Episode 227 – Abolition with David Correia

Macro N Cheese – Episode 227
Abolition with David Correia
June 3, 2023

 

[00:00:00] David Correia [Intro/Music]: I don’t have to explain to anybody who’s ever come in contact with a cop. You’ve experienced that overbearing arrogance that cops bring to every situation, and it’s because their job is to produce good order. That is whatever the cop thinks it is.

The fact of people’s fear, despite living in a world awash in cops, ought to suggest to us that more cops might not help.

[00:01:26] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:34] Steve Grumbine: All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We’re gonna take a trip behind the blue line. We’re gonna talk about the police. And let me just say, for the record, capital has to have a way of protecting itself and private property. And when private property is the key to your existence, then the police become your protector.

They become the muscle that makes sure that you are able to keep what you have. And if something bad happens and other people are suffering, the police are there to protect you, not them. And we’re gonna talk a lot about that today, the co-author of the book Police: A Field Guide is joining me. His name is David Correia.

He’s a writer and a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He’s the author of An Enemy Such As This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation In One Family On Two Continents Over Three Centuries at Haymarket Books. That’s 2022. Also, Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico.

That’s Georgia 2013. He’s also the co-author along with Tyler Wall of the Aforementioned Police: A Field Guide, Verso 2018 and Red Nation Rising from Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, PM Press 2021. He is a co-editor of Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police, Haymarket Books 2021. And he is the recipient of a Ford Fellowship, a Henry Bellon DuPont Fellowship, and a Lannon Residency Fellowship.

Without further ado, my guest, David Correia. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:03:24] David Correia: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

[00:03:26] Grumbine: Absolutely. So David and I spoke a little bit offline. I’m not gonna get into all the history of Grumbine. You guys are pretty much well aware that I came from the right wing libertarian background and through the course of learning economics and understanding the way the state and the way capital oppress poor minorities and the vulnerable, the capital order protects itself. It reinforces itself and it uses things like the police force to ensure its viability and stability and it never loses its place in the sun.

And so I figured what better person to bring on than my guest, David. Who wrote this fantastic book, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about this book, but it’s more than this book. This isn’t just gonna be a book review, but I do recommend going out and picking up Police: A Field Guide from [Verso] Books.

It’s a phenomenal book. David, thank you again for coming on with me.

[00:04:28] Correia: Yeah, I’m glad to be here.

[00:04:29] Grumbine: So you guys started writing this book back when Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, another Confederate state downing a black guy, death by cop in this case. What was the motivation aside from just seeing this guy laying there in the street for six hours or however long it was, and once again seeing cops get away with murder.

[00:04:55] Correia: Yeah, we did start this shortly after Ferguson Police killed Mike Brown, but for me at least, it began before that in March of 2014, when Albuquerque Police murdered an unsheltered man named James Boyd. It was a shocking thing. It was all captured on their lapel cameras. Progressives love reforms, like lapel camera videos, but all it does is just witness police violence from the perspective of cops, and in this case, he was just trying to find a safe place to camp for the night.

In March, the shelters were closed because it was getting warmer in Albuquerque, and so he camped in the foothills and it’s a wealthy area. There were a lot of large homes in the area and someone called the cops and they showed up and it was a six hour standoff and they ended up executing him in cold blood.

You can find the video on YouTube. Just search Albuquerque, James Boyd, and I will warn you, it’s a harrowing video. It brought people who love police into the street to protest police. That’s how terrifying it was. And terrorizing it was. And that was for me, quite an education organizing on the street with folks in Albuquerque to confront the Albuquerque Police Department, which arguably has the most notorious reputation of any municipal police department in the United States.

In 2014, the year they murdered James [Boyd], Albuquerque Police committed 20% of all homicides in the city of Albuquerque. So, I remember I did a lot of writing in local press at the time, and I was trying to appeal to liberals. My idea was all these radicals are joining us in the street and there’s not a need for political education with those folks.

But your average working person, or like a white economically secure person, they might be down for confronting police in these extraordinary moments. Albuquerque, after James Boyd or in Ferguson after Mike Brown. But as you said in your opening, they understand eventually their privileges are gifts cops give them. Their property and all that they hold dear can’t be defended without the violence of police.

So it takes a lot of work to organize with people whose interests are aligned with police. And I spent a lot of time like writing and local alternative newspaper in Albuquerquean Press, trying to make this argument “Look: you say you are rational person? Well, let’s look at the history of this police department and the history of all the efforts to reform it”.

They’ve never worked. If we’re gonna make some claim about the ability of police reform to fix police, maybe we could look at the evidence of police reform in the past and decide if it’s even possible. And Albuquerque also arguably, has had more reform and more intense police reform than any place in the country.

The police department now is currently and has been under a consent decree with the federal courts for nine years. But every time Albuquerque Police Department has these crisis moments and goes through these rounds of reform, the result is more cops, more weapons, more people they killed, more people they harass on a daily basis.

And I thought that it was just a matter of presenting facts and if I could just make a compelling case to otherwise rational people, they would come to recognize that the system of policing as we know it is a system that fabricates an unequal order that targets working people, particularly working people of color, constrains their life prospects and defends the privileges of those with means and often largely white populations.

And I was really pretty naive at that. The idea of police and the ability of reformists in particular to shore up police legitimacy through all their many promises to fix what’s wrong with police and the way that they define the problem of police is never really a problem of police itself, but rather always a problem of our lack of faith in police where the problem is you and you don’t respect police enough.

Those are always really the problems that police reformists are really talking about when they acknowledge there’s a problem.

[00:09:15] Grumbine: MLK said something really important about this. Back in, I guess what 67 where he talked about beware of the white moderate…

[00:09:22] Correia: Yeah. Right.

[00:09:24] Grumbine: …that places law and order over justice. During the Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton primary debate. I remember when Black Lives Matter showed up at Bernie Sanders rally and the girl took the microphone and people were aghast. How could they do that to Bernie? And at the time I would call myself one of those people that was aghast.

[00:09:48] Correia: Yeah.

[00:09:49] Grumbine: Getting aware of your world is not an event, it’s a process. Everybody starts from a propagandized perspective.

[00:09:57] Correia: Right.

[00:09:58] Grumbine: So as part of this process, watching that happen to Bernie was one thing, but then when it happened to Hillary again, and I was appalled to watch not white people, but black people railing on the Black Lives Matter girl that was doing this for being disrespectful to Hillary. There was a protection of the order of the political class that didn’t compute with me.

I spoke to the late Glen Ford about this and he said, this is part of the problem. The misleadership class, as he called it, has led a lot to believe that the Democratic Party is their savior and people just accept these are truths. And yet there’s an entire element that people in exerting their basic humanity say, no, I’m not gonna do that.

And then that’s when people start getting killed. When they don’t follow those basic rules. And I guess my question to you is this, there’s a massive list of unarmed dead black people who have been gunned down by police violence based on a whole host of things. And possibly the one that gets me the most is the children with autism.

They don’t know how to comply. The police aren’t trained to deal with the autistic, and all of a sudden their arms and their feet are tied together with plastic wraps and all kinds of abuse happens. And I’ve seen some of the videos of autistic kids getting yanked outta cubby holes where they’re trying to be safe and secure.

This whole fear factor, this terror factor, “you must obey” aspect. What is the point of that? I’m at a loss to really come to grips with why that is the way it is.

[00:11:48] Correia: This question of obedience and compliance is at the heart of any discussion we ought to have about police. Because that’s the route to what cops call good order, which is the basic and broad mandate that police have and the discretion that they have in producing this outcome called Good Order. And your reaction to the Black Lives Matter activist grabbing the microphone is an example of what we call in the book seeing the world like police.

We’ve all got that cop in our head that wants us to see a world full of threats and emergencies. And in one way or another, everyone who is raised in this country, I’m gonna only really talk about the United States. That’s where I live, that’s where I was raised. I think it would be presumptuous to make claim what other countries, although there’s a lot of similarities, but it’s not an accident that polite and police share a particular root word.

Police once was understood much more broadly than it is now, and it was understood as this larger claim to order. And so it’s police don’t fight crime or enforce laws. They fabricate the order in which we find ourselves. And the idea that cops have discretion is not something they use to blunt the work they do, but rather is the way in which cops are able to have this sort of broad mandate applied however they would think.

And there are certain times when the blunt logic of that broad mandate is so outrageous that it becomes impossible to defend. And so your example of the child who has autism, who’s beaten, we could come up with the whole list of Tamir Rice murdered on a playground by a cop. Who’s playing with a little toy gun, like kids play with toy guns.

So how should we make sense of that? And one way to make sense of it is just to take cops seriously. When cops describe what it is they do and how they do it, we ought to take them seriously. I’m not an advocate of anyone going to coffee with a cop. Because those are just the sort of counterinsurgency community policing ploys that cops use to reinforce that cop in our head and get us to continue to see the world like cops do.

But they’ll talk about the thin blue line, and that is not a metaphor. Like cops really understand their role as the guarantor of civilization. There’s savagery, and then there’s civilization and cops stand between it and make civilization possible, and they do it through this everyday grinding, arrogant authority that I don’t have to explain to anybody who’s ever come in contact with a cop.

You’ve experienced that overbearing arrogance that cops bring to every situation, and it’s because their job is to produce good order, whatever that is, the cop thinks it is. And that requires really understanding the origins of cops and how they developed and in whose interests they serve. And in the case of a little kid with autism or someone who’s deaf and can’t respond to a command a cop makes, none of the discretion and mandate that cops have is possible without total obedience and compliance.

So you disobey a cop, and that is grounds for force. Cops have what they call the use of force continuum, which is just a sort of evolving subjective standard that the courts consider objective that allows them to defend whatever violence they use. So you refusing an order from a cop gives that cop the authority by law to use violence to bring you into compliance.

So there’s no reforming that out of police. It’s not police if that’s reformed out of police. That’s not a result of a bad apple cop. That’s not something that we can just train out of a cop. These are at the heart of all of the arguments and claims of abolitionists who are ignored, yet are the only empirical among us who point out: if you care about public safety then you ought to think about getting rid of cops and redeploying the resources we’ve given to cops elsewhere. So that we actually have a social safety net that protects people rather than this armed wing of the state imposing authority on them.

By the way, that thing, in 2014, 2015, all of the white conservative, libertarian, or even like mainstream Democrats who were involved in some of the anti-police violence organizing we were doing, they were obsessed with that idea. Oh, the child who was deaf, how do we protect them? They were fine with all the other violence that cops enact.

They just wanted to take the rough edge off police violence. How do we do that? And at the time, I was naive enough to think: I’ll just explain to ’em why you can’t. If you want police, you’re gonna have to accept that they’re gonna beat up some children with autism, they’re gonna kill Tamir Rices. They’re gonna do it regularly.

It’s gonna be a regular part of police practice. If you want police, there’s nothing you can do to change that in practice. You can pass policies and you can celebrate victories with new ordinances, and you could put cops and whole departments under consent decrees, and you can celebrate that victory. But in the end, and this is true of every case we’ve looked at, every reform process, the result is the same.

Grinding, humiliating, daily violence. If you want cops, you want that. There’s no separating those things. And people eventually get frustrated and they leave those meetings and there’s nothing you can do with people like that.

[00:17:49] Grumbine: To me, when you have a neoliberal order that prioritizes winners and losers, that ensures that winners stay winners and that the people at the bottom have to strive even harder. They use the threat of layoffs. They use drug testing to make sure that your employment is total precarity. You lose your job and you get excommunicated from the traditional economy and now you’ve got a black mark on your record and your ability to survive is compromised.

You are no longer a human being. You’re a felon or a former criminal with a record, or you are a poor person that doesn’t have a home. We’ve been working to keep people trapped for a very long time. And so I’ve spoken with people like Sandy Darity, who wrote the book From Here To Equality about reparations, and he painstakingly goes through step by step every time the US could have done the right thing by black and brown people.

[00:18:56] Correia: Yeah.

[00:18:57] Grumbine: This place has been based on property rights and property owners. So this is not just a issue of police. Police are the billy club of capitalism, but they’re not the primary. They’re the defender of the system. And my tagline on Twitter is austerity is murder. And austerity breeds the very conditions that create these quote unquote criminals who have to resort to life outside of the standard way that is acceptable by society.

And you’ve got people that are desperate, doing desperate things. And if you create criminals by creating austerity and you create a school to prison pipeline by making poverty illegal, basically, it’s very easy to see how you’ve got a natural built-in lower class that can never escape. And once they get in the system and they get a record, they’re no longer viable and there’s no path out of that. The system itself reinforces this, and then the police are there to make sure it stays intact. What do you see in terms of the way minorities and poor people in general are kept in this status where they ensure that they can’t really escape? Where do you see the relationship between austerity and policing?

[00:20:21] Correia: I would start by maybe slightly revising the macro story you just told, which I largely agree with, but I would say that you have to put police in a little earlier into that story.

[00:20:36] Grumbine: Sure.

[00:20:37] Correia: But it’s true. I agree with you that police exist to reinforce the conditions that guarantee this massive populations of laboring poor with very limited prospects who are therefore made available for the most difficult labor paid the least. I agree with you that cops exist to defend that system, but we’re talking about a system built on private interest and private property. There was no general consensus that we’re gonna organize ourselves this way and now we need police to reinforce it. Police exist prior to the establishment of a system built on the private ownership of the means of production.

Certainly, capitalism can’t exist very long without the cops we have, and the version we find ourselves living under was a police accomplishment. And Marx wrote about that in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. We could do this whole big macroeconomic world historical approach to trying to understand it, but the basic argument I’m suggesting we take seriously, few, I think on the left, do.

If you’re gonna talk about power, if you’re gonna talk about poverty, if you’re gonna talk about politics at all, you should center police in that conversation because without police, there is no system of private property. And so therefore, it might be useful to understand the role of police in establishing property relations and the conditions of production.

[00:22:15] Grumbine: Let’s do that. Would you mind taking us through that? That’s exactly what I’d like to hear about.

[00:22:21] Correia: I just finished a book with Haymarket, should probably be out beginning of next year. It’s a book about the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 in Eastern Pennsylvania, which seems like an obscure thing to consider. But Anthracite, if anyone’s ever doubted the idea of clean coal, you should watch Anthracite burn. It burns like natural gas.

It’s very little smoke or soot. It’s obviously a fossil fuel. I’m not defending the use of anthracite. Before oil and gas overtook coal as a primary fossil fuel, anthracite fueled every steam ship that crossed every ocean, ran every boiler and every iron factory. In every city, anthracite was the only coal that was allowed to be burned, it heated every hearth and home, up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States.

And it was only found in five counties in eastern Pennsylvania. All the other coal that was mined everywhere else at the time was bituminous or ignite or dirty, filthy. You wouldn’t wanna burn it in a city. So it was this very incredibly important resource. And when 147,000 anthracite coal miners walked out on strike in 1902, it shut down every industry on earth, or at least threatened to shut down every industry on earth, particularly because they were pretty militant miners and they would attack the replacement workers that all the coal mines tried to bring in to take their jobs.

And so the scabs were attacked and run off. And it’s a very dramatic story, but the story is really a story about the birth of police as we know it, because up until 1902, an industry this important, an industry that produced the fuel that fueled every other industry, had to be a stable industry. The production of anthracite had to be reliable. And the way that Pennsylvania accomplished that goal was by selling the police powers to the coal companies in the form of private police. And in Pennsylvania, they called them Coal and Iron Police or Railroad Police, but they were everywhere in the United States at the time. Before 1902,

most policing that happened in the United States was private. And even what looked like public or municipal policing was actually private cops that in whole or in part were paid with the fines of the people they arrested. And particularly immigrant populations were targeted by police because it was very easy to arrest them and get fines from them.

They couldn’t defend themselves, they didn’t speak the language. But most of it, every industry in every state had statutes on the book that provided steamboat police and coal and iron police and railroad police and merchant police. And you name the business or the industry, and there was a private policing entity or agency or statute that provided for it.

And this wasn’t security guards. They had all the authority and powers of any official state commission police because they held commissions and they were only raised in times of strikes. So there’d be a strike in Pennsylvania and suddenly there were 5,000 private cops roaming around just shooting striking minors with their Winchesters and beating them to death.

And there’s plenty of dramatic examples of that in a lot of great history books, and we could talk about those, but this system that always culminated with the militia coming into the coal fields and forcing the miners back to the mines. Eventually when the Coal and Iron Police couldn’t do, it fell apart in 1902, that system didn’t work anymore.

Public opinions swung to the miners because the shocking brutality of not just the Coal and Iron Police, but the militia just eroded the public support that the coal mine owners before that could rely on. And so there’s multiple stories there. One is what we think of the National Guard today emerged originally as these business private vigilante groups often called city guards or they had like a adjective of “the rifles”, the Swatara Rifles.

They were funded fully by and at least in Pennsylvania coalmine companies over time, particularly after the Civil War, they developed more formal relationships among the different groups. And, so what we think of as the National Guard originally was these private strike breaking groups that were relied on during large industrial work stoppages.

And so the 1902 strike, this is the birth of the United Mine Workers. They were very young union at the time. They overcame all this ethnic divide that made that workforce usually so compliant and easy for the mine owners to control. It’s a really remarkable story of that sudden solidarity of 147,000 miners who refused to go back to the mines who were beating up cops in big strike conflicts.

And so there had to be an alternative to the police they had at the time. They needed to build a kind of police that could replace the ones they had that could no longer produce the order that generated the stable industrial order. And they found their most effective allies among progressives in this early progressive era who were obsessed with industrial stability.

And all of the standard, progressive campaigns were all about the temperance and clean cities and sewer socialists are often called. But really they were about coming up with new ways that were more acceptable to enforce a particular kind of social order that could result in industrial stability.

Because from the railroad strikes of 1877 to the anthracite strike of 1902, it was just this unruly world of labor asserting itself, demanding higher wages, refusing to go back to work, and progressives were among the most effective political force in developing a new order. And that new order required a different cop.

And so those new cops, after the strike of 1902, Pennsylvania created the Pennsylvania State Police. The first department of state police was actually tested during the strike. The first SWAT unit in the United States was created by a consortium of coal mine operators in the Hazleton area of Pennsylvania in 1902. The first regional police agency in the United States was created by the same consortium of coal mine owners, the North Lehigh Coal and Iron Police Association. And after the strike, they used those models of new kinds of policing, quasi-public, private, to create the Pennsylvania State Police. They hired the captain of one of the militias that came into the coal fields during the strike to force the miners back to work.

He took the kind of policing that was going on during the strike as a model that he paired with the Royal Irish Constabulary, he went to Ireland. How did they maintain order? And he understood police as a colonial occupation. Police can’t be temporary. You can’t raise departments of police during times of chaos.

They have to be on duty at all times. Prior to 1902, it was very rare. Only the largest cities had staffed police departments 24 hours a day. They had to have a jurisdiction that was broader than just the county or a city. So they had to create statewide agencies. They had to be professional, which they understood at the time to be military.

This idea that police and military are not the same is not something you find at the origins of every police department in the US. At the time they understood the police, particularly the state police, as a military occupation. So where should you put a police station? Wherever there is an unruly laboring poor. What kind of posture should police adopt in those places?

A military posture. What is order? Whatever the police say it is. Who pays for police? The private sector provides much of the funding for police. That was true then. And it remains true in one way or another today. And so the outcome of this strike, we could talk about this in all kinds of ways. Capitalism is particularly brilliant at constantly resolving these internal contradictions that it produces.

And if you look at all of the examples of it, we could talk about the eighties industrial restructuring that produced what we think of as neoliberalism as a police action that required a wholesale transformation of the way policing happened, how it was deployed, where it was focused. The stories we tell about social and political and economic transformations begin as police stories, and that’s what Tyler and I were trying to do in Police: A Field Guide was just point out this fundamental nature of the police powers at the heart of liberal democracies.

These should be called security democracies, as we argue in the book, because the liberty that we’re promised is the difference between a liberal democracy like the US and some like North Korea. Doesn’t look so different when you recognize the broad mandate of the police powers and the deference law gives to the discretionary authority of the state to declare emergencies and suspend all liberties.

And so that’s not often how we talk about it. Police are often just a sideshow. We imagine there’s some order that somehow came out of nowhere, existed inherently or intrinsically somehow prior to the cops with guns who enforce it. And that’s the same kind of magical thinking that gives what we call copspeak so much of its power because the order we live in, we take it for granted. Well, this is the order we live in.

Like you should be polite. You shouldn’t take the microphone away from Bernie. Oh, you shouldn’t be so rude to that cop. And therefore you should pay it because you transgressed this boundary because you’re producing disorder. And what we are trying to do in the book is just point out, let’s just define what order and disorder is.

Because usually cops produce the disorder that they then resolve. Look at 2020 and all the uprisings, particularly in like Philadelphia. Are you from Philly, Steve, by the way?

[00:32:59] Grumbine: I’m from the state capital of Harrisburg.

[00:33:03] Correia: Okay. Recognize it in your accent. So you know, remember that 5,000 people that marched, I forgot the date, but then they got it all kettled up against the highway where the cops cordon them and increasingly squeezed and squeezed and squeezed people tighter and tighter and tighter. This is a police tactic we could also think of as a metaphor.

There’s nothing intrinsically vulnerable about any identity, whether it’s an individual identity or a group identity, those are produced, just like the chaos that happened during that police kettling of protestors. They gave them no outlet, and so all hell broke loose and the cops used the chaos that they produced to rationalize the violence that they then used against all of those folks, all the tear gas that they fired, all the truncheons hitting skulls that then they said later, well, we had to because it was chaos.

Well, police produced the chaos that they then pointed to as the rationale for the need for more police. But if you ask any Democrat, well, let’s not even talk about Republicans, right? Because right wingers just support police period. But if you’re gonna talk to Democrats, their support police is conditional, but it shares and subscribes to this police logic that you need police for order, and without police, there would be disorder. And it doesn’t matter how many examples we provide and how much evidence we offer to show that the disorder that we all agree exists is actually a result of policing. Doesn’t matter. That somehow disappears into the mist of police copspeak as we talk and we just hope for the best.

Cops are always great tomorrow. We might have shitty cops today, but boy, we’re gonna have great cops tomorrow. Or we might have shitty cops today, but we used to have great cops. The people that talk about that, that’s the right wing line. The police in the past were so much better. It was this more polite society.

[00:35:09] Grumbine: Make America great again.

[00:35:12] Correia: We don’t need to unpack that for your listeners. They understand clearly what’s going on there. That’s fascism.

[00:35:19] Grumbine: All the way.

[00:35:21] Correia: Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.

[00:35:24] Grumbine: I agree.

[00:35:25] Correia: And so both hinge on police, you can’t have any of this without police. This is why the abolition is so confusing to people because it really is not about police. We’re talking about more than police when we talk about police.

[00:35:42] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:35:54] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:36:45] Grumbine: The organization that I am the founder of is called Real Progressives, as you’re describing the progressive movement of the 1900s. I’m about an inch tall right now behind my microphone, which is significantly larger than me at the moment. And it’s tough when you have a title like that to change it.

But the reality is the term progressive has been, I don’t even know if you could call it co-opted. If you think about the history of it, it’s kind of settling back into where it belonged. I think a lot of us just assumed that the term progressive was akin to leftist because of Bernie Sanders, and so we adopted it because we bought the right wing talking points that Joe Biden’s a communist.

And so as you start peeling back the layers of that idiocy, you recognize that words matter, and it’s good to get their definitions and know their historical context. But I wanna say something that I think is really important that you brought up. When Trump was inaugurated, I was a part of a larger group.

A bunch of people that were involved in this thing called Occupy Inauguration, and there was a sister movement that was doing Disrupt J 20, and a lot of those individuals got arrested on the Disrupt J 20. I was on the Occupy inauguration side of that, but I was aware of the various people and we were downtown during the inauguration and we were protesting.

I remember I was at one of the squares in DC and Michael Moore was speaking and all of a sudden mayhem broke out and cops on horses riding through tear gas and these flashbang grenades that were popping off at people’s feet. And there was groups of people on one side of the street with rocks and bottles and bricks and masks.

And the other side was cops on giant steeds, basically pushing back with riot gear. And that was my first experience being in what felt like a war zone. I remember my heart was in my ears. I couldn’t breathe very well. People were crying. I couldn’t hear very well. My ears were echoing from all the pops and loud noises and people just trying to get away from them. And it was in that moment, that was the first time that I was ever genuinely afraid.

That moment struck me. I had never seen that. To me, at that point, something changed to me. I really still don’t fully know what it was, but I do know I wasn’t the same person after it. What would you say to the average activist right now who is recognizing that in order to make change, we might have to go outside of the electoral process and look at becoming less than governable?

We might have to do direct action. Your book basically is an activist field guide.

[00:39:38] Correia: Yeah,

[00:39:39] Grumbine: What would your advice be to activists that are looking to make change? What might you tell them?

[00:39:47] Correia: That’s a good question. The idea of a field guide is not a gimmick.

[00:39:51] Grumbine: Sure.

[00:39:51] Correia: Cops are not what they seem, and we need some help in understanding what it is we’re actually seeing. And so that’s the idea behind it. I think that example you gave about seeing the world differently after that moment in the street, I hear that a lot from people.

That’s a common story. Particularly a lot of young people after 2020 that I talked to, they were really not even necessarily radicalized, but just, wow, I didn’t know that this is how things work. If you’re black and working class, you don’t need any help understanding that particular relational violence to cops on the street. But for millions of people it took getting in the street.

I think this might be a bit of a stretch, but I’ve been thinking a lot about, well, you brought up neoliberalism. And I think one of the lasting legacies of the neoliberal transformation, if we’re thinking like seventies, early eighties, Reagan era, is this hollowing out of unions. I was a part of a group that formed a union among faculty at UNM.

I’ve been a member of unions everywhere. I’ve had the opportunity to do it and started them when I’ve been able to be a part of groups starting them. But also, I recognize this formist nature of a lot of mainstream unions, AFL-CIO unions. I’m not a fan of the kind of top down bureaucratic partnering with capital kind of thing.

Even in 1902, the United Mine Workers wanted to be just an adjunct to capital, and the miners were like, fuck no man. We wanna live dignified lives. We don’t wanna just help the capitalists to make more money. But the one thing that really is different today than in the sixties and seventies before austerity and neoliberalism is that because of the almost complete lack of unions in the private sector and the hollowing out of laws protecting the rights of unions and union members so that there’s very little you can do other than just negotiate a contract in a room with a bunch of lawyers. Union members are not in the street. Regular working people are not finding themselves around other regular working people in the same wage relation with the bosses.

And watch how the cops are enforcing the privileges and rights of the bosses, particularly when it comes to strikes. But not only strikes. And I’m not a conspiracy theorist, it’s not as though restructuring was all just a ploy to hollow out the unions, but it certainly was an effort to restructure the global economy so that capital could be more mobile.

And that meant, of course, freed from union contracts, obviously. And what does it mean to be free of union contracts? Well, it means that this working class isn’t a class. People who work for a wage aren’t surrounded by people who share these insecurities and precarities that they deal with on a daily basis.

And so then it becomes really difficult to build a particular kind of confrontational approach to something like the police who, even if you’re making a minimum wage, if you’re not a part of the union, you’re not in the street fighting for your and your coworkers rights and higher wages and seeing how cops are serving the interests of those with money and the bosses against you.

And it’s a hell of a lot easier to organize with particularly the white working class when they understand themselves as a class. And so in terms of like advice or activism, I’m writing a book about 1902 Pennsylvania, about coal miners. If we were to talk to all the coal miners today in Pennsylvania, I would say most of them voted for Trump.

[00:43:36] Grumbine: Yep.

[00:43:37] Correia: Rural white working class. These are not radical groups. These folks don’t see their interests aligned with Black Lives Matter activists from Philadelphia. That is a very difficult thing to bridge that divide that’s been partly produced through this austerity and restructuring that we would call neoliberalism.

And so we gotta rebuild those bridges. We have to do that. We have to rebuild those. And that starts with, first of all, just you’re gonna find yourself organizing with people who maybe hold political views or social views that you find abhorrent. But set that shit aside, man. I’m not suggesting, let’s go organize with a bunch of white supremacists, because that’s not who I’m talking about.

There’s always been, of course, reactionary elements in any social movement. Well, I’m not talking about that, but I’m saying there has to be some commitment to class-based organizing on the left that understands the importance of building power at the site of the workplace. The wage relation still matters, but it’s just been so atomized and we’re just all on our own just fucking gig working, trying to make a buck that it makes it really hard to see where our interests and solidarities overlap, and that’s the work that we need to do.

And there’s such amazing examples, particularly in the union movement, radical groups emerging out of an otherwise often pretty conservative union movement in the US in the late 20th century up until now. Pushing unions to be more democratic, to bridge the racial divides that capital relies on and that police force, and there just isn’t the infrastructure there once was to do that kind of work.

And so, we have a lot of work cut out for us is basically what I would say. And I really think it needs to start there. And it’s a hard thing to do. When we were organizing in 2014, we were organizing a big rally, and I was with a group of people that wanted to get this city counselor to speak at our rally, and he was a Democrat, but today he would be more thought of like a Democratic socialist

[00:45:51] Grumbine: Hmm.

[00:45:51] Correia: and he supported us. We gotta build support with people who don’t necessarily agree with everything we’re saying. And the way to do that is to take them seriously. Let’s not dismiss them. And but there was this other faction that was like, no, he gets to speak all the time. We want only certain kinds of people, people that are disenfranchised from the system, we want them to talk.

And they didn’t care what they had to say or what the content of their talk would be or what their political positions might be. It was just they held this identity that was opposed. They weren’t white, they weren’t male, they weren’t straight. And I’m like, well, let’s do that. Let’s have those people talk, but let’s also remember that we’ve got a lot of white working class, particularly in Albuquerque, like Hispanic working class people who see their interests slightly align differently. And don’t we wanna organize with them? We’re not gonna do anything unless this is a huge movement. If we abolish just police, we’re all in for trouble because then all those cops will just reform as private vigilante groups paid directly.

More directly, I should say, by business groups and wealthy neighborhoods. Obviously that already exists. I’m not pretending like that, but right. We need to build broad movement that shares certain values that have been completely hollowed out in the last 30 years, and unions are one of those. Unions were one of the ways that people came together and saw their interests represented collectively.

And also saw more often than most people do now, oh, cops are not actually on our side. When we call the cops, they’re often called against us. We don’t say that directly in the book, but I think it’s something if you get that cop outta your head, you can abolish the cop in your head first. And we got a shot at abolishing the cop on the street

[00:47:49] Grumbine: I told you I came from a far right wing background and moved very left over a long arc. Here I’m surrounded by family and friends who genuinely are afraid someone’s gonna break into the house. If cops aren’t there, then somebody’s gonna sneak up behind them at the ATM and hit ’em over the head. And I often look at the hatred for immigrants because the way they’ve got austerity baked into the system, it’s this artificial scarcity that they use that turns people against each other. So your point is well taken that you get rid of the cops, but you haven’t fixed the system. And now all hell’s gonna break loose as well.

[00:48:30] Correia: Right.

[00:48:31] Grumbine: There is that internal feeling of protection. I can understand it. There’s an element to that, that you don’t want to get hurt. And that on paper they say that the cops are there to protect and serve. How do we talk to normal people? That whole defund the police thing. You did great work in the book explaining. No, we really meant abolition. We meant that.

[00:48:57] Correia: Yeah.

[00:48:57] Grumbine: People backpedaled from it. There’s a lot of people in general who probably are sympathetic to a lot of things that we’re talking about, but just cannot envision life without police. How do you deal with that without alienating them further? They’re watching the five o’clock propaganda. How do you explain to them the nature of policing?

[00:49:21] Correia: Well first of all, it’s true the people are not making up these fears. They might be exaggerating them to some degree, particularly white people in wealthy communities who have nothing to worry about. But people have real fears and can point to real examples of times in their lives when they or their family members have been victims of interpersonal violence.

[00:49:45] Grumbine: Yes,

[00:49:46] Correia: And so to just dismiss those fears to do that, then we’re the elitist

[00:49:53] Grumbine: yes.

[00:49:53] Correia: that many would claim we aren’t if we were to do that. It’s absurd to tell somebody who objects to your argument on the grounds of their own personal safety, that they’re being ridiculous. Like I know what someone’s life is like and whose fears matter more than others.

That’s incredibly arrogant. And so we have to take it seriously and it’s when you take it seriously that you can have a real conversation about what might be the best way to deal with your fears. And I usually will ask somebody, well, have you ever called the police and have they resolved that situation. And usually it’s a story of, yeah, I called, but they didn’t show up or Yeah, I called and they didn’t do anything.

They told me to take out a restraining order and I did that and that person kept harassing me or stalking me. I’ve talked to people who’ve been stalked and they’re like, I would never abolish police. Well, what have the police done exactly that have made you feel safer? And I would say while there’s plenty of people who can point to times when police have actually maybe helped them, it’s rare.

Those are the aberrations when a cop actually goes out of their way to help a person, those are the aberrations, not the violence. Because usually the story that people tell me when I say something like, well, tell me the story about the time you called the police. It’s not a story of I had a problem and now it’s resolved and I’m happy.

The fact of their fear, despite living in a world awash in cops, ought to suggest to us, that more cops might not help if we already have all the cops we could possibly want. They can’t even hire cops now, most places. And it’s not because people are fearful to become cops, it’s because we have so many fucking cops that you’re gonna have to take people away from other sectors of the economy.

Just in Albuquerque alone, the city of 400,000 spends hundreds of millions of dollars on police and has thousands of cops. The municipal police department is not even half of the total number of cops patrolling the city of Albuquerque. So what have all these cops done for us other than produce this unresolved insecurity we point to as the reason for having cops?

That’s part of the way I do it. When I’m invited, I mean, I’m not gonna impose myself on anyone and demand they talk to me about cops. But when I have those conversations, that’s what I try to do is just say, tell me about how you use the police department to help you resolve your fears or insecurity.

And those usually lead to a conversation about what else would we do? And often this, what else we would do shifts the conversation from this interpersonal thing about you and your own fears and security to this larger structural conversation about there is no alternative because it’s been created that way.

We’ve thrown all of our resources into policing to create and sustain an order that requires incredible insecurity to function. And it’s a huge conversation to have at this point. And so I wouldn’t suggest just launching into that because it’s difficult to do. But let’s talk about modern monetary theory for a second.

Since this is what you’re interested in and this is what the podcast is organized around. Think of what a world without economic security would look like. It could not be one that organizes the way we’ve organized it because monetary policy requires a laboring poor

[00:53:35] Grumbine: Yep.

[00:53:36] Correia: in order so that wage demands can be depressed.If there are no additional workers left to hire, then the workers who have jobs have an enormous amount of authority. At least this is the liberal macroeconomic theory. It’s the idea that manipulating interest rates by the Fed either increases or decreases the circulation of money in the economy. And what the Fed does in terms of where that interest rate goes up or down, is partly calibrated on wage demands of workers.

If wage demands of workers are going up, then that’s gonna create an inflationary pressure. We’ve gotta tamp that down, and the way to tamp that down is to raise interest rates, so less economic activity happens, and the result of that at fewer jobs available.

[00:54:23] Grumbine: Layoffs. Yes. There’s a three-pronged austerity angle. There’s monetary austerity, there is fiscal austerity, and then there is the sack, which you’re describing right now.

[00:54:35] Correia: Right, right, right.

[00:54:37] Grumbine: Yep.

[00:54:37] Correia: I was talking to my sister-in-law’s dad, and he was an electrician, and he worked at John Deere, and he was among the layoffs, I think it was 80 or 81. He was telling me this story. This was when the air traffic controllers were all laid off. This is ground zero when we think about the Reagan revolution, the beginning of the hollowing out of unions. I don’t know what the number is, but John Deere in Waterloo, Iowa, went from 15,000 or 12,000 employees down to 6,000 in one round of layoffs.

So suddenly thousands of people in this town of 40,000 were thrown out of work. And not to get into the weeds about it, but one of the results was 30 electricians were suddenly laid off. What are 30 electricians, unemployed electricians gonna find for work, and what kind of power are the electricians employed at John Deere gonna have when there’s 30 electricians waiting to take their jobs? So that economic insecurity and this precarious nature of waged work in this country that’s manipulated through things like property ownership and interest rates, requires police.

[00:55:46] Grumbine: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:46] Correia: This is because of the disorder. You want cops in Waterloo after those 30 electricians get laid off because of all the chaos as a result. That’s what police do, but that’s the purpose they serve; to tamp down on the chaos that capitalist economy requires in any scenario. We could even talk before neoliberalism, but that’s the role of cops. And theoretically, we’ll just accept it because there’s no alternative. That’s the argument.

So if we’re gonna have a conversation about abolition, abolishing cops, then what we need is a conversation about transforming. Not just getting rid of brick and mortar police departments and uniformed police officers, but how are we going to resolve the chaos and disorder of a system built by and defended by cops?

We can’t have a fed manipulating rates so that there is this laboring poor, endlessly available for capital. We have to rethink questions like property. These are not things that I can just on a podcast, explain how it’s gonna play out. What we’re gonna do. Cause that’s the world we live in now. I know what I want, but that’s me, and I’m not living in a world of mes thankfully.

So there are difficult conversations to have then about these structural conditions that produce the need for cops. And so if we’re having a conversation with someone about what’s the alternative to police, there’s the interpersonal cops are not helping you, so we need something else. And that conversation, if it’s a serious and honest conversation, will broaden into how are we gonna deal with this problem?

And every problem then really is a police problem. Ultimately, when we really think about making a world just for everyone, how would we do that? Well, the world we have is held together because it’s not just for everyone and cops make it possible for that to continue and resolve all those contradictions.

How are we gonna live in a world beyond police? That’s a difficult conversation to have because there’s nothing so easily to hang your hat on there. Will there be banks? Will there be grocery stores?

[00:58:05] Grumbine: Right.

[00:58:06] Correia: It gets too theoretical and it’s very difficult to do that. So it requires a transformation that has to begin with a commitment.How about we just say we wanna abolish coercive institutions? What would a world look like with no coercive institutions? That’s gonna prompt and provoke a discussion about what constitutes coercion and how do we adjudicate disputes in a world without police? What would that look like? How do we decide that?

And I would love to have those conversations, but we cannot have those conversations in the world we live in right now, when people are scared to walk outta their house at night.

[00:58:40] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:58:41] Correia: You gotta get past that before you get to those more structural problems. And cops are really good and cop supporters are really good at hammering that home so much that we can never get past that.

[00:58:56] Grumbine: That’s a powerful point to make. I’ve got so much more I wanna ask you. I hope I can have you back on sooner than later because I have so much more I wanna talk about to cap this one off cuz we didn’t hit a lot of things that I would like to talk about. Is there anything specific that, if anybody took one thing away, what is the most important thing they can take away?

[00:59:20] Correia: In terms of the book, I hope that people would take the central idea of copspeak seriously. In other words, the way you think about the world. The way we understand the world often comes to us from police. This idea of threats and emergencies and the need for security and the fear of others. That’s a cop way of seeing the world, and so I hope people would really try to think about how do I not see the world like a cop?

That’s kind of a transformative way to move through the world. It’s really easy to move through the world fearing others. This is one that asks you to look with empathy on everybody, that’s what I would say. And this conversation, I hope they would take away from that maybe they should still read the book even if they don’t like what I’ve said. Because it wasn’t just me, Tyler Wall and I wrote it so it didn’t just spring from my own crazy mind.

It has been a very collaborative effort. We consider ourselves part of a community of people who write about and think about this. So this book is a product of all of those many conversations and relationships and a builds on the work of a lot of really amazing scholars like [Ruth] Wilson Gilmore, Mark Neocleous, and Miriam Kaba, and folks like that.

And so I hope it represents the best of that work, which is really grounded in care. I don’t have an axe to grind, like an intellectual or scholarly axe to grind. We don’t want the last word, and we’re not the smartest people in the room. We’re just committed to trying as hard as we can to be a part of a movement to change this world for the better.

That’s what the book tries to do, and I hope that comes through and it’s an honest book because of it. I think we ought to take class a lot more seriously on the left. I hope that the book contributes to this. Cops kill a lot of white people, and it’s not to say that that’s more important. Let’s just remember that policing is a class project.

When we talk about something called like racial capitalism, we live in a world built on the stolen land of native people and the stolen labor of enslaved black folks, and then fueled by the wages of an army of poor white people. And those are solidarities that are hollowed out. Have been hollowed out and are aggressively policed. God forbid, capitalism, if we all realized the power that the working class have in this country.

And that comes through in the book I think for sure.

[01:02:04] Grumbine: It definitely does. David, thank you so much for your time and I would hope that I could have you both on sometime in the future. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this. You are my first trip down police lane as far as the podcasting world goes. I’ve thought about it, I’ve talked about it, but I’ve never come out and done a show like this cuz this is stuff that just isn’t gonna go away. And

[01:02:28] Correia: It won’t

[01:02:29] Grumbine: I don’t want it to be hyperbolic either. I want it to be thoughtful. And you’ve been the most excellent guest. I really appreciate how down to earth you are. And your book is amazing. It really is. So

[01:02:40] Correia: Thank you.

[01:02:41] Grumbine: thank you so much for joining me today, sir.

[01:02:44] Correia: Yeah, you’re welcome. It, it was great to talk.

[01:02:46] Grumbine: Absolutely. All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese, my guest David Correia we are outta here.

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