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As the original edition of Our Enemies in Blue would predict, not much has changed in terms of how policing functions in the United States since it was first published. This reality, in and of itself, underscores the unique contribution and critical importance of this book, and of its timely update.

Our Enemies in Blue offers a systematic, well-researched, readable, and engaging examination of the evolution of police forces as tools of political control as well as political entities of their own. Tracing the roots of policing from imposition of colonial order in England, Ireland, and the Americas to slave patrols and urban watches allows us to see the skeleton underlying the present shape of policing, illuminates the social forces that drive policing paradigms, and charts the complicity of community members, from the Klan through George Zimmerman, in the project of controlling Black, immigrant, and working class people.

There are new names—Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley—and with each of them, new moments of resistance. Yet the history of modern-day policing outlined in careful and compelling detail in the first edition of Our Enemies in Blue, now updated and applied to the events of the past ten years, continues to play out, not only in single incidents of deadly force against Black and Brown bodies, but also in the everyday violence of policing—be it racially discriminatory “stop and frisk” practices in New York City, continuing racial disparities in traffic stops on the nation’s streets and freeways, or through daily stops, searches, beatings, sexual assaults, and police occupation of communities of people of color that are not just reminiscent of slavery and the Jim Crow era, but its direct descendants. Exposing the core of policing, as well as the social forces that drive it, enables us to see that, even as its outward form shifts over time, the underlying structure and purpose ultimately remains the same, decade after decade.

This is not to say that resistance has had no impact: it has forced police departments to shift strategies and has at times reduced some harms of policing. It is simply to say that the history of policing, the underlying forces of punishment, and responses to calls for reform laid out in the following pages is essential to understanding how we arrived at the present moment, and to envisioning what lies ahead. By placing the string of individual cases of police violence that have captured headlines over the past two decades into a larger context, we are pushed beyond an understanding of them as individual acts of racist police officers to an examination of their root causes and sinister systemic underpinnings. Our demands for change are thus necessarily expanded beyond prosecutions in individual cases and advocacy for policy reform, while simultaneously acknowledging the pain and outrage generated by each individual act of police violence, and the limited respite changes to policing policies can bring.

Particularly relevant to the present moment and the “broken windows” policing practices that ultimately killed Mike Brown and Eric Garner, Our Enemies in Blue chronicles the emergence of “order maintenance policing” as the modern-day manifestation of Black Codes, vagrancy laws, and common nightwalker ordinances. Pursuant to this theory, through what has become known as “quality of life” policing, officers are given explicit permission and discretion to target populations inextricably intertwined with notions of the “dangerous classes” described in Our Enemies in Blue. Police extortion schemes of old are replaced with a more elaborate shakedown of poor people through assessment of exorbitant fees and fines for minor, vague, and discriminatorily enforced “quality of life” offenses such as littering, sleeping, eating, or appearing disorderly or lewd in public. Indeed, it is telling that the biggest impact of the slowdown by NYPD officers in early 2015 was loss of revenue, not increased crime, and that first olive branch offered by the Ferguson police department in the wake of the uprising following Mike Brown’s murder by Darren Wilson was a reduction in fees associated with failing to appear in court to answer to minor charges which were the bread and butter of city coffers.1

Perhaps the most critical intervention Our Enemies in Blue makes to the current moment comes in the final chapter, which traces the roots of militarization of police departments displayed in such stark and brutal relief during the days and months following Mike Brown’s killing in Ferguson to the advent of SWAT teams and the declaration of a “war” on drugs. Here, Williams reveals “community policing,” the kinder, friendlier face of law enforcement being advanced as its alternative, to simply be another side of the same coin. Like early police forces, “community policing” works to conscript civilians and “helping” institutions into the project of social control, while serving as the stick that continues to enforce the “order” that serves existing power relations.

One thing that has changed since the first edition is the way we understand how policing operates along the axes of gender and sexuality, within and alongside those of race and class. Over the past decade a body of work has emerged, which, like Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith, traces its lineage back to Indigenous women’s resistance to the sexualized violence by state actors that has been an essential weapon of colonization, or, like “Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color,” an article I authored for Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (South End Press 2006), to Black women’s resistance to slave patrols and lynching, and to the struggles of freedom fighters like Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur in response to police violence against themselves and their communities.2

Some of this work—like the book I co-authored with Joey Mogul and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States—draws directly on the history of morals enforcement through vagrancy laws and on the critical analysis of “broken windows” policing offered by Our Enemies in Blue to highlight how policing operates to enforce racialized and classed norms of gender and sexuality in both public and private spheres.3 This process is mediated, as we discuss in Queer (In)Justice, through criminalizing narratives and archetypes that literally shape how the same conduct by different people is perceived differently within the context of maintaining “order” and ensuring community “safety.” Others, like Dean Spade’s Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Nat Smith and Eric Stanley, further elucidate the multiple ways in which law enforcement, prisons, and other systems of control explicitly police the lines of the gender binary.4

This literature, along with research conducted by grassroots organizations, policy advocacy groups, academics, and even law enforcement, as well as powerful interventions made by Black feminists in the post-Ferguson public discourse, has irrevocably expanded the frame of the conversation around policing to incorporate the voices and experiences of women of color and LGBTQ people of color targeted by gendered and sexuality-based forms of racial profiling and police violence, painting a more complete picture of the structures and dynamics of policing.

For instance, researchers have begun to dig deeper into the statistics illuminating patterns of racialized policing detailed in Chapter 4 to unearth the experiences of women of color. As noted in a submission endorsed by over seventy-five organizations and individuals to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (which was convened as a result of sustained national outcry in the wake of failure to hold officers who killed Mike Brown and Eric Garner accountable):

Although racial profiling data reported by federal and state governments is rarely, if ever, disaggregated by race and sex, racial profiling studies which do analyze the experiences of women of color separately from those of men of color conclude that “for both men and women there is an identical pattern of stops by race/ethnicity.” For instance, in New York City, one of the jurisdictions with the most extensive data collection on police stops, rates of racial disparities in stops and arrests are identical among men and women. Racial profiling of women of color has specifically been reported in the context of law enforcement practices associated with the “war on drugs” and the policing of prostitution-related offenses.5

Black women and women of color, who have played a leadership role in struggles against state-sponsored violence since colonial times and slavery, have increasingly insisted on recognition that we too are direct, and not collateral or occasional, targets of police shootings and violence. As pointed out to the Task Force:

Black women and women of color also experience excessive force up to and including police shootings, including most recently Jessie Hernandez, a 16 year old queer Latina killed by Denver police as this submission was being prepared, Aura Rosser, a forty-year-old Black woman killed by Ann Arbor police, and Tanisha Anderson, a 37 year old Black woman killed by Cleveland police, all of whom were killed in the short period of time since this Task Force was established. In the weeks following Eric Garner’s killing in New York City, an NYPD officer put Rosan Miller, a Black 27 year-old 5 month pregnant woman in a chokehold as they attempted to arrest her for grilling on the sidewalk, Denise Stewart, a Black grandmother who also had asthma was dragged naked into a hallway by officers who falsely assumed she was abusing her children, a woman perceived by NYPD officers to be queer was thrown to the ground and beaten after being accused of jaywalking in the West Village, and another pregnant mother was thrown to the ground in Sunset park by NYPD officers who then used a TASER on her stomach. These are but a few examples of the excessive force to which women of color are submitted on a routine basis, and which must also be at the center of national debates surrounding police shootings and use of excessive force against people of color.6

As Our Enemies in Blue points out early on, what is defined as police brutality is normatively constructed. The common construction excludes not only women and LGBT people of color’s experiences of what is normatively defined as police brutality—physical violence up to and including murder of Black and Brown men—but also gender- and sexuality-specific forms of racialized and poverty-based police violence. For instance, since the time of colonial armies to the present day, sexual violence has been an unacknowledged but essential weapon of institutionalized policing so clearly described in these pages. The submission to the Task Force goes on to note:

In 2010 the CATO Institute’s National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project … [found] Sexual assault and misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct after excessive force, representing 9.3% of complaints analyzed. Over half of the officers involved in reported misconduct were alleged to have engaged in forcible nonconsensual sexual conduct while on-duty. Over half of incidents analyzed alleged police sexual misconduct with minors. Rates of sexual assault rising to the level of FBI index crimes were found to be significantly higher among law enforcement officers than the general population.…

Other studies found that up to 2 in 5 young women reported sexual harassment by law enforcement, and that young women of color, low income women, lesbian and transgender women, and otherwise marginalized women—as well as men and transgender people—are particularly vulnerable to sexual misconduct by law enforcement. Sexual harassment and assault have been reported to be particularly pervasive during traffic stops and in the context of police cadet programs intended to engage youth from the community. It is also reported to take place with alarming frequency in the context of responses to requests for assistance or investigation of domestic violence or sexual assault.

Sexual harassment and assault by law enforcement officers may take many forms, ranging from sexual comments, to unwarranted call backs to crime victims, to extorting sexual favors in exchange for leniency, to unlawful strip searches, including searches to assign gender, to forcible or coercive sexual conduct, including rape.7 It is by no means an isolated phenomenon, and while not an officially sanctioned law enforcement activity, is facilitated by the authority vested in law enforcement officers.8

Similarly, separate testimony submitted to the Task Force on behalf of over 45 LGBT organizations pointed out that,

As noted by the NAACP’s recently released report, Born Suspect, LGBTQ people of color experience gender and sexuality-specific forms of racial profiling and police brutality. Additionally, LGBTQ people, particularly LGBTQ youth and people of color, also experience pervasive profiling and discriminatory treatment by local, state and federal law enforcement agents based on actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or HIV status.

Over the past decade, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) has found that law enforcement agents have consistently been among the top three categories of perpetrators of homophobic or transphobic violence against LGBTQ people reported to anti-violence organizations. In a recent national survey of LGBTQ people conducted by Lambda Legal, a quarter of respondents who had in-person contact with police reported at least one type of misconduct or harassment, including profiling, false arrests, verbal or physical assault, or sexual harassment or assault. LGBTQ people of color, LGBTQ youth, low-income LGBTQ people, and transgender people were much more likely to report an experience of at least one type of police misconduct or harassment.… Across the country, non-heterosexual youth are more likely to be stopped by the police and experience greater criminal justice sanctions not explained by greater involvement in violating the law.… Investigations of local police departments in New Orleans and Puerto Rico by the U.S. Department of Justice have documented patterns and practices of profiling and discriminatory policing of LGBTQ people, and a number of local organizations have documented department-specific patterns and practices.9

These more recent studies echo the patterns and practices of police misconduct identified by Amnesty International in its 2005 report Stonewalled: Police Misconduct and Abuse Against LGBT People in the United States—widespread homophobic, transphobic, and sexual harassment; name calling and verbal abuse by law enforcement officers; profiling and discriminatory enforcement, including citation of possession or presence of condoms as evidence of intent to engage in prostitution-related or lewd conduct offenses; failure to respect gender identity and expression when addressing members of the public, and during arrest processing, searches, and placement in police custody; unconstitutional and unlawful searches to assign gender; sexual assault and rape by law enforcement officers; and dangerous placement and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in police custody.10

By incorporating an analysis of the ways in which systemic police violence affects all members of our communities in both similar and unique ways, this literature has informed and driven the work described in the afterword to this edition—envisioning, and more importantly, enacting, a world without police—while offering the clearest of rationales for doing so. Ultimately, police operate as a source of violence rather than safety—even for those the law claims to protect—for reasons deeply rooted in the history of policing that Our Enemies in Blue so clearly lays out for us.

Our Enemies in Blue critically informs and provides an essential basis for analysis of present and future possibilities in the current moment, and offers examples and criteria by which to evaluate our efforts. What does prevention and response to violence look like? And given the history of police and policing through the present day, can the police ever be the ones to provide them?

—Andrea J. Ritchie

Brooklyn, NY

March 2015

Andrea Ritchie is a Blacklesbian police misconduct attorney and organizer who has engaged in extensive research, writing, litigation, organizing, and advocacy on profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women, girls, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people of color over the past two decades. She was recently awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship to engage in documentation and policy advocacy around the experiences of women of color—trans and not trans, queer and not queer—of profiling and policing. Ritchie helped found and coordinate Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at sharing “know your rights” information, strategies for safety and visions for change among LGBT youth of color who experience of gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization, and now serves as the organization’s Senior Policy Counsel. Ritchie is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press, 2011) and serves on the steering committee of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR).