Outside agitators are a police myth
The day before the Kent State massacre in 1970, when 13 unarmed students were shot by the Ohio National Guard, the Governor of Ohio James Rhodes issued a statement asserting that outside agitators “worse than the brown shirts and the communist element” were driving the protests, and that the he was ready to “apply every force of the law that we have under our authority”. Yesterday the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, made statement with worrying echoes of the past. He declared that the city was “confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.” The job of the authorities now, then, is “saving our [sic] city from those who would destroy it.”
The notion that the current uprisings are being driven from outside only serves to further legitimize and justify institutionally racist and violent police forces. By evoking the image of the external threat, the need for internal security is reified. The vagueness of what this threat is exactly is irrelevant, only that the violence is inorganic and therefore deserving of repression. And it is certainly vague. While the Mayor has called out crime and white extremists, the Attorney General stated yesterday that the violence has been driven by “anarchic and leftist groups”. The Governor of Minnesota, Tim Waltz, raised the possibility of drug cartels helping to drive the violence. None of them provided any proof of this phenomenon
All of this culminates in statements which argue that the ongoing situation is no longer about the killing of George Floyd. The Governor has stated that the protests now are “a mockery of pretending that this is about George Floyd’s death.” The Mayor yesterday urged the people of Minneapolis to stay home so that local forces could defeat the external threat. President Trump announced today that he will be labelling Antifa a terrorist group. So, what has generated this response? If there is so much uncertainty about who is responsible, then why is there such certainty about the presence of outside influences?
This boils down to the power of police departments in shaping security across the country. State and local officials rely on police sources to know what is happening on the ground and are willing to trust them. This is one of the great institutional powers of the police. When crime is invisible to the vast majority of the population, we rely on those who are supposedly designated to deal with these issues to supply us with information. The police inform state officials about Antifa and domestic terrorist and cartels and this is taken at face value. The police tell us the threat we face, and it is accepted, never minding the incentives police forces might have to exaggerate that threat for increased budgets and continued impunity.
Take the assertion yesterday made by both the Governor and Mayor that over 80% of those arrested in Minneapolis on May 29 were from out of state. This was essentially the regurgitation of information fed to them by the police. They both had to withdraw their statements when local reporting revealing that the vast majority of those arrested had Minnesota addresses. This is a clear example of the police feeding false information to politicians, who repeat it to the media, who then report the assertions widely. What is entirely removed from the discussion is that those driving the assertions are the same people that caused the protests in the first place when they murdered an unarmed black man in public.
The out of state narrative is useful for the security apparatus in another way too. As William Barr was careful to note in his statement yesterday “it is a federal crime to cross state lines or to use interstate facilities to incite or participate in violent rioting.” If the protestors are out of state and participating in rioting, then the use of federal law enforcement is justified.
By blaming this on outside agitators, governments are working in the interests of police departments and law enforcement. They are taking these groups at their word, erasing the actual causes of the uprising, and justifying further aggressive repression. Years of exaggerating the threats of terrorists, drug cartels, gangs, and Antifa in the media means nobody bats an eyelid when the Minnesota Department of Public Safety declares that the protests have become a ‘sophisticated network of urban warfare’. The implication is that they are preparing for domestic warfare, justified on the basis of a coordinated attack by an enemy that nobody is even able to reliably identify. This will only lead to more deaths and more police impunity.
Even well-meaning liberals who try to stress the role of right-wing extremists in driving the violence serve to justify heavy handed suppression by law enforcement. It reflects an inability, or unwillingness, to see the rage that has burst out as a result of another senseless, racist murder. There is a strange phenomenon occurring where some people are willing to call the police racists or murderers while being unable to call them out as liars as well.
Undoubtedly, as in any protest, there will be opportunists. No major uprising has ever been entirely unified in ideology or goals. However, videos of white individuals smashing up buildings do not reflect a conspiracy. It is the police that are driving this narrative of nefarious and nebulous outside agitators. Any explanations being pushed by these groups should be treated with the utmost suspicion. Indeed the only group with any real history of infiltrating protests are the police themselves. These protests were and remain centred on the institutional racism of the police in the United States. We must ensure that a protest against police violence does not turn into a paradoxical reassertion of the securitized narratives of threats that allowed for such a crisis to emerge in the first place.
