When American Policing Reaches White Liberals

There’s no question in my mind that a big part of the reaction to ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis is that the type of aggressive, violent policing that happens all the time in Black and poor communities is being applied to white protestors of injustice and outraging them. It should outrage them. But the liberal response to the “abolish the police” calls back in 2020–“That’s unrealistic! And what about people who speed and commit real crimes!”–demonstrated a lack of understanding of just how violent policing is in a lot of American communities. And ICE is building on that and applying to overtly fascist ends rather than being something new under the sun. Tim Dickinson has more on this at his substack:

I’ve reported on police brutality, off and on, since the Ferguson uprising in 2014. I have seen more videos than I care to count of black and brown bodies being destroyed by cops who shot as a first resort — in much the same way DHS agents struck down Good and Pretti. As the progressive activist and former Ohio state senator Nina Turner puts it: “This pain is not new to Black America.”

One need not even look outside of the Twin Cities metro to find wretched, similar killings by local cops. Recall the 2016 police stop of Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old school-lunch supervisor, who was driving with a broken tail light. Immediately after Castile attempted to do the responsible thing, and disclose to police that he was legally carrying a pistol, an officer killed him in a hail of seven bullets.

What one learns by watching policing is that the valuable and necessary function of law enforcement — including tracking down and arresting violent criminals — is married to a much darker function. Namely, enforcing a hierarchy of dominance and control. (Academic research backs this up.) This latter function rears its rotten head with random, but predictable, bursts of violence, that have the effect of menacing those at the bottom rungs of an American society still stratified by race.

The George Floyd protests of 2020 challenged this corrosive, low-grade authoritarianism — to insist that no one should live in fear of state-sanctioned killing for failing to abjectly comply with the cops. And in Minneapolis, the Black Lives Matter movement sparked meaningful reform, including a consent degree signed between the local police and the Biden Justice Department.

The Trump administration’s current tactics in Minneapolis, however, are not only reviving this rotten core of American policing. They are reveling it. The agents of ICE and Border Patrol are not in Minneapolis significantly as “law enforcement.” They are there to impose federal control over a vibrant, multicultural community, with paramilitary aggression.

People of color are bearing the brunt of Operation Metro Surge. DHS officers have been harassing and intimidating the Twin Cities’ large Somali and Hmong populations, many of whom are second and third generation citizens. And they’ve been rounding up as many Hispanic non-citizens as possible — targeting even a five year old and a toddler — and speed running them to camps in Texas, regardless of their legal status.

The threat of official violence is constant. Only now, the menace is extending beyond black and brown residents, to anyone who dares to decry or document the administration’s overreach. In short, the protective factor of white privilege is collapsing in the face of Trump’s fascism.

That’s right. And it might behoove a lot of people to realize that ICE tactics are completely normal in communities of color and build on this moment to demand a real accounting of the deadly, overly militarized, racist, hyperviolent policing that happens every day in this nation.