Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
renewed emphasis on rehabilitation or any reinvestment in criminalized communities. Instead, the contracting prison is supplemented by intelligence fusion, which enables punitive forms of decarceration. These changes are making mass supervision an increasingly salient and important state strategy. The central focus on imprisonment, which defined mass incarceration, is giving way to a more surveillance- and police-intensive mode of regulation. Specifically, warrant sweeps, compliance checks, chronic-offender initiatives, and saturation patrols supplement contracting prisons with expansive policing in an effort to pacify criminalized surplus populations. Even as aggressive policing complements reduced prison populations to produce a punitive version of decarceration, the commitment to workfare remains and in some ways deepens, as seen in the restructuring of the police agencies.
The third and final part of the book concerns the fabrication of social order, showing the novel reconfiguration of political policing effected by fusion centers and detailing the varied ways fusion centers and related ILP operations regulate surplus populations beyond incarceration. “Beyond COINTELRPO,” the fifth chapter, examines the contention that fusion centers are involved in political policing. While activists on the far right and far left both allege that fusion centers are the centerpiece of a new crackdown on dissent, a massive collection of released documents and my own interviews and observations reveal that there is no federally coordinated project to repress political activity along the lines of the earlier COINTELPRO program. Instead, political policing today operates through overlapping interagency intelligence networks, including the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. Reflecting the decentralized and competitive nature of this state-form, these intelligence networks are subject to a diverse set of political pressures, such as the external forces that shaped the divergent responses to different Occupy encampments or the internal struggles within the state that complicate the relations between the security apparatus and far-right movements. This patchwork of political policing is a complex and convoluted arrangement. Enhanced coordination creates organic opportunities for plausible deniability. It is hard to discern the leading actors and exact sequence of events. It also muddles command hierarchies. This lack of clarity is only partially caused by secrecy and the proximity of events. Increased political indeterminacy is built into the very structure of the workfare-carceral state. The current patchwork of political policing is much harder to expose and redress than COINTELPRO. If these arrangements can withstand their own internal contradictions, they may be a more effective means to contain class struggle.
The sixth chapter, “Pacifying Poverty,” reveals the way fusion centers and related police operations produce capitalist forms of social order. While activists fear government persecution, reformers bemoan waste and mission failures, and watchdogs fret about civil liberties, intelligence fusion subjects entire populations to constant surveillance and, often, aggressive ILP operations. These activities continue with little to no controversy because they target a group with almost no formal political power—the surplus populations warehoused in hyper-ghettoized communities, doubly segregated by race and class. This situation reflects the basic mandate of police power: to regulate poverty and fabricate capitalist forms of order. This conclusion becomes clear in light of a series of ILP operations that share a common convergence in the criminalization of “the moral economies of poverty,” the ill-understood survival strategies of those struggling at the bottom of the crushing inequalities that define capitalist societies. These police projects attempt to reorganize social relations on terms that support capital accumulation. Much of this work centers on the drug economy. Today, intelligence fusion helps police launch multiagency investigations into drug-related criminal networks. These operations attempt to regulate and, through asset forfeiture laws, tax the criminalized labor at the core of moral economies of poverty. When successful, they push the drug economy off the street and indoors. Here, landlord training, trespass affidavit, and narcotics eviction programs enlist non-state actors in the work of pacification, compelling landlords to police the survival strategies and quotidian behaviors of surplus populations. Finally, secondhand dealer laws provide police new tools to not only monitor and manage the market in stolen goods but also (re)produce the market and reaffirm the power of capital. These efforts continually (re)produce capitalist social relations by subsuming threatening forms of labor within the criminal legal system, enforcing legal forms of subjectivity, and constructing administratively legible market relations.
Pacifying the Homeland concludes with a reflection on contemporary movements and returns to Camden, New Jersey. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement formed after the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting and exploded into American consciousness following the 2014 death of Mike Brown and the subsequent rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri. The mounting deaths and continuing protests created a crisis of legitimacy in policing and the wider criminal legal system. In response, President Obama convened the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, bringing together police administrators, academics, and police advocates to articulate a vision for police reform. Moderate elements of BLM, such as Campaign Zero, endorsed the commission’s eventual findings. When President Obama announced the proposed reforms, he traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to use the city as a backdrop. By 2015, crime rates in Camden had fallen considerably from their 2012 crescendo. The president attributed the success to their community policing programs and their use of intelligence.
While BLM moderates have endorsed these reforms, more radical organizations have rejected them as an effort not to police with the community but police through the community, selectively deputizing certain individuals to act as intelligence collectors and unofficial apparatchiks of the carceral state. Indeed, when President Obama traveled to Chicago to promote his reforms to the annual meeting of the International Associations of Chiefs of Police, he was met by street demonstrations and civil disobedience. A few days after, a group of grassroots organizations released The Counter-CAPS Report: The Community Engagement Arm of the Police State, an independent study of Chicago’s community policing programs that sought to recast the debate around police reform and challenge the reemergence of community policing. These battle lines have only sharpened during the Trump administration. The effort to co-opt and mollify BLM moderates and repair the public image of police with the media-friendly optics of community policing seems to be on hold, if not completely collapsed. Meanwhile, a new law-and-order offensive promises to reverse the modest reforms that began under the Obama administration. While these polarized politics have raised the stakes, they have also increased the stature of BLM radicals, a nascent socialist movement, and autonomous grassroots organizations who are working to abolish the workfare-carceral state and replace it with real alternatives that seek to transcend police power and capital.
1. Connecting the Dots beyond Counterterrorism and Seeing Past Organizational Failure
The Critique of Security and the Prose of Pacification
On September 9, 2001, a Maryland state trooper stopped Ziad Jarrah for a traffic violation. Having no reason to do otherwise, the trooper sent Jarrah on his way. Two days later, he was the hijacker-pilot of Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Citing incidents like this stop, the 9/11 Commission found that the intelligence community had failed to “connect the dots.”1 In response, the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) promised to link the entirety of domestic intelligence—from municipal police departments to the federal intelligence community—with a new National Network of Fusion Centers. At the same time, the spread of intelligence-led policing (ILP) complemented the rise of these networked intelligence hubs with a “smarter” approach that uses intelligence to preempt threats.
The resultant process of intelligence fusion starts with information: massive databases decades in the making; open-source data gleaned from the web and social media; and streams of information created by new surveillance systems like automated license plate readers. To “fuse” data into useful information, analysts often use powerful computers and specialized software to “connect the dots” and, in theory, draw out the signal from the noise of data. Different tools offer different insights. With specialized software, analysts can turn unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can map unwieldy agglomerations of information—such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records—to create “predictive” heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur.