By: Raúl Zibechi

Michel Foucault considered the police as the permanent coup d’état, a phrase that became famous, although few people fully assume it. The philosopher lived and reflected in France in 1978, when the welfare state was still functioning in what Frantz Fanon called the “zone of being,” where people’s humanity is respected and violence is the exception.

Foucault’s 1978 course, compiled in the book Security, Territory, Population, focuses on the government of the population, the exercise of power that has individuals as its object, to govern the life of each person in its smallest details. The art of governing based on the reason of state consists in “the search for a technique of growth of state forces, by police whose essential goal would be the organization of relations between a population and a production of commodities (p. 386).

It clarifies that the police should not conform to the rules of justice, since their regulations are of a different type from civil laws. The instruments of this permanent coup d’état are ordinances, prohibitions, regulations and arrest, with the aim of disciplining. As can be seen, they are the means that the welfare state developed in the zone of being.

Let’s try a reflection guided by the same logic to understand the police action in the “zones of non-being” (where violence is the norm to resolve conflicts), where States prevail for dispossession, since the 1% kidnapped them to shield their interests. Are we not dealing with policemen who embody the permanent genocide of the peoples of the color of the earth?

Many may be surprised by such an assertion, if not outraged because they continue to consider police violence as exceptional and believe that state institutions are the least bad thing that can happen to a society. Let’s look at some examples.

France’s two main police unions have declared, during riots over the police murder of a young man of Algerian descent, that they are at war with teenagers whom they consider enemies to eliminate, although they refer to them as savage hordes of vermin.

The sociologist Denis Merklen, a researcher in the French and Argentine urban peripheries, considers in a recent interview that these are coup statements and recalls that the police made the Interior Minister resign in 2019 during the rebellion of the yellow vests (https://lc.cx/LomYW). He adds that never before had the police killed an unarmed person by shooting him from a few meters away, as happened with the young Nahel. He was executed, sentenced. Witnesses say the policeman shouted: Don’t move or I’ll put a bullet in your head (https://lc.cx/E3UkpV).

Then it transpired that in the networks a fund was created to support the murderous policeman that raised almost one million euros in a few days, when the initial goal was just 50 thousand. Days later, ultra-right gangs armed with the slogan of lynching blacks and Arabs emerged, thus complementing the police work, already lethal.

The young people without a future who are crowded into huge blocks in peripheral neighborhoods, have not limited themselves this time to burning cars and buildings in their neighborhoods, as in previous revolts, but attacked police stations and occupied the center of the cities, where the privileged classes sleep.

The state was ruthless, putting anti-terrorist units into the streets, such as RAID (Investigation, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence), although the name designates military assault. According to some media, RAID was deployed in up to 13 cities, considering that the rioters practice street terrorism (https://lc.cx/5rqf0B).

Finally, impunity. Merklen mentions that the ombudsman brought more than 3,000 cases of police violence to justice. Only two of them went to trial, sentence. Nothing happens when those same policemen demonstrate hooded and with their service weapons, demanding again the right to kill, without the political system doing anything (https://lc.cx/E3UkpV).

If this happens in France, we know what is happening in our lands. In Latin America, the police are autonomous, financed by illegal economies (clandestine gambling, trafficking, drug trafficking, among others). In Rio de Janeiro, the militias are the state, as researcher Claudio Alves says. They are heirs of the death squads because, he says, we never left the dictatorship, and today they directly control more than half of the city, while expanding within the State.

This happens in all countries. The police are the permanent genocide of the popular and racialized sectors. We cannot and should not trust state institutions, or those who govern them.

Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Friday, July 14, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/07/14/opinion/019a2pol and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee