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“It all started with Eddie”: Thanatopolitics, police power, and the murder of Edward Byrne
Abstract
On February 26, 1988, rookie New York City police officer Edward Byrne was shot dead while guarding a material witness in a drug trafficking case in South Jamaica, Queens. This article considers how state narratives and visual rhetoric emerging from Byrne’s murder emboldened the police power and a revanchist campaign aimed at “taking back the streets” secreted under the war on drugs. As such, this case powerfully illustrates a disparate politics of death and the ways that the state enlists thanatopolitical power in order to reaffirm and reproduce its sovereign authority. Such a reproduction or reanimation of power registers as the state’s ability to unleash violence unequivocally and unequally upon poor and marginalized communities, as later demonstrated by the legal and proper police murder of Sean Bell, a resident of South Jamaica, Queens killed by NYPD agents in 2006.
... A critical-cultural perspective contextualizes Blue Alerts in relation to the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. Blue Alerts potentially reinforce public perceptions that violence directed at law enforcement originates from political beliefs, whereas law enforcement violence represents (non-political) protection (Turner, 2019). To our knowledge, not one of the 1,099 people killed by police in 2019 in the United States (54 percent of those being people of color) resulted in any WEA messages (Mapping Police Violence, 2019). ...
... The difficulty of even imagining an alert system designed to warn the public of police violence demonstrates the power of ideological and structural forces that valorize law enforcement. Extending Turner's (2019) analysis of police power, we suggest that Blue Alerts symbolize "unequal representations of death," illustrating how a law enforcement officer's death "is a political act which offers the state a mechanism to (re)emphasize and (re)imagine its own power" (p. 241). ...
This chapter examines an intersection of two domains of crisis communica-tion and social media research and practice: law enforcement alerts and mobile technology. In what follows, we explore the social significance and implications of what we define as “idle alerts” – messages that ask recipients to increase their alertness or to observe their surroundings. In contrast, crisis communication research has to date mostly focused on improving the effectiveness of what we call “actionable alerts” – messages that typically instruct recipients to perform a specific protective action. We argue that while law enforcement-related idle alerts are intended to improve public safety, they also serve powerful symbolic functions and communicate social values. As such, we urge crisis communication and social media scholars to apply critical-cultural perspectives in studying public alert and warning and to carefully distinguish idle alerts from actionable alerts.
... Symbols of patriotism and community solidarity are conjured up in the days following police deaths to represent, reinforce, and legitimate the power of the state, and counter fears of more violence (see Lawrence 2000). Turner (2019) suggests that news media play an important role in this process of police legitimation following line-of-duty deaths by advancing a discourse where police lives are more germane than those of "others," who often include persons of color and members of other marginalized groups. In relying on the moral depravity frame, news media draw boundaries between good, which includes the police and civilized populace, and evil, including persons demonized as threats to the safety and well-being of communities. ...
The line‐of‐duty death of a police officer challenges the public’s shared views of social order and morality. Local news media help audiences make sense of these tragedies. This study examines how attributions of responsibility are framed in local print news stories, guided by the question, “How do news stories frame the cause of death when police officers are killed in the line of duty?” We conducted an ethnographic content analysis of stories about line‐of‐duty deaths published in Indianapolis, Indiana newspapers between 1872 and 2019. Six frames promoting causal explanations for police officer deaths emerged from our analysis: moral depravity, gun availability and lethality, the nature of the job, unaddressed mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse, and officer failings. While line‐of‐duty deaths have been consistently framed as a result of individual and societal moral depravity over time, we also find that officer deaths have more recently been framed as simply being part of the job. We discuss our findings within the broader framing of social problems literature, recognizing how frames shift over time and conflate social issues to maintain their salience.
With a rise in overdose deaths in the United States, opioid awareness has come in a variety of ways. One of these, as reporters suggest, is obituary writing. Obituaries are considered in news media as offering “brutally frank” depictions of addiction that “chronicle the toll of heroin.” Moreover, obituary sharing by parents and loved ones has increasingly taken place on digital platforms, memorial websites expanding the visibility of overdose death while facilitating the building of virtual grief communities. Not solely commemorating individual loss, obituaries thus contain symbolic power—they reflect dominant social values and shape collective memory. As such, overdose obituaries inform how opioid crisis is framed, represented, and addressed. From a qualitative content analysis of 533 opioid-related U.S. obituaries published on Legacy.com and ObitTree.com , I find that while obituaries reduce stigma associated with drug use, addiction, and overdose, they primarily tell white tales of addiction. In affording a white racial framing of drug addiction, obituary writing corresponds with a larger whitewashing of the opioid crisis while implicitly constructing symbolic boundaries between those memorialized, who are predominantly white and middle-class, and those who are deemed as raced and classed Others. Such storytelling, particularly when popularized in news media and made visible on digital platforms, contributes to ongoing systemic inequality in the prevailing drug war.
This article unpacks the idea of police as a “thin blue line” as narrating a story about the police invention of the human through a civilizing and exterminating war against beasts. To speak in the name of the “thin blue line,” then, is to articulate the police as the primary force which secures, or makes possible, all the things said to be at the core of “human” existence: liberty, security, property, sociality, accumulation, law, civility, and even happiness. The current project is less a history of the thin blue line slogan than a more conceptually grounded sketch, and abolitionist critique, of its most basic premises: the idea at the heart of thin blue line is that the most routine mode of violent state prerogative—the police power—is imagined as always a defense of civilization, which at once means the “human species.” In other words, thin blue line, to use a formulation from Sylvia Wynter, is best understood as a defense of a particular genre of the human, or “Man,” that “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.” But importantly, thin blue line articulates this police project of inventing the human as always incomplete, insecure, and unstable. Of course, it must always be incomplete, because it is through its inability to fully eradicate the bestial trace that police claim a license to endless war in the name of humanity. As a discourse of ordinary emergency, thin blue line becomes an expression of what Diren Valayden outlines as “racial feralization,” or the colonial bourgeois anxiety that humanity will regress back into a violent nature. A critique of the thin blue line encourages a consideration of how fantasies and failures of becoming human animate all things police, including the racialized violence at the heart of the police project.
This book is a critical exploration of the ways in which the war power and the police power are intertwined in the form of state violence and exercised in the fabrication of order. It is not a book about an institution called ‘the military’ and how it connects to an institution called ‘the police’ but is, rather, an attempt to think critically about how powers of war and powers of police coincide for the purposes of social ordering. In tracing this argument the book generates a provocative set of claims about state power and capital accumulation, the role of violence in the making of liberal order, the police wars at the heart of this violence, and the ways in which these processes come to be called ‘peace and security’. In the process, the book explores the liberal ‘war on waste’, debates about effeminacy, the proliferation of resilience and trauma-talk, civilization as a process of violence, drones as the culmination of colonial bombing campaigns, and no-fly zones as the perfect accompaniment for drones.
The history of bourgeois modernity is a history of the Enemy. This book is a radical exploration of an Enemy that has recently emerged from within security documents released by the US security state: the Universal Adversary. The Universal Adversary is now central to emergency planning in general and, more specifically, to security preparations for future attacks. But an attack from who, or what? This book - the first to appear on the topic - shows how the concept of the Universal Adversary draws on several key figures in the history of ideas, said to pose a threat to state power and capital accumulation. Within the Universal Adversary there lies the problem not just of the 'terrorist' but, more generally, of the 'subversive', and what the emergency planning documents refer to as the 'disgruntled worker'. This reference reveals the conjoined power of the contemporary mobilisation of security and the defence of capital. But it also reveals much more. Taking the figure of the disgruntled worker as its starting point, the book introduces some of this worker's close cousins - figures often regarded not simply as a threat to security and capital but as nothing less than the Enemy of all Mankind: the Zombie, the Devil and the Pirate. In situating these figures of enmity within debates about security and capital, the book engages an extraordinary variety of issues that now comprise a contemporary politics of security. From crowd control to contagion, from the witch-hunt to the apocalypse, from pigs to intellectual property, this book provides a compelling analysis of the ways in which security and capital are organized against nothing less than the 'Enemies of all Mankind'.
In May 2012, police shot Rudy Eugene, a black man of Haitian decent, dead as he ‘ate the face’ of a homeless man on a deserted Miami causeway. Because of the strange gruesomeness of the attack and other similar violent acts, some in the media declared that a terrifying pandemic—the ‘zombie apocalypse’—had arrived. While this particular case may be yet another instance of mediated panic, we suggest cries of ‘zombies’ and ‘cannibals’ should not be dismissed as simply sensationalistic, irresponsible journalism. Rather, we see this case as a powerful example of the cultural production of a spectral sort of monstrosity that obscures and justifies police violence and state killing. As such, we argue that all of the contemporary ‘zombie talk’, usefully reveals how the logics of security, state violence and punitive disposability are imagined and reproduced as livable parts of late-capitalism.
Over the last two decades, New York City has witnessed historic drops in crime. Numerous explanations for this crime decline have been discussed, and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has been central to that debate, most notably because of the adoption of order maintenance policing and the implementation of Compstat. While those developments in the early 1990s are clearly important for understanding the potential role of the NYPD in the crime decline, those changes did not occur in a vacuum. This paper adopts an historical framework that places the role of the NYPD in the crime decline in the larger context of the department’s history, culture, and key events over a nearly 40-year span. This perspective suggests that many of the crime control strategies implemented by the NYPD over that time have been driven by internal and external crises, and that these strategies have also produced unintended consequences. With the historical analysis as a backdrop, the paper considers the ongoing debate over stop, question and frisk practices, and their disproportionate impact on minority residents, as the next potential crisis for the NYPD. The paper concludes with a discussion of the historical framework as a foundation for initiating a comparative dialog across law enforcement agencies regarding crime control strategies, their impact, and their consequences.
Much of the recent scholarship in anthropology and related disciplines suggests that attempts to theorize the operations of power under modern capitalism require us to rethink the state as a site of meaning production, emotional investment, and fantasy. But, moreover, as I argue here, modern states are not just imagined or discursive cultural regimes but also embodied forms. Political fields and national spaces have a visual, tactile, sensuous, and emotional dimension: the life of the state has a corporal grounding. My argument is centered on those sensually concrete spaces of power, where the machinations of state and the embodied subject collide: in these zones of contact, the political field assumes a somatosensory gestalt. By a focus on the entanglements of subjectivities, bodies, and states, my essay aims to contribute toward a new cultural analytics of political regimes.
This book reveals the disturbing truth about how the escalation of the War on Drugs over the past 30 years has eroded the human and property rights of Americansâwhile doing little to stop drug trafficking or use.
Unique in its perspective, this eye-opening book looks at the drug war as a rights issue and concludes that Americans' civil liberties are clearly being violated. The volume proceeds from two premises: that over the past 30 years, America's War on Drugs has done more harm than good; and that if the United States is going to reform the criminal justice system, the public must understand that this "war" is empowered by the profits it provides to law enforcement and other groups.
A central factor causing the upsurge in the drug war, the author explains, is the fact that laws were passed in the 1980s that allowed law enforcement to profit from seizing property based on scanty evidence and without criminal charges. His meticulous research has revealed that this "policing for profit" is responsible for a variety of assaults on civil liberties, including mass incarceration, SWAT teams, and random drug sweeps. A second factor that infects every aspect of the War on Drugs is racismâthe widespread stereotyping of drug traffickers as African Americans and Latinos. These issues and more are explored in this book that lays bare what the media largely ignores.
This title explores the psychological transformations and adaptations that result from police officers’ encounters with death. Police can encounter death frequently in the course of their duties, and these encounters may range from casual contacts with the deaths of others to the most profound and personally consequential confrontations with their own mortality. Using the ‘survivor psychology’ model as its theoretical base, this insightful and provocative research ventures into a previously unexplored area of police psychology to illuminate and explore the new modes of adaptation, thought, and feeling that result from various types of death encounters in police work. The psychology of survival asserts that the psychological world of the survivor—one who has come in close physical or psychic contact with death but nevertheless managed to live—is characterized by five themes: psychic numbing, death guilt, the death imprint, suspicion of counterfeit nurturance, and the struggle to make meaning. These themes become manifest in the survivor’s behavior, permeating his or her lifestyle and worldview. Drawing on extensive interviews with police officers in five nominal categories—rookie officers, patrol sergeants, crime scene technicians, homicide detectives, and officers who survived a mortal combat situation in which an assailant or another officer died-the author identifies the impact such death encounters have upon the individual, the police organization, and the occupational culture of policing.
This paper brings into conversation two ostensibly disparate geographies of state violence: the routine police surveillance and killing of members of the "dangerous classes" in the United States, an issue that is in no way new but nevertheless has gained increased attention over the last year with the Black Lives Matter movement; and the targeted drone strikes against "terrorist suspects" in the "war on terror". By laying side by side the "war drone" and domestic police power, it becomes readily apparent that despite ostensible differences-foreign vs. domestic, war vs. peace, exceptional vs. normal, military vs. police, legal vs. extralegal-the unmanning of state violence gains much of its political and legal force from the language and categories that have long animated the routine policing of domestic territory. The paper calls for taking the violence of police power more seriously than many drone commentators have.
The 40% drop in crime that occurred across the U.S. from 1991 to 2000 largely remains an unsolved mystery. Even more puzzling then is the crime rate drop in New York City, which lasted twice as long and was twice as large. This 80% drop in crime over nineteen years represents the largest crime decline on record. This book sets off in search of the reason for the New York difference through a detailed and comprehensive statistical investigation into the city's falling crime rates and possible explanations. If you listen to City Hall, aggressive police created a zero tolerance law enforcement regime that drove crime rates down. Is this self-serving political sound bite true? Are the official statistics generated by the police accurate? The book shows the numbers are correct and argues that some combination of more cops, new tactics, and new management can take some credit for the decline, but zero tolerance policing and quality of life were never a consistent part of the NYPD's strategy. That the police can make a difference in preventing crime overturns decades of conventional wisdom for criminologists, but the book points out that the New York experience challenges the major assumptions dominating American crime and drug control policies that almost everyone else has missed. First, imprisonment in actually New York decreased significantly from 1990 to 2009 and was well below the national average, proving that it is possible to have substantially less crime without increases in incarceration. Second, the NYPD sharply reduced drug violence (over 90%) without any reduction in hard drug use. In other words, they won the war on drug violence without winning the war on drugs. Finally, the stability of New York's population, economy, education, demographics, or immigration patterns calls into question the long-accepted cultural and structural causes of violence in America's cities. That fact that high rates of crime are not hard wired into modern city life is welcome news for policy makers, criminal justice officials, and urban dwellers everywhere.
For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology. Avoiding the hype of popular science and the pessimism of most social science, Nikolas Rose analyzes contemporary molecular biopolitics, examining developments in genomics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology and the ways they have affected racial politics, crime control, and psychiatry. Rose analyzes the transformation of biomedicine from the practice of healing to the government of life; the new emphasis on treating disease susceptibilities rather than disease; the shift in our understanding of the patient; the emergence of new forms of medical activism; the rise of biocapital; and the mutations in biopower. He concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be.
International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialisation practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology to consider the politics of life and death, Auchter traces the story of how life and death and a clear division between the two is summoned in the project of statecraft. She argues that by letting ourselves be haunted, or looking for ghosts, it is possible to trace how statecraft relies on the construction of such a dichotomy.
This essay considers the emergence of the concept of police power and the institution of policing in the United States in relation to the development and maintenance of projects of enslavement, settler colonialism, racial domination, and overseas conquest over time. It speculates that whiteness and policing have become coconstitutive through a long historical process, one that continues to define and constellate the present.
Louis Althusser’s renowned short text ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks of cultural, political and literary theory. The text has influenced thinkers such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek. The piece is, in fact, an extract from a much longer book, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, until now unavailable in English. Its publication makes possible a reappraisal of seminal Althusserian texts already available in English, their place in Althusser’s oeuvre and the relevance of his ideas for contemporary theory. On the Reproduction of Capitalism develops Althusser’s conception of historical materialism, outlining the conditions of reproduction in capitalist society and the revolutionary struggle for its overthrow. Written in the afterglow of May 1968, the text addresses a question that continues to haunt us today: in a society that proclaims its attachment to the ideals of liberty and equality, why do we witness the ever-renewed reproduction of relations of domination? Both a conceptually innovative text and a key theoretical tool for activists, On the Reproduction of Capitalism is an essential addition to the corpus of the twentieth-century Left.
Taking up the critical theorization of death as an important, though ambivalent, popular hermeneutic, this article attempts to expand upon existing arguments by examining death in the popular framings of an ever-growing U.S. militaristic biocitizenship (Mbembe, Giroux, Butler, Murray, Arendt). By understanding death as posing an existential crisis to collective and individual (social) life—as it is constructed through formations of moving embodiment—we argue that certain forms of death are required to be both knowable and of meaning to define the boundaries of a living body politic and the defense thereof. Whereas death within late modern society has become both increasingly knowable (through advances in medical knowledge) and anomalous (through the biopolitical attribution of most deaths to faulty cells, tissues, or organs, failures that are theoretically preventable), death that is relegated to zones of war and achieved in the service of nationalist ideals is theorized here as particularly certain and non-ambivalent. To understand this complex configuration of life, we interrogate three military deaths: that of the soldier who dies in battle, the living-death of the veteran, and the death of soldier who commits suicide. We argue that such deaths are both necessary and productive features of the protracting military State; soldiers who return from combat—bringing with them the trauma of dismemberment and the re-memberment of their deathly encounters—carry the potential to reproduce, and challenge, the hegemony of a contextually specific militaristic biocitizenship.
This article examines the government of trauma by examining the rebuilding of Ground Zero as a practice of folding the traumatic event, of capturing the traumatic event by containing it within the forms of what can be said and what can be seen. Something always goes missing in this process: the ungraspable and inexpressible dimension of trauma, which ultimately resists capture. On this basis, it considers different architectural designs and proposals as expressions of different strategies of folding the traumatic event. One strategy seeks to capture and contain the traumatic event through the production of specific forms of seeing and speaking in the social field. A second strategy points to our inability to capture the traumatic event through folding. The conclusion considers how these two strategies can be used to analyze the political significance of architecture in the discourses of the war on terror.
Among the powers of government none is greater than the power to police, and none less circumscribed. For centuries, it has been a commonplace of American legal and political discourse that the police power "is, and must be from its very nature, incapable of any very exact definition or limitation." Upon the police power, "the most essential, the most insistent, and always one of the least limitable of the powers of government," hinges nothing less than "the security of social order, the life and health of the citizen, the comfort of an existence in a thickly populated community, the enjoyment of private and social life, and the beneficial use of property." Often treated as coextensive with the power to govern, the power to police underlies a vast expanse of legislation and regulation at all levels of governance, from the national government through the states and down to the smallest municipalities. This book explores the origins of this most expansive, and most amorphous, of governmental powers with a particular focus on its most awesome manifestation, the law of crime and punishment. It argues that the defining characteristics of the police power, including its very undefinability, reflect its origins in the discretionary, and virtually limitless, patriarchal power of the householder over his household. The results of this genealogical investigation then are used to set the framework for a critical analysis of the police power in general, and the criminal law in particular.
The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italyâs most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucaultâs fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotleâs notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over âlifeâ is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmittâs idea of the sovereignâs status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificedâa paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective ânaked lifeâ of all individuals.
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of American Police Forces
- R Balko
Sean Bell Center closed
- R Bockmann
Battles erupts over honoring Officer Byrne
- C Bohlen
PAL center’s name opens racial divide
- K Burke
Remarks at the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Day Ceremony. 15 May
- G Bush
This execution was ‘declaration of war’
- T Connor
System lashed as police honor 5 slain on duty. The New York Times
- D Dunlap
NYPD pays tribute to Eddie Byrne’s legacy: Rookie cop’s murder 27 years ago horrified – then transformed – a city
- M Gannon
Nearly 25 years after infamous cop killing, NYPD Commissioner Kelly asks board to deny murderers parole. The Village Voice
- G Howard
Report from the front line: The Bennett Plan, street-level drug enforcement in New York City and the legalization debate
- M Z Letwin
Inquiry in officer’s slaying is said to be stalled
- J Barron
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
- C Bell
Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler
- E Brown
Snitch: Informants, Cooperators, and the Corruption of Justice
- E Brown
Officer in Bell killing is fired; three others to be forced out
- M Flegenheimer
- Baker
Is street-level enforcement a bust?
- A Frankel
- L Freeland
Even in death, rookie cop Eddie Byrne’s assassination sparked the beginning of a safer city
- D Hamil
Felons’ swagger: Look at 2 suspects
- G James
Cop’s kin should sue killer
- J Dwyer