s conception of security was intimately connected to its vision of political subjectivity centred on the self-contained and property-owning individual. The reason liberty is wrapped in the concept of security, then, is because security is simultaneously wrapped in the question of property, giving us a triad of concepts which are usually run so close together that they are almost conflated (“liberty, security, property”), a triad found in Smith, Blackstone, Paine, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in various other formulations elsewhere. Thus as liberalism generated a new conception of “the economy” as its founding political act, a conception which integrated the wealth of nations, the world market and the labour of the population, its notion of liberty necessitated a particular vision of security: the ideological guarantee of the egoism of the independent and self-interested pursuit of property. It is for this reason Marx calls security “the supreme concept of bourgeois society.”
Simply put, the “liberty” engendered within historical capitalism is contingent on the security of private property. On this basis, the critique of security, like Marx’s critique of political economy, begins with a deep engagement with existing security ideology and its social context, “simultaneously unmasking ideas and rooting them within the context of class society and the commodity form.”34
A central part of this project is the reappropriation of the term pacification from military jargon to analyze practical and historical connections among policing, warfare, and social policy as processes of order making. Pacification connotes the systematic fabrication of capitalist social relations. While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war of one against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites to us consider what relations produce these