Today’s show features an interview with the Portland-based author and activist, Kristian Williams. Williams speaks on his first book, Our Enemies in Blue: A History of Policing in America), on recent articles about community policing and the counterinsurgency training shared between the U.S. military and domestic law enforcement agencies and the growing movement calling for the abolition of police in the United States, and the Pacific Northwest in particular). The show will air at 1pm EST at www.ashevillefm.org and be archived for a week at www.ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw .
Check out www.kristianwilliams.com for more information on the interviewee
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Transcription:
TFSR: Thanks so much for being on the air Kristian.
Kristian Williams: Well, thanks for asking me.
TFSR: I would love to have the opportunity to talk for hours on your first book Our Enemies in Blue, but this show is sadly only an hour long. Your book covers the history of policing in the United States with a starting point marked as developing out of slave patrols, rather than the more service-oriented model of the London Watch. Can you elaborate on what this says about the nature of policing and how it’s developed in the United States in terms of class and race?
Kristian Williams: Sure. I should note at the beginning that the history that I put forward is sort of a heretical account. If you go to the community college where you live and take a criminal justice course, on the first day of the criminal justice course they’re probably going to say something about where the police come from. It is not going to be that story. They’re going to tell you the story about the Night Watch, which we inherited from England, which took hold in Boston, and in response to a crime wave, became the modern police. I go into this in much more detail in the book but I find a more credible and more systematized account is running. Attached to slavery there was this militia organization called the slave patrols, in response to periodic crises, fears of slave revolts. Over time the slave patrol went from being an unprofessional, sporadic (I don’t want to say volunteer, because it was more likely you got drafted into it, not for pay, not regular shifts, not that kind of organization) and became a professionalized, regular, broader law enforcement organization. That happened in stages over the course of one hundred or so years, resulting in the first thing I’ve seen that’s identifiable as looking like our modern police force arising in Charleston, South Carolina, right at the end of the 18th century, right at the beginning of the 19th century.
What this says about the police is that from their very inception they were there to control, on the one hand the Black population and on the other hand the labor force. It happened in South Carolina, it was with the same bunch of people. It developed with, specifically, that race and class character in mind. That wasn’t incidental to how we got this modern institution, it was the point. I argue in the book that if you look at how the institutions developed since then, if you look at how the police use their discretion on the street, or even at the level of policy, that really the race and class stratification of the community are still the main driving factors in determining what the police do. That’s in some ways, pretty remarkable. On the other hand, it makes what they do intelligible in a way. If you think about what they do as having something to do with fighting crime or punishing bad guys or something like that, a lot of what they do just makes no sense at all. But if we look at it through these two lenses of race and class, their priorities, their activity, their the decisions they make, suddenly come into focus. That said, I don’t know how different it would have been if they had developed out of the English model and out of the Night Watch. I think we would probably have an institution that looks very different, but given the history of colonialism and given the stratification of our society, and also the society that they were borrowing from, I’m not sure how different it would have been. The fact there are half a dozen cities in England on fire right now because of the police killing people maybe points to some of the similarities.
TFSR: London, Birmingham, Liverpool, and other major cities around England, like you said, are in their fourth day rioting in response to the murder of a Black man, Mark Duggan, by Metro Police. Darcus Howe, a journalist and commentator from Brixton has called the unrest an “insurrection of the masses”. January of 2009 saw nights of burning and looting around San Francisco Bay Area in response to the videotaped police murder of Oscar Grant. For almost a month prior to that, parts of Athens and other cities in Greece and Europe burned in response to police killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos. The banlieues of Paris revolted in 2005, after a young black kid was killed while evading the police. And there’s of course,the videotape beating of Rodney King with the City of Los Angeles rising in rebellion following the verdict, or lack of verdict, against the police. There are tons more incidents that are like those. Individuals maimed or killed by law enforcement in popular rage, rising into a riot or rebellion.
Do you see these responses, like we’re seeing in England and like we’ve seen other parts of the world, as a heightening awareness of the role of police in society by the most downtrodden and affected? Or has this just always been there, and technology is just allowing word to travel faster?
Kristian Williams: I think there have been riots in response to policing for as long as there has been policing. In the generation before the wave of riots you just mentioned (and I’ll mostly just talk about the US here, because that’s what I know about) there were riots in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, in the East Bay. This goes back before the period that we tend to think of as the militant ‘60s. The Detroit riot was I think, in 1963. Before that, there was one in Newark, which I think was in ‘60 or ‘61. All those were set off by some sort of police action. Usually it was killing somebody. Look back at the ‘30s. In 1934 there was an earlier Detroit riot, also set off by police action, and similar things in the teens, going really all the way back to the early 19th century. Rioting has been the tactic of last resort for the lowest stratum of the population. That’s been true since before there were cops. It just happened that the police have an interestingly prominent role in the cycle of unrest. For one thing, they’re the first body that’s responsible for responding to it and putting it down. Often their action in response to it, whatever the initial cause, becomes the target of the rioting. So the things that the cops do, often make the rioting more intense, rather than actually quelling it. The cops themselves become targets as kind of the embodiment of the coercive power of the State. Then it’s also that the police represent the power of the States as they walk around and do their business. That business involving harassing, bullying, brutalizing, sometimes killing people. It’s not surprising that they become the trigger that sets off this whole configuration.
Coming out of the period of the period of writing in the ‘60s, there were several government commissions set up to study them and basically figure out what to do differently to stop that from happening again. The most famous of these was the Kerner Commission. They described the initial incident that sets it off as being typically something that the cops do, but that the context in which it occurs, makes that incident seem representative of the entire system of inequality. What’s important is that the police have acted in some way that seems to perfectly capture the power dynamics of the society. That that then ignites what the Commission referred to as “the reservoir of grievance of the Black community.” So the cops have a very visible role in the unrest cycle, but it ties into concerns about housing, education, concerns about employment, poverty, and the general humiliation of racism. I think that’s been obviously true in the English example, where people are really worried about unemployment and also the imposition of austerity. One place where I think the technology may play a role is that, it used to be that the incident would happen and somebody would see it, and then they would tell somebody else. The word about it spread literally by word of mouth. Now it may be on video, and the symbolism of, for example, the police killing Oscar Grant, or the cops beating Rodney King, can be visually communicated and is more compelling than it may have been previously. Therefore it can also spread faster. So there’s more of a chance for what may have previously been just another incident of the cops killing somebody, to become the trigger for that kind of unrest. The unrest itself is really nothing new.
TFSR: In in your article, “The Other Side of The COIN”, you present your research into discussion and sharing of training and information between law enforcement and military occupational forces of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can talk about that? Why did you call it the other side of the COIN?
Kristian Williams: This is an article that I wrote for the journal Interface, which is available online. If you go to my website, which is kristianwilliams.com and you look at the tag that says “Articles online”, you will be able to find it there. I called it the other side of the coin and to some degree I’m being punny because “COIN” is military jargon for counterinsurgency. There are really at least three reasons that I called it that. One being that we tend to think about counterinsurgency being something that happens overseas, that it’s done at the frontiers of the empire. I’m suggesting that the other side of that, is that it infects the interior of the Empire as well. Secondly, we tend to think of counterinsurgency as being typified by the hard tactics: the drone attacks, the death squads, the concentration camps, that sort of business. One of the things that I argue (I hope, forcefully) in the essay, is it’s also the legitimacy building sort of nonprofit NGO work and the cooptation and the public relations aspect, and, in terms of policing, the community policing project that is also part of the counterinsurgency dynamic. The third reason is because wars have two sides. It’s pretty clear domestically, that the one side is the police, and they’re pretty clear on who the other side is. The problem is that opposition movements in the US mostly don’t think of themselves as being involved with war against the State. We need to catch up or the State is going to just keep winning.
TFSR: Kristian, can you talk a little bit about community policing? What the term means, and it’s applications? It’s referenced a number of times in “The Other Side of the COIN” that Interface article that you wrote, it’s referenced by the RAND Corporation, it’s referenced, to a degree I believe, by the field manuals that you quote in it. How did that develop and what are the implications of community policing?
Kristian Williams: I’d be glad to talk about that. There is a lot of confusion about community policing in the liberal left. To some degree that’s because the State has done its job well. A lot of well meaning, but in my view naive people, think that community policing is really the thing that we want to be going for and that it means that the police will be part of the community, that they’ll understand our norms and our culture. They will not be this alienating, alienated, occupying force, but will be there to genuinely respond to problems that people in neighborhoods have and that sort of thing. That is definitely the image that the cops want to develop. As it happens, that is not the real agenda. In Our Enemies in Blue, I make this argument that there are two main developments in policing, since the crisis of the ‘60s. Those being community policing and militarization and are actually two halves of a single development, which is the reinvention of the police on a counterinsurgency model.
Some of the reason I said that is, if you look back at the police literature from the period where these changes were taking place- from the 1970’s and the early ‘80s- what you very quickly see is that both of these were driven by the police concern over the unrest of the ‘60s and trying to find ways to head off similar unrest in the years to come. One of the things that they learned about that was that the ‘60s left them suffering a loss of legitimacy. The cops had really been discredited. They had very low social esteem, not a lot of community trust. One of the things that they had learned, was that they needed the cooperation of the public if they were going to do their jobs. Community policing was born out of that insight as a way to gain the cooperation of the public so that they could control social unrest. As it happened, there also community policing and militarization, they didn’t just arise at the same time, in response to the same social situations but they also tended to arise in the same places. The places that were experimenting with the neighborhood watch, the DARE program, community meetings and all that sort of thing- with the same police forces that were introducing SWAT teams, getting helicopters and reorganizing their command structure to be more military-like. The evidence pushed me in that direction.
I was previously familiar with some of the counterinsurgency literature, and I understood that counterinsurgency relied both on having access to overwhelming force and also doing things to build legitimacy for the counterinsurgency force. Meaning, gain popular support, learn to interact with the population in the occupied country and that sort of thing. The parallel to me seemed very stark. That’s the way the evidence led me, that’s what I argued in Our Enemies in Blue. I was really unsure about it at the time. I kind of thought that I may just be a crackpot. Well, it turns out you fast forward a few years, the US invades and then occupies Iraq, General Petraeus, who had written the new US Army field manual on counterinsurgency, gets put in charge of the occupation force. Suddenly, there’s this huge explosion of literature on counterinsurgencies, much of it directed toward giving professional advice to the US Army in Iraq. It turns out that a lot of that literature points to the domestic police in the United States and their community policing programs, as an example of counterinsurgency and how it should be done. On the one hand, I really don’t relish being proved right about this, but on the other hand I’m very relieved in terms of what it says about my analytic skills.
TFSR: Seen not as being a crackpot.
Kristian Williams: It turns out I’m not a crackpot, or at least I’m right, going on a crackpot. The point of community policing is to insinuate the police into the community, for the sake of increasing their power over the community. Specifically for the sake of of neutralizing any possible opposition that may come out of that community.
TFSR: In a way that can be seen in the governmental takeover and presentation of services that came after, the Panther Party, for instance, developed the breakfast programs and the medical clinics where that was lacking. The government’s able to insinuate itself in there and then slowly, after they’ve taken over the program, sort of defund it and take away any teeth.
Kristian Williams: The government taking it over in some ways depoliticizes it. That means that they’ve they take away the thing that the Left had to offer. It also means that they control it, they can put in their agenda. It means that once the threat has abated- the threat in that case being organized Black people with guns- once that’s abated, then they can phase out the services that they were providing. Something similar actually happened with the women’s movement and the development of battered women [domestic abuse] shelters. At the time that was this grassroots, very feminist, very politicized effort. Over the course of 40 years now, the State has largely co-opted it and has used that to tie the protection of women from men who have been violent, to policing in effect, to other men who are violent. The Incite! statement that I was mentioning before was, to some degree, responding to that trajectory and the insinuation of the coercive force of the State into what, at one point, was this radical political program.
TFSR: And the major theme of Incite!’s book, The Revolution Will Not be Funded, right?
Kristian Williams: Yeah. That is one of the ways the repression happens. It doesn’t just happen by them kicking in your door. It also happens by them, sort of channeling, using incentives, including access legitimacy, funding to channel your political action into areas that are safe for the government, where the challenge is to some degree neutralized.
TFSR: I was wondering if you could speak on the efficacy or purpose of civilian review boards. I know a lot of cities have organized around police accountability and helped to bring these in. And to varying degrees, police departments have been helpful in the process or fought against it. But what can you say about your experience with police review boards?
Kristian Williams: Everywhere that I have looked into it, the police have fought it being established until such a point that it became obvious that they were going to lose that fight. At which point they totally got on board for the sake of getting the kind of review board that they wanted. So they typically lose the fight for there not to be a review board and then win the fight of what kind of review board they want. The result being that review boards tend to be relatively powerless, relatively ineffective. In most places they can issue a finding or they can recommend discipline against an officer. They can’t actually discipline him. In most places they can recommend policy changes, but they can’t actually set policy. So the result tends to be that important community figures or prominent activists who would otherwise be in the neighborhoods organizing people, or on the streets causing trouble with the cops, instead are stuck in some boardroom, they’re in City Hall, hearing the seemingly endless testimony about this or that particular incident with the cops for the sake of making some recommendation that will either be taken or ignored. If the point is to waste some time of people who might otherwise be leaders in opposition to the police, civilian review boards do a great job. If the point is to actually hold the police accountable, not so good. Some of that is in the details of how the things were set up, and specifically what the laws say, what the policies are and all that boring bureaucratic crap.
The problem with some of it is that the civilian review board is the wrong tool to address the problem that we have. The reason that we have trouble with the police is not usually that the cops are breaking their own rules, that they’re liars, that they’re individually prejudiced, or any of that. Although all those things are sometimes true, right? The reason we have a problem with the police is because we have a society that’s stratified very sharply in terms of race and class and the job of the cops is to preserve that stratification. There’s not a review board in the world that can do anything about that. That said, if you’re in a city that doesn’t have a review board, organizing to demand a review board can provide a very good avenue to bringing out a lot of the dirty laundry that the cops have, give people an opportunity to articulate what their complaints are, and to some degree build momentum to stake out other positions in a politics against policing. I don’t want to say that it’s never worth pursuing. To some degree, they probably do put some check on the most egregious abuses. But don’t expect too much out of a civilian review board.
TFSR: At the Law and Disorder Conference that happened earlier this year at Portland State University, you gave a presentation on the distinctions between the goals of police accountability organizing and police abolition organizing. Can you elaborate on that presentation?
Kristian Williams: The distinction that I was drawing out was that police accountability organizing suggests that there is some sort of role for the police, and that the what’s needed to address the problems of the institution, involve some reforms, either within the institution, or some sort of external checks and balances. That the police organization is necessary and to some degree legitimate and in principle, salvageable. The abolitionist perspective, on the other hand, suggests that the institution of policing itself is so tied to the inequalities of the society that it operates in, especially those based on race and class, that in the process of eliminating those inequalities, we are also going to need to get rid of this institution of policing and find some other means for ensuring public safety and resolving disputes and handling social conflict. That sort of thing.
In the short term, the way this tends to play out is that police accountability activists pursue reforms in the form of better policies, or different training. The ultimate stage in this is the establishing of a civilian review board, and the hope that with the correct internal and external mechanisms, policing can be done in a humane and fair way. In the short term there’s a real question as to what the abolitionists should be doing. The ultimate aim is to totally change the structure of society and get rid of the course of institutions that we now have. That’s not exactly something that you can plan for next Tuesday. It’s more of a remote goal. The question of what you do to work toward that is a fairly complicated one. The advice that I was giving in the course of that talk, was that this isn’t just a matter of do you pursue reforms, or do you pursue revolution but that actual abolitionists need to engage in reform work, but they need to engage in reform work very carefully and only engage in those reforms that actually do limit the worst abuses and tend to weaken the institution as a whole, reduce police power and shift power toward the community. And not get sucked into working on reforms that are going to strengthen the institution or improve its functioning or prolong its life.
TFSR: In line of alternatives to police, and that being an increasing debate, I saw on the website for Rose City CopWatch that members of that organization (which you volunteer with) have been doing presentations on alternatives to policing, what’s wrong with policing, the whole rotten barrel idea, what community restorative justice models might look like, and what they’ve looked like in different places around the world and you touched on this during the last chapter of Our Enemies in Blue. It seems like there’s an upswing in discussion around the Pacific Northwest and in Portland in particular, between Rose City CopWatch (and I’m sure other projects) and the community alternatives to policing. I Just saw a couple of their pamphlets on the alternatives to policing. How much of that discussion has been the generalized population and the populations that are most affected, like people of color and mostly poor people? How much of it has been a discussion among activists?
Kristian Williams: That’s a really good question, and it’s hard for me to say anything about that definitively. If we take a sort of slightly longer look at this, compare where we are now to where we were 10 or 15 years ago, my impression is that over that amount of time, this discussion has become more publicly articulated. I believe that’s moving from both. On the one hand, there were plenty of radicals (especially anarchists) who, when I started this work in the in the mid ‘90s, thought that we needed to get rid of the police and did not have a very precise idea of what that would mean. That’s part of why in the last chapter of Our Enemies in Blue, I described a couple of places where policing just became impossible in the normal sense because of social conflict. I talked about the movement against apartheid in South Africa and the Community Restorative Justice Project in Northern Ireland. The social movements took on the question of how to address crime. I sketched that out to to some degree, just to show that that people had done something else, and that whatever the problems were, it presented possibilities. The fact that people have done something else implies that we can do something else. At the time, there was really very little in the sort of social movement literature about that. The people who looked at those particular conflicts knew a little bit about it but there weren’t stories about alternatives to police and experiments in restorative justice circulating in the activist milieu overall. In the ten years since then that’s really changed.
Similarly, in the communities where the police are most present and most abusive- in particular, those are poor communities and among people of color- it’s not news to them that the cops are a problem. It’s not a new idea for them, that if there’s something else that you can do instead, that you should probably do that instead of calling the police. There have been some very informal, some more formal, organic responses to crime and interpersonal conflict and all that sort of thing in those communities, I think, always. They haven’t generally been formal or permanent arrangements, they haven’t usually been attached to a political project. That said, one thing that I’ve seen very recently in Portland, is that discussion has taken a more systematic bent and it has also, to some degree entered into the mainstream discourse more. The best example that I know of is there’s a newspaper here in Portland called The Scanner, which I believe is the largest Black newspaper in the state. It ran an editorial a little more than a year ago after the this very tragic incident in which this African American family called the police because they were worried that this young man, Aaron Campbell, was distraught and was considering suicide. Campbell wasn’t a criminal suspect, and he wasn’t a danger to anybody other than himself. The police showed up with the SWAT team and ordered him out of his apartment, and as he was attempting to comply with their orders, one of the snipers on the SWAT team shot him and killed him. The Scanner ran an editorial saying very upfront that it’s not safe for Black people to call the police. Everyone can see why the Campbell family would do that, everybody could understand the pressures that they were under. But in the scope of things, the Black community needed to find a different way of making sure members of that community are safe, because the police cannot be trusted to do it. Now, I doubt that was much of a surprise to the readership of that newspaper, the target audience, but it was in the newspaper, and it was something that other newspapers then picked up on. To some degree, the editorial became itself a matter of controversy. There was a lot of talk in the media about the fact that this point had been made in print. Again, I don’t think it was a new point to the Black population, but I think that it’s showing up in print changed the conversation in the larger more mainstream media.
TFSR: Can you speak a little bit to how the dialog, or the difference between abolitionism and accountability has become more clear among organizers around policing issues in the Pacific Northwest. Over the last year, I’ve at least found references that in Portland there being a number of marches last year in direct response to killings by police. In Olympia, April of last year, August of last year in Seattle, after John T Williams was killed, throughout the first half of February. In March and in July, after a house party was raided by police and people were beaten and hospitalized. Is this a new period in organizing against the police? Is the idea of abolitionism becoming more prominent, or is it just that abolitionists, often politically radical or anarchist people, are becoming more vocal, and maybe drawing from Greece and drawing from other examples where police brutality has led to an escalation? From LA in 92 or any of these other examples? Do you feel like it’s changing or are people becoming more vocal?
Kristian Williams: I think there’s some of both. There’s the two tendencies build on each other, but they have some different causes. On the one hand, looking back 10 or 15 years ago, there were definitely people who we would now call police abolitionists, and they were doing various kinds of anti-cop organizing. Then, they were, to some degree, inside and obscured by the police accountability movement. There was not a distinctly abolitionist position, either within or separate from the police accountability work. So there were people who individually thought that we needed to get rid of the cops, but lacking other avenues for doing that, became involved in accountability work. That’s largely reflective of my own experience. In any case, one of the things that changed and also one of the things that really puts the need to find alternatives on the left wing activist radar, was the creation of Critical Resistance, which is a prison abolition organization, in I think ‘98. They really staked out this bold position about getting rid of the prison-industrial complex top to bottom. There were a lot of really smart organizers involved in that, there were a lot of really credible intellectuals involved in that. They really staked out that position, and they did it in a way that was credible and legitimate seeming, and that people took seriously. That opened up space within the area of people who were mostly concerned about police, to do some of the same things and to stake out a police abolition position and to build on some of that work. Critical Resistance also put out a statement with Incite!…
TFSR: Which is Women of Colour Against Violence, right?
Kristian Williams: Yes, thank you. They were arguing that, on the one hand, people who are working in violence against women, need to take the violence of the criminal justice system seriously and do something about that. On the other hand, people who are fighting the criminal justice system need to start creating alternatives in order to address violence in their communities. I think that really served to motivate a lot of people to do some serious thinking about those questions. At the same time, I think that some of what we’re seeing is that there’s been an increase in specifically anarchist organizing and of anarchist political activity, especially in the Northwest. Some of that is building off of…not even so much the occurrence of the WTO protests in Seattle, but the memory of the WTO protests in Seattle. So one of the things that that helped develop, was a distinctly anarchist area of political action, to some degree, autonomous from the rest of the Left. One of the places that anarchists distinguish themselves, to some degree mistakenly, from the rest of the Left is claiming a monopoly on the police abolitionist or prison abolitionist point of view. When there’s already an uptick in controversy around the police, it makes sense that will build on this developing anarchist milieu, and we’ll see an increase in activity in that area as well. Some of it is specific to the issue of policing, and some of it is a more general increase in anarchist activity.
TFSR: Within the Left, what other groupings are not necessarily taking an anti-police perspective- as in police upholding this system that we live under, and that Leftists are going to agree is a horrible system- but actually proposing alternatives and direct resistance to those institutions. What tendencies are there?
Kristian Williams: Besides anarchism? The two places that I have seen that coming from, I have already mentioned one, being the position represented by Critical Resistance. I’m sure that there are anarchists involved in Critical Resistance, but many of the luminaries of that organization, and many of the people who were involved in the founding of it, are definitely not anarchists. One of the people who is most cited in terms of talking about prison abolition is Angela Davis, who was a longtime member of the Communist Party and is definitely not an anarchist. The other being the kind of feminism that is represented by Incite! and their work on ending violence against women and children, and them taking seriously the fact that the State is also a perpetrator of that kind of violence. Again, I’m sure that there are anarchists involved with Incite! as well, but it is not…
TFSR: … an explicitly an anarchist organizations, or organizing models.
Kristian Williams: And if you look at the rhetoric, culture and theory of an organization like Incite! and you look at the rhetoric and the culture and the theory of the kind of anarchist milieu engaging this, they’re obviously very different. There are probably other places on the left as well that are putting forward ideas about that either I don’t know about or aren’t coming to mind off the top of my head.
TFSR: Well, Bring the Ruckus for a while was organizing around forming CopWatches and Anarchist Black Cross type organizations like prisoner support groups around the country. That was a lot of Trotskyists as well as anarchists and radical left folks, is that right?
Kristian Williams: Yes and actually, I’m a little bit embarrassed that didn’t occur to me sooner. But BTR has been doing work around that to some degree here, but to a large degree in the Bay Area. Their position was a little bit harder to nail down, but they’re definitely some sort of libertarian left cadre organization. Which is distinct from the sort of anarchist milieu that I was describing a minute ago, and also very different from the Critical Resistance perspective that I was talking about.
TFSR: Kristian, could you speak briefly about another recent article you’ve written called Profiles Of Provocateurs about the FBI infiltrating radical communities, in particular anarchist communities?
Kristian Williams: This is an article that I posted on a handful of internet sites, and got reposted other places. I was moved to write it because I read an article in The Stranger, which is the alternative weekly in Seattle, about this. In particular, I’m looking at not just snitches but provocateurs, meaning people who actually create criminal activity (for the sake of setting people up) in the service to some government agency instead of telling them about crimes that are happening. In particular, I was looking at when this was done targeting anarchists. There was an article in The Stranger about this guy who got involved in this after-hours party scene with the idea that he was going to insinuate himself into this cultural niche, and from there, be able to find people who are involved in the Earth Liberation Front. In the course of that he totally failed at that mission, but he did manage to set a bunch of people up for illegal gambling charges and he managed to set one guy up on a drug bust. Reading the article, the thing that struck me was that he exhibited any number of behaviors that, whether or not he was a cop, people really just shouldn’t been putting up with. At the same time there were any number of sketchy-seeming details that the people that he set up had commented on but that nobody had bothered to follow up on. Like at one point, somebody went to his apartment and they went to the bathroom and there was just nothing in the bathroom, no soap, no towels, no toothbrush. Which is pretty odd.
This got me thinking about some of the other cases that I heard about, in particular the Brandon Darby case. He helped set up a couple much younger activists on fire bomb charges related to the Republican National Convention in 2008. As well as the woman known as Anna, who helped set up Eric McDavid and a couple other people. Basically Anna, on the FBI’s behalf, while being on their payroll, created an ELF style cell and created a plan to blow up a dam, and then brought in the FBI to to put her co-conspirators in prison. In the course of the article I try to point out some of the commonalities that these people exhibited. The main one is that they preyed upon people who felt like they had something to prove. They basically bullied them into doing things (which I think most people looking at it from the outside would have to say, whatever your politics are) were just bad ideas.
TFSR: So, Kristian, what’s coming up?
Kristian Williams: I have a couple pieces that I’ve been working on this summer that should be announced in the next month or so. One of them is a piece for In These Times about a couple of the police killings here in Portland, that have happened in the last several years. I don’t want to give away too much here, but the argument that I make is that we can see some of the class and race dynamics playing themselves out in these cases. What they reflect are efforts for the police to exclude people that are considered undesirable, in particular, poor people and people of color, from some of the commercial areas and that the police are doing that in direct response to the agenda of the Portland Chamber of Commerce, which is called the Portland Business Alliance. So that will be in In These Times. I think it comes out the first week of September. Also coming out right around Labor Day, Dollars and Sense will be running an article that I wrote about the labor unrest in Wisconsin earlier this year, and the cops role in both supporting and repressing the unions there. I compare that to other historical cases in which the cops have slipped out of their usual repressive function and have in some way or another, aided the struggle of workers. That’s what I have on the agenda for the next few weeks.
TFSR: We’ve been speaking with Kristian Williams, author and activist out of Portland, Oregon. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak.
Kristian Williams: Thanks for having me on. Anytime.