Some see an injustice in the institutions of the executive. Here, the officers hit a left-wing sit-in too hard in order to allow a right-wing march to pass, there they would act too gently against lateral thinkers, migrants would be deported to “unsafe” countries of origin, and if an officer’s trigger leads to death, he should be brought to court for his irregular actions, since he must have acted out of personal rather than professional motivation.
It is this attitude that sees the police as a more or less neutral hinge between rebellious forces in society and those who strive to live in a peaceful, democratic and tolerant agreement. It is this attitude that imagines itself morally on the side of the good and innocent and ignores structural differences and privileges, which could be the reason why the cudgel is rarely aimed at their heads. This attitude leads to the abstruse reproach to the police squad: “Where were you in Hanau?”. This attitude represents a distrust of the individual, who could not live in a society with others without authority and the threat of repression. It is this attitude that makes you wonder if you won’t dial 110 in an emergency? It is this attitude that makes the narrative of the individual case possible.
It is this attitude that asserts that violence against the police is violence against people like you and me. This attitude allows the uniform or badge to be seen as a garment, an occupational utensil, rather than a globally legitimized expression of a function.
Cops all over the world have the function to detect the smallest rebellion against the system of capital, against the system of patriarchy, to press it into the logic of criminal law (i.e. to present it as non-political), to discredit it and to appropriate it. In the struggle for interpretive sovereignty, their goal is to control and crush this rebellion, with visible or subtle violence, depending on the balance of power and the form of government.
In this sense, the system of subjugating every element of our lives to the standard of norming and hierarchization according to property, body, religion, gender, origin, and attitude that prevails everywhere is manifested.
Their use cannot be judged in the categories of unjust or unjustified. The institutionalization of the police has never been about justice. The police are a system of domination and any narrative of humanity behind the uniform serves only to obscure social conditions. Continue reading “Berlin, Germany: Molotov cocktail attack on police station in Tiergarten district”