I’m fascinated by the narrative conflict around whether the police should be construed as the agents of the state enemy, or else as the also-human guys doing a necessary job.
The calls from some sections of the US left, to defund or disband the police indicates the idea of having a police force is itself the problem, rather than the behaviour of the current officers.
In the UK, the supporters of Extinction Rebellion debate whether to regard the police as their allies in protesting safely, or an antagonist trashing their peaceful protest sites.
I am inclined to place these perspectives alongside the statement from Debord: [Society of the Spectacle 87] “the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won”.
In painting the police as part of the enemy, the would-be revolutionaries are accepting that they will never win. That they will never be among those who hold power, and would therefore create and enforce laws, and thus employ a police force to implement and enforce those laws.
Whereas the middle class protesters (the bourgeoisie?) have every expectation of exercising power now and in future, via their elected representatives, and thus must affirm the police who (in due course) they expect to be enforcing the environmental laws for which they currently campaign.
Similarly, the narratives around whether the “state” itself is a positive or negative concept.
Outside an extreme anarchist position, the state, the organ which exercises either the democratic will of the people or the will of some dictator, needs to exist. One can argue about the size and functions of the state, and how its decision makers come to power, but something needs to exist. In “Spectacle” Debord talks at some length about how the early soviet system tied itself up in knots by trying to pretend that a state bureaucracy didn’t exist, when clearly it did and needed to, in order for the instructions of Lenin, Stalin, etc to get implemented across a huge country.
There will always be opposition to any political programme; some groups will be losers compared to the prior situation. Therefore any political faction who hope their programme will become the implemented will of society must approve the concept of a group tasked by society to deal with those who violently or fraudulently act against it: their police force. Advocating the disbanding of that force therefore becomes anti-democratic, in that it removes any impediment to violent or fraudulent action against the will of the people.
(For sure, it is essential to weed out illegal and violent behaviour by members of the police force. The US has gone too far in tolerating a kill count by police of 100 people a month: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
RJ7: Sept 2020