The Spectacular Hunt:

Police Roundup Powers and Capitalist Spectacle

Final Report for School of Justice Studies 2014-15 Research Grant

Prepared by Tyler Wall, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Justice Studies.

In Manhunts: A Philosophical History (2012), Grégoire Chamayou insightfully demonstrates the politico-historical importance of the manhunt, arguing how the hunt for humans by humans has long been a central means of enforcing relations of domination. Most interesting for my purposes here is Chamayou’s provocative argument that the modern police department is first and foremost a “hunting institution”, coming into existence largely by the state appropriating the legitimate means of pursuit and capture. The manhunt predates the modern police department as attested to by the biblical figure of Nimrod, described as a “Great hunter” of men, the slave hunts of antiquity (Greek and Roman, for example), and the colonial, capitalist hunts for the indigenous and chattel slaves in the American South. Emerging out of and alongside this history though is what Chamayou calls the “founding act” of police power – specifically referencing the massive “rounding up” of the poor, beggars, and vagrants in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries (Chamayou 2012), a power that later became central to the Nazi round ups of Jews and Gypsies. Important here is the older notion of police that understood police as broad social policy (Foucault, 2007; Neocleous, 2000) – state power itself understood as a broad police power. Hence the founding act of hunting surplus subjects predated what is commonly known as the police. But the prerogatives of pursuing, tracking, and capturing eventually came to be monopolized by the administrative, “professional” police force. The modern police department, then, is the “state’s arm of pursuit” and thereby codifying and institutionalizing the state’s monopoly on the hunt. Chamayou’s analysis is helpful in a variety of ways, one of which is it placing the practice of predation at the heart of capitalist order and one of its main sovereign arteries, the police power.

With these issues in mind, this SJRP project has set out to explore the “manhunt” as a central technology of police power and capitalist spectacle. I have tried to do this by engaging a specific genus of the police hunt: the roundup. My focus, then, is not the apparent isolated hunts for specific individual suspects, fugitives, or “persons of interest.” Rather, my focus is the political animus of mass capture/arrest as the police hunt becomes directed at social groups and political categories within the larger population. Although the roundup is a common trope to describe projects of mass arrest, it is also often referred as a “sweep”, “dragnet”, and/or “mass raid,” and often associated with a “crackdown” on a particular activity or population. My goal is to tease out some of the animating logics of the roundup power while also demonstrating the prominence, utility, and normalization of mass capture in the fabrication of capitalist order, with the political history of the United States as my primary guide. I have been asking a variety of broad, intertwined research questions:

  • What are some of the important histories of the police hunt/roundup and how do these histories structure the contemporary police hunt/roundup?
  • In what ways are manhunts and round ups justified – that is, what discourses and ideologies help legitimate this technology of state power? What populations are actually rounded up on a routine basis?
  • What might the police round up power tell us about the animus of police power specifically and state power more generally? Put another way: What does the police hunt tell us about the police institution and its governing mandates and logics?
  • What are the guiding relations between law and the round up power of police? That is, how does law speak about the police hunting power? In what ways does law restrain or license the police round up power? What might the round up power tell us about the animus of law?
  • What might the police round up power teach us about the larger social and political order? What sorts of material interests are behind the police manhunt? Who benefits? Who is served? What are some of the effects on subject populations?

Preliminary Notes on the Roundup

Although at the time of this writing, the research, writing, and thinking on the roundup is ongoing and in no way complete. I am currently in the process of trying to complete an article, and I also know that this roundup research will influence research and writing projects I already have planned for the future. In many ways this project is an extension of some of my earlier work, including research funded by past SJRP grants (Wall 2013; Wall 2014), and so this particular grant on police roundups should be understood as growing out of this earlier work. With this in mind, below I offer a basic outline on some of my “findings” and current thinking on the political animus of the police roundup:

1)History.As I have already noted in the introduction, the history of police is the history of the roundup, and technically speaking the roundup – understood as the capturing of a multitude – predates “the police.” This is to say that the logic of the roundup informed the history of the police. Here we can think of the long history of rounding up indigenous populations and slaves and vagrants from 16th-19th centuries. For instance, although slave patrols, and early night watchmen police, hunted individual fugitive slaves, they also engaged in what more closely resembles mass capture, such as in Lexington, Kentucky when an ordinance was passed in 1832 that required the “Night Watchmen of the city” “to arrest each and every slave found on the street after dark and before 9 o’clock,” unless they had a slave pass. The patroller would take the slave to the local jail to await the arrival of the “master”, who had to pay 50 cents to have his slave released. If the master failed to pick up his slave, “ten lashes” would be delivered upon the slave’s flesh. But there are also more recent histories, such as the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 that targeted communists, anarchists, trade unionists, and immigrants (it is striking how easily these mass roundups are forgotten and little discussed today). Or efforts associated with the “Black Codes” and Jim Crow policing, or “Operation Wetback”, a federal program of rounding up immigrant workers in the 1950s and 1960s. There are others, of course. The point of the history focus is to make an argument that liberal democracies, such as the United States, have long turned to the roundup as a potent instrument for securing the insecurities of white bourgeois order and “the color line”, and that these histories should inform our current understandings of police power. Therefore, I am trying to think through the ways that this history structures the contemporary present of police power. Yet on top of this concern with historical continuity is an equal concern with new developments, or new uses of the roundup, or new justifying discourses.

2)Ubiquitous and Normalized. But the project is not only or even primarily concerned with history, as it is more so focused on the “neoliberal” moment, from local campaigns of rounding up the homeless, prostitutes, “dead beat parents”, speeders, and gang members, to the US Marshall’s massive yet rarely discussed Operation Falcon. Indeed, the police roundup is a normalized yet spectacular feature of contemporary “law and order” politics. A quick internet search reveals how pervasive the roundup, as both trope and practice, actually is. For instance, a recent headline from Indiana reads “Police arrest 38 in Floyd County drug roundup”, with the police chief declaring that “(This is) the largest local drug roundup in New Albany's history.” In Baton Rouge a headline reads, “Police: Truancy roundup results in 99 arrests so far”, an example of police arresting parents due to their children’s lack of school attendance. Similarly, in Bergen, New Jersey there is an annual holiday “Deadbeat Parent roundup.” In West Virginia and Florida respective headlines read, “10 arrested in police prostitution roundup” and “Bradenton prostitution roundup nets 22 arrests.” Operation Grinch Stopper, described by media as an “Arizona-wide roundup”, focuses primarily on property crimes around the holiday season, arresting more than 130 people each holiday season during its first three years. In Texas there is the “Annual Great Texas Warrant Round-Up”, an official joint-agency project targeting anyone with a warrant, from unpaid traffic and parking tickets to drug offenses to violent crime. In 2013 the Kentucky State Police arrested over 500 drug suspects in Operation Black Friday, dubbed “the agency’s largest ever round-up of drug suspects.” There is also the massive roundup, although little discussed, called Operation Falcon, that is directed by the US Marshals but carried out across the United States with local police agencies. There have been over 90,000 fugitives captured since its beginning in 2005. There is much to be said about this ubiquity and normalization of the police roundup, and I am currently thinking through this specific issue. Clearly, the roundup is an instrument of state power that targets predominately the poor and other marginalized populations, and groups deemed “undesirable” or “disobedient.” We all might have fears of being “rounded up”, but in reality some populations have long been deemed more suitable prey than others populations. If “rounding up the usual suspects” has become little more than a well-worn cliché, the argument being developed insists that this “public secret” be recognized as exposing a certain truth about the predatory power of police in liberal democracy.

3)Theatrics: When examining the ubiquity and normalization of the police roundup in the contemporary United States it becomes clear that the roundup is highly theatrical. That is, the political utility of the roundup is the ways it “performs” or “stages” a certain politics of state power and social order. From the police perspective, the roundup is often the “solution” to a perceived breakdown in the legal or moral order: a group or populations is deemed a threat, and a threat that is “taking over the streets” and “transgressing the law” or “causing harm” to more “law-abiding, moral” groups and populations. This is what I am referring to, drawing from others, as the theatrical powers of the police roundup. For police to mobilize the roundup power is at once to engage in political theatre – statecraft as stagecraft. To speak of this theatrical power of police is not merely to speak of the power of representation or subjectivity or “mass media” – it is to insist on the dramaturgical as part and parcel of the material foundations of state power. As Poulantzas rightly argued, the legal terror of the “truly Kafkaesque castle of the modern state” is always a theatrical terror, referring to “the mechanisms of fear” that “are inscribed in the labyrinths where modern law becomes a practical reality.” Jean and John Comarroff (2004) suggest that police theatrics circulate as melodrama between “conflicting forces” of order and disorder, civilization and savagery, “the staging of which strives to make actual, both to its subjects and to itself, the authorized face, and force, of the state – of a state, that is, whose legitimacy is far from unequivocal.” Here cultural fantasies, symbolic displays, and a politics of storytelling are rooted in the police project as the poor, criminals, druggies, vagrants, gangs, pedophiles, terrorists, activists, protesters, dead beat parents, and prostitutes personify wickedness, immorality, and lawlessness, and hence need “rounding up” or “swept off the streets.” “On this desperate image of evil”, writes Michael Taussig (2004), “the castle sustains itself” and it is this “negative sacred” of evil and disorder “that provides the most compelling scenario and performative power for the mystical foundations of authority.” The police roundup, I think, animates, and is animated by, this theatrics of the “negative sacred.”

4)Revanchist Roundups: But sort of theatrics is the contemporary roundup mobilizing or performing? It seems to me that the police roundup illuminates the revanchist animus of police power. That is, the roundup is a mobilization of political revenge, or a “taking back the streets” from those deemed “undesirable” or “in the way” of the “progress” of bourgeois order. Here I am drawing from the work of the late geographer Neil Smith, who discussed revanchism as the exacting of revenge against urban “undesirables” who threaten bourgeois social relations, such as the homeless, petty criminals, prostitutes, drug users, and street youth. As a “taking back” of lost territory revanchism activates, and is activated by, classed and racialized scripts of degeneracy in the service of “gentrification”, which “portends a class conquest of the city” in the name of “urban re-development” or “re-investment.” The roundup, I am wanting to argue, is one of the primary sites to locate the links between police power and the “revanchist city.” To roundup, then, is not simply a mode of repression, but a means of fabricating order. The revanchist roundup, in this analysis, becomes a means of building order through the mass capture of “undesirables.” It should go without saying that the police roundup has been a central means of “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” policing, and these in turn, as Smith shows, were central to the politics of gentrification.

5)Roundup Nation? Or From the Hunt to the Cage: Finally, I have come to think the police roundup might tell us something about the politics of mass incarceration. That is, I am wanting to draw some parallels between the roundup and confinement, prison or jail, and thereby demonstrating the importance of thinking of the prison state as a product of police power. In my research to this point, this is starkly observed in one example: Following the murder of 15-year old Hadiya Pendleton in Chicago, Illinois Senator Mark Kirk suggested he was working on a plan for “rounding up” all of the 18,000 members of the Gangster Disciples, the gang thought to be responsible for the murder: "My top priority is to arrest the Gangster Disciple gang, which is 18,000 people. I would like to a mass pickup of them and put them all in the Thomson Correctional Facility…I will be proposing this to the assembled federal law enforcement: ATF, DEA and FBI.” He went on to suggest that he had already talked to federal prosecutors and the FBI on his plan: "They usually say, when you talk about 18,000 arrests, ‘Oh! That's a lot!’”

This example, I think, draws out the ways that mass incarceration is dependent on practices of mass arrest. Today, the United States incarcerates over 2.3 million people in human cages, not to mention those in jails or some other form of “community control.” But what the roundup helps to crystalize is the ways this project of mass caging is at once a project of mass capture – this is to say that to be “caged” one usually has to be hunted and then captured, and this is the task of police. This also then allows me to insist that resistance to mass incarceration has to at once challenge the roundup power of police. I am not suggesting that the millions in prisons and jails have been “caught” in some form of technical “roundup” like Operation Falcon mentioned above. What I am saying, based on my above comments, is that ultimately there has to be a focus on the general powers of arrest, or what I think of as capture, granted to police. In the United States, anywhere from 10-14 million people are arrested each year. This, then, is to pose a question: might the United States be usefully thought of as “roundup nation”? Or: might we think of mass incarceration as at once the product of the largest roundup in history?

Writing and Dissemination

At the time of this writing I am currently still researching, writing, and thinking through the above issues. In March of 2015, I presented a preliminary paper at the Southern Sociological Society in New Orleans. The paper was titled “Cynegetic Theatrics: Police Roundups as Capitalist Spectacle”, and was very well received by the audience and other panelists. As of now, my goal is to finish a single-authored article on this by the end of January 2016 and then submit it for peer-review. In addition, much of my research on roundups will inform some of the content in a collaborative monograph project with Mark Neocleous in the Department of Politics and History at Brunel Univerisity in London. This project, at this point in the preliminary writing stage, is a co-authored book on the politics of manhunting and its role in the fabrication of capitalist order.

References

Chamayou, Grégoire. 2012. Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Princeton and Oxford:

Princeton University Press.

Jean and John Comaroff. 2004. Criminal Obsessions, After Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder. Critical Inquiry, 30(4): 800-824

Foucault, Michel (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 977-1978. New York: Picador.

Neocleous, Mark. 2000. The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press.

Poulantzas, Nicos. 1980. State, Power, Socialism. London and New York: Verso.

Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge.

Taussig, Michael. 2010.Walter Benjamin's grave. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Wall, Tyler. 2013. Unmanning the Police Manhunt: Vertical Security as Pacification.

Socialist Studies / Études socialistes. 9 (2): 32-56.

Wall, Tyler. 2014. Legal Terror and the Police Dog. Radical Philosophy. 188: pps 2-7.