The following column was submitted to PrinceGeorgeMatters from Soili Smith, a black woman born and raised in Prince George, an alum of UNBC and currently a PhD student in American Studies at Rutgers University.
I begin with gratitude: the reaction to my previous piece for PrinceGeorgeMatters —“Are You Uncomfortable Yet?”— received more kind and encouraging feedback than I could have ever imagined.
I am especially grateful to the many Black women from all over northern B.C. that reached out to me in the letter’s wake to express solidarity and share their own experiences. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that none of us were ever truly alone.
But following my previous writing and the two rallies held against racism and police brutality at the beginning of the month, we must now, as municipal, national, and global community make the difficult transition from acknowledging the problem to acting on it.
This is where the real discomfort lies. Though we have come to believe that our first step in eradicating racism is acknowledging its existence and harm via conversation and debate, as was indicated by some of our city councillors recently, that’s actually not true.
We do not come upon a burning house and spend time congratulating ourselves on noticing the fire. Noticing the fire is not step one, it is step zero. The planning, logistics and hard work of putting it out and preventing it from happening again are the steps that matter, and moving through them quickly and as accurately as possible is a matter of life and death, and a measure of our capacity, priorities and courage.
The systemic problem at hand is much bigger and more formidable than the routine of interpersonal racism, with which we all have firsthand experience; whether that’s as a witness, a perpetrator or a victim, and, are therefore, more ready to acknowledge in the first place.
Unfortunately, systemic problems such as racism are not solved alone by the small, daily actions of individuals, they are solved by changing the system. If the system does not change, then the problems remain, though we may be personally more polite about it.
This seems like a simple conclusion to come to, but the naturalization of our current societal structures obscures the obviousness of this statement.
Here is where I make you truly uncomfortable: policing, as an action, as an institution, is racist and violent.
I make this claim with the unfortunate knowledge that it will reflexively upset many, especially those who are, or are friends and family of, police officers.
That I do understand. One does not usually or purposely invest that much of their life into something they believe to be harmful, and yet, it happens. It happens every day, and the harmful systems themselves rely on it.
For me, it is actually far more comforting to understand police violence in this way. It is not so much a problem of thousands of murderous individual officers infiltrating and corrupting a much-needed and thus innocent institution, but rather it is a problem of the institution itself, which is not and was never innocent, which creates conditions under which violence is systemic and routine. Gladiators fight because the occupation demands it. There is no such thing as law enforcement without force.
For the record: I am an abolitionist.
This is not a political position I have come to lightly or flippantly, and it is certainly not, until rather recently, a popular one either. This is not an accident though, as those in power have spent a couple hundred years running an impressive campaign against it.
If you have watched or participated in any of the protests against police brutality, you will have likely heard the chant directed at militarized riot police, “Who do you protect, who do you serve?” because that question is what is at the heart of police and prison abolitionist criticism.
For the Friday (June 5) round of rallies in front of City Hall, the RCMP in Prince George initially refused to block off the roads for the march portion.
Police representatives told organizers that they did not support our cause. In the end they did show up, to “protect the public” they said. I believe they themselves believe this to be true. But I’m still unclear on who they imagined the public to be at that point. Certainly not the rally participants, as they made clear. Very likely they meant the businesses and buildings, which I hope we all agree are not people, though they are owned by them or corporate boards.
Some history might help us here on the question of for whom and by whom.
From early colonial constabularies (the beginning of modern policing) to present, policing has been about keeping the public in line, which is not the same as protecting them, though it may, fortuitously for those in power and occasionally by intention, overlap.
Police were initially a colonial project, because, apparently, it is very difficult to get people to give over their land, resources, art or kin to a foreign power willingly, and war is pricey and demoralizing. Developing a police force to reside within and control the population is far easier and less costly to those in power than perpetual war.
Eventually, as those colonized began to move to the metropole, as pesky slaves continued to try to escape, keeping the marginalized in line became as much a domestic project as a matter of foreign policy. But violence abroad always comes home to roost. The officer in charge of developing surveillance policing in the Philippines eventually returned to the U.S. and started an early version of the C.I.A. The RCMP was developed to beat down rebellious Indigenous peoples in what is currently Canada, and now even white people are subject to its force. So, the purpose of policing globally has not changed much beyond its sheer spread, we’ve just allowed ourselves to be convinced it has via repetition and without evidence or reason.
Our trouble, then, is we continue to invest in an institution that does not do what it proclaims to do. Decades worth of data says that increased policing does not lead to a reduction in crime, in fact, because crime statistics are just arrest and conviction statistics, crime rates increase when policing does. And policing has increased in poor and urban Black and Indigenous communities. If the RCMP routinely raided and searched affluent homes, they may indeed find enough drugs, fraud, domestic violence, illicit material, and arrest resistance to increase suburban crime rates significantly.
The point, however, is that people as the whole don’t steal because no one is looking; they steal because they have no money, and we have set up society to require money to live.
The central reasons for drug use, murder, and assault are not a matter of lack of forceful oversight, but rather a lack of material resources, education, mental health intervention, and community-based social services.
Who were the RCMP serving and protecting when they invaded Wet'suwet'en territory? Certainly not the local community. They were there on behalf of the federal government and a failing oil company based thousands of miles away.
So historically and presently, police are not answerable to the public. They are the enforcement arm of property owners and the elite. Their orders come from a class of people who do not daily experience their violence; a class of people who are typically white and wealthy or who have found ways to benefit from proximity to whiteness and wealth. And no matter the good intentions of individual officers, police cannot satisfactorily serve the needs of the community because that is not their purpose. Their orders do not come from us, and refusing orders does not lead to a long career. It is not, in the end, their job.
We clearly need large-scale restructuring on a societal level to address problems of poverty, addiction, and the maintenance of mental health. We have defunded our education, health and social service sectors and instead put increasingly more of our resources into superficially addressing these problems via policing; an institution whose purpose and method is force, and then we have the gall to be surprised when the outcome of this is violence and death. We wrongly construe these social problems, rooted in the systemic inequalities of capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, etc., as legal matters that can be enforced away.
History has shown that we cannot enforce away exploitation and dispossession. The poor remain poor. The Black remain Black. The Indian, it turns out, could not be removed from the child. People cannot be permanently beaten into unjust submission, but for reasons as virulent as they are embarrassing, instead of listening, adjusting, and revolutionizing, we continue to try.
Perhaps you will dismiss my arguments as utopic, or naïve. But for me, the true naiveté is continuing to have faith in a system of colonial violence to do good in spite of its purpose.
Reimagining the longstanding structures of our world takes courage. Fighting for and implementing those changes takes more yet. I am encouraged by the widespread acknowledgment, but it is centuries late, and the time for talk is over.
I hope to continue to see you all, my community and loved ones, at the real first step, today.
