Critique of Violence

"I chose it specifically because of its relevance and importance in understanding the special role of the police in everything we’ve discussed so far. Walter Benjamin’s essay focuses on the distinction between two types of violence: one that creates legal order, such as a revolution, and one that is meant to protect an existing legal order. According to him, there are two activities that blur this dichotomy. The first one is the general strike, in which one uses an existing right to take society to a halt and create a new legal order; it’s a way of using an already-acquired power for revolutionary purposes. The other exception is the police, which is one of the rare instituted powers that is able to invent its own legality. The police, and we can see it in many examples of trials around the world, are always able to claim their own innocence by interpreting their own acts in a favourable manner; by saying that an officer felt in danger, or that they reacted in a proportionate manner to an aggression, or that they acted with ‘strong suspicion’ that somebody had committed a crime. This makes the police a very problematic institution, one that has the power to reinterpret the frame under which its activity is supposed to be regulated. “Everything that the police does is violent, in the effects it has on an individual’s freedom, their body, their possessions, or their future.” The ideas of Walter Benjamin should also help us rethink the way in which we, too often, describe how the police acts. I have been strongly involved in a French movement called Comité Adama, that is fighting against police practices and defending its victims, who are mostly young black and Arab boys. I published a book, The Adama Fight (Le Combat Adama) , with Assa Traoré, whose brother Adama was killed by policemen in 2016. In this context, I gave a lot of thinking to the notion of ‘police brutality’. In recent years especially, some of the media has started keeping track of what it calls acts of police ‘violence’ during strikes, riots, marches, etc. But this categorisation of certain acts as ‘violent acts’ necessarily implies that the police, the rest of the time, acts in a non-brutal way, simply because it is acting legally. It implies that a police search, an arrest, or even an identity check aren’t violent. But everything that the police does is violent, in the effects it has on an individual’s freedom, their body, their possessions, or their future. So it is almost impossible to identify a specific category of police actions that could be called brutal, as if others were not. Police means violence. And so the type of police brutality seems irrelevant. What’s violent about the police isn’t when they go too far by punching a protester in the eye, or suffocate a drug dealer during an arrest. What’s truly violent is the law that protects them, takes them out of our reach, and allows them to create their own legality. In a sense, I argue that what we call ‘police violence’ isn’t what is beyond legality but, on the contrary, moments when the police are redefining the legal order. What is violent in the police is the law."