The Killing Class - the New Inquiry
But the police impunity chronicles had the effect of pushing me further beyond not just the sociological premise of the police as rightful heirs to force nor even my own prior casting of the police as architects/guardians of space. The more one pays attention to the conspiratorial way (and I mean conspiracy factually, as in a plot that has a familiar narrative end) that police walk away scot-free from the storm of violence they enact the more one reaches toward a higher definitional value. The police are defined by the power to kill with impunity, period. The police are the killing class. And it is in clarifying, not reducing, that existential value that the “theory” can become generative and useful beyond the mole-like venues of the “local” or “municipal” or “federal.” In Palestine, where I am currently living and from where I continue to watch Ferguson unfold with urgency, the IDF is both “foreign” occupation regime and “local” police force, maiming and eradicating human beings with impunity.
If the police are supremacists in the act of impunity, the work of the righteous is organized opposition to that supremacy. The 2014 Summer of Death was unfathomably chilling. I feel its traumatic aftereffects both on those immediately around me and those at a digital-intimate distance. But the steadfastness of survivors, and the daily effort to maintain one’s self and community safe and alert, keeps the plight of deadening disillusionment at bay and solidarity and mutual respect deeply alive.