WBS OutlineWork Breakdown Structure OutlineProject Initiation1.1De.docx

WBS OutlineWork Breakdown Structure OutlineProject
Initiation1.1Develop Project Charter1.2Define Scope1.3Define
Requirements1.4Finalize Charter and Gain Approvals1.5Hold
Review Meeting1.6Revise Project charter1.7Gain
approvalsPlanning2.1Preliminary project scope
development2.2Project Team Determination2.3Project Team
meeting2.4Develop project plan, schedule, and budget2.5Submit
project plan2.6Project plan approval.Execution3.1Project Team
meeting3.2Assignment of Tasks3.4Area visits and
tests3.5Design system3.6Procure the hardware and softwere
needed3.7Testing phase3.8Install the live system3.9User
TrainingControl4.1Initiate risks management
strategies4.2Project evaluation4.3Project Status updates4.4Risk
identification4.5Constant update of project planClose
out5.1Audit project5.2Document all the findings5.3Update files
and all the relevant records5.4Gain formal
acceptance5.5Archive all the files and documents related to the
project
Assignment OneActivity NameWBS IDNamePrecedent
TaskStart DateFinish Date# Days DurationResource%
CompletionInitiation1.1Develop project charter29-Mar30-
Mar11001.2Define Scope1.130-Mar30-Mar0.51001.3Define
Requirements1.230-Mar30-Mar0.51001.4Gain Approvals1.331-
Mar2-Apr31001.5Hold Review Meeting1.43-Apr3-
Apr11001.6Revise Project charter1.53-Apr3-Apr0.51001.7Gain
approvals1.63-Apr4-Apr180Planning2.1Preliminary project
scope development1.65-Apr6-Apr102.2Project Team
Determination2.16-Apr12-Apr702.3Project Team meeting2.214-
Apr14-Apr0.502.4Develop project plan, schedule, and
budget2.314-Apr14-Apr0.502.5Submit project plan2.414-Apr14-
Apr0.502.6Project plan approval.2.514-Apr16-
Apr20Execution3.1Project Team meeting2.618-Apr18-
Apr0.5Human assets03.2Assignment of Tasks3.118-Apr18-
Apr0.5Team members03.3Area visits and tests3.219-Apr22-

Apr403.4Design system3.219-Apr22-Apr403.5Procure the
hardware and softwere needed3.219-Apr22-
Apr4Finance03.6Testing phase3.525-Apr29-Apr503.7Install the
live system3.62-May4-May203.8User Training3.79-May13-
May5Relevant workers0Control5.1Initiate risk management
strategies2.618-Apr20-Apr205.2Project evaluation3.814-May17-
May305.3Project Status updates2.618-Apr20-May3205.4Risk
identification2.618-Apr20-Apr205.5Constant update of project
planClose out5.1Audit project3.814-May16-May205.2Document
all the findings5.116-May18-May205.3Update files and all the
relevant records5.218-May19-May105.4Gain formal
acceptance5.319-May20-May1Management05.5Archive all the
files and documents5.419-May20-May10
ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIANT PUPPETS:
broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the
cosmological role of the police in American culture
by David Graeber
What follows is an essay of interpretation. It is about direct
action in North America, about the
mass mobilizations organized by the so called “anti-
globalization movement”, and especially, about the
war of images that has surrounded it. It begins with a simple
observation. I think it’s fair to say that if
the average American knows just two things about these
mobilizations, they are, first of all, that there
are often people dressed in black who break windows; second,
that they involve colorful giant puppets.
I want to start by asking why these images in particular appear
to have so struck the popular
imagination. I also want to ask why it is that of the two,

American police seem to hate the puppets
more. As many activists have observed, the forces of order in
the United States seem to have a
profound aversion to giant puppets. Often police strategies aim
to destroy or capture them before they
can even appear on the streets. As a result, a major concern for
those planning actions soon became
how to hide the puppets so they will not be destroyed in pre-
emptive attacks. What’s more, for many
individual officers at least, the objection to puppets appeared to
be not merely strategic, but personal,
even visceral. Cops hate puppets. Activists are puzzled as to
why.
To some degree this essay emerges from that puzzlement. It is
written very much from the
perspective of a participant. I have been involved in the global
justice movement1 for six years now,
having helped to organize and taken part in actions small and
large, and I have spent a good time
wondering about such questions myself. If this were simply an
essay on police psychology, of course,
my involvement would put me at a significant disadvantage,
since it makes it difficult to carry out
detailed interviews with police. Granted, being active in the
movement does afford frequent occasions
for casual chats with cops. But such chats aren’t always the
most enlightening. The only extended
conversation I ever had with police officers on the subject of
puppets, on the other hand, was carried
out while I was handcuffed—which if nothing else makes it very
difficult to take notes. At any rate, this
essay is not so much about the particulars of police, or activist,
psychology as what the Annales school
historians liked to call a “structure of the conjuncture”: the
peculiar—and endlessly shifting—symbolic

1 I’m adopting here the name most commonly employed by
participants in North America. Most firmly reject the term
“anti-globalization”. I have in the past proposed simply
“globalization movement”, but some find this confusing. In
Europe, the terms “alternative-“ or “alter-globalization” are
often used, but these have yet to be widely adopted in the
US.
1
interactions of state, capital, mass media, and oppositional
movements that the globalization movement
has sparked. Since any strategic planning must start from an
understanding of such matters, those
engaged in planning such actions end up endlessly discussing
the current state of this conjuncture. I see
this essay, therefore, as a contribution to an ongoing
conversation—one that is necessarily aesthetic,
critical, ethical, and political all at the same time. I also see it
as ultimately pursuing the movements’
aims and aspirations in another form. To ask these questions—
Why puppets? Why windows? Why do
these images seem to have such mythic power? Why do
representatives of the state react the way they
do? What is the public’s perception? What is the “public”,
anyway? How would it be possible to
transform “the public” into something else?—is to begin to try
to piece together the tacit rules of game
of symbolic warfare, from its elementary assumptions to the
details of how the terms of engagement
are negotiated in any given action, ultimately, to understand the
stakes in new forms of revolutionary
politics. I am myself personally convinced that such

understandings are themselves revolutionary in
their implications.
Hence the unusual structure of this essay, in which an analysis
of the symbolism of puppets
leads to a discussion of police media strategies to reflections on
the very nature of violence and the
state of international politics. It is an attempt to understand an
historical moment from the perspective
on someone situated inside it.
a problematic
There is a widespread perception that events surrounding the
WTO ministerial in Seattle in
November 1999 marked the birth of a new movement in North
America. It would probably be better to
say that Seattle marked the moment where a much larger, global
movement—one which traces back at
least to the Zapatista rebellion in 1994—made its first
appearance on North American shores.
Nonetheless, the actions in Seattle were widely considered a
spectacular victory. They were quickly
followed in 2000 and 2001 by a series of similar mobilizations
in Washington, Prague, Quebec City,
and Genoa, growing in size but facing increasing levels of state
repression. September 11th and
subsequent “war on terror” changed the nature of the playing
field, enabling governments to step up
this repression quite dramatically, as in the US became clear in
the extraordinary violence with which
police tactics confronted protestors during the Free Trade Areas
of the Americas summit in Miami in
November 2003. Since then the movement has largely been in a
process of regrouping, though at the

time of writing (summer 2006) there are increasing signs of a
second wind.
The movement’s disarray was not simply due to heightened
levels of repression. Another reason
was, however paradoxical this may seem, that it reached so
many of its immediate goals so quickly.
After Seattle, the WTO process froze in its tracks and has never
really recovered. Most ambitious
global trade schemes were scotched. The effects on political
discourse were even more remarkable. In
fact the change was so dramatic that it has become difficult, for
many, to even remember what public
discourse in the years immediately before Seattle was actually
like. In the late ‘90s, “Washington
consensus”, as it was then called, simply had no significant
challengers. In the US itself, politicians and
journalists appeared to have come to unanimous agreement that
radical “free market reforms” were the
only possible approach to economic development, anywhere and
everywhere. In the mainstream media,
anyone who challenged its basic tenets of this faith was likely
to be treated as if they were almost
literally insane. Speaking as someone who became active in the
first months of 2000, I can attest that,
however exhilarated by what had happened at Seattle, most of
us still felt it would take five or ten years
to shatter these assumptions. In fact it took less than two. By
late 2001, it was commonplace to see
even news journals that had just months before denounced
protestors as so many ignorant children,
declaring that we had won the war of ideas. Much as the
movement against nuclear power discovered
2

in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the direct action approach was so
effective that short-term goals were
reached almost immediately, forcing participants to have to
scramble to redefine what the movement
was actually about. Splits quickly developed between the “anti-
corporates” and the “anti-capitalists”.
As anarchist ideas and forms of organization became
increasingly important, unions and NGOs began
to draw back. What’s critical for present purposes is that all this
became a problem largely because the
initial movement was so successful in getting its message out.
I must, however, introduce one crucial qualification. This
success applied only to the
movement’s negative message—what we were against. That
organizations like the IMF, WTO, and
World Bank were inherently unaccountable and undemocratic,
that neoliberal policies were devastating
the planet and throwing millions of human beings into death,
poverty, hopelessness, and despair—all
this, we found, was relatively easy to communicate. While
mainstream media were never willing to
quote our spokespeople or run the editorials we sent them, it
wasn’t long before accredited pundits and
talking heads (encouraged by renegade economists like Joseph
Stiglitz), began simply repeating the
same things as if they’d made them up themselves. Admittedly,
American newspaper columnists were
not going to repeat the whole of the movement’s arguments—
they certainly were not willing to repeat
anything that suggested these problems were ultimately rooted
in the very nature of the state and
capitalism. But the immediate message did get out.

Not so for what most in the movement were actually for. If
there was one central inspiration to
the global justice movement, it was the principle of direct
action. This is a notion very much at the
heart of the anarchist tradition and, in fact, most of the
movement’s central organizers—more and more
in fact as time went on—considered themselves anarchists, or at
least, heavily influenced by anarchist
ideas. They saw mass mobilizations not only as opportunities to
expose the illegitimate, undemocratic
nature of existing institutions, but as ways to do so in a form
that itself demonstrated why such
institutions were unnecessary, by providing a living example of
genuine, direct democracy. The key
word here is “process”—meaning, decision-making process.
When members of the Direct Action
Network or similar groups are considering whether to work with
some other group, the first question
that’s likely to be asked is “what sort of process do they
use?”—that is: Do they practice internal
democracy? Do they vote or use consensus? Is there a formal
leadership? Such questions are usually
considered of much more immediate importance than questions
of ideology.2 Similarly, if one talks to
someone fresh from a major mobilization and asks what she
found most new and exciting about the
experience, one is most likely to hear long descriptions of the
organization of affinity groups, clusters,
blockades, flying squads, spokescouncils, network structures, or
about the apparent miracle of
consensus decision making in which one can see thousands of
people coordinate their actions without
any formal leadership structure. There is a technical term for all
this: “prefigurative politics”. Direct
action is a form of resistance which, in its structure, is meant to
prefigure the genuinely free society one

wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-
sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing
whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the
defiant insistence on acting as if one is
already free.
The positive message, then, was a new vision of democracy. In
its ability to get it out before a
larger public, though, the movement has been strikingly
unsuccessful. Groups like the Direct Action
Network have been fairly effective in disseminating their
models of decision-making within activist
circles (since they do, in fact, work remarkably well), but
beyond those circles, they have had very little
2 Obviously, this assumes that the groups in question are
broadly on the same page; if a group were overtly racist or
sexist
no one would ask about their internal decision-making process.
The point is that questions of process are far more
important than the kind of sectarian affiliations that had so
dominated radical politics in the past: i.e., Anarcho-
Syndicalists versus Social Ecologists, or Platformists, etc.
Sometimes these factors do enter in. But even then, the
objections are likely to be raised in process terms.
3
luck. Early attempts to provoke a public debate about the nature
of democracy were invariably brushed
aside by the mainstream media. As for the new forms of
organization: readers of mainstream
newspapers or TV viewers, even those who followed stories
about the movement fairly assiduously,

would have had little way know that they existed.
Media Images
I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that many
of those involved in the global
justice movement see their main task as getting a message out
through the media. It is a somewhat
unusual feature of this new movement that large elements of it
are openly hostile to any attempt to
influence what they called “the corporate media”, or even, in
many cases, to engage with it at all.
Companies like CNN or the Associated Press, they argue, are
capitalist firms; it would be utterly naïve
to imagine they would been willing to provide a friendly venue
for anyone actively opposed to
capitalism—let alone to carry anti-capitalist messages to the
public. Some argue that, as a key element
in the structure of power, the media apparatus should itself be
considered appropriate targets for direct
action. One of the greatest accomplishments of the movement,
in fact, has been to develop an entirely
new, alternative media network—Independent Media, an
international, participatory, activist-driven,
largely internet based media project that has, since Seattle,
provided moment-to-moment coverage of
large mobilizations in email, print, radio, and video forms.
All this is very much in the spirit of direct action. Nonetheless,
there are always activists—even
anarchists—who are willing to do more traditional media work.
I myself can often be counted among
them. During several mobilizations, I ended up spending much
of my time preparing press conferences,
attending meetings on daily spins and sound bites, and fielding
calls from reporters. I have in fact been

the object of severe opprobrium from certain hardcore anarchist
circles as a result. Still, I think the
anarchist critique is largely correct—especially in America. In
my own experience, editors and most
reporters in this country are inherently suspicious of protests,
which they tend to see not as real news
stories but as artificial events concocted to influence them.3
They seem willing to cover artificial events
only when constituted by proper authorities. When they do
cover activist events, they are very self-
conscious about the dangers that they might be manipulated—
particularly if protests they see as
“violent”. For journalists, there is an inherent dilemma here,
because violence in itself is inherently
newsworthy. A “violent” protest is far more likely to be
covered; but for that reason, the last thing
journalists would wish to think of themselves as doing is
allowing violent protestors to “hijack” the
media to convey a message. The matter is further complicated
by the fact that journalists have a fairly
idiosyncratic definition of “violence”: something like ‘damage
to persons or property not authorized by
properly constituted authorities’. This has the effect that if even
one protestor damages a Starbucks
window, one can speak of “violent protests”, but if police then
proceed to attack everyone present with
tazers, sticks and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as
violent. In these circumstances, it’s hardly
surprising that anarchist media teams mainly end up doing
damage control.
One can now begin to understand the environment in which
images of Black Bloc anarchists
smashing windows, and colorful puppets, predominate media
coverage. “Message” is largely off-limits.
Almost every major mobilization has been accompanied by a

day of public seminars in which radical
3 That policy can be summed up by the New York Times’ senior
news editor, Bill Borders, who, when
challenged by FAIR, a media watchdog group, to explain why
the Times provided almost no coverage to 2000
inauguration protests (the second largest inaugural protests in
American history), replied that they did not
consider the protests themselves to be a news story, but “a
staged event”, “designed to be covered”, and therefore
not genuine news (“ACTIVISM UPDATE: New York Times
Responds on Inauguration Criticism”: news release,
(February 22, 2001), Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR).) FAIR replied by asking in what sense the
inaugural parade itself was any different.
4
intellectuals analyze the policies of the IMF, G8, and so on, and
discuss possible alternatives. None to
my knowledge have ever been covered by the corporate press.
“Process” is complicated and difficult to
capture visually; meetings are usually off-limits to reporters
anyway. Still, the relative lack of attention
to street blockades and street parties, lock-downs, banner drops,
critical mass rides and the like, is
harder to explain. All these are dramatic, public, and often quite
visually striking. Admittedly since it is
almost impossible to describe those engaged in such tactics as
“violent”, the fact that they frequently
end up gassed, beaten, pepper-sprayed, shot at with plastic
bullets, and otherwise manhandled by police
provides narrative dilemmas most journalists would (apparently)
prefer to avoid.4 But this alone does

not seem an adequate explanation.5
We return then to my initial observation: that here would seem
to be something compelling
about the paired images of masked window-breakers and giant
puppets. Why?
Well, if nothing else the two do mark a kind of neat structural
opposition. Anarchists in Black
Bloc mean to render themselves anonymous and
interchangeable, identifiable only by their political
affinity, their willingness to engage in militant tactics, and their
solidarity with one another. Hence the
uniform black hooded sweatshirts and black bandanas worn as
masks. The papier-mâché puppets used
in actions are all unique and individual: they tend to be brightly
painted, but otherwise to vary wildly in
size, shape, and conception. So on the one hand one has
faceless, black anonymous figures, all roughly
the same; on the other polychrome goddesses and birds and pigs
and politicians. One is a mass,
anonymous, destructive, deadly serious; the other, a multiplicity
of spectacular displays of whimsical
creativity.
If the paired images seem somehow powerful, I would suggest,
it is because their juxtaposition
does, in fact, say something important about what direct action
aims to achieve. Let me begin by
considering property destruction. Such acts are anything but
random. They tend to follow strict ethical
guidelines: individual possessions are off-limits, for example,
along with any commercial property
that’s the base of its owner’s immediate livelihood. Every
possible precaution is to be taken to avoid
harming actual human beings. The targets—often carefully

researched in advance—are corporate
facades, banks and mass retail outlets, government buildings or
other symbols of state power. When
describing their strategic vision, anarchists tend to draw on
Situationism (Debord and Vaneigem have
always been the most popular French theorists in anarchist
infoshops). Consumer capitalism renders us
isolated passive spectators, our only relation to one another our
shared fascination with an endless play
of images that are, ultimately, representations of the very sense
of wholeness and community we have
thus lost. Property destruction, then, is an attempt to “break the
spell”, to divert and redefine. It is a
direct assault upon the Spectacle. Consider here the words of
the famous N30 Seattle Black Bloc
communiqué, from the section entitled “On the Violence of
Property”:
4 One effect of the peculiar definition of violence adopted by
the American media is that Gandhian tactics do not,
generally speaking, work in the US. One of the aims of non-
violent civil disobedience is to reveal the inherent violence
of the state, to demonstrate that it is prepared to brutalize even
dissidents who could not possibly be the source of
physical harm. Since the 1960s, however, the US media has
simply refused to represent authorized police activity of any
sort as violent. In the several years immediately proceeding
Seattle, for instance, forest activists on the West Coast had
developed lockdown techniques by which they immobilized
their arms in concrete-reinforced PVC tubing, making them
at once obviously harmless and very difficult to remove. It was
a classic Gandhian strategy. The police response was to
develop what can only be described as torture techniques:
rubbing pepper spray in the eyes of incapacitated activists.
When even that didn’t cause a media furor (in fact, courts
upheld the practice) many concluded Gandhian tactics simply

didn’t work in America. It is significant that a large number of
the Black Bloc anarchists in Seattle, who rejected the
lockdown strategy and opted for more mobile and aggressive
tactics, were precisely forest activists who had been
involved in tree-sits and lockdowns in the past.
5 Those with puppets have been attacked and arrested
frequently as well but to my knowledge the corporate media has
never reported this.
5
When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of
legitimacy that
surrounds private property rights. At the same time, we exorcise
that set of violent and
destructive social relationships which has been imbued in
almost everything around us. By
“destroying” private property, we convert its limited exchange
value into an expanded use
value. A storefront window becomes a vent to let some fresh air
into the oppressive atmosphere
of a retail outlet (at least until the police decide to tear-gas a
nearby road blockade). A
newspaper box becomes a tool for creating such vents or a small
blockade for the reclamation
of public space or an object to improve one’s vantage point by
standing on it. A dumpster
becomes an obstruction to a phalanx of rioting cops and a
source of heat and light. A building
facade becomes a message board to record brainstorm ideas for
a better world.
After N30, many people will never see a shop window or a

hammer the same way again.
The potential uses of an entire cityscape have increased a
thousand-fold. The number of broken
windows pales in comparison to the number of broken spells--
spells cast by a corporate
hegemony to lull us into forgetfulness of all the violence
committed in the name of private
property rights and of all the potential of a society without
them. Broken windows can be
boarded up (with yet more waste of our forests) and eventually
replaced, but the shattering of
assumptions will hopefully persist for some time to come.6
Property destruction is a matter of taking an urban landscape
full of endless corporate facades and
flashing imagery that seems immutable, permanent,
monumental—and demonstrating just how fragile
it really is. It is a literal shattering of illusions.
(the fall of one Starbucks in Seattle)
6 In The Black Bloc Papers, compiled by David and X of the
Green Mountain Anarchist Collective. Black Clover Press,
Baltimore, 2002, p. 53. The references to diverting forms of
exchange value into use values is clearly directly inspired
by Situationist manifestos.
6
What then of puppets?
Again, they seem the perfect complement. Giant papier-mâché
puppets are created by taking
the most ephemeral of material—ideas, paper, wire mesh—and

transforming it into something very like
a monument, even if they are, at the same time, somewhat
ridiculous. A giant puppet is the mockery of
the idea of a monument7, and of everything monuments
represent: the inapproachability, monochrome
solemnity, above all the implication of permanence, the state’s
(itself ultimately somewhat ridiculous)
attempt to turn its principle and history into eternal verities. If
one is meant to shatter the existing
Spectacle, the other is, it seems to me, to suggest the permanent
capacity to create new ones.
In fact, from the perspective of the activists, it is again
process—in this case, the process of
production—that is really the point. There are brainstorming
sessions to come up with themes and
visions, organizing meetings, but above all, the wires and
frames lie on the floors of garages or yards or
warehouses or similar quasi-industrial spaces for days,
surrounded by buckets of paint and construction
materials, almost never alone, with small teams in attendance,
molding, painting, smoking, eating,
playing music, arguing, wandering in and out. Everything is
designed to be communal, egalitarian,
expressive. The objects themselves are not expected to last.
They are for the most part made of fairly
delicate materials; few would withstand a heavy rainstorm;
some are even self-consciously destroyed
or set ablaze in the course of actions. Even otherwise, in the
absence of permanent storage facilities,
they usually quickly start to fall apart.
(a typical puppet workshop)
As for the images: these are clearly meant to encompass, and
hence constitute, a kind of

7 I owe the phrase to Ilana Gershon.
7
universe. Normally Puppetistas, as they sometimes call
themselves, aim for a rough balance between
positive and negative images. On the one hand, one might have
the Giant Pig that represents the World
Bank, on the other, a Giant Liberation Puppet whose arms can
block an entire highway Many of the
most famous images identify marchers and the things they wear
or carry: for instance, a giant bird
puppet at A16 (the 2000 IMF/World Bank actions) was
accompanied by hundreds of little birds on top
of signs distributed to all and sundry. Similarly, Haymarket
martyrs, Zapatistas, the Statue of Liberty, or
a Liberation Monkeywrench might carry slogans identical to
those carried on the signs, stickers, or T-
shirts of those actually taking part in the action:
(Direct Democracy Puppet, School of Americans Protest)
The most striking images though are often negative ones: the
corporate control puppet at the 2000
democratic convention, operating both Bush and Gore like
marionettes, a giant riot policeman who
shoots out pepper spray, and endless effigies to be encompassed
and ridiculed.
8

(Corporate Control Puppet, 2000 Democratic Primary, Los
Angeles)
(World Bank, IMF, WTO Puppets, A16)
The mocking and destruction of effigies is of course one of the
oldest and most familiar gestures
of political protest. Often such effigies are an explicit assault
on monumentality. The fall of regimes are
marked by the pulling down of statues; it was the (apparently
staged) felling of the statue of Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad that, in the minds of almost everyone,
determined the moment of the actual end of
his regime. Similarly, during George Bush’s visit to England in
2004, protestors built innumerable
9
mock statues of Bush, large and small, just in order to pull them
down again.
(Bush effigies pulled down in the UK)
Still, the positive images are often treated with little more
respect than the effigies.
Here is an extract from my early reflections on the subject,
jotted down shortly after spending
time in the Puppet Warehouse in Philadelphia before the
Republican Convention in 2000, somewhat
reedited.
(field notes extracts, July 31st, 2000)
The question I keep asking myself is: why are these things even

called “puppets”?
Normally one thinks of “puppets” as figures that move in
response to the motions of some
puppeteer. Most of these have few if any moving parts. These
are more light moving statues,
sometimes worn, sometimes carried. So in what sense are they
“puppets”?
Puppets are extremely visual, large, but also delicate and
ephemeral. Usually they fall
apart after a single action. This combination of huge size and
lightness seems to me makes them
a bridge between words and reality; they are the point of
transition; they represent the ability to
start to make ideas real and take on solid form, to make our
view of the world into something of
equal physical bulk and greater spectacular power even to the
engines of state violence that
stand against it. The idea that they are extensions of our minds,
words, make help explain the
use of the term “puppets”. They may not move around as an
extension of some individual’s
will. But if they did, this would somewhat contradict the
emphasis on collective creativity.
Insofar as they are characters in a drama, it is a drama with a
collective author; insofar as they
are manipulated, it is in a sense by everyone, in processions,
often passed around from one
activist to the next. Above all they are meant to be emanations
of a collective imagination. As
such, for them either to become fully solid, or fully manipulable
by a single individual, would
contradict the point.
Puppets can be worn like costumes, and in large actions, they

are in fact continuous with costumes.
10
Every major mobilization had its totem, or totems: the famous
sea-turtles at Seattle, the birds and
sharks at A16, the Dancing Skeletons at R2K (the Republican
Convention in Philly), the caribou at
Bush’s inauguration, or for that matter, the fragments of
Picasso’s Guernica designed for the protests
against the upcoming Iraq invasion in 2003, designed so that
they could each wander off and then all
periodically combine together.
(Sea Turtles in Seattle, N30, 1999)
In fact, there’s usually no clear line between puppets, costumes,
banners and symbols, and simple
props. Everything is designed to overlap and reinforce each
other. Puppets tend to be surrounded by a
much larger “carnival bloc”, replete with clowns, stilt-walkers,
jugglers, fire-breathers, unicyclists,
Radical Cheerleaders, costumed kick-lines or often, entire
marching bands—such as the Infernal Noise
Brigade of the Bay Area or Hungry March Band in New York—
that usually specialize in klezmer or
circus music, in addition to the ubiquitous drums and whistles.
The circus metaphor seems to sit
11
particularly well with anarchists, presumably because circuses

are collections of extreme individuals
(one can’t get much more individualistic than a collection of
circus freaks) nonetheless engaged in a
purely cooperative enterprise that also involves transgressing
ordinary boundaries. Tony Blair’s famous
comment in 2004 that he was not about to be swayed by “some
traveling anarchist circus” was not
taken, by many, as an insult. There are in fact quite a number of
explicitly anarchist circus troupes, their
numbers only matched, perhaps, by that of various phony
preachers. The connection is significant; for
now, the critical thing is that every action will normally have its
circus fringe, a collection of flying
squads that circulate through the large street blockades to lift
spirits, perform street theater, and also,
critically, to try to defuse moments of tension or potential
conflict. This latter is crucial. Since direct-
actions, unlike permitted marches, scrupulously avoid marshals
or formal peacekeepers (who police
will always try to co-opt), the puppet/circus squads often end up
serving some of the same functions.
Here is a first-hand account by members of one such affinity
group from Chapel Hill (“Paper Hand
Puppet Intervention”) about how this might work itself out in
practice.
“Burger and Zimmerman brought puppets to the explosive
protests of the World Trade
Organization in Seattle two years ago, where they joined a
group that was blockading the
building in which talks were being held. “People had linked
arms,” Zimmerman says. “The
police had beaten and pepper-sprayed them already, and they
threatened that they were coming
back in five minutes to attack them again.” But the protestors
held their line, linking arms and

crying, blinded by the pepper spray. Burger, Zimmerman and
their friends came along—on
stilts, with clowns, a 40-foot puppet, and a belly dancer. They
went up and down the line,
leading the protesters in song. When the security van returned,
they’d back the giant puppet up
into its way. Somehow, this motley circus diffused the situation.
“They couldn’t bring
themselves to attack this bunch of people who were now singing
songs,” Zimmerman says.
Injecting humor and celebration into a grim situation, he says,
is the essence of a puppet
intervention.8
For all the circus trappings, those most involved in making and
deploying giant puppets will
often insist that they are deeply serious. “Puppets are not cute,
like muppets,” insists Peter Schumann,
the director of Bread and Puppet Theater—the group historically
most responsible for popularizing the
use of papier-mâché figures in political protest in the ‘60s.
“Puppets are effigies and gods and
meaningful creatures”.9 Sometimes, they are literally so: as
with the Maya gods that came to greet
delegates at the WTO meetings in Cancun in September 2003.
Always, they have a certain numinous
quality.
8 From “Puppet Masters: Paper Hand Puppet Intervention
brings its bring of political theater back to Chapel Hill”
(Independent Ontline, 8/8 2001
http://indyweek.com/durham/2001-08-08/ae.html, accessed June
2004.
9 Similar themes recur in many interviews with radical
puppeteers. This is from Mattyboy of the Spiral Q Puppet

Theater
in Philadelphia: “OK, I’m 23. I’ve lost 13 friends to AIDS. This
is wartime, it’s a plague. This is the only way for me to
deal with it. With puppets I create my own mythology. I bring
them back as gods and goddesses” (“The Puppets are
Coming”, Daisy Freid, Philadelphia Citypaper January 16-23,
1997.) One illustrated volume on Bread & Puppet is
actually called Rehearsing with gods: photographs and essays
on the Bread & Puppet Theater (Ronald T. Simon &
Marc Estrin. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Pub.
Co., 2004).
12
http://indyweek.com/durham/2001-08-08/ae.html
(Maya God puppet, 2003, WTO Meetings in Cancun)
Still, if giant puppets, generically, are gods, most are obviously,
foolish, silly, ridiculous gods. It
as if the process of producing and displaying puppets becomes a
way to both seize the power to make
gods, and to make fun of it at the same time. Here one seems to
be striking against a profoundly
anarchist sensibility. Within anarchism, one encounters a
similar impulse at every point where one
approaches the mythic or deeply meaningful. It appears to be
operative in the doctrines of Zerzanites
and similar Primitivists, who go about self-consciously creating
myths (their own version of the Garden
of Eden, the Fall, the coming Apocalypse), that seem to imply
they want to see millions perish in a
worldwide industrial collapse, or that they seek to abolish
agriculture or even language—then bridle at
the suggestion that they really do. It’s clearly present in the

writings of theorists like Peter Lamborn
Wilson, whose meditations on the role of the sacred in
revolutionary action are written under the
persona of an insane Ismaili pederastic poet named Hakim Bey.
It’s even more clearly present among
Pagan anarchist groups like Reclaiming, who since the anti-
nuclear movement of the ‘80s,10 have
specialized in conducting what often seem like extravagant
satires of pagan rituals that they nonetheless
10 Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution:
Non-violent Direct Action in the 1970s and
1980s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
13
insist are real rituals which are really effective—even, that
represent what they see as the deepest
possible spiritual truths about the world.11
Puppets simply push this logic to a kind of extreme. The sacred
here is, ultimately, the sheer
power of creativity, of the imagination—or, perhaps more
exactly, the power to bring the imagination
into reality. This is, after all, the ultimate ideal of all
revolutionary practice, to, as the ‘68 slogan put it,
“give power to the imagination.” But it is also as if the
democratization of the sacred can only be
accomplished through a kind of burlesque. Hence the constant
self-mockery, which, however, is never
meant to genuinely undercut the gravity and importance of
what’s being asserted, but rather, to imply
the ultimate recognition that just because gods are human
creations they are still gods, and that taking

this fact too seriously might prove dangerous.
PART II: SYMBOLIC WARFARE ON THE PART OF THE
POLICE
Anarchists, as I’ve said, avoid designing their strategies around
the media. The same cannot be
said of the police.
It’s obvious that the events of N30 in Seattle came as a surprise
to most in the American
government. The Seattle police were clearly unprepared for the
sophisticated tactics adopted by the
hundreds of affinity groups that surrounded the hotel and, at
least for the first day, effectively shut
down the meetings. The first impulse of many commanders
appears to have been to respect the non-
violence of the actions.12 It was only after 1 PM on the 30th,
after Madeleine Albright’s call to the
Governor from inside the hotel demanding that he tell them to
do whatever they had to do to break the
blockade13 that police began a full-blown assault with tear gas,
pepper spray, and concussion grenades.
Even then many seemed to hesitate, while others, when they did
enter the fray, descended into wild
rampages, attacking and arresting scores of ordinary shoppers in
Seattle’s commercial district. In the
end the governor was forced to call in the National Guard.
While the media pitched in by representing
police actions as a response to Black Bloc actions that began
much later, having to bring in federal
troops was an undeniable spectacular symbolic defeat.
In the immediate aftermath of Seattle law enforcement
officials—on the national and

international level—appear to have begun a concerted effort to
develop a new strategy. The details of
such deliberations are, obviously, not available to the public.
Nonetheless, judging by subsequent
events, it seems that their conclusion (unsurprisingly enough)
was that the Seattle police had not
resorted to violence quickly or efficiently enough. The new
strategy—soon put into practice during
subsequent actions in Washington, Windsor, Philadelphia, Los
Angeles, and Quebec—appears to have
been one of aggressive preemption. The problem was how to
justify this against a movement that was
overwhelmingly non-violent, engaged in actions that for the
most part could not even be defined as
criminal,14 and whose message appeared to have at least
potentially strong public appeal.
11 The Pagan Bloc has been a regular fixture in large-scale
actions since Seattle, and, unlike the Quakers and other
Christian proponents of civil disobedience, was willing,
ultimately, to recognize Black Bloc practice as a form of non-
violence and even to form a tacit alliance with them.
12 Videographers documented police commanders on the first
day reassuring activists that the Seattle police “had never
attacked non-violent protestors and never would.” Within hours
the same commanders had completely reversed course.
13 The best source I’ve found on these events is in Joseph
Boski’s “The Costs of Global Governance: Security
and International Meetings since WTO Seattle.” Paper Presented
at the CYBER Conference, Globalization:
Governance and Inequality, May 31-June 1, 2002, Ventura
California.
14 Blocking a street is in fact technically not even a crime, but

an “infraction” or “violation”: that is, the legal equivalent
of jaywalking, or a parking ticket. If one violates such
ordinances for non-political purposes one can normally expect
to
14
One might phrase it this way. The summits and other events
targeted by the movement—trade
summits, political conventions, IMF meetings—were largely
symbolic events. They were not, for the
most part, venues for formal political decision-making, but
junkets, self-celebratory rituals, and
networking occasions for some of the richest and most powerful
people on earth. The effect of the
actions is normally not to shut down the meetings, but to create
a sense of siege. It might all be done in
such a way as not to physically endanger anyone; the catapults
might (as in Quebec) only be hurling
stuffed animals, but the result is to produce meetings
surrounded by mayhem, in which those attending
have to be escorted about by heavily armed security, the
cocktail parties are cancelled, and the
celebrations, effectively, ruined. Nothing could have been more
effective in shattering the air of
triumphant inevitability that had surrounded such meetings in
the ‘90s. To imagine that the “forces of
order” would not respond aggressively would be naïve indeed.
For them, the non-violence of the
blockaders was simply irrelevant. Or: to be more precise, it was
an issue only because it created
potential problem of public perception. This problem, however,
was quite serious. How was one to
represent protestors as a threat to public safety, justifying

extreme measures, if they did not actually do
anyone physical harm?
Here one should probably let events speak for themselves. If
one looks at what happened during
the months immediately following Seattle, the first things one
observes are a series of preemptive
strikes, always, aimed at threats that (not unlike Iraq’s weapons
of mass destruction) never quite
materialized:
* April 2000, Washington D.C.
Hours before the protests against the IMF and World Bank are
to begin on April 15,
police round up 600 marchers in a preemptive arrest and seize
the protesters’ Convergence
Center. Police Chief Charles Ramsey loudly claims to have
discovered a workshop for
manufacturing molotov cocktails and homemade pepper spray
inside. DC police later admit no
such workshop existed (really they’d found paint thinner used in
art projects and peppers being
used for the manufacture of gazpacho); however, the
convergence center remains closed and
much of the art and many of the puppets inside are
appropriated.
* July 2000, Minneapolis
Days before a scheduled protest against the International
Society of Animal Geneticists,
local police claim that activists had detonated a cyanide bomb
at a local MacDonald’s and
might have their hands on stolen explosives. The next day the
DEA raids a house used by

organizers, drags off the bloodied inhabitants, and appropriates
their computers and boxes full
of outreach materials. Police later admit there never actually
was a cyanide bomb and they had
no reason to believe activists were in possession of explosives.
*August 2000, Philadelphia
Hours before the protests against the Republican Convention are
to begin, police,
claiming to be acting on a tip, seize the warehouse where the
art, banners and puppets used for
the action are being prepared, arresting all of the at least 75
activists discovered inside. Police
Chief John Timoney loudly claims to have discovered C4
explosives and water balloons full of
hydrochloric acid in the building. Police later admit no
explosives or acid were really found; the
arrestees are however not released until well after the actions
are over. All of the puppets,
banners, art and literature to be used in the protest are
systematically destroyed.
receive some kind of ticket, but certainly not to be taken to a
station or spend the night in jail.
15
While it is possible that we are dealing with a remarkable series
of honest mistakes, this does
look an awful lot like a series of attacks on the material
activists were intending to use to get their
message out to the public. Certainly that’s how the activists
interpreted them—especially after

Philadelphia. Organizers planning the parallel protests against
the Democratic Convention in L.A.
managed to obtain a restraining order barring police from
attacking their convergence center, but ever
since, in the weeks before any major mobilization, a key issue is
always how to hide and protecting the
puppets.
By Philadelphia, it became quite clear that the police had
adopted a very self-conscious media
strategy. Their spokesmen would pepper each daily press
conference with wild accusations, well aware
that the crime-desk reporters assigned to cover them (who
usually relied on good working relations
with police for their livelihood) would normally reproduce
anything they said uncritically, and rarely
considered it to merit a story if afterwards the claims turned out
to be false. I was working the phones
for the activist media team during much of this time and can
attest that a large part of what we ended up
doing was coming up with responses to what we came to call
“the lie of the day”. The first day, police
announced that they had seized a van full of poisonous snakes
and reptiles that activists were intending
to release in the city center (they were later forced to admit that
it actually belonged to a pet store and
had nothing to do with the protests). The second day they
claimed that anarchists had splashed acid in
an officer’s face; this sent us scrambling to figure out what
might have actually happened. (They
dropped the story immediately thereafter, but it would appear
that if anything was actually splashed on
an officer, it was probably red paint that was actually directed
at a wall.) On the third day we were
accused of planting “dry ice bombs” throughout the city; this,
again, sent the anarchist media teams

scrambling to try to figure out precisely what dry ice bombs
were (it turned out the police had
apparently found the reference in a copy of the “Anarchist
Cookbook”.) Interestingly, this last story
does not seem to have actually made the news: at this point,
most reporters no longer were willing to
reproduce the most dramatic claims by the authorities. The fact
that the first two claims turned out to be
false, however, along with the claims of acid and explosives in
the puppet warehouse, or that Timoney
appeared to have developed an intentional policy of lying to
them, was never considered itself
newsworthy. Neither, however, was the actual reason for the
actions, that were meant to draw attention
to the prison industrial complex (a phrase that we repeated
endlessly to reporters, but never made it into
a single news report)—presumably, on the grounds that it would
be unethical for reporters to allow
violent protestors to “hijack” the media.
This same period began to see increasingly outlandish accounts
of what had happened at
Seattle. During the WTO protests themselves, I must emphasize,
no one, including the Seattle police,
had claimed anarchists had done anything more militant than
break windows. That was the end of
November 1999. In March 2000, less than three months later, a
story in the Boston Herald reported
that, in the weeks before an upcoming biotech conference,
officers from Seattle had come to brief the
local police on how to deal with ‘Seattle tactics’, such as
attacking police with “chunks of concrete, BB
guns, wrist rockets and large capacity squirt guns loaded with
bleach and urine”.15 In June, New York
Times reporter Nicole Christian, apparently relying on police
sources in Detroit preparing for a trade

protest across the Canadian border in Windsor, claimed that
Seattle demonstrators had “hurled Molotov
cocktails, rocks and excrement at delegates and police officers.”
On this occasion, after the New York
Direct Action Network picketed their offices, the Times ended
up having to run a retraction, admitting
that according to Seattle authorities, no objects had been thrown
at human beings.16 Nonetheless, the
15 “Police prep for protests over biotech conference at Hynes”
by Jose Martinez, Saturday, Boston Herald, March 4 2000.
16 New York Times, June 6, Corrections, pA2. The original
story was significantly entitled, “Detroit Defends
16
account appears to have become canonical. Each time there is a
new mobilization, stories invariably
surface in local newspapers with the same list of “Seattle
tactics”—a list that also appears to have
become enshrined in training manuals distributed to street cops.
Before the Miami Summit of the
Americas in 2003, for example, for example, circulars
distributed to local businessmen and civic
groups listed every one of these “Seattle tactics” as what they
should expect to see on the streets once
anarchists arrived:
Wrist Rockets - larger hunter-type sling shots that they use to
shoot steel ball bearings
or large bolts. A very dangerous and deadly weapon.
Molotov Cocktails - many were thrown in Seattle and Quebec
and caused extensive

damage.
Crow Bars - to smash windows, cars, etc. They also pry up
curbs, then break the cement
into pieces that they can throw at police officers. This was done
extensively in Seattle.
Squirt guns - filled with acid or urine.17
Again, according to local police’s own accounts, none of these
weapons or tactics had been used in
Seattle and no one has produced any evidence they’ve been used
in any subsequent US mobilization.18
In Miami, the predictable result was that, by the time the first
marches began, most of downtown lay
shuttered and abandoned.
Miami, as the first major convergence in the new security
climate after September 11th, might
be said to mark the full culmination of this approach, combining
aggressive disinformation and
preemptive attacks on activists. During the actions, the police
chief—John Timoney again—had
officers pouring out an endless series of accusations of activists
hurling rocks, bottles, urine, and bags
of feces at police. (As usual, despite ubiquitous video cameras
and hundreds of arrests, no one was ever
charged, let alone convicted, of assaulting an officer with any
such substance, and no reporter managed
to produce an image of an activist doing so.) Police strategy
consisted almost entirely of raids and
preemptive attacks on protestors, employing the full arsenal of
old and newly developed “non-lethal”
weaponry: tazers, pepper spray, plastic and rubber and wooden
bullets, bean-bag bullets soaked in
pepper spray, tear gas, and so on—and rules of engagement that

allowed them to pretty much fire at
anyone at will.
Here too, puppets were singled out. In the months before the
summit, the Miami city council
actually attempted to pass a law making the display of puppets
illegal, on the grounds that they could
be used to conceal bombs or other weapons.19 It failed, since it
was patently unconstitutional, but the
Get-Tough Stance” by Nichole Christian, June 4, 2000, A6. The
correction reads: “An article on Sunday about
plans for protests in Detroit and in Windsor, Ontario, against an
inter-American meeting being held in Windsor
through today referred incorrectly to the protests last November
at the World Trade Organization meeting in
Seattle. The Seattle protests were primarily peaceful. The
authorities there said that any objects thrown were
aimed at property, not people. No protestors were accused of
throwing objects, including rocks and Molotov
cocktails, at delegates or police.”
17 This document was transcribed and widely circulated on
activist listserves at the time. According to one story in the
Miami Herald (“Trade protesters mean business, analyst warns”,
Joan Fleischman, October 1, 2003), it derived from
“retired DEA agent Tom Cash, 63, now senior managing
director for Kroll Inc., an international security and business
consulting firm.” Cash in turn claimed to derive his information
from “police intelligence” sources.
18 A number of Molotovs were thrown in Quebec City,
apparently by local people. But francophone Canada has a very
different tradition of militancy.
19 See, for example, “Can Miami Really Ban Giant Puppets”,

Brendan I. Koerner, Slate, Nov. 12, 2003,
http://www.slate.com/id/2091139/.
17
message got out. As a result, the Black Bloc in Miami actually
ended up spending most of their time
and energy on protecting the puppets. Miami also provides a
vivid example of the peculiar personal
animus many police seem to have against large figures made of
papier-mâché. According to one
eyewitness report, after police routed protesters from Seaside
Plaza, forcing them to abandon their
puppets, officers spent the next half hour or so systematically
attacking and destroying them: shooting,
kicking, and ripping the remains; one even putting a giant
puppet in his squad car with the head
sticking out and driving so as to smash it against every sign and
street post available.
(Sun Puppet in Miami FTAA protests, 2003. All the Miami
puppets were ultimately
attacked and destroyed by police.)
rallying the troops
The Boston example is particularly striking because it indicates
that there were elements in the
Seattle police actually training other police in how to deal with
violent tactics that official Seattle
spokesmen were, simultaneously, denying had actually been

employed. While it’s very difficult to
know exactly what’s going on here—even really, to figure out
precisely who these endlessly cited
“police intelligence” sources actually are (we seem to be
entering a murky zone involving information
being collected, concocted, and passed back and forth between a
variety of federal police task forces,
private security agencies, and allied right-wing think tanks, in
such a way that the images become self-
reinforcing and presumably, no one is quite sure what is and
isn’t true)—it is easy to see how one of the
main concerns in the wake of Seattle would be to ensure the
reliability of one’s troops. As commanders
discovered in Seattle, officers used to considering themselves
guardians of public safety frequently
balk, or at least waver, when given orders to make a baton
charge against a collection of non-violent
18
16-year-old white girls. These were, after all, the very sort of
people they are ordinarily expected to
protect. At least some of the imagery, then, appears to be
designed specifically to appeal to the
sensibility of ordinary street cops.
This at least would help to explain the otherwise peculiar
emphasis on bodily fluids: the water-
pistols full of bleach and urine, for example, or claims that
officers were pelted with urine and
excrement. This appears to be very much a police obsession.
Certainly it has next to nothing to do with
anarchist sensibilities. When I’ve asked activists where they
think such stories come from, most

confess themselves deeply puzzled. One or two suggested that,
when defending a besieged squat,
sometimes buckets of human waste is one of the few things one
has to throw. But none have ever heard
of anyone actually transporting human waste to an action in
order to hurl or shoot at police, or could
suggest why anyone might want to. A brick, some point out, is
unlikely to injure an officer in full riot
gear; but it will certainly slow him down. But what would be
the point of shooting urine at him? Yet
images like this reemerge almost every time police attempt to
justify a preemptive strike. In press
conferences, they have been known to actually produce jars of
urine and bags of feces that they claim
to have discovered hidden in backpacks or activist convergence
sites.20
It is hard to see these claims as making sense except within the
peculiar economy of personal
honor typical of any institution that, like the police, operates on
an essentially military ethos. For police
officers, the most legitimate justification for violence is an
assault on one’s personal dignity. To cover
another person in shit and piss is obviously about as powerful
an assault on one’s personal dignity as
one can possibly make. We also seem to be dealing here with a
self-conscious allusion to the famous
‘image of ‘60s protesters “spitting on soldiers in uniform” when
they returned from Vietnam—one
whose mythic power continues to resonate, not just in right-
wing circles, to this day, despite the fact
that there’s little evidence that it ever happened.21 It’s almost
as if someone decided to ratchet the image
up a notch: ‘if spitting on a uniform is such an insult, what
would be even worse?’

That there might have been some kind of coordination in this
effort might be gleaned, too, from
the fact that it was precisely around the time of the democratic
and republican conventions in the
summer of 2000 that mayors and police chiefs around America
began regularly declaring, often in
striking similar terms (and based on no evidence whatsoever)
that anarchists were actually a bunch of
“trust fund babies” who disguised their faces while breaking
things so their wealthy parents wouldn’t
recognize them on TV—an accusation that soon became
received wisdom among right-wing talk show
20 One has to wonder where they actually get these things. A
typical example from my own experience comes from the
World Economic Forum protests in New York in early 2002.
Police at one point attacked a group of protestors who were
part of a crowd waiting to begin a permitted march when they
observed them distributing large plexiglass posters that
were designed to double as shields. Several were dragged off
and arrested. Police later circulated several different stories
for the reasons for the attack but the one they eventually fixed
on was a claim that the arrestees were preparing to attack
the nearby Plaza Hotel; they claimed to have discovered “lead
pipes and jars full of urine” on their persons—though in
this case they did not actually produce the evidence. This is a
case on which I have some first-hand knowledge, since I
knew the arrestees and had been standing a few feet away from
them when it happened. They were, in fact,
undergraduate students from a small New England liberal arts
college who had agreed to have their preparations and
training before the march video-taped by a team of reporters
from ABC Nightline (the reporters, though, unfortunately,
were not actually there at the time). A less likely group of thugs
would have been hard to imagine. Needless to say, they
were startled and confused to discover police were claiming that

they had come to the march equipped with jars of urine.
In such cases, claims that urine or excrement were involved is
considered, by activists, instant and absolute proof that
the police had planted the evidence.
21 There is also no clear evidence that ‘60s protestors spat on
soldiers any more than early feminists actually burned bras.
At least, no one has managed to come up with a contemporary
reference to such an act. The story seems to have
emerged in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, and, as the recent
documentary “Sir! No Sir!” nicely demonstrates, the only
veteran who has publicly claimed this happened to him is likely
to be lying.
19
hosts and law enforcement professionals across America.22 The
obvious message to the officer on the
street appeared to be: ‘do not think of your assignment as
having to protect a bunch of bankers and
politicians who have contempt for you against protestors whose
actual positions on economic issues
you might well agree with; think of it, rather, as a chance to
beat up on those bankers’ and politicians’
children.’ In a sense, one might say the message was perfectly
calibrated to the level of repression
required, since it suggests that while force was appropriate,
deadly force was not: if one were to
actually maim or kill a protestor, one might well be killing the
son or daughter of a senator or CEO,
which would be likely to provoke a scandal.
Police are also apparently regularly warned of that puppets
might be used to conceal bombs or

weapons.23 If questioned on their attitudes towards puppets,
this is how they are likely to respond.
However, it’s hard to imagine this alone could explain the level
of personal vindictiveness witnessed in
Miami and other actions—especially since police hacking
puppets to pieces must have been aware that
there was nothing hidden inside them. The antipathy seems to
run far deeper. Many activists have
speculated on the reasons:
David Corston-Knowles’ opinion: You have to bear in mind
these are people who are
trained to be paranoid. They really do have to ask themselves
whether something so big and
inscrutable might contain explosives, however absurd that might
seem from a non-violent
protester’s perspective. Police view their jobs not just as law
enforcement, but also as
maintaining order. And they take that job very personally. Giant
demonstrations and giant
puppets aren’t orderly. They are about creating something—a
different society, a different way
of looking at things—and creativity is fundamentally at odds
with the status quo.
Daniel Lang’s opinion: Well, one theory is that the cops just
don’t like being upstaged
by someone putting on a bigger show. After all, normally
they’re the spectacle: they’ve got the
blue uniforms, they’ve got the helicopters and horses and rows
of shiny motorcycles. So maybe
they just resent it when someone steals the show by coming up
with something even bigger and
even more visually striking. They want to take out the
competition.

Yvonne Liu’s opinion: It’s because they’re so big. Cops don’t
like things that tower
over them. That’s why they like to be on horses. Plus, puppets
are silly and round and
misshapen. Notice how much cops always have to maintain
straight lines? They stand in
straight lines, they always try to make you stand in straight
lines... I think round misshapen
things somehow offend them.
Max Uhlenbeck’s opinion: Obviously, they hate to be reminded
that they’re puppets
themselves.
22 I have been unable to trace who first publicly announced
such claims, though my memory from the time was that they
were voiced almost simultaneously from Mayor Riordan of Los
Angeles and a Philadelphia Democratic Party official,
during the preparations for those cities’ respective primaries.
The claim was obviously also meant to appeal to
conservative stereotypes of liberals as members of a “cultural
elite”—but it had surprisingly wide influence. As Steven
Shukaitis has pointed out, it has been reproduced even by
sympathetic voices in the NGO community (“Space,
Imagination // Rupture: The Cognitive Architecture of Utopian
Political Thought in the Global Justice Movement”,
University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History 8, 2005.)
While I have not conducted systematic surveys of the
socio-economic background of anarchists in the course of my
own research, I can rely on six years of personal
experience to say that, in fact, “trust fund babies” in the
movement are extremely rare. Any major city is likely to have
one or two, often prominent simply because of their access to
resources, but I myself know at least two or three
anarchists from military families for every one equipped with a
trust fund.

23 One common fear is that wooden dowels used in their
construction could be detached and used as cudgels, or to break
windows
20
I will return to this question shortly.
ANALYSIS I: THE HOLLYWOOD MOVIE PRINCIPLE
(typical police images from Seattle, WTO actions, November
1999)
From the point of view of security officials during this period,
rallying the troops was
presumably the easy part. The stickier problem was what to do
with the fact that the bulk of the
American public refused to see the global justice movement as a
threat. The only survey I am aware of
taken at the time that addressed the question—a Zogby America
poll taken of TV viewers during the
Republican convention in 2000—found that about a third
claimed to feel “pride” when they saw
images of protestors on TV, and less than 16% percent had an
unqualified negative reaction.24 This was
24 Monday, August 21st, “Convention Protests Bring Mixed
Reactions” (Reuters/Zogby). “In a Zogby America survey of
21

especially striking in a poll of television viewers, since TV
coverage during the convention was
unremittingly hostile, treating the events almost exclusively as
potential security threats.
There is, I think, a simple explanation. I would propose to call
it the Hollywood movie
principle. Most Americans, in watching a dramatic
confrontation on TV, effectively ask themselves: “if
this were a Hollywood movie, who would be the good guys?”
Presented with a contest between what
appear to be a collection of idealistic kids who do not actually
injure anyone, and a collection of
heavily armed riot cops protecting trade bureaucrats and
corporate CEOs, the answer is pretty obvious.
Individual maverick cops can be movie heroes. Riot cops never
are. In fact, in Hollywood movies, riot
cops almost never appear; about the closest one can find to them
are the Imperial Storm troopers in Star
Wars, who, like their leader Darth Vader, stand in American
popular culture as one of the most familiar
archetypes of evil. This point is not lost on the anarchists, who
have since A16 taken to regularly
bringing recordings of the Imperial Storm Trooper music from
Star Wars to blast from their ranks as
soon as a line of riot cops starts advancing.
If so, the key problem for the forces of order became: what
would it take to reverse this
perception? How to cast protesters in the role of the villain?
In the immediate aftermath of Seattle the focus was all on
broken windows. As we’ve seen, this
imagery certainly did strike some sort of chord. But in terms of
creating a sense that decisive measures
were required, efforts to make a national issue out of property

destruction came to surprisingly little
effect. In the terms of my analysis this makes perfect sense.
After all, in the moral economy of
Hollywood, property destruction is at best very minor
peccadillo. In fact, if the popularity of the
various Terminators, Lethal Weapons, or Die Hards and the like
reveal anything, it is that most
Americans seem to rather like the idea of property destruction.
If they did not themselves harbor a
certain hidden glee at the idea of someone smashing a branch of
their local bank, or a MacDonald’s
(not to mention police cars, shopping malls, and complex
construction machinery), it’s hard to imagine
why they would so regularly pay money to watch idealistic do-
gooders smashing and blowing them up
for hours on end, always in ways which, through the magic of
the movies—but also like the practice of
the Black Bloc—tend to leave innocent bystanders entirely
unharmed? Certainly, it’s unlikely that there
are significant numbers of Americans who have not, at some
time or another, had a fantasy about
smashing up their bank. In the land of demolition derbies and
monster trucks, Black Bloc anarchists
might be said to be living a hidden aspect of the American
dream.
Obviously, these are just fantasies. Most working class
Americans do not overtly approve of
destroying a Starbucks facade; but, unlike the talking classes,
neither do they see such activity as a
threat to the nation, let alone anything requiring military-style
repression.
ANALYSIS II: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION AND THE
PRIVATAZATION OF DESIRE

One could even say that in a sense, the Black Bloc appear to be
the latest avatars of an
artistic/revolutionary tradition which runs at least through the
Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists
(the latter by far the most popular theorists in American
anarchist bookshops): one which tries to play
off the contradictions of capitalism by turning its own
destructive, leveling forces against it. Capitalist
societies—and America in particular—are, in essence, potlatch
societies. That is, they are built around
1,004 adults, 32.9% said they were proud of the protesters,
while another 31.2% said they were wary. Another 13.2%
said they were sympathetic and 15.7% irritated and 6.9% said
they were unsure.” Considering the almost uniform
hostility of the coverage, the fact that a third of the audience
were nonetheless “proud”, and that less than one in six were
sure their reaction was negative, is quite remarkable.
22
the spectacular destruction of consumer goods.25 They are
societies that imagine themselves as built on
something they call “the economy” which, in turn is imagined
as a nexus between “production” and
“consumption”, endlessly spitting out products and then
destroying them again. Since it is all based on
the principle of infinite expansion of industrial production—the
very principle which the Black Bloc
anarchists, mostly being highly ecologically conscious anti-
capitalists, most vehemently oppose—all
that stuff has to be constantly destroyed to make way for new
products. But this, in turn, means
inculcating a certain passion for or delight in the smashing and

destruction of property that can very
easily slip into a delight in the shattering of those structures of
relation which make capitalism possible.
It is a system that can only renew itself by cultivating a hidden
pleasure at the prospect of its own
destruction.26
Actually, one could well argue that there have been two strains
in twentieth century
artistic/revolutionary thought, and that both have been
entangled in the—endlessly ambivalent—image
of the potlatch. In the 1930s, for example, George Bataille
became fascinated by Marcel Mauss’
description of the spectacular destruction of property in
Kwakiutl potlatches; it ultimately became the
basis for his famous theory of “expenditure”, of the creation of
meaning through destruction, that he
felt was ultimately lacking under modern capitalism. There are
endless ironies here. First of all, what
Bataille and subsequent authors seized on was not, in fact, “the
potlatch” at all, but a small number of
very unusual potlatches held around the turn of the century, at a
time marked both by a rapid decline in
Kwakiutl population, and a minor economic boom had left the
region awash in an unprecedented
number of consumer goods. Ordinary potlatches did not
normally involve the destruction of property at
all; they were simply occasions for aristocrats to lavish wealth
on the community. If the image of
Indians setting fire to thousands of blankets or other consumer
goods proved captivating, in other
words, it was not because it represented some fundamental truth
about human society that consumer
capitalism had forgotten, but rather because it reflected the
ultimate truth of consumer capitalism itself.
In 1937, Bataille teamed up with Roger Callois to found a

reading group called “The College of
Sociology”, that expanded his insights into a general theory of
the revolutionary festival: arguing that it
was only by reclaiming the principle of the sacred, and the
power of myth embodied in popular
festivals that effective revolutionary action would be possible.
Similar ideas were developed in the ‘50s
by Henri Lefebvre, and within the Lettrist International, whose
journal, edited by Guy Debord, was,
significantly, entitled “Potlatch.”27 Here there is of course a
direct line from the Situationists, with their
promulgation of art as a form of revolutionary direct action, to
the punk movement and contemporary
anarchism.
If Black Blocs embody one side of this tradition—capitalism’s
encouragement of a kind of
fascination with consumerist destruction that can, ultimately, be
turned back against capitalism itself—
the Puppets surely represent the other one, the recuperation of
the sacred and unalienated experience in
the collective festival. Radical puppeteers tend to be keenly
aware that their art harkens back to the
wickerwork giants and dragons, Gargantuas and Pantagruels of
Medieval festivals. Even those who
have not themselves read Rabelais or Bakhtin are likely to be
familiar with the notion of the
25 Probably the destruction of productive capacity as well,
which must be endlessly renewed.
26 It might be significant here that the United States’ main
exports to the rest of the world consist of (a) Hollywood action
movies and (b) personal computers. If you think about it, they
form a kind of complementary pair to the brick-through-
window/giant puppet set I’ve been describing—or rather, the

brick/puppet set might be considered a kind of subversive,
desublimated reflection of them—the first involving paeans to
property destruction, the second, the endless ability to
create new, but ephemeral, insubstantial imagery in the place of
older, more permanent forms.
27 Some of this history is retold, and the story brought
forward to Reclaim the Streets and the current carnivals against
capitalism, in an essay by Gavin Grindon called “The Breath of
the Possible”, to appear in Constituent Imagination:
Militant Investigation, Collective Research” (David Graeber and
Stevphen Shukaitis, editors), AK Press, 2006.
23
carnivalesque.28 Convergences are regularly framed as
“carnivals against capitalism” or “festivals of
resistance.” The base-line reference seems to be the late
Medieval world immediately before the
emergence of capitalism, particularly, the period after the Black
Death when the sudden decline in
population had the effect of putting unprecedented amounts of
money into the hands of the laboring
classes. Most of it ended up being poured into popular festivals
of one sort or another, which
themselves began to multiply until they took up large parts of
the calendar year; what nowadays might
be called events of “collective consumption”, celebrations of
carnality and rowdy pleasures and—if
Bakhtin is to be believed—tacit attacks on the very principle of
hierarchy. One might say that the first
wave of capitalism, the Puritan Moment as it’s sometimes
called, had to begin with a concerted assault
on this world, which was condemned by improving landlords

and nascent capitalists as pagan,
immoral, and utterly unconducive to the maintenance of labor
discipline. Of course a movement to
abolish all moments of public festivity could not last forever;
Cromwell’s reign in England is reviled to
this day on the grounds that he outlawed Christmas. More
importantly, once moments of festive,
collective consumption were eliminated, the nascent capitalism
would be left with the obvious problem
of how to sell its products, particularly in light of the need to
constantly expand production. The end
result was what I like to call a process of the privatization of
desire; the creation of endless individual,
familial, or semi-furtive forms of consumption; none of which,
as we are so often reminded, could
really be fully satisfying or else the whole logic of endless
expansion wouldn’t work. While one should
hardly imagine that police strategists are fully cognizant of all
this, the very existence of police is tied
to a political cosmology which sees such forms of collective
consumption as inherently disorderly, and
(much like a Medieval carnival) always brimming with the
possibility of violent insurrection. “Order”
means that citizens should go home and watch TV.29
For police, then, what revolutionaries see as an eruption of the
sacred through a recreation of
the popular festival is a “disorderly assembly”—and exactly the
sort of thing they exist to disperse.
However, since this sense of festival as threatening does not
appear to resonate with large sectors of the
TV audience, the police were forced to, as it were, change the
script. What we’ve seen is a very
calculated campaign of symbolic warfare, an attempt to
eliminate images of colorful floats and puppets,
and substitute images of bombs and hydrochloric acid—the very

substances that, in police fantasies, are
likely to actually lurk beneath the papier-mâché façade.
ANALYSIS PART III: THE LAWS OF WAR
To fully understand the place of puppets, though, I think one
has to grapple with the question of
rules of engagement.
I already touched on this question obliquely earlier when I
suggested that when politicians
informed street cops that protestors were “trust fund babies”,
what they really meant to suggest was
that they could be brutalized, but not maimed or killed, and that
police tactics should be designed
accordingly. From an ethnographer’s perspective, one of the
most puzzling things about direct action is
to understand how these rules are actually negotiated. Certainly,
rules exist. There are lines that cannot
be crossed by the police without risk of major scandal, there are
endless lines that cannot be crossed by
activists. Yet each side acts as if it is playing a game whose
rules it had worked out exclusively through
28 For one good example of such reflections, see “History of
Radical Puppetry”, by the Wise Fool Puppet Collective
(www.zeitgeist.net/wfca/radpup.htm). Wise Fool traces their art
more back to Medieval mystery plays than
festivals but it provides a nice historical perspective.
29 Where they will normally turn on shows which take the
perspective of the same police in charge of getting them off the
streets to begin with; more on this later.
24

http://www.zeitgeist.net/wfca/radpup.htm
its own internal processes, without any consultation with the
other players. This could not ultimately be
the case. I first began thinking about these question after my
experience in Philly during the Republican
Convention in the summer of 2000. I had working mainly with
an activist media team. During the day
of action, however, my job was to go out into the streets with a
cell phone to report back to them what
was actually happening. I ended up accompanying a column of
Black Bloc’ers whose actions were
originally meant as a diversion, to lure police away from street
blockades in a different part of town.
The police appear to have decided not to take the bait, and as a
result, the Bloc briefly had their run of a
wide stretch of downtown Philadelphia:
(based on field notes, Philadelphia, August 1st 2000).
faced with a rapidly moving column of several hundred
anarchists appearing out of
nowhere, small groups of police would often abandon their cars,
which the anarchists would
then proceed to trash and spray-paint. A couple dozen police
cars, one stretch limo, and
numerous official buildings were hit in the course of the next
hour or so. Eventually,
reinforcements, in the form of police bicycle squads, began to
appear and before long there was
a rough balance of forces. What followed at this point could
only be described as an episode of
some kind of nonviolent warfare. A few Black Bloc kids would
try to shut down a bus by
playing with valves in the back; a squad of bike cops would

swoop in and grab a few, cuffing
them and locking their bikes together to create tiny fortresses in
which to hold them. Once, a
large mass of protesters appeared from another direction and the
cops ended up besieged in
their little bike fort, with Black Blockers surrounding them,
screaming insults, throwing paint
bombs above their heads, doing everything but actually
attacking them. On that occasion the
Bloc wasn’t quite able to snatch back their arrested comrades
before police vans with
reinforcements appeared to take them away; elsewhere, there
were rumors of successful
‘unarrests’. The police even suffered a casualty in that
particular confrontation: one overweight
cop, overwhelmed by the tension and stifling heat, collapsed
and had to be carried off or
revived with smelling salts.
It was obvious that both sides had carefully worked out rules of
engagement. Activists
tended to work out their principles carefully in advance, and
while there were certainly
differences, say, between those who adopted classic non-violent
civil disobedience rules (who
had, for example, undergone nonviolence trainings) and the
more militant anarchists I was with,
all agree at least on the need to avoid directly causing harm to
other human beings, or to
damage personal property or owner-operated “mom and pop”
stores. The police of course could
attack protesters more or less at will, but at this point at least,
they seemed to feel they had to do
so in such a way as to be fairly sure that none would be killed
or more than a handful required
hospitalization—which, in the absence of very specific trainings

and technologies, required a
fair amount of constraint.
These basic rules applied throughout; however, over the course
of the day, the tenor of
events was constantly shifting. The Black Bloc confrontations
were tense and angry; other areas
were placid or somber ritual, drum circles or pagan spiral
dances; others, full of music or
ridiculous carnival. The Black Bloc column I was
accompanying, for example, eventually
converged with a series of others until there were almost a
thousand anarchists rampaging
through the center of the city. The District Attorney’s office
was thoroughly paint-bombed.
More police cars were destroyed. However it was all done
quickly on the move and larger and
larger bike squads started followed our columns, splitting the
Bloc and threatening to isolate
smaller groups that could, then, be arrested. We were running
faster and faster, dodging through
25
alleys and parking lots.
Finally, the largest group descended on a plaza where a
permitted rally was being held;
this was assumed to be a safe space. In fact, it wasn’t quite.
Riot police soon began surrounding
the plaza and cutting off routes of escape; it seemed like they
were preparing for a mass arrest.
Such matters usually simply come down to numbers: it takes
something like two officers in the

field for every protester to carry off a mass arrest, probably
three if the victims are trying to
resist, and have some idea of how to go about it (i.e., know
enough to link arms and try to keep
a continuous line.) In this situation the Black Bloc kids could be
expected to know exactly what
to do; the others, who thought they were attending a safe,
permanent event, were mostly entirely
unprepared but could nonetheless be assumed to follow their
lead; on the other hand, they were
trapped, they had no way to receive reinforcements, and the
police were getting a constant flow
of them. The mood was extremely tense. Activists who had
earlier been conducting a teach-in
and small rally against the prison industrial complex milled
about uncomfortably around a giant
poster-board as the Bloc, now reduced to a couple hundred
black figures in bandanas and gas
masks, formed a mini-spokescouncil, then faced off against the
police lines at two different
points where it seemed there might be a break in their lines
(there usually is, when the police
first begin to deploy); but to no avail.
I lingered on the plaza, chatting with a friend, Brad, who was
complaining that he had
lost his backpack and most of his worldly goods in the police
raid on the puppet space that
morning. We munched on apples—none of us had eaten all
day—and watched as four
performance artists on bicycles with papier-mâché goat heads,
carrying a little sign saying
“Goats With A Vote”, began wading into the police lines to
perform an acapella rap song. “You
see what you can do with puppets?” laughed Brad. “No one else
would ever be able to get away

with that.”
The Goats, as it turned out, were just the first wave. They were
followed, ten minutes
later, by a kind of “puppet intervention”. Not with real
puppets—the puppets had all been
destroyed, and the musicians all arrested, at the warehouse
earlier that morning. Instead, the
Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc appeared; led by two
figures on high bicycles, blowing
horns and kazoos, spreading streamers and confetti everywhere;
alongside a large contingent of
‘Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)’, dressed in high camp tuxedos
and evening gowns. There were
probably not more than thirty or forty of them in all but
between them they immediately
managed to change the tenor of the whole event, and to throw
everything into confusion. The
Billionaires started handing fake money to the police (“to thank
them for suppressing dissent.”)
the clowns attacked the Billionaires with squeaky mallets.
Unicycles appeared, and fire
jugglers. In the ensuing confusion, cracks did appear in the
police lines and just about everyone
on the Plaza took advantage to form a wedge and burst out and
to safety, with the Black Bloc
leading the way.
Let’s consider for a moment this idea of nonviolent warfare.
How much of a metaphor is it
really?
One could well make the argument that it is not a metaphor at
all. Clausewitz notwithstanding,
war has never been a pure contest of force with no rules. Just
about all armed conflicts have had very

complex and detailed sets of mutual understandings between the
warring parties. When total war does
occur, its practitioners—Attila, Cortes—tend to be remembered
a thousand years later for this very
reason. There are always rules. As the Israeli military theorist
Martin Van Creveld observes, if nothing
else, in any armed conflict there will normally be:
26
* rules for parlays and truces (this would include, for example,
the sanctity of
negotiators)
* rules for how to surrender and how captives are to be treated
* rules for how to identify and deal with non-combatants
(normally including medics)
* rules for levels and types force allowable between combatants
- which weapons or
tactics are dishonorable or illegal (i.e., even when Hitler and
Stalin were going at it neither tried
to assassinate one another or used chemical weapons)30
Van Creveld emphasizes that such rules are actually necessary
for any effective use of force,
because to maintain an effective army, one needs to maintain a
certain sense of honor and discipline, a
sense of being the good guys. Without the rules, in other words,
it would be impossible to maintain any
real morale or command structure. An army which does not
obey rules degenerates into a marauding
band, and faced with a real army, marauding bands invariably
lose. Van Creveld suggests there are

probably other reasons why there must be rules: for instance,
that violence is so intrinsically frightening
that humans always immediately surround it with regulation....
But one of the most interesting. because
it brings home how much the battlefield is an extension of a
larger political field, is that, without rules,
it is impossible to know when you have won—since ultimately
one needs to have both sides agree on
this question.
Now consider the police. Police certainly see themselves
soldiers of a sort. But insofar as they
see themselves as fighting a war (the “war on crime”), they also
know they are involved in a conflict in
which victory is by definition impossible.
How does this affect the rules of engagement? On one level the
answer is obvious. When it
comes to levels of force, what sort of weapons or tactics one
can use in what circumstances, police
operate under enormous constraints—far more than any army.
Some of these constraints remain tacit.
Others are quite legal and explicit. Certainly, every time a
policeman fires a gun, there must be an
investigation. This is one of the reasons for the endless
elaboration of “non-lethal” weapons—tazers,
plastic bullets, pepper spray and the like—for purposes of
crowd control: they are not freighted with
the same restrictions. On the other hand, when police are
engaged in actions not deemed to involve
potentially lethal force, and that are not meant to lead to a
suspect’s eventual criminal conviction, there
are almost no constraints of what they can do—certainly none
that can be enforced in any way.31
So in the last of Van Creveld’s categories, there are endless

constraints. As for the other rules,
anyone who has been involved in direct action can testify to the
fact that the police systematically
violate all of them. Police regularly engage in practices which,
in war, would be considered outrageous,
or at the very least, utterly dishonorable. Police regularly arrest
mediators. If members of an affinity
group occupy a building, and one does not but instead acts as
police liaison, it might well end up that
the liaison is the only one who is actually arrested. If one does
negotiate an agreement with the police,
they will almost invariably violate it. Police frequently attack or
arrest those they have earlier offered
safe passage. They regularly target medics. If those carrying out
an action in one part of a city try to
create “green zones” or safe spaces in another—in other words,
if they try to set up an area in which
everyone agrees not to break the law or provoke the authorities,
as a way to distinguish combatants and
non-combatants—the police will almost invariably attack the
green zone.
30 Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War, New
York, Free Press, 1991.
31 . See Egon Bitner, Aspects of Police Work. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1990, for a good summary of
police
sociology’s understanding of these constraints and the general
issue of “discretion”. Since most Americans assume that
police are normally engaged in preventing or investigating
crimes, they assume that police conduct is freighted with
endless bureaucratic restraints. In fact, one of the great
discoveries of police sociology is that police spend a
surprisingly
small percentage of their time on criminal matters.

27
Why? There are various reasons for this. Some are obviously
pragmatic: you don’t have to
come to an understanding about how to treat prisoners if you
can arrest protesters, but protesters can’t
arrest you. But in a broader sense such behavior is a means of
refusing any suggestion of equivalency
—the kind that would simply be assumed if fighting another
army in a conventional war. Police
represent the state; the state has a monopoly of the legitimate
use of violence within its borders;
therefore, within that territory, police are by definition
incommensurable with anyone else. This is
essential to understanding what police actually are. Many
sociological studies have pointed out that
maybe 6% of the average police officer’s time is spent on
anything that can even remotely be
considered “fighting crime”. Police are a group of armed,
lower-echelon government administrators,
trained in the scientific application of physical force to aid in
the resolution of administrative problems.
They are bureaucrats with guns, and whether they are guarding
lost children, talking rowdy drunks out
of bars, or supervising free concerts in the park, the one
common feature of the kind of situation to
which they’re assigned is the possibility of having to impose
“non-negotiated solutions backed up by
the potential use of force”.32 The key term here I think, is
“non-negotiable”. Police do not negotiate—at
least when it comes to anything important—because that would
imply equivalency. When they are
forced to negotiate, they pretty much invariably break their

word.33
In other words, police find themselves in a paradoxical position.
Their job is to embody the
state’s monopoly on the use of coercive force; yet their freedom
to employ that force is extremely
limited. The refusal to treat the other side as honorable
opponents, and therefore, as equivalent in any
way, seems to be the only way to maintain the principle of
absolute incommensurability that
representatives of the state must, by definition, maintain. This
would appear to be the reason why, when
restrictions on the use of force by police are removed, the
results are catastrophic. Whenever you see
wars that violate all the rules and involve horrific atrocities
against civilians, they are invariably framed
as “police actions”.
Obviously, none of this actually answers the question of how
rules of engagement are
negotiated. But it does make it clear why it cannot be done
directly. This seems particularly true in
America; in many countries, from Italy to Madagascar, the rules
of civil resistance can sometimes be
worked quite explicitly, so that protest ends up becoming a kind
of game in which the rules are clearly
understood by each side. A good example is the famous tute
bianci or ‘white overalls’ tactics employed
in Italy between 1999 and 2001, where protestors would fortify
themselves with layers of padding and
inflatable inner tubes and the like and rush the barricades, at the
same time pledging to do no harm to
another human being. Participants often admitted to me that the
rules were, for the most part, directly
negotiated: “you can hit us as hard as you like as long as you
hit us on the padding; we won’t hit you

but we’ll try to plow through the barricades; let’s see who
wins!” In fact matters had come to such a
pass that negotiation was expected: before the G8 meetings in
Genoa, when the government opted for a
policy of violent repression, they were forced to bring in the
LAPD to train Italian police in how not to
interact with protesters, or allow either side to be effectively
humanized in the eyes of the other.34 In the
United States, however, police appear to object to such
negotiations on principle—unless, that is,
protestors are actually trying to get arrested, and are willing to
negotiate the terms.
Still, it’s obvious that on some level, negotiation must take
place. What’s more, whatever level
32 Bittner’s phrase. See also Mark Neocleus, The Fabrication of
Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police
Power. London: Pluto Press, 2000.
33 Consider here the fact that “police negotiators” are
generally employed in hostage situations; in other words, in
order to
actually get the police to negotiate, one has to literally be
holding a gun to someone’s head. And in such situations police
can hardly be expected to honor their promises; in fact, they
could well argue they are morally obliged not to.
34 Organizers at Genoa uniformly spoke of their shock during
the actions when suddenly, all the police commanders
whose cell phone numbers they had assembled suddenly refused
to answer calls from activists.
28

that is, it is the real level of power: since, after all, as always in
politics, real power is not the power to
win a contest, but the power to define the rules and stakes, not
the power to win an argument, but the
power to define what the argument is about. Here it is clear that
the power is not all on one side. Years
of moral-political struggle, one might say, have created a
situation in which the police, generally
speaking, have to accept extreme restrictions on their use of
force; this is much more true when dealing
with people defined as “white”, of course, but nonetheless it is
a real limit on their ability to suppress
dissent. The problem for those dedicated to the principle of
direct action is that while these rules of
engagement—particularly the levels of force police are allowed
to get away with—are under constant
renegotiation, this process is expected to take place through
institutions to which anarchists, on
principle, object. Normally, one is expected to employ the
language of “rights” or “police brutality”, to
pursue one’s case though the courts—with the help of liberal
NGOs and sympathetic politicians—but
most of all, one is expected to do battle in “the court of public
opinion.” This of course means through
the corporate media, since “the public” in this context is little
more than its audience. Of course for an
anarchist, the very fact that human beings are organized into a
“public”, into a collection atomized
spectators, is precisely the problem. The solution for them is
self-organization: they wish to see the
public abandon their role as spectators and organize themselves
into an endless and overlapping
collection of directly democratic voluntary associations and
communities. Yet according to the
language normally employed by the media and political classes,

the moment members of the public
begin to do this, the moment they self-organize in any way—
say, by forming labor unions or political
associations—they are no longer the public but “special interest
groups” presumed by definition to be
opposed to the public interest. (This helps explain why even
peaceful protestors at permitted events
expressing views shared by overwhelming majorities of
Americans, are nonetheless never described as
members of “the public.”)
Negotiation, then, is supposed to take place indirectly. Each
side is supposed to make its case
via the media—mainly, through precisely the kind of calculated
symbolic warfare that the police, in
America, are willing to play quite aggressively, but activists,
and particularly anarchists, are
increasingly unwilling to play at all. Anarchists and their allies
are above all trying to circumvent this
game. To some degree they are trying to do so by creating their
own media. To some degree, they are
trying to do so by using the corporate media to convey images
that they know are likely to alienate
most suburban middle class viewers, but that they hope will
galvanize potentially revolutionary
constituencies: oppressed minorities, alienated adolescents, the
working poor. Many Black Bloc
anarchists were quite delighted, after Seattle, to see the media
“sensationalizing” property destruction
for this very reason. To some degree, too, they are trying to
circumvent the game by trying to seize the
power to renegotiate the terms of engagement on the field of
battle. It’s the latter, I think, that the police
see as fundamentally unfair.
29

SO WHY DO COPS HATE PUPPETS?
30
Let’s return, then, to the notion of a “puppet intervention”.
In Philly, on the evening of the 1st, we organized a press
conference in which one of the few
puppetistas who escaped arrest that morning was given center
stage. During the press conference and
subsequent talks with the media, we all emphasized that the
puppet crews were, effectively, our
peacekeepers. One of their main jobs was to intervene to defuse
situations of potential violence. If the
police were really primarily concerned with maintaining public
order, as they maintained, peacekeepers
seemed a strange choice for a preemptive strike.
By now, it should be easy enough to see why police might not
see things this way. This is not to
say we were not right to insist that the attack on the puppet
warehouse was inspired by political
motives, rather than a desire to protect the public.35 It was. As
we’ve seen, it appears, with its wild
claims of acid and explosives, to have been part of a calculated
campaign of symbolic warfare. At the
same time, the manner in which puppets can be used to defuse
situations of potential violence is
completely different than, say, would be employed by protest
marshals. Police tend to appreciate the
presence of marshals, since marshals are organized into a chain

of command that police tend to
immediately to treat as a mere extension of their own—and
which, as a result, often effectively
becomes so. Unlike marshals, puppets cannot be used to convey
orders. Rather, like the clowns and
Billionaires, they aim to transform and redefine situations of
potential conflict.
It might be helpful here to reflect on the nature of the
violence—”force”, if you like—that
police represent. A former LAPD officer writing about the
Rodney King case pointed out that in most
of the occasions in which a citizen is severely beaten by police,
it turns out that the victim was actually
innocent of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars”, he
observed. If you want to cause a policeman to
be violent, the surest way is to challenge their right to define
the situation. This is not something a
burglar is likely to do.36 This of course makes perfect sense if
we remember that police are, essentially,
bureaucrats with guns. Bureaucratic procedures are all about
questions of definition. Or, to be more
precise, they are about the imposition of a narrow range of pre-
established schema to a social reality
that is, usually, infinitely more complex: a crowd can be either
orderly or disorderly; a citizen can be
white, black, Hispanic, or an Asian/ Pacific Islander; a
petitioner is or is not in possession of a valid
photo ID. Such simplistic rubrics can only be maintained in the
absence of dialogue; hence, the
quintessential form of bureaucratic violence is the wielding of
the truncheon when somebody “talks
back”.
I began by saying that this was to be an essay of interpretation.
In fact, it has been just as much

an essay about frustrated interpretation; about the limits of
interpretation. Ultimately, I think this
frustration can be traced back to the very nature of violence—
bureaucratic or otherwise. Violence is in
fact unique among forms of human action in that it holds out the
possibility of affecting the actions of
others about whom one understands nothing. If one wants to
affect another’s actions in any other way,
one must at least have some idea who they think they are, what
they want, what they think is going on.
Interpretation is required, and that requires a certain degree of
imaginative identification. Hit someone
over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant.
Obviously, two parties locked in an equal
contest of violence would usually do well to get inside each
other’s heads, but when access to violence
becomes extremely unequal, the need vanishes. This is typically
the case in situations of structural
violence: of systemic inequality that is ultimately backed up by
the threat of force. Structural violence
35 I have yet to hear of a passing pedestrian or other member
of “the public” who was injured by even the rowdiest
anarchist tactics; in any large-scale action, large numbers of
passing pedestrians are likely to end up gassed, injured, or
arrested by police.
36 Marc Cooper, “Dum Da Dum-Dum”. Village Voice April
16, 1991, pp.28-33. I have developed these themes in much
greater detail elsewhere: see my Malinowski lecture of 2006,
“Beyond Power/Knowledge: A Theory of the Relation
Between Power, Ignorance and Stupidity.”
31

always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of
imagination. Gender is actually a telling
example here. Women almost everywhere know a great deal
about men’s work, men’s lives, and male
experience; men are almost always not only ignorant about
women’s lives, they often react with
indignation at the idea they should even try to imagine what
being a woman might be like. The same is
typically the case in most relations of clear subordination:
masters and servants, employers and
employees, rich and poor. The victims of structural violence
invariably end up spending a great deal of
time imagining what it is like for those who benefit from it; the
opposite rarely occurs. One
concomitant is that the victims often end up identifying with,
and caring about, the beneficiaries of
structural violence—which, next to the violence itself, is
probably one of the most powerful forces
guaranteeing the perpetuation of systems of inequality. Another
is that violence, as we’ve seen, allows
the possibility of cutting through the subtleties of constant
mutual interpretation on which ordinary
human relations are based.
The details of this play of imagination against structural
violence are endlessly complicated and
this is hardly the place to work out the full theoretical
ramifications. For now I only want to emphasize
two crucial points.
The first is that the line of riot police is precisely the point
where structural violence turns into
the real thing. Therefore, it functions as a kind of wall against
imaginative identification. Nonviolence
training actually focuses on trying to break the barrier and teach

activists how to constantly bear in
mind what the cops are likely to be thinking, but even here, we
are usually dealing with thought on its
most elemental, animalistic level (“a policeman will panic if he
feels he is cornered”, “never do
anything that he might interpret as reaching towards the gun”...)
For most anarchists, the existence of
the imaginative wall is intensely frustrating, because anarchist
morality is based on a moral imperative
towards imaginative identification.37 On many occasions, I
have seen legal trainers having to remind
activists that, whatever their inclinations, one should not engage
in conversation with one’s arresting
officer, no matter how apparently open or interested they seem
to be, because chances are they are
simply fishing for information which will help in a conviction.
And during the actions themselves, one
tends to hear endless dismayed speculation about what the cops
must be thinking as they truncheon or
tear gas nonviolent citizens; conversations which make clear,
above all else, that really, no one has the
slightest idea. But this is precisely the police role. The point of
military-style discipline is to make any
individual officer’s actual feelings or opinions not just
impenetrable, but entirely irrelevant.
Obviously no wall is completely impenetrable. Given sufficient
pressure, any will eventually
begin to crumble. Most of those who help to organize mass
actions are keenly aware that historically,
when anarchists actually win, when civil resistance campaigns
of any sort topple governments, it is
usually at the point when the police refuse to fire on them. This
is one reason why the image of police
officers crying behind their gasmasks in Seattle was so
important to them. Security officials seem to

understand this principle as well. That’s why they spent so
much energy, in the months after Seattle, in
trying to rally their troops.
So this is the first point: the imaginative wall.
The second point is that this juxtaposition of imagination and
violence reflects a much larger
conflict between two principles of political action. One might
even say, between two conceptions of
political reality. The first—call it a “political ontology of
violence”—assumes that the ultimate reality
is one of forces, with “force” here largely a euphemism for
various technologies of physical coercion.
To be a “realist” in international relations, for example, has
nothing to do with recognizing material
realities—in fact, it is all about attributing “interests” to
imaginary entities known as “nations”—but
37 Peter Kropotkin, still probably the most famous anarchist
thinker to have developed an explicit ethical theory, argued
that all morality is founded on the imagination. Most
contemporary anarchists would appear to follow him on this, at
least implicitly.
32
about willingness to accept the realities of violence. Nation-
states are real because they can kill you.
Violence here really is what defines situations. The other could
be described as a political ontology of
the imagination. It’s not so much a matter of giving “power to
the imagination” as in recognizing that
the imagination is the source of power in the first place (and

here we might take note of the fact that
next to the Situationists, the French theorist one will encounter
the most often in anarchist bookstores is
Cornelius Castoriadis).38 This is why imaginative powers are
seen as suffused with the sacred. What
anarchists regularly try to do is to level a systematic and
continual challenge to the right of the police,
and the authorities in general, to define the situation. They do it
by proposing endless alternative
frameworks—or, more precisely, by insisting on the power to
switch frameworks whenever they like.
Puppets are the very embodiment of this power.
What this means in the streets is that activists are trying to
effectively collapse the political,
negotiating process into the structure of the action itself. To
win the contest, as it were, by continually
changing the definition of what is the field, what are the rules,
what are the stakes—and to do so on the
field itself.39 A situation that is sort of like nonviolent warfare
becomes a situation that is sort of like a
circus, or a theatrical performance, or a religious ritual, and
might equally well slip back at any time.
Of course from the point of view of the police, this is simply
cheating. Protesters who alternate
between throwing paint balls over their heads, and breaking into
song-and-dance numbers, are not
fighting fair. But of course as we’ve seen the police aren’t
fighting fair either. They systematically
violate all the laws of combat. They systematically violate
agreements. They have to, as a matter of
principle, since to do otherwise would be to admit the existence
of a situation of dual power; it would
be to deny the absolute incommensurability of the state.
In a way, what we are confronting here is the familiar paradox

of constituent power. As various
German and Italian theorists are fond of reminding us, since no
system can create itself (i.e., any God
capable of instituting a moral order cannot be bound by that
morality...), any legal/political order can
only be created by some force to which that legality does not
apply.40 In modern Euro-American
history, this has meant that the legitimacy of constitutions
ultimately harkens back to some kind of
popular revolution: at precisely the point, in my terms, where
the politics of force does meet the politics
of imagination. Now of course revolution is precisely what the
people with the puppets feel they are
ultimately about—even if they are trying to do so with an
absolute minimum of actual violence. But it
seems to me that what really provokes the most violent
reactions on the part of the forces of order is
precisely the attempt to make constituent power—the power of
popular imagination to create new
institutional forms—present not just in brief flashes, but
continually. To permanently challenge the
38 Particularly Castoriadis’ “Imaginary Institution of
Society”. Again, this is a theme that I can only fully develop
elsewhere, but one could describe the history of left-wing
thought since the end of the eighteenth century as revolving
around the assumption that creativity and imagination were the
fundamental ontological principles. This is obvious in
the case of Romanticism, but equally true of Marx—who
insisted in his famous comparison of Architects and Bees that
it was precisely the role of imagination in production that made
humans different from animals. Marx, in turn, was
elaborating on perspectives already current in the worker’s
movement of his day. This helps explain, I think, the
notorious affinity that avant garde artists have always felt with
revolutionary politics. Rightwing thought has always

tended to accuse the Left of naivete in refusing to take account
of the importance of the “means of destruction”, arguing
that ignoring the fundamental role of violence in defining
human relations can only end up producing pernicious effects.
39 One might draw an analogy here to the collapse of levels
typical of consensus decision-making. One way to think of
consensus process is an attempt to merge the process of
deliberation with the process of enforcement. If one does not
have a separate mechanism of coercion that can force a minority
to comply with a majority decision, majority voting is
clearly unadvisable—the process of finding consensus is meant
to produce outcomes that do not need a separate
mechanism of enforcement because compliance has already been
guaranteed within the process of decision-making
itself.
40 I am referring here of course to Karl Schmitt, Walter
Benjamin, and more recently, to Toni Negri and Giorgio
Agamben.
33
authorities’ ability to define the situation. The insistence that
the rules of engagement, as it were, can be
constantly renegotiated on the field of battle; that you can
constantly change the narrative in the middle
of the story; is in this light, just one aspect of a much larger
phenomenon. It also explains why
anarchists hate to think of themselves as having to rely in any
way on the good offices of even well-
meaning corporate media or liberal NGO groups, even, the
frequent hostility to would-be benefactors,
who nonetheless demand, as a prerequisite to their help, the

right to place anarchists within their own
pre-set narrative frameworks. Direct action is, by definition,
unmediated. It is about cutting through all
such frameworks and bringing the power of definition into the
streets. Obviously, under ordinary
conditions—that is, outside of those magical moments when the
police actually do refuse to fire—there
is only a very limited degree to which one can actually do this.
In the meantime, moral-political
struggle in the “courts of public opinion”–as well of the courts
of law—would seem unavoidable. Some
anarchists deny this. Others grudgingly accept it. All cling to
direct action as the ultimate ideal.
This I think makes it easier to see why giant puppets, that are so
extraordinarily creative but at
the same time so intentionally ephemeral, that make a mockery
of the very idea of the eternal verities
that monuments are meant to represent, can so easily become
the symbol of this attempt to seize the
power of social creativity41, the power to recreate and redefine
institutions. Why, as a result, they can
end up standing in for everything—the new forms of
organization, the emphasis on democratic process
—that standard media portrayals of the movement make to
disappear. They embody the permanence of
revolution. From the perspective of the “forces of order”, this is
precisely what makes them both
ridiculous, and somehow demonic. From the perspective of
many anarchists, this is precisely what
makes them both ridiculous, and somehow divine.42
SOME VERY TENUOUS CONCLUSIONS
This essay thus ends where it should perhaps have begun, with
the need to thoroughly rethink

the idea of “revolution”. While most of those engaged with the
politics of direct action think of
themselves as, in some sense, revolutionaries, few, at this point,
are operating within the classic
revolutionary framework where revolutionary organizing is
designed to build towards a violent,
apocalyptic confrontation with the state. Even fewer see
revolution as a matter of seizing state power
and transforming society through its mechanisms. On the other
hand, neither are they simply interested
in a strategy of “engaged withdrawal” (as in Virno’s
“revolutionary exodus”), and the founding of new,
autonomous communities.43 . In a way, one might say the
politics of direct action, by trying to create
alternative forms of organization in the very teeth of state
power, means to explore a middle ground
precisely between these two alternatives. Anyway, we are
dealing with a new synthesis that, I think, is
not yet entirely worked out.
If nothing else, some of the theoretical frameworks proposed in
this essay provide an interesting
vantage on the current historical moment. Consider here the
notion of “the war on terror”. Many have
spoken with some dismay of the notion of permanent war that
seems to be Simplied. In fact, while the
twentieth century could be described as one of permanent war—
almost the entire period between 1914
41 The T-Shirt of the Arts in Action collective that actually
makes many of these puppets features a quote from Brecht: “we
see art not as a mirror to hold up to reality but as a hammer
with which to shape it”.
42 It is interesting to observe that there is a longstanding
tradition in American thought that sees creativity as inherently

anti-social, and therefore, demonic. It emerges particularly
strongly in racial ideologies. This however is properly the
subject for another essay.
43 See Radical thought in Italy: a potential politics (Paolo
Virno and Michael Hardt, editors). Minneapolis, MN,
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
34
and 1991 was spent either fighting or preparing for world wars
of one kind or another—it is not at all
clear whether the twenty-first could be described in the same
terms. It might be better to say that what
the United States is attempting to impose on the world is not
really a war at all. It has of course
become a truism that as nuclear weapons proliferate, declared
wars between states no longer occur, and
all conflicts come to be framed as “police actions”. Still, it is
also critical to bear in mind that police
actions have their own, very distinctive, qualities. Police see
themselves as engaged in a war largely
without rules, against an opponent without honor, towards
whom one is therefore not obliged to act
honorably, but in which victory is ultimately impossible.
States have a strong tendency to define their relation to their
people in terms of an unwinnable
war of some sort or another. The American state has been one of
the most flagrant in this regard: in
recent decades we have seen a war on poverty degenerate into a
war on crime, then a war on drugs (the
first to be extended internationally), and finally, now, a war on
terror. But as this sequence makes clear,

the latter is not really a war at all but an attempt to extend this
same, internal logic to the entire globe. It
is an attempt to declare a kind of diffuse global police state. In
the final analysis, I suspect the panic
reaction on the part of the state was really more a reaction to
the success of an ongoing, if subtle, global
anti-capitalist uprising than to the threat of Osama bin Laden—
though the latter certainly provided the
ultimate convenient excuse—it’s just that on a global scale as
well, moral-political struggle has created
rules of engagement which make it very difficult for the U.S. to
strike out directly at those against
whom it would most like to strike out.44
To put it somewhat glibly: just as the structure of violence most
appropriate for a political
ontology based in the imagination is revolution, so is the
structure of imagination most appropriate for
a political ontology based in violence, precisely, terror. One
might add that the Bushes and Bin Ladens
are working quite in tandem in this regard (it is significant, I
think, that if Al Qaida does harbor some
gigantic utopian vision—a reunification of the old Islamic
Indian Ocean Diaspora? a restoration of the
Caliphate?—they haven’t told us much about it.)
Still, this is no doubt a bit simplistic. To understand the
American regime as a global structure,
and at the same time to understand its contradictions, I think
one must return to the cosmological role
of the police in American culture. It is a peculiar characteristic
of life in the United States that most
American citizens, who over the course of the day can normally
be expected to try to avoid any
circumstance that might lead them to have to deal with police or
police affairs, can also normally be

expected to go home and spend hours watching dramas that
invite them to see the world from a
policeman’s point of view. This was not always so. It’s actually
quite difficult to identify an American
movie from before the 1960s where a policeman was a
sympathetic hero. Over the course of the ‘60s,
however, police abruptly took the place previously held by
cowboys in American entertainment.45 The
timing seems hardly insignificant. Neither does the fact that by
now, cinematic and TV images of
American police are being relentlessly exported to every corner
of the world, at the same time as their
flesh and blood equivalents. What I would emphasize here
though is that both are characterized by an
extra-legal impunity which, paradoxically, makes them able to
embody a kind of constituent power
turned against itself. The Hollywood cop, like the cowboy, is a
lone maverick who breaks all the rules
(this is permissible, even necessary, since he is always dealing
with dishonorable opponents). In fact, it
is usually precisely the maverick cop who engages in the
endless property destruction that provides so
44 The fact that almost all the principle figures involved in the
repression of protest in America ended up as “security
consultants” in Baghdad after the American conquest of Iraq
seems rather telling here. Of course, they rapidly
discovered their usual tactics were not particularly effective
against opponents who really were violent, capable, for
example, of dealing with IMF and World Bank officials by
actually blowing them up.
45 Clint Eastwood, of course, in his shift from Spaghetti
Western to Dirty Harry, was the very avatar of the
transformation.
The moment cop movies rose to prominence, cowboy movies

effectively disappeared.
35
much of the pleasure of Hollywood action films. In other words,
police can be heroes in such movies
largely because they are the only figures who can systematically
ignore the law. It is constituent power
turned on itself of course because cops, on screen or in reality,
are not trying to create (or constitute)
anything. They are simply maintaining the status quo.
In one sense, this is the most clever ideological displacement of
all—the perfect complement to
the aforementioned privatization of (consumer) desire. Insofar
as the popular festival endures, it has
become pure spectacle, with the role of Master of the Potlatch
granted to the very figure who, in real
life, is in charge of ensuring that any actual outbreaks of
popular festive behavior are forcibly
suppressed.
Like any ideological formula, however, this one is
extraordinarily unstable, riddled with
contradictions—as the initial difficulties of the US police in
suppressing the globalization movement so
vividly attest. It seems to me it is best seen as a way of
managing a situation of extreme alienation and
insecurity that itself can only be maintained by systematic
coercion. Faced with anything that remotely
resembles creative, non-alienated, experience, it tends to look
as ridiculous as a deodorant commercial
during a time of national disaster. But then, I am an anarchist.
The anarchist problem remains how to

bring that sort of experience, and the imaginative power that
lies behind it, into the daily lives of those
outside the small autonomous bubbles they have already
created. This is a continual problem; but there
seems to me every reason to believe that, were it possible,
power of the police cosmology, and with it,
the power of the police themselves, would simply melt away.
Uploaded 5 Apr 2007, reformatted 15 Mar 2009
Source and permision: http://balkansnet.org/zcl/puppets.html
36
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'Senseless' violence: Making sense of murder
Author(s): Waverly Duck
Source: Ethnography, Vol. 10, No. 4, SPECIAL DOUBLE
ISSUE (PART ONE) – URBAN
ETHNOGRAPHY: ITS TRADITIONS AND ITS FUTURE
(December 2009), pp. 417-434
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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ARTICLE
Ethrto graphy
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http://eth.sagepub.com Vol 10(4): 417^434[DOI:
10.1177/1466138109346989]
Copyright © The Author(s), 2009.
'Senseless' violence
Making sense of murder
Waverly Duck
Yale University, USA

ABSTRACT« This article, based on an ethnographic study
conducted
over a three-year period in an impoverished, predominately
African
American and Latino neighborhood in the northeastern US,
describes how
a drug gang narrative was created by the police and prosecutors
to
explain a series of unsolved murders. The narrative that the
authorities
constructed retroactively tied these unrelated crimes together by
connecting them to neighborhood drug dealers whom they
construed as a
gang. Through this narrative, the authorities were able to
prosecute all
the cases in sequence and deploy a series of defendants and
witnesses to
win convictions - even in cases where they had little evidence.
Murders
like these are typically described by law enforcement agencies
and the
media as 'senseless' acts of 'random violence'. When examined
with

ethnographic detail, however, these acts of murder turn out to
have
motives that community members understand but have nothing
to do
with gang activity.
KEY WORDS* social construction of gangs, murder,
orderliness,
community policing, gangs, sensemaking
This article presents an ethnographic study of the local order
informing a
series of murders and analyzes how a drug gang narrative
created by law
enforcement authorities obscured the sense made of those
murders by
members of the local community. This study was conducted in
an impov
2016 15:35:27 UTC
418 Ethnography 10(4)
erished, predominately African American and Latino
neighborhood located
in a northeastern city I call Bristol Hill.1

During my fieldwork, I tried to learn and understand the local
practices
of staying safe in a neighborhood where drug dealing and gun
use are a
part of everyday life. Both media accounts and police records
reported that
this community was controlled by drug gangs. Yet, when I
questioned the
residents and some of the dealers, no one could produce an
account about
gangs. The accounts which were provided were accounts about
drug
dealing and murders related to drug dealing activity. In this
community,
four murders had gone unsolved for over four years, and an
additional
murder would take place before all of them would be solved.
Only when
a prominent outsider was killed did outside law enforcement
agencies and
the media begin to pay attention. Police and prosecutors
constructed a
drug gang narrative in order to connect these crimes and the
suspects so
that they could be efficiently prosecuted. Despite the fact that
the individ
ual murders seemed to be unrelated, the creation of a drug gang
narrative
by authorities as a tactic served the purpose of bringing

resources into a
community to address murders local law enforcement agencies
were unable
to address.
The five unsolved murders that took place over a four-year
period were
prosecuted in three separate cases in different court systems.
According to
the local media, police records and prosecutor's indictments, all
of the
murders were gang related, committed by drug dealing gang
members. To
solve these murders, some alleged eyewitnesses (who
themselves had
pending charges) were offered plea deals, some testified in
return for lesser
sentences, some received continued established government
subsidies
(housing and public assistance), and some witnesses' probation
and parole
violations went unreported. Significantly, the story that was
produced in
the context of the courtroom often ran in contradiction with
what the locals
understood to be the 'truth', which is what kept most of the

inhabitants
relatively safe from harm. Adding further confusion between the
commu
nity narrative and legal narrative, the local newspaper produced
a hybrid
account. This media story was initially informed by police
records followed
up by interviews with relatives of victims within the context of
a pending
legal case. The legal tactics and recordkeeping by the justice
system and the
reporting by the media facilitated the social construction of a
gang, in a
place where a gang did not exist. A total of six individuals were
arrested
and prosecuted. The accused and the cooperating witnesses were
all born
or lived in the neighborhood; some were involved in drug
dealing along
what I call Lyford Street. Residents of the neighborhood and
local police
were certain that there were no gangs operating in the area. This
field study
examines residents' accounts of how murder happens in this
community,
providing them with some predictability and enabling them to
remain safe

2016 15:35:27 UTC
Duck a 'Senseless'violence 419
in dangerous situations, and shows how that understanding is
blurred by
police and media accounts.
Both classic and contemporary ethnographic studies have
focused on
street gangs, exploring their social meanings, recruitment
processes, and
interactional order (Garot, 2007; Horowitz, 1987; Klein, 1995;
Moore,
1978; Moore et al., 1985; Short, 1974; Thrasher, 1927, 1936;
Venkatesh,
1997; Yablonsky, 1959). Surprisingly few studies have
critically examined
the process through which law enforcement authorities create a
gang myth
as an aid to prosecution in a community where gangs do not
exist.2
Misconstruing crimes for which there are clear individual
motives as

gang violence leads to their description by law enforcement
authorities and
the media as 'senseless' acts of 'random violence'. The crimes of
violence
associated with drug dealing come to be identified as gang
related, even in
places where gangs do not exist. When examined in detail and
in context,
however, these acts of murder turn out to be closely tied to local
orders of
expectation and practice. They are far from 'senseless' and
'random'
- so
much so that people in the local community can usually avoid
becoming
targets and can predict who are likely to become victims. By
probing resi
dents' local knowledge and viewpoints, we can come to see
these crimes in
terms of interactional, learned, commonly recognized,
temporally ordered,
sanctioned, and rewarded practices that are contextual and
situationally
understood (Garfinkel and Rawls, 2006, 2008). The
neighborhood context
of understood interactional practices is required in order to
make sense of
these murders.

Field research in this neighborhood points to a serious
discrepancy
between the actual events as they occurred and the official
account focusing
on gangs, that was constructed retrospectively. This local
community has
an order of its own that gives meaning to these events.
Participants in social
arenas construct coherence in their daily actions and routines
through
orderly social processes, which in turn comprise the foundation
of their
assumptions about the world. Ethnographic knowledge about the
orderly
properties of different types of social activities within the
locality is essen
tial to understanding how and why a particular event, or a series
of events
such as these five murders, happens in a specific place and time.
People who
live in this community consistently disputed the gang narrative
and articu
lated their own locally embedded accounts that focused on
relationships
between individuals and on the local code of expectations. They
pointed
toward motives and reasons that everyone could understand. Not
once did
they describe the violence as random or senseless.

The murders in Bristol Hill were committed for many different
reasons,
but they all made sense to residents. The police practice of
linking unsolved
murder cases to each other through a gang narrative and
explaining
drug-related activity as gang activity flew in the face of the
sense that local
2016 15:35:27 UTC
residents made of each murder. These five murders were
committed for a
variety of reasons, including self-defense, revenge, economic
gain, and the
desire to avoid long prison stays. The degree to which
community members
cooperated with police in solving these cases varies. If a murder
is viewed
by local residents as a justifiable homicide, cooperation is
extremely
unlikely, especially when those people in the know have nothing
to gain.
Cooperation is unlikely in many urban communities where a
police presence

is inconsistent at best and the risk of retaliation is high. But the
fact that
community members often view the act as justifiable must be
acknowl
edged. In cases where the murder is viewed as totally
unjustified, individu
als in the community are more likely to cooperate. Cooperation
with a
murder investigation in this neighborhood is predictable,
depending on how
justified the residents feel the murder was, consideration of the
assailants'
motivation and the informer's concern for their personal safety,
and the
likelihood that the police will be able to solve the case.
When murder, which is relatively rare in most communities, is
interpreted
by people from outside the community in which it has occurred,
they tend
to project their view of it as senseless and random. The notion
that deadly
violence is gang related is commonly put forward by outsiders
who regard
the inner-city neighborhood as pathological. While murder
without any
leads seems random and senseless, the gang narrative serves as
a tool to
explain the unexplainable, especially if this narrative goes
unchallenged in

the justice system. In an area that is economically depressed,
heavily im
poverished, drug infested, and politically marginalized, a gang
narrative
becomes very believable in this dire context. The projection of
this point of
view by law enforcement, prosecutors, the media and social
commentators
conflicts with the views of community members who understand
and have
observed what is for them the real context of the crimes. Using
the outsiders'
way of making sense of these murders undermines the informed
understand
ing of the locals. Outsiders who produce an account specific to
their
enterprise
-
police records, court indictments, and newspaper stories
-
usually present events as instances of law breaking, as disorder
intruding
on order. But, in the local order of day-to-day social life,
murder and
violence are often predictable and based on reasons that people
understand.

In these five murders, although local residents, the drug dealers
them
selves, and even some local police officers did not consider
those accused
to be members of a gang, the gang narrative nevertheless
organized the
prosecutions, and the situationally informed motivations behind
the
murders were not explored.
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Duck m 'Senseless'violence 421
Studying the community
I conducted this ethnographic study during three years of
participant obser
vation in the neighborhood. Initially, I observed how the
neighborhood
dealers sold drugs, signaled customers, stored their stash, and
collected
money. I also focused on the dealers' interactions with local
residents and
with law enforcement. Most of my ethnographic observations
focused on

a block where drug dealing took place on a regular basis and
several of the
unsolved murders had taken place. The study aimed to gain an
understand
ing of the local order of the community and of how residents
were making
sense of this neighborhood space. Drug dealing on this
particular street has
been ongoing since the mid-1980s. Lyford Street is a short
block (less than
400 feet long) that is tightly packed with two-storey houses.
The city of
Bristol Hill is home to approximately 43,000 people, most of
whom are
African American (75%) and Latino (18%).
My initial observations began in the fall of 2005, a year and a
half after
the last murder. In addition to observing activities on the block,
I conducted
interviews with relatives of the murder victims, police and
prosecutors, and
defense attorneys; I attended the murder trials and interviewed
the dealers.
Over the three years, my role changed as I volunteered as a
community
organizer and in a day camp for neighborhood children.
The possibility of an untimely death was evident in the accounts
Lyford
residents produced about their personal safety. Neighborhood
informants

explained that the dangers in the neighborhood were ever
present, but they
took steps so that they would not become victims of gun
violence; they
avoided dealers, stayed close to home, and limited their
interactions with
everyone who was known to be violent, including residents who
were not
drug dealers. Strangely enough, I did not fear for my safety. I
did not present
myself as a threat. I believed that if I took precautions very
similar to the
locals I could go unharmed. I did run the risk of being mistaken,
most
commonly for a social worker. I conducted most of my
interviews during
daylight hours. I dressed in tan khakis and buttoned shirt. I kept
my
distance from the dealers and made sure friends knew my
whereabouts
during evening interviews. Finally, there was a 10- to 15-year
age differ
ence between myself and the street dealers. I personally did not
fear them
because I perceived them as children and teenagers.
This community was knit together by interconnected familial
relation
ships that grew out of a mass migration of Southerners to this

northeastern
city between the 1940s and the late 1970s. The neighborhood is
close knit;
most of the children went to the same elementary school, middle
school,
and high school. By my rough estimates, at least a quarter of the
residents
are related as distant cousins and through intermarriage and
parenthood of
2016 15:35:27 UTC
children. Most of the residents are familiar with one another;
many know
one another well.
In this ethnographic analysis, I tell the stories of these murders
as they
were told to me, presenting the overlapping accounts of local
residents as
they understood the motives behind murder in their
neighborhood. One of
the main informants for this study is a former drug dealer who
became
involved in the drug trade at the age of eight; he was influential
in helping
me interpret my field notes and observations. Most of the other

informants
also grew up in the neighborhood and were in a position to
observe and
interpret the events around these murders.
Lyford Street is situated just off a major expressway, flanked by
highway
entrances and exits. This location facilitates drug dealing. The
so-called
drug corners in the neighborhood were, and still are, located in
such a way
that drug purchasers can get off the expressway, buy their drugs
at a street
corner, and return to the expressway quickly and easily. The
block is popu
lated predominantly by low-income households. In 2004, the
average home
value in the vicinity of Lyford Street was about $17,000, and
subsidized
three-bedroom housing units rented for $400 a month. In Bristol
Hill, about
two-fifths of the homes are publicly owned and rented as
subsidized
housing; two-fifths are owned by individuals and companies and
rented to
tenants; and one-fifth are owner occupied.
The account that follows presents these five unsolved murders
as my

informants told me about them, along with contextual
information. The
narratives that I present here, which articulate local
perspectives on these
events, challenge the gang narrative put forward by the
prosecutors in the
criminal cases. By examining the circumstances of each murder,
we come
to understand reasons for these murders that rest on situated
meanings and
a locally understood order. Without this context, these
situations appear to
be senseless, random acts of violence. Treating them as law
enforcement
did obscures neighborhood people's shared understanding of
how violence
works in this place. Expert local knowledge of this space
provides a level
of predictability for community residents.
The breakup: A son kills his mother's boyfriend
The construction of the story of the so-called Lyford Street
Gang began
with the murder of a prominent outsider whom I call Leslie.
This 43

year-old man was killed by the son of his girlfriend, a 16-year-
old called
Blake, in an altercation involving his relationship with the boy's
mother.
Although this situation was known to local residents, the police
created the
narrative of the Lyford Street Gang to account for his murder.
The previous day, the 35-year-old Donna had attempted to end
her two
year relationship with Leslie. The argument between Leslie and
Donna was
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Duck m 'Senseless' violence 423
overheard by their neighbors, who reported the verbal
confrontation to
police. Donna also complained to her son that she wanted to
break up with
Leslie. The shooting took place around 9:00 the next evening.
That day,
Leslie was seen knocking on the door of the home Donna shared
with Blake

and his older sister. Later, his body was found in front of his
car a few feet
away from Donna's house. Prior to his death, Leslie had left
Donna a letter
asking her to reconcile, which she turned over to the police
afterwards.
According to Blake's sister, her younger brother viewed himself
as the man
of the house and as the protector of his mother and sister.
Donna was interested in pursuing a relationship with another
man. She
was sexually linked to an elected official with influence over
Blake's initial
hearing when he was arrested for Leslie's murder. Even though
this official
knew Blake and was having a sexual relationship with his
mother, he used
his influence against Blake. Documentation of this affair and
DNA evidence
linking Donna to both Leslie and the elected official were
entered into
evidence; a pair of Donna's underwear was found in Leslie's car
after his
death that carried DNA from Donna herself, Leslie, and the
elected official.
But her relationship with the public official was never discussed
during the
trial by either the defense or the prosecution.

As I interviewed a number of the attorneys and witnesses
involved in this
case, it became clear that the attorneys involved had extensive
relationships
with one another, with the elected official, and with friends of
Leslie. Most
of the defense and prosecuting attorneys and judges had career-
long
acquaintanceships; public defenders and prosecutors had been
mentored by
judges in that jurisdiction. Most of the court officers lived in
the same
community. Several attorneys said that it is extremely difficult
to help
anyone who is accused of murdering an important outsider.
Ironically,
outsider status is given to anyone who does business on the
behalf of the
state: politicians, mail carriers, social workers, law
enforcement, trash
collectors, teachers, firefighters, emergency medical
technicians, etc. These
individuals have a special status because their 'business'
requires them to
enter into communities where they do not reside. These cases
are well

attended, and officers work closely with prosecutors to solve
them.
Leslie's death was explained by police as the product of the
putative
Lyford Street Gang's effort to protect its territory; its alleged
objective was
to silence anyone who threatened the neighborhood drug
enterprise. For
instance, if Leslie were a mail carrier and delivered mail in a
drug hotspot,
he could easily be used as a witness. Although this is not the
case, outsiders,
even myself, witness things that would be considered illegal.
Being skilled
at turning a blind eye to suspected drug dealing is crucial.
Incidentally, if
your way of doing your job places you at risk, a drug gang
narrative may
explain why. This argument was presented by the prosecutors in
the other
two murder trials as well. The argument described a deadly
gang, who went
to great lengths to punish anyone who threatened the drug
enterprise,
2016 15:35:27 UTC

including potential witnesses. From all accounts, both my
interviews with
local residents and the official court records, there is no
evidence that Blake
ever sold drugs. He and his mother merely lived on Lyford
Street. Never
theless, Leslie's death led to the formation of a seven-agency
task force that
searched and subpoenaed 400 residents of the Lyford Street
neighborhood,
under a blanket subpoena intended to protect witnesses from
being targets
of revenge and the claim that they had been individually singled
out for
cooperation.
Four prior murders and the genesis of a gang narrative
At the time of Leslie's death, four previous murders that had
occurred on
Lyford Street remained unsolved. Until Leslie's death there had
been no
suggestion that any of these deaths was gang related. Soon after
his murder,
a series of legal indictments and media reports began referring
to the drug
dealers on Lyford Street as the Lyford Street Boys, the Bristol
City Boys,
the Bristol City Crew, and then the Lyford Street Gang. This

name stuck
when the county newspaper picked it up.
According to Jonathan, a drug dealer who was an alleged gang
member,
local police officers, and many neighborhood informants, there
was no
organized gang. Between 30 and 50 different dealers sold drugs
indepen
dently on Lyford Street at any given time. Rather than being
organized
into one or more gangs, they operated in direct competition with
one
another.
The gang narrative had utility for law enforcement. The six drug
dealers
who were alleged to comprise the gang
-
Jonathan, Antonio, Byron, Joseph,
Antoine, and Paul
- were charged under a federal law enacted to control
organized crime. The prosecutor alleged that the pattern of their
actions
demonstrated that they belonged to an 'ongoing criminal
organization'. The
accused men were identified with the street because they were
closely

connected to one another and with the neighborhood. All six
were born
and lived on Lyford Street. Two sets of them are related as
brothers, cousins,
and childhood friends. To outsiders, then, the gang narrative
seemed
plausible.
The role of media in naming alleged street gangs has been noted
in the
work of Yablonsky (1959). The reporter from the township
newspaper
wrote stories about Lyford Street based on information from the
indict
ment, the murder trials, and interviews with the families of the
murder
victims. In these reports, neither community residents nor local
police spoke
of the accused as gang members. In court, the drug dealers who
were
witnesses for the prosecution and were not accused of
membership in the
criminal gang referred to themselves as 'the team' or 'the group'.
None of
2016 15:35:27 UTC

Duck m 'Senseless'violence 42 5
the accused men was found guilty of racketeering, but the gang
narrative
helped law enforcement officials to prosecute the Lyford Street
murders.
Death of a witness: Murdered to prevent her from testifying
Four days before Leslie was murdered, Janet, a 31-year-old who
had lived
on Lyford Street for 20 years, was shot twice in the back of the
head as she
was returning home from an errand at a neighborhood
convenience store
in the middle of the afternoon; her body was found on her front
lawn. Her
mother, who lived a few blocks away, would pick up Janet's
five-year-old
daughter before she returned home. Prior to Janet's death, she
told her
friends and neighbor about her pending court case; she had just
been
charged with illegally purchasing guns for neighborhood drug
dealers.
Several of her friends and neighbors were keeping a close watch
on her and
her daughter because of the case. A witness named Karen
testified that she

saw Antoine kill Janet. Karen knew Antoine, a 20-year-old
dealer from the
neighborhood, and she also knew that Janet had purchased a gun
for
Antoine.
Janet had grown up with all the guys in the neighborhood.
Although she
was older than most of the accused, their family members knew
one
another. Janet was related as a second cousin to two of the
accused. It had
been her practice to take drug dealers to the gun shop. They
would choose
a gun, and she would purchase the gun with the money they
gave her. She
had bought seven guns this way for five different dealers.
Two men were arrested with guns in their possession that Janet
had
purchased. One was Antonio, whose brother Jonathan was my
informant.
The other was a 19-year-old called Joseph. Five guns that were
traced back
to Janet remained missing. In return for her testimony against
those for
whom she had illegally obtained weapons, Janet would have
received three
years' probation, and whoever she testified against would have
received a

three-year prison term. Janet, who was a second cousin to
Antonio and
Jonathan, told them that she was going to testify only against
Antonio, who
was already in jail because of these charges. But she needed to
produce the
other weapons to convince the police that Antonio was the only
person she
had given guns to. She wanted Antonio and Jonathan to help her
get
the remaining guns back so that she would not have to testify
against all
of the parties involved.
Janet wanted to pin all the gun purchases on Antonio because he
was
an easy fall guy. During my interviews with all the members of
his family,
even before they knew about his IQ test results, Antonio was
described
as a nice guy but 'intellectually challenged'. His sister described
him as
'not that bright, but a hard worker'. His mother said she did not
think
2016 15:35:27 UTC

he was retarded, but he was not that smart, and he worked hard.
The
father said that Antonio was his favorite child because he
always did what
he asked him to do. Antonio had been diagnosed as mentally
retarded
while in elementary school and later was tested twice by
psychologists; he
scored in the 'mentally retarded' range twice and just two points
above it
on the third. His name on the street was Watermelon Head. As
he got older,
people called him Melo, short for melon, a put-down that
referred to his
gullibility.
Janet told Antonio she was going to testify against him. When
Janet's
mother, the boy's first cousin, found out about the gun case, she
spoke to
Jonathan and Antonio, who assured her that Janet would be safe.
Janet's
mother was also told about the plan to get the guns back.
According to
Paul, a 20-year-old dealer and former resident of Lyford Street
who was
one of the other gun owners and testified during an unrelated
drug trial,
Janet had told him that she was going to tell the prosecutor that

the other
five guns she had previously purchased and were unaccounted
for all
belonged to Antonio. That strategy would only work if she
could get the
guns back from the other three men who had them: Joseph, Paul,
and
Antoine. She joked about 'wearing a wire' to record her
conversations
secretly on behalf of the police, telling various people in the
neighborhood
that if she was wearing a wire she would give them a signal to
let them
know. Her plan to retrieve the guns and her statements about the
legal situ
ation caused problems for Janet. If she named the other three
men for whom
she had purchased guns, they could be locked up for three years.
She told
her story of buying guns and her plan to get them back to
anyone who
would listen, including at least seven other people besides her
two second
cousins. Apparently she believed that talking to so many people
would
ensure her safety, because all the parties involved had been
named and they

would be suspects if something happened to her.
The murder of Janet, a prosecution witness, was still being
investigated
when Leslie was murdered. Blake, who was arrested for that
crime, was
tied to the so-called Lyford Street Gang primarily because the
gun he used
to kill Leslie was purchased by Janet. Janet had not bought this
gun for
Blake, however; she had bought it for Joseph. Blake had
borrowed the gun
from a vacant house used to store weapons and drugs on Lyford
Street.
After the murder, Blake returned the gun to one of the vacant
lots in the
neighborhood where drugs and guns were stashed.
Immediately after Karen, a friend and neighbor of Janet,
witnessed her
murder, she called the police, identified the murderer as
Antoine, and went
into hiding in an adjacent state. Antoine was later arrested. He
confessed
to Janet's murder after his arrest, and told Paul that he 'shot her
twice and
put her brains to the side of the car for fucking with his money'.

He agreed
to testify against Jonathan, Antonio, Byron, and Joseph, his
drug dealing
2016 15:35:27 UTC
competitors on Lyford Street. For his cooperation he received a
20-year
sentence for the murder of Janet.
Antoine testified that Antonio and his brother Jonathan had
ordered him
to kill Janet. Both men were home at the time of her murder,
and Antonio
was under house arrest with an electronic monitoring device.
Antonio and
Jonathan, despite being Janet's cousins, were later charged with
conspiracy
to commit murder. Previously, they had been charged only with
the sale and
possession of cocaine. Similar charges were filed against Byron,
Joseph's
cousin and Jonathan's childhood friend.
Antoine's cooperation with prosecutors extended to testimony in

two
other murders: Darnell, a neighborhood acquaintance who was
murdered
over a dice game that went wrong, and Omar, the stepfather of
Jonathan's
daughter Violet, who was murdered over 'turf'. Omar had also
shot his
own cousin John. Antoine also admitted to being present at the
murder of
Thomas, a drug dealer who was killed because he was suspected
of co
operating with the police. These men were all competitors on
the corner.
Although they had grown up in the neighborhood and pairs of
them were
related or hung out together, they were not all friends, let alone
a gang.
Revenge: You killed my cousin
Omar was murdered at the age of 20, three years before Leslie's
death. Paul,
a 22-year-old Lyford Street resident, drug dealer, and witness
for the pros
ecution, testified that while Omar was in prison on drug charges
three
months prior to his death, his 31-year-old girlfriend Whitney
sold his bullet
proof vest and gun to his second cousin on his mother's side, a

19-year-old
marijuana dealer named John. According to Paul, when Omar
was released
from prison, he and Omar went to John's home and demanded he
return
Omar's gun and vest. John told them that he was not giving
them anything
and that he had paid $500 for the gun and vest. John told Omar
to see his
girlfriend, who had sold him these items. Finally, he said it
didn't matter
anyway because he had already sold the gun and bulletproof
vest to
someone else.
Paul testified that Omar shot John twice in the chest on his
porch. John
had been living with his mother, Omar's mother's first cousin, at
the time.
She found her son's body when she returned from work. John's
mother,
Catherine, knew that her son was a dealer and believed his
death was drug
related, but she did not know the particulars. When neighbors
were ques
tioned by the police, no one came forth. The investigation lasted
only two
days. After two months his murder was still unsolved. John's
maternal first

cousin Byron, who was also a neighborhood dealer, began
asking questions.
A neighbor who was never questioned by police investigators
told Byron
2016 15:35:27 UTC
that he saw Paul and Omar leave the scene of the shooting.
People saw
Byron confront Paul, with whom he had gone to both
elementary and
middle school, and ask him about this incident.
Two months after John's murder, Omar was selling drugs on a
corner of
Lyford Street when a silver minivan pulled up. It was dark,
around 10:00
p.m., and visibility was poor. Someone fired two shots into his
chest, and
then another 12 were fired at close range until the gun was
emptied.
Although at least 30 people witnessed the shooting and reported
hearing
the clicks of an empty gun, no one was willing to cooperate
with law

enforcement at first. A neighbor who lived two houses away
from the
murder, a 60-year-old married Hispanic woman called Mrs
Sanchez, said
that once she realized who had been shot she was somewhat
'happy'
because of all the 'trouble' (drug dealing, other shootings,
dealing in front
of her home) that Omar had caused over the years. After she
realized that
the shooting victim was Omar, she took a sleeping pill and
kissed her
husband goodnight; she was not going to lose any sleep over
Omar. Over
400 neighborhood residents were subpoenaed. During the initial
investiga
tion, no one could identify the shooter. Dion, a cocaine addict
who lived
nearby, testified that even though visibility was poor he could
identify Byron
as the shooter because he knew how Byron moved and
recognized him as
he was walking toward the body to take the last shots. Dion
testified that
he 'thought' he could identify the driver of the minivan as
Jonathan based
on his silhouette.
After Paul was arrested on an unrelated drug charge that would
have led
to a 10-year prison stay unless he cooperated with prosecutors,

he volun
teered information about the deaths of Omar and John, telling
police that
Byron had killed Omar because Omar had killed his cousin
John. Although
he did not witness the second killing, he said that after Omar's
death Byron
told him that he had done it. Ironically, Byron and Omar are
also second
cousins. Omar is also the stepfather of Jonathan's three-year-old
daughter
Violet, and Omar's one-year-old daughter is Violet's stepsister.
Violet's
mother is Whitney, the girlfriend who sold the bulletproof vest
and gun
while he was in jail. When Paul testified against Omar and
Byron, he said
that he did not cooperate with the police initially because he
feared Omar
would kill him. He also testified that he called Byron to let him
know when
Omar was on the corner alone.
Missing drugs: Killed after he was released from jail 'too early'
Two years before Leslie was killed, Thomas, a 14-year-old
dealer, was shot
twice in the back of the head. His body was found in a wooded
park located

in a major city 25 miles from Bristol Hill. A police officer who
was at the
2016 15:35:27 UTC
park on his break testified that he heard the gunshots and
proceeded
towards the sound. The officer then saw a silver 1989 Impala
take off. After
a pursuit, the car was found with three doors hanging open, and
the sound
of footsteps was heard in the woods. The officer did not pursue
but called
for backup; a police helicopter and scent-tracking dogs arrived
on the scene.
Forensic tests found the fingerprints of Antoine in the front of
the Impala
and the fingerprints of Antonio in the rear behind the front seat.
They traced
the car to Kenny Mack, who rented his car out to people in the
Lyford
Street neighborhood. Mack told the authorities that he had
rented it to
Antoine. When the police interviewed Antoine, he told them he
had lent
the car to Thomas, but the youth had not returned it. Mack later
reported

the car as stolen.
About ten days before his murder, Thomas had been arrested
along with
three other 'Youngboys'
- the local term for low-level drug dealers between
the ages of 12 and 17. Thomas was released a few hours later,
while the
others each spent three days in jail. When he returned to the
corner after
staying in the house for a week, the three Youngboys teamed up
and jumped
Thomas. They thought it was suspicious that Thomas was
released so
quickly, and they accused him of being a snitch. The fact that
Antoine's
drug stash spots were raided after Thomas was arrested also
aroused their
ire. Antoine was one of the two major drug suppliers to the
dealers of
Lyford Street, and these three boys worked for Antoine.
Jonathan was the
other major supplier, and Thomas was Jonathan's Youngboy.
Thomas
would have known where Antoine and his Youngboys kept their
stashes
because all the dealers operated in close proximity on the street.

When Jonathan saw Antoine's Youngboys attacking his
Youngboy, he
intervened, making them fight Thomas one on one instead of
ganging up
on him. After the fight was over, he picked up the bruised and
bleeding
youth and took him home. According to Jonathan, he protected
Thomas
and put the word out to the other Youngboys that no harm was
to come
to him. This statement was corroborated in court by the three
Youngboys
who had attacked Thomas. Antoine, who turned witness for the
prosecu
tion after he was positively identified as Janet's murderer, made
a plea deal
in exchange for giving the authorities the identity of Thomas's
murderer.
According to Antoine's testimony, he and Antonio picked up
Thomas
under the guise that they were going to 're-up', or get a new
supply of drugs,
in the city, but Antonio drove to the park and shot Thomas
twice in the
head. When the police pursued, Antoine said that Antonio had
called his
brother Jonathan to rescue them. Antonio was convicted of this
murder and
ultimately was sentenced to life in prison. He escaped the death

penalty
only because of his prior diagnosis of mental retardation.
Antoine has never
been charged for this murder, even as an accessory. He was
sentenced to 20
years in prison for killing Janet.
2016 15:35:27 UTC
According to the police, Thomas did not cooperate with them,
as the
other Youngboys believed. He was released early because it was
his first
arrest. Antoine's drugs were confiscated on the basis of
information from
one of Antoine's dealers.
Dice game gone bad
Darnell was a regular dice game player behind Luigi's
convenience store.
Luigi's is the only store within a two-mile radius of the
neighborhood and
was considered a neutral space for dice games attended by drug
dealers and

other residents of the neighborhood.
At the time Darnell was murdered, he was 25 years old, and
Jonathan
was 18. According to Jonathan, he lost $5000 playing dice with
Darnell.
In this neighborhood, it is customary that when you win all of
another
man's money, you always give him back 10 percent of it as
'walk away'
money. But when their game was over Darnell did not give
Jonathan his
walk away money. Jonathan became angry and brandished a
gun. Jonathan
was younger than Darnell, and he felt it was crucial for him to
maintain
the respect of older men in the community. If he let Darnell get
away with
this insult, he would lose their respect.
According to Allen Walker, who witnessed this confrontation
along with
four other players (none of whom ever came forward), Jonathan
fired a
shot in the air and demanded 10 percent back. Darnell complied,
giving
back $500. But Darnell was shocked by Jonathan's actions and
told
Jonathan that he was a dead man for having challenged him.
Jonathan put

his gun away and walked home. Later that day Darnell stopped
at
Jonathan's parents' home, where Jonathan no longer lived,
apparently
looking for Jonathan. The following day a masked man shot
Darnell and
killed him while he was playing dice at Luigi's convenience
store. Of the
six men who witnessed this shooting, only Allen Walker would
testify.
Allen Walker was playing dice with Darnell at the time. During
the initial
investigation, he said that he didn't know who the shooter was
because the
man wore a mask. Three years later, when he testified before a
grand jury
after having been charged with violating probation, he changed
his state
ment, testifying on behalf of the prosecution that he knew the
masked man
was Jonathan based on the way he ran away. Walker and Paul
also testi
fied that Darnell had intended to kill Jonathan because of the
gun incident.
So they saw the killing as a form of self-defense. After his
testimony, Walker
received a lesser charge for a pending drug case.

Antoine was the key witness in the Darnell case. He was also
present at
two of the other murders. The same method, two shots to the
head, was
used to kill both Janet and Thomas. Janet provided law
enforcement with
2016 15:35:27 UTC
information against Antoine, but that information was never
entered into
court and he was never charged. Ultimately Antoine received
the lightest
sentence in exchange for his cooperation: 20 years for the
murder of Janet.
Conclusion
This ethnographic study probes the orderliness of each murder
based on
corroborated informant accounts, which gives insight into the
types of
murders that are solved and those that are likely to go unsolved.
A detailed
examination of the context of each murder reveals the weakness

of the gang
theory for any of these crimes and the implausibility of the drug
gang narra
tive as an explanation of this series of killings. Every man
charged lived on
the same street and sold drugs on the same corner. They were
competitors
in the drug trade, not members of the same gang. They were
also relatives
with interrelationships that are so complex that it is difficult to
keep track
of them. The dealers worked in small groups, and some did not
like each
other. Conflicts among them arose for a host of reasons.
There is a level of certainty that has given rise to practices that
allow
people to control their level of relative 'safety', even in
instances where they
are forced to use what Anderson (1999) calls 'street justice'.
Here the local
order collides with the order of the justice system. This
situation is further
blurred when the media reports on the tactics of the criminal
justice system
and then interviews from that standpoint, creating an account
that is based
on information that is not entirely true. Similar to the finding in
a study by
Albert J. Meehan, the social construction of the gang narrative

is not only
the work of the community and the media but also the work of
various
legal and political bodies that must produce a narrative to
account for
illegal behavior (Meehan, 2000; see also Bowditch, 1993;
Emerson, 1991;
Margolin, 1992).
Although the acts of violence in this community are portrayed
as sense
less, random, and disorderly, they conform to a local order that
takes into
account the circumstances of economic isolation and relatively
capricious
punishment via the street justice and the legal system, which
may become
a dual punishment for those already in a difficult bind. The
people who live
in these spaces must take into account their safety in the present
and the
foreseeable future. If their lived daily experience shapes their
decisions, then
they ai;e unlikely to cooperate with law enforcement because of
its limited
ability to keep them safe. This situation is equally problematic
for law

enforcement officers who must contend with a local order in
which
members of the community selectively cooperate with the
police, where
information about crimes is used as a potential bargaining tool,
and where
people know about crimes but do not report them. There is no
lack of
2016 15:35:27 UTC
arrests in this community, but it suffers from lack of
cooperation on
both sides. The tensions between local accounts, legal tactics,
and the
media's representation of the practices add to the
misunderstanding of the
community's insider and outsider narratives.
Yet, even within the context of a problematic relationship
between the
community and outsiders, witnesses come forward and identify
killers and

go into hiding until the cases blow over. Equally important, in
this neigh
borhood parents go to the men who mean to do their children
harm and
try to negotiate their safety. When people live in a
neighborhood in which
drug dealing is prevalent, they must develop expert knowledge
of the prac
tices that order these activities. Ordinary citizens who walk
down the street
on the way home must be able to interpret the signs of trouble
and be able
to signal to the drug dealers that they are not trouble. These
individuals are
not worlds apart; their proximity requires that they understand
one another.
Learning to walk in a way that says 'you can ignore me, I am
not a threat'
is a survival skill.
In this setting, murder is committed for a range of reasons and,
depend
ing upon the context, it may have different consequences. The
limited,
skewed way in which law enforcement investigates and
prosecutes these
crimes obscures and distorts the local understanding of why
murders
happen here. This series of cases remained unsolved until the
death of an

important person brought in a set of outsiders with a
commitment to
solving that crime. All lives are not given the same value. The
creation of
a drug gang narrative that authorizes prosecuting drug dealers
as gang
members produces accounts that contradict the evidence
regarding these
events, but ultimately links people together in such a way that
they can be
prosecuted and convicted, although unequally and, perhaps,
unjustly.
A focus on the meaning and order of the street corner and the
neighbor
hood offers a very different perspective. This ethnographic
account and
analysis reveals that what outsiders consider senseless acts are
orderly inter
actions. These murders have motives that are intelligible to
local observers
and arise in the context of situations that are understood in
terms that are
shared within the community. In any social situation,
participants act in

accordance with expectations that are often taken for granted.
The social
orders of this urban neighborhood, such as the informal rules
governing
eye contact, are produced moment by moment and have
immediate
relevance which affects the activities of everyone in the
community. Like
these small gestures and interactions, murders must also be
studied in local
context, as they are produced through patterned relationships in
which
violence is integral and even predictable. Those who avoid
'trouble' and
those who commit serious crimes share understandings that defy
the
narratives imposed by the authorities for their own purposes.
2016 15:35:27 UTC
Acknowledgements
I would like to give a special thanks to Anne Rawls, Peter

Manning, Phil Smith,
Nadine Amalfi, Paige Black and Elijah Anderson for their
comments.
Notes
All names of persons and places are pseudonyms.
A classic exception is research by Albert J. Meehan (2000),
which demon
strated that a 'gang' myth was created by police in two cities,
over the
summer preceding the reelection of the mayor and for
recordkeeping
purposes.
References
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the Moral Life
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7(2): 3-19.
■ WAVERLY DUCK is currently completing a three-year
postdoctoral associate appointment at Yale University in the
Department of Sociology. He earned his PhD from Wayne State
University. His areas of interest are gender, urban ethnography,
qualitative and quantitative research methods, and gerontology.
Address: Department of Sociology, Yale University, PO Box
208265, New Haven, CT 06520-8265, USA. [email:
[email protected]] ■
2016 15:35:27 UTC
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jspArticle
Contentsp. [417]p. 418p. 419p. 420p. 421p. 422p. 423p. 424p.
425p. 426p. 427p. 428p. 429p. 430p. 431p. 432p. 433p.
434Issue Table of ContentsEthnography, Vol. 10, No. 4
(December 2009) pp. 371-564Front MatterIntroduction [pp.
371-374]The Chicago School and the roots of urban
ethnography: An intergenerational conversation with Gerald D.
Jaynes, David E. Apter, Herbert J. Gans, William Kornblum,
Ruth Horowitz, James F. Short, Jr, Gerald D. Suttles and Robert
E. Washington [pp. 375-396]Urban ethnography and research
integrity: Empirical and theoretical dimensions [pp. 397-
415]'Senseless' violence: Making sense of murder [pp. 417-

434]Primary groups and cosmopolitan ties: The rooftop pigeon
flyers of New York City [pp. 435-457]Taking chances: The
experience of gambling loss [pp. 459-474]Open mic:
Professionalizing the rap career [pp. 475-495]'Mama's family':
Fictive kinship and undocumented immigrant restaurant workers
[pp. 497-513]Parking lots and police: Undocumented Latinos'
tactics for finding day labor jobs [pp. 515-533]Ethnography,
interaction and ordinary trouble [pp. 535-548]The role of theory
in ethnographic research [pp. 549-564]Back Matter
1963
The Culture of Poverty
Oscar Lewis
Iwant to take this opportunity to clear up some pos-sible
misunderstanding concerning the idea of a
"culture of poverty." I would distinguish sharply be-
tween impoverishment and the culture of poverty. Not
all people who are poor necessarily live in or develop
a culture of poverty. For example, middle class people
who become impoverished do not automatically be-
come members of the culture of poverty, even though
they may have to live in the slums for a while. Simi-
larly, the Jews who lived in poverty in eastern Europe
did not develop a culture of poverty because their
tradition of literacy and their religion gave them a sense
of identification with Jews all over the world. It gave
them a sense of belonging to a community which was
united by a common heritage and common religious
beliefs.
In the introduction to The Children of Sanchez, I

listed approximately fifty traits which constitute what
I call the culture of poverty. Although poverty is only
one of the many traits which, in my judgment, go to-
gether, I have used it to name the total system because
I consider it terribly important. However, the other
traits, and especially the psychological and ideologi-
cal ones, are also important and I should like to elabo-
rate on this a bit.
The Helpless and The Homeless
The people in the culture of poverty have a strong
feeling of marginal ity, of helplessness, of dependency,
of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own
country, convinced that the existing institutions do not
serve their interests and needs. Along with this feel-
ing of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferi-
ority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum
dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a dis-
tinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from ra-
cial discrimination. In the United States the culture of
poverty of the Negroes has the additional disadvan-
tage of racial discrimination.
People with a culture of poverty have very little
sense of history. They are a marginal people who
know only their own troubles, their own local condi-
tions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life.
Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision
nor the ideology to see the similarities between their
problems and those of others like themselves else-
where in the world. In other words, they are not class
conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed
to status distinctions. When the poor become class
conscious or members of trade union organizations,

or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the
world they are, in my view, no longer part of the cul-
ture of poverty although they may still be desper-
ately poor.
Is It All Bad?
The idea of a culture of poverty that cuts across
different societies enables us to see that many of the
problems we think of as distinctively our own or dis-
tinctively Negro problems (or that of any other spe-
8 / SOCIETY • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1998
cial racial or ethnic group), also exist in countries
where there are no ethnic groups involved. It also
suggests that the elimination of physical poverty as
such may not be enough to eliminate the culture of
poverty which is a whole way of life. One can speak
readily about wiping out poverty; but to wipe out a
culture or subculture is quite a different matter, for it
raises the basic question of our respect for cultural
differences.
Middle class people, and this certainly includes
most social scientists, tend to concentrate on the nega-
tive aspects of the culture of poverty; they tend to have
negative feelings about traits such as an emphasis on
the present and a neglect of the future, or on concrete
as against abstract orientations. I do not intend to ide-
alize or romanticize the culture of poverty. As some-
one has said, "It is easier to praise poverty than to live
it." However, we must not overlook some of the posi-
tive aspects that may flow from these traits. Living

immersed in the present may develop a capacity for
spontaneity for the enjoyment of the sensual, the in-
dulgence of impulse, which is too often blunted in our
middle class, future-oriented man. Perhaps it is this
reality of the moment that middle class existentialist
writers are so desperately trying to recapture, but which
the culture of poverty experiences as a natural, every-
day phenomenon. The frequent use of violence cer-
tainly provides a ready outlet for hostility, so that
people in the culture of poverty suffer less from re-
pression than does the middle class.
In this connection, I should also like to take excep-
tion to the trend in some studies to identify the lower
class almost exclusively with vice, crime and juve-
nile delinquency, as if most poor people were thieves,
beggars, ruffians, murderers or prostitutes. Certainly,
in my own experience in Mexico. I found most of the
poor decent, upright, courageous and lovable human
beings. I believe it was the novelist Fielding who
wrote, "The sufferings of the poor are indeed less ob-
served than their misdeeds."
It is interesting that much the same ambivalence in
the evaluation of the poor is reflected in proverbs and
in literature. On the positive side, the following serve
as typical:
"Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God."
{Luke, 6:20).
"The poor are the proteges of the Gods."
(Menander, The Lxidy of Leucas, c. 330 B.C.)
"The poor man alone.
When he hears the poor moan

From a morsel a morsel will give."
(Thomas Holcraft. Gcijfer Gray.)
Yes! in the poor man's garden grow
Far more than herbs and flowers.
Kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind.
And joy for weary hours."
(Mary Howitt, The Poor Man's Garden.)
"Poverty! Thou source of human art,
Thou great inspirer of the poet's song!"
(Edward Moore, Hymn to Poverty.)
"Few, save the poor, feel for the poor."
(Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Poor.)
"Happier he, the peasant, far.
From the pangs of passion free.
That breathes the keen yet wholesome air
of ragged penury."
(Thomas Gray, Ode on The Pleasure
A rising from Vicissitude.)
"O happy unown'd youths! Your limbs can bear
The scorching dog-star and the winter's air.
While the rich infant, nurs'd with care and pain.
Thirsts with each heat and coughs with every rain."
(John Gay, Trivia. Bk. II, I. 145.)
"My friends are poor but honest."
(All's Well Thar Ends Well, I, iii, 201.)
The following illustrate the negative elements in
some of the stereotypes of poverty:
"All the days of the poor are evil."

{Babylonian Talmud, Kethubot, 110b.)
"He must have a great deal of godliness who can
find any satisfaction in being poor."
(Cervantes, Don Quixote, Pt. II, Ch. 44.)
"Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is con-
foundedly inconvenient."
(Sydney Smith, His Wit and Wisdom (1900), p. 89)
"The resolutions of a poor man are weak."
(Doolittle, Chinese Vocabulary 11, 494 (1872.)
"What can a poor man do but love and pray?"
(Hartley Coleridge. Sonnets—No. 30.)
"If you've really been poor, you remain poor at
heart all your life."
(W. Somerset Maugham, Introduction to Arnold
Bennett, The Old Wives Tale, in Ten Novels.)
"It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest."
(H.D. Thoreaux, Walden, Ch. 18.)
"The life of the poor is the curse of the heart."
{Ecclestiasticus, 38:19.)
THE CULTURE OF POVERTY / 9
"There is no virtue that poverty destroyeth not."
(John Florio. First Fruits, Fo. 32.)
"Poverty makes some humble, but more malignant."
(Bulwer-Lytton. Fugene Aram. Bk. 1, Ch. 7.)

"The devil wipes his tail with the poor man's
pride." (John Ray. English Proverbs. 21.)
"The poor, inur'd to drudgery and distress.
Act without aim, think little, and feel less.
And nowhere, but in feign'd Arcadian scenes,
Taste happiness, or know what pleasure means."
(William Cowper. Hope I. 7.)
In short, some see the poor as virtuous, upright,
seretie, independent, honest, secure, kind, simple and
happy, while others see them as evil, mean, violent,
sordid and criminal.
Most people in the United States find it difficult to
think of poverty as a stable, persistent, ever present
phenomenon, because our expanding economy and the
specially favorable circumstances of our history have
led to an optimism which makes us think that poverty
is transitory. As a matter of fact, the culture of poverty
in the United States is indeed of relatively limited
scope; but as Michael Harrington and others show, it
is probably more widespread than has been generally
recognized.
Poverty Here and Abroad
In considering what can be done about the culture
of poverty, we must make a sharp distinction between
those countries in which it involves a relatively small
segment of the population, and those in which it con-
stitutes a very large section. Obviously, the solutions
will have to differ in these two areas. In the United
States, the major solution proposed by planners and
social workers for dealing with what are called "mul-

tiple problem families," the "undeserving poor," and
the "hard core of poverty," is slowly to raise their level
of living and eventually incorporate them into the
middle class. And, wherever possible, there is some
reliance upon psychiatric treatment in an effort to im-
bue these "shiftless, lazy, unambitious people" with
the higher middle class aspirations.
In the undeveloped countries, where great masses
of people share in the culture of poverty, I doubt that
social work solutions are feasible. Nor can psychia-
trists begin to cope with the magnitude of the prob-
lem. They have all they can do to deal with the growing
middle class.
In the United States, delinquency, vice and violence
represent the major threats to the middle class from
the culture of poverty. In our country there is no threat
of revolution. In the less developed countries of the
world, however, the people who live in the culture of
poverty may one day become organized into political
movements that seek fundamental revolutionary
changes and that is one reason why their existence
poses terribly urgent problems.
If my brief outline of the basic psychological as-
pects of the culture of poverty is essentially sound,
then it may be more important to offer the poor of the
world's countries a genuinely revolutionary ideology
rather than the promise of material goods or a quick
rise in the standards of living.
It is conceivable that some countries can eliminate
the culture of poverty (at least in the early stages of
their industrial revolution) without at first eliminat-

ing impoverishment, by changing the value systems
and attitudes ofthe people so they no longer feel help-
less and homeless—so they begin to feel that they are
living in their own country, with their institutions, their
government and their leadership.
Oscar Lewis is the author of a number of books, includ-
ing, such best sellers as Five Families and The Children of
Sanchez. He has taught at Brooklyn College and Washing-
ton University and is now a professor of anthropology at
the University of Illinois. He has just completed a new book,
Pedro Martinez: A Peasant's View of the Mexican Revolu-
tion, and is writing another on the culture of poverty in
Puerto Rico.
[Deceased]
“Visible Signs of a City Out of Control”:
Community Policing in New York City
Benjamin Chesluk
Fordham University
This article examines institutions of community policing and
their relationship
to changing conceptions of order in New York City in the
1990s. The sites of
my research were: a special meeting of the Hell’s Kitchen
Neighborhood Asso-
ciation; the Midtown North Precinct Community Council; and

the Citizens’
Police Academy run by the New York Police Department
(NYPD). These
staged dialogues with the police made up part of Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani’s
program of order-maintenance policing, which was, in turn, one
aspect of his
administration’s attempt to make New York City a more civil
and livable city
(Blumenthal 1994; Flynn 2000; Krauss 1994). The question
posed by Gi-
uliani’s critics was, and still is, of course, “livable for whom?”
(Harcourt 1998
and 2001; McArdle and Erzen 2001; Smith 1998).1
I argue that these dialogues between police and community
groups acted
out larger debates over the nature of citizenship and social order
in the context
of urban socioeconomic change; specifically, the transformation
of the built,
legal, economic and social environment under the ideology of
neoliberalism.
In New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, these transformations
entailed pri-
vatizing public spaces and the promotion of other programs
aimed at fostering
a climate conducive to real estate speculation and development.
The encoun-
ters I describe between police and community groups can be
seen, in part, as
fractal images of the ideological struggles between
neoliberalism and its dis-
contents. They were enactments-in-miniature of the battles over
this new po-
litical–economic order: its attempts to achieve hegemonic

status; the efforts of
individuals and groups to accommodate themselves to its harsh
ideology; and
the struggles of those who cannot comfortably find a place in
the world neolib-
eralism makes.
To analyze these meetings, I draw on the approach to narrative
politics
and poetics modeled by recent critical histories and
ethnographies of develop-
ment (Cintron 1997; Ferguson 1994; Ivy 1995; Martin 1994;
Mitchell 1991;
Pemberton 1994; Stewart 1996). These texts look at
development institutions
across a broad scale, from colonial powers to the World Bank
and national cul-
tural preservation programs to corporate workforce trainers and
local zoning
Cultural Anthropology Vol. 19, Issue 2, pp. 250–275, ISSN
0886-7356. © 2004 by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission
to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University
of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite
303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
250
boards. They pay close attention to the ways in which social
conflicts are ex-
pressed in aesthetics—in the form and content of the narratives
of development
workers, as well as the people whose lives they affect. These

texts help us un-
derstand the ways in which macroscale political power is
experienced on the
more intimate scale of everyday life. They show how important
it is to examine
taken-for-granted ideas about social order: both how these ideas
play out in
everyday practice and the political conflicts they encode.
With this in mind, I explore how people construct the social
order and dis-
order in the charged context of dialogues between the NYPD
and community
groups. I pay specific attention to the dominant ideology of
order-maintenance
policing. This is a belief system structured around the imagined
threat of a per-
manent and intensifying crisis of crime (Hall et al. 1978)—of
criminal outsid-
ers who threaten stable, homogeneous communities, creeping
into the struc-
tures of society through neglected cracks in the orderly facades
of everyday
urban life. In the police–community meetings I describe in this
article, the po-
lice attempted to interpellate, or hail (Althusser 1971), a
particular community
subject, one that would accept this ideology and respond on its
terms—a com-
munity that would narrate its fears of disorder in an orderly and
useful way.
But in these meetings, things happened that seemed at times to
lie outside of
the official vision of social order and even, in certain instances,
to contradict it.
Those whom the police addressed in the order-maintenance

discourse did in-
deed take up this ideology of crime and crisis, by working with
it and speaking
its language. At the same time, they challenged it by turning it
back on itself in
moments of conflict and apparent disorder within the rhetorical
space of law
and order.
The confusion and challenges within these meetings rang with
undertones
of larger social debates: over the changes in urban infrastructure
and everyday
life wrought by neoliberal redevelopment projects; over the
nature of the “so-
cial order” that these redevelopment projects seek to impose;
and over the rela-
tion of the police to defining and maintaining that order. These
debates un-
folded in a neighborhood where a new vision of order centered
on real estate
speculation was playing havoc with local inhabitants’ everyday
experience of
the city and their perception of their place in it.
In other words, was the definition of “order” presented in these
interac-
tions between police and local community groups universally
agreed upon or
only one order among many? And if so, whose vision of order
was it?
Neoliberal New York and the Redevelopment of Times Square
My research on community policing was part of my fieldwork in
1997 and

1998 on the widely publicized and debated redevelopment of
Times Square,
which is a decades-long collaboration between private
developers and city and
state governmental agencies to redefine the built, legal, social,
and economic
environment of the Times Square area. The real estate
developers, city plan-
ners, architects, and others involved in this redevelopment play
with signs of
the history of Times Square as a center for night life and
spectacular license,
COMMUNITY POLICING IN NEW YORK CITY 251
even as they work to turn the area into a corporate office
district. Lynne Saga-
lyn characterizes both the redevelopment of Times Square and
Mayor Gi-
uliani’s “quests for order” as signs of a larger social shift—“the
end of the
broad liberal experiment in New York” (Sagalyn 2001:475).
The Times Square redevelopment has produced enormous
changes, both
in the makeup and scale of the businesses, architecture, and
social life of the
area. One immediately sees and viscerally feels these changes
as one walks
through the neighborhood. No one could now portray Times
Square as the de-
graded, squalid place seen in the films Midnight Cowboy and
Taxi Driver. The
area’s former booming market in pornography and other kinds

of sexually ex-
plicit entertainment has been almost completely displaced—
along with the
groups of gay men, black and Latino youths, and others for
whom Times
Square had once provided a haven. The area is chockablock
with new corpo-
rate office buildings, giant electronic billboards, and slick
national and global
chain stores and restaurants. Along 42nd Street, until recently
filled with cheap
movie houses, sex shops, souvenir stands, and walk-up tenement
buildings,
new theaters and multiplex cinemas fill the streetscape now
overshadowed by
four soaring new towers. The new stores, theaters, and office
buildings of
Times Square and 42nd Street house global brand names in
finance, such as
NASDAQ and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, as well as mass
media, both jour-
nalism and entertainment, including Reuters, Conde Naste,
MTV, and Disney.2
The redevelopment of Times Square has also greatly affected
the city
around it, particularly the residential neighborhood just to the
west, an area
variously known as Clinton or Hell’s Kitchen, depending on
whom you ask.
When I first arrived in New York City, I rented a room there in
what I found to
be an extremely diverse neighborhood, made up largely of
tenements housing
older working- and lower-middle-class residents who were
mostly white and

of various ethnic backgrounds, actors and theater professionals,
and a growing
gay population moving up from the Chelsea neighborhood.
There were also the
inhabitants of numerous local treatment centers and halfway
houses to the
south; a large Latin American population in a row of housing
towers lined up
along Tenth Avenue; and a substantial number of newly-arrived
young profes-
sionals who filled the large new apartment buildings going up
throughout the
area. All these groups met (or avoided) each other on Ninth
Avenue, a busy
commercial strip increasingly dominated by upscale restaurants
and bars cater-
ing to Broadway theater patrons and local yuppies.
The Times Square redevelopment and the influx of affluent new
residents
and businesses in Hell’s Kitchen contributed to a rise in
property values in the
neighborhood, putting pressure on older tenants to move out so
that landlords
could raise rents or sell the buildings to developers. More and
more older
buildings in or around the area were being razed to make way
for larger office
or apartment towers. This new scale of development continues
to cast a literal
and figurative shadow over Hell’s Kitchen’s shops and
tenements.
The comprehensive physical and social reorganization of places
like
Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen reflect what geographers

Jamie Peck and
252 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Adam Tickell (2002) call the “neoliberalization of space.” This
“new religion
of neoliberalism . . . combines a commitment to the extension of
markets and
logics of competitiveness with a profound antipathy to all kinds
of Keynesian
and/or collectivist strategies . . . married with aggressive forms
of state down-
sizing, austerity financing, and public-service ‘reform’ ”
(2002:381). Since the
1980s, neoliberalism has created a climate of intense, zero-sum
competition
among cities over scarce economic and political resources. City
governments
increasingly rely on “elite partnerships, mega-events, and
corporate seduction”
to stay afloat (2002:393). Peck and Tickell see this desperate
“urban entre-
peneurialism” as the source of “the serial reproduction of
cultural spectacles,
enterprise zones, waterfront developments, and privatized forms
of local gov-
ernance” across the United States and elsewhere (2002:393).
Neoliberal urban
development carves cities into privatized, fortified enclaves
(Caldeira 1999;
Davis 1992; Judd 1995; Sorkin 1992), with a new social
emphasis on “order”
as determined by corporate interests and aesthetics (Deutsche
1996; Guano

2002; cf. Ellin 1999; Harvey 1990). These spatial
transformations go hand in
hand with a parallel restructuring of public policy and social
services; specifi-
cally, the “selective appropriation of ‘community’ ” both to
justify and to fund
local governmental initiatives (Peck and Tickell 2002:393; see
also Crawford
1997:167–168). In other words, these transformations of urban
space are accom-
panied by changes in policing and social policies that
increasingly rely on rhe-
torical and practical reworkings of concepts of both “order” and
“community.”
“Quality-of-Life” and the Trope of the Broken Window
Initially, I had not planned to study the NYPD, but my research
in New
York City came to be framed by incidents of what many took to
be extreme po-
lice violence against black New Yorkers. My research began in
the summer of
1997 on the very day that the Abner Louima police torture case
hit the front
pages and it was concluded in 1998 about the same time that
Amadou Diallo
was shot by four members of the NYPD street crimes unit in the
Bronx. I was
immersed in writing about the relationship between police and
real estate de-
velopment in Times Square when Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian-
American se-
curity guard, was shot in a scuffle with undercover officers
posing as drug cus-
tomers near the Port Authority bus terminal, just west of Times

Square. All
three of these incidents led to a wave of angry attacks on what
some saw as the
excesses of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s “order maintenance”
strategies and the
NYPD’s disdainful, even violent, attitude toward nonwhite New
Yorkers
(McArdle and Erzen 2001; Smith 1998).
As I acquainted myself with the neighborhood of Hell’s
Kitchen, I noticed
fliers posted on local bulletin boards announcing various
political meetings
and other events, including invitations for area residents to talk
with officers
from the local Midtown North and South Precincts of the
NYPD. Once I began
attending these meetings, one phrase in particular leapt out at
me: “quality-of-
life.” People used the phrase “quality-of-life offenses” to refer
to those misde-
meanors formerly known as “victimless crimes”: soliciting for
prostitution,
petty drug sales, and drinking in public. At one such community
policing meet-
ing, I heard a New York City judge define “quality-of-life
offenses” as “annoy-
ing, very annoying, very annoying misdemeanors that upset
people as much as
felonies—sometimes more than felonies.” I also heard people
use “quality-of-

life” to signal a host of “disorderly” but noncriminal behaviors,
as well as to
talk about the general decay they perceived in the built
environment around
them.
I was curious about the apparent flexibility of this phrase and
the work it
did in these meetings. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls the
concept of “qual-
ity-of-life” an “image [that] is perpetually changing” (Bauman
1995:80). He
argues that its rhetorical power lies in its flexible and open-
ended nature:
There would be no interest in the “quality of life” . . . if not for
the widespread,
often vague, but always acute and unnerving feeling that life as
it is “is not good
enough.” Discussion of quality of life is . . . about giving that
vague, elusive feel-
ing of disaffection some flesh and bone: about spelling out just
what makes life as
it is not pleasant enough and on the whole unsatisfactory. For
that reason the
“quality of life” discourse is in its innermost core a critique of
daily life. [Bauman
1995:77]
When I asked city officials and others to explain the concept of
quality-of-
life and the new police practices it was used to describe, they
often told me
what I came to think of as “broken windows stories.” I heard
these stories from
security guards, community activists, and real estate developers

alike during
my fieldwork. People told broken windows stories when they
wanted to ex-
plain why they thought it was important to control even
relatively innocuous
disorderly behavior. For example, one board member of an
organization called
the Times Square Business Improvement District (BID) used the
story to ex-
plain why his organization had instituted its own trash
collection services in
Times Square:
There’s a philosophy of keeping things clean called the “broken
windows syn-
drome.” An empty building, if somebody breaks a window in it,
a lot of people will
break other windows in it. If you put graffiti on a wall, [and]
people don’t scrub the
graffiti off promptly, pretty soon there’ll be more graffiti, more
and more. But
keep the wall clean, it tends to stay clean. If the street’s clean,
it tends to stay clean.
If there’s trash flowing around the street, why should you not
drop your gum wrap-
per or cigarette wrapper? I mean, somebody else does it. But if
it’s really nice and
neat and clean, you are more apt to wait ’til you get to a
wastebasket.
He laughed as he went on to give another example of what he
considered a
broken window: on the way to meet me at the coffee shop on
Ninth Avenue
where we spoke, he had spotted what he took to be the Police
Commissioner’s

limousine, illegally parked half up on the sidewalk.
These broken windows stories all seemed to draw both their
form and
their content from a single, paradigmatic source: an article from
the Atlantic
Monthly by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling
(1982) entitled,
“Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The
title alludes to
a story that the authors tell in the first pages of the article, an
archetypical bro-
ken windows story, in which “a stable neighborhood of families
who care for
their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown
on unwanted
intruders” is transformed into “an inhospitable and frightening
jungle . . . vul-
nerable to criminal invasion” due to the simple neglect of one
abandoned piece
of property (Wilson and Kelling 1982:31). The authors use this
story to call for
the police to crack down on “disorderly” acts such as drinking
or sleeping in
public, in the name of defending the communities they serve:
“The essence of
the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal
control mecha-
nisms of the community itself” (Wilson and Kelling 1982:31).
They proposed
that following this principle of zero tolerance will bring about a

general social
good: “order.”
The discourse of “broken windows” has traveled widely,
circulating through-
out police and urban development circles and beyond, in the
form of anecdotes,
favorable media coverage, and inclusion in collections of
“classic readings” on
policing and community–police relations (e.g., Oliver 2000) as
well as framing
coauthor Kelling’s subsequent book, Fixing Broken Windows
(Kelling and
Coles 1997). It has also been the subject of much debate (Miller
2001). Many
have criticized it for providing “the central rationale for
oppressive and intoler-
ant policing practices (Harcourt 2001:129, 161–171; Kraska
and Kappeler
1997) that put the interests of property owners and business
leaders over the in-
terests of tenants, the homeless, and other inhabitants (cf.
Gregory 1998:151).
The theory also assumes a natural alliance between city and
state authorities
and community interests, “despite the fact that urban structures
and harsh con-
trol measures are themselves contributing elements in
community dissolution
and dissent” (Baird 1999; see also Crawford 1997:151–153;
Greene and Mas-
trofski 1988). As criminologist Adam Crawford observes, “Both
the privatiza-
tion of life and anxieties about life in public appear to march
hand in hand. . . .
In many senses, the whole debate about ‘fear of crime,’ which

has spawned a
mini-industry of its own, is a trope for the decline and
impoverishment of pub-
lic spaces” (1997:85). In other words, “crime” is far from being
the only source
of fear and uncertainty in contemporary urban life—something
humorously ac-
knowledged by the Times Square BID boardmember in the story
about the Po-
lice Commissioner’s limousine.
But the power of the broken windows discourse has brushed
these cri-
tiques aside. It has become a powerful commonsense trope—a
symbol that
condenses an entire, morally charged narrative framework.
Specifically, the
broken window now serves as a figure for a struggle between
order and disor-
der fought in the arena of everyday life and the taken-for-
granted. It effectively
gives an apocalyptic resonance to an open-ended critique of the
every-
day—every moment of discomfort can be read as a potential
broken window
and therefore the first step on the road to chaos.
In 1994, Mayor Giuliani and his first police commissioner,
William Brat-
ton, brought the concept of broken windows and order
maintenance into the

heart of NYPD practice. Bratton and Giuliani both alluded to it
indirectly in
their inaugural manifesto, Police Strategy Five:
New Yorkers have for years felt that the quality of life in their
city has been in de-
cline, that their city is moving away from, rather than toward,
the reality of a de-
cent society. The overall growth of violent crime during the past
several decades
has enlarged this perception. But so has an increase in the signs
of disorder in the
public spaces of the city. . . . Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has
called these types of
behavior “visible signs of a city out of control, a city that can’t
protect its space or
its children.” [New York Police Department 1994:4]
Police Strategy Five goes on to announce the NYPD’s more
general inter-
est in controlling crime as well as the fear of crime in everyday
life. In order to
justify its crackdown on quality-of-life offenses, as well as its
interest in under-
standing and controlling everyday fear, the document expresses
concern for
New York City’s “embattled communities” that it imagines as
the terrified vic-
tims of these offenses.
Discourses of Order and Community
Those who hold this contemporary vision of policing, oriented
toward
quality-of-life issues and order maintenance, believe that
these “embattled

communities” possess an intuitive and legally sound sense of
order and disor-
der. They imagine that law-abiding citizens sense the presence
or absence of
social order through interpreting signs of threat in their
everyday lives; that
these citizens form coherent communities who can articulate a
positive vision
of order; that the role of the police is to represent the standards
held by the
community at large; and that the police can both listen to these
communities
sympathetically and respond appropriately.3
According to this perspective, the police must help law-abiding
citizens to
create orderly communities by inciting people to understand and
talk about
their everyday experiences of the city in terms of signs of
disorder. This dis-
course sorts people and behaviors into categories of order and
disorder: natu-
ral and unnatural, social and antisocial, good and bad. It reduces
the work of
understanding human life simply to a task of decoding signs in a
binary code.
But society does not consist of a binary opposition between
good people and
practices and bad ones.4 Instead, “order maintenance” should
better be called
“order production,” “order manufacture,” or “order imposition.”
Such an act of
creating order is itself a disorderly and exclusionary task. As
Ralph Cintron
observes, “the process [of making an order] entails ordering
something

out”—censoring and excluding ideas, behaviors, and people
(1997:x).
In the context of community policing organizations, what gets
“ordered out”
are “troublesome groups,” including “marginalized youths
(neither full con-
sumers nor citizens), vagrants, drug abusers, prostitutes, and so
forth” (Craw-
ford 1997:168). These groups “are identified as the architects of
neighborhood
change and economic decline, rather than as its victims”
(Crawford 1997:267).5 In
place of these “undesirables,” the police reach out to those well-
organized
groups they call “the community.” But the police determine in
part the nature
of the “community” and how they will speak. The police
summon particular
groups together, organize their speakers, interpret their words,
and decide how
to respond to their requests for action. The discourse of
“community policing”
addresses a subject constituted by this very address. The official
rhetoric is
also a pedagogical practice. “Community initiatives allow
relevant criminal
justice agencies . . . to attempt to rearticulate and redefine the
boundaries or the
public’s legitimate expectations of state agencies. Community
involvement is,

therefore, a means of managing and steering expectations”
(Crawford 1997:
265).
In other words, these institutions hold a mirror up to “the
community” so
that it can know itself—a particular, highly selective and
romanticized version
of itself, “cleansed of any negative or criminogenic
connotations and endowed
with a simplistic and naïve purity and virtue” (Crawford
1997:153). At the
same time, to extend the metaphor, this ideological mirror
shows an image of
the police as actively responding to the community’s desires
(“doing some-
thing”). This is an example of what Bourdieu calls a “usurping
ventriloquism . . .
in which someone speaks in the name of something which is
made to exist
through this very discourse” (Bourdieu 1984/5:63). The
“community” who
speaks here is in part an artifact of the “order maintenance”
approach, carefully
selected and ordered before the fact and primed to speak the
police’s language
of order. In particular, it is a community of empowered
consumers—citizens of
revamped urban spaces such as the New Times Square.6
Trouble Corners and Hot Spots
The discourse of community policing outlined above projects a
space
where the community and the police meet to work out effective
strategies for

social control. However, in my experience, these meetings were
often a good
deal more contentious and fraught than the relatively cheery and
straightforward
image that “community–police dialogue” implies. This was not
because com-
munity members resisted the NYPD’s requests to speak about
their fears and
worries. On the contrary, they embraced the opportunity; once
they got started,
they rarely ran out of material. This was especially true when
they responded
directly to police officers, whose presence at these meetings
seemed to hold the
promise of making their fears and confusions go away. Members
of the com-
munity would begin to think of more and more things that
bothered them in
their everyday lives. They would call these out, asking whether
or not the po-
lice could do anything about them in a spiral of questioning and
curiosity.
Their confusion about what the police could or could not (or
would not) do on
their behalf seemed often to provoke suspicious or angry
responses on the part
of the police. It was as though the police were inciting the
community to speak
about signs of disorder and then interpreting the unruly results
as though the
community itself was a source of disorder.
A good example would be the February 1998 meeting of the
Hell’s Kitchen
Neighborhood Association. This neighborhood covers the area
just southwest

of Times Square, and the association drew its members from the
inhabitants of
the lofts and tenements south of the Port Authority bus terminal,
from Forty-
First Street down to around Thirty-Fourth Street, and from
Eighth Avenue all
the way to the West Side Highway. This area is a notably
unglamorous mixed-
use area, full of old factories, warehouses, and parking lots. I
had seen the
black-and-white posters announcing a series of themed
Neighborhood Asso-
ciation meetings; the theme of this meeting was “Safer” and it
was presented as
a chance for area residents to “share their quality-of-life
concerns” with offi-
cers from the Midtown South Precinct.7 Although these posters
were my intro-
duction to the meeting, I assume that the primary method by
which people
were notified was through informal neighborhood networks of
friendship and
activism—lines of association that recruited some into the
Neighborhood As-
sociation while seeming to exclude others, as we shall see.
When I arrived at the tiny community center just off Tenth
Avenue where
the neighborhood association met, the room was already packed.
A large dele-
gation of ten or so uniformed police officers, including the

Midtown South
commanding officer (CO), sat or stood at the front of the room,
facing the
eager crowd. The meeting started slowly. An association board
member made
some opening remarks then threw the floor open to questions
from the audi-
ence. But before anyone could begin, there was a disturbance in
the back of the
room. Someone poked their head in the door and said something
in Spanish;
and a group of ten or so people, who had been standing together
in a group and
looking about uncertainly before the meeting started, filed out. I
discovered
later that a tenants’ rights meeting for Spanish speakers was
being held that
night in a building down the street.
The people around me had been swiveling their heads over their
shoulders
to look at the group even before the interruption. They
exchanged glances with
each other and seemed hesitant to speak. Finally, one woman
from the audi-
ence spoke up, identifying herself as “someone who lives on
‘the border’,” in
other words, as she explained, near the corner of Thirty-Ninth
Street and Ninth
Avenue, close to the boundary between the Midtown North and
South police
precincts. She said that there was a group of men who would
call out lewd re-
marks to her as she walked past the area. She thought the men,
who she called
“the harassers,” crossed from precinct to precinct in order to

avoid police atten-
tion, “like the border between the U.S. and Mexico.” The
woman went on to
describe these men as “drunken people from these little
haciendas—or what-
ever they are. . . . They’re also getting grabby. It’s like they set
up camp on
Thirty-Ninth and Ninth with their chairs and their bottles of
beer—in broad
daylight!”
I was glad that the group of Spanish speakers had left at the
beginning of
the meeting. What would they have made of these remarks? I
would prefer to
presume that she felt comfortable making them since the group
was no longer
present, but I am not sure this is true. The fact that they were
going to attend a
meeting held in another language provides a concrete example
of the lines
along which the Hell’s Kitchen “community” is divided. As it
was, nobody
present seemed to take offense. Rather, the woman’s story about
“the haras-
sers” on “the border” catalyzed an outpouring of related stories
from those in
attendance. The tiny room was suddenly filled with a clamor of
voices relating
stories: of people calling out threats from the corner of Thirty-
Ninth Street and

Ninth Avenue; of petty crimes like purse snatchings; or of
“quality-of-life of-
fenses” such as men drinking in public or urinating against the
wall of a build-
ing in plain view. Someone speculated that these men
congregated around
Mexican grocery stores and restaurants in that area. This
remark, in turn,
prompted a laughing wave of admonitions to the police not to
close a favorite
cheap Mexican restaurant on the same corner: “Don’t close Los
Dos Hermanos!”
Throughout these successive waves of stories, as people sat up
in their
seats and interrupted each other, laughing or looking serious as
they told of
their shared feelings of discomfort or danger, the men whose
uniforms made a
solid blue wall at the head of the room stood by impassively.
Their faces were
studies in blank composure. When the riot of stories died down,
the officers
simply replied to those who had spoken that they would
investigate if there
was a serious crime to report. However, they added that the men
gathered on
the corner of Thirty-ninth and Ninth did not present “a police
problem.” The
attendees looked stunned. Someone spoke up with a rhetorical
challenge for
the police: “So, what do you do if three guys say something
really filthy?” One
officer replied, “It’s called freedom of speech.”
It seemed that the police were largely dismissive of both the

challenge and
the complaints as a whole. But they followed this by asking the
audience to tell
them more about what they called “other bad corners” and
“trouble spots.”
People immediately spoke up, mentioning particular street
corners; complain-
ing about seeing someone selling drugs on the sidewalk outside
what they
called “a bad restaurant;” naming a bar on Eighth Avenue,
saying, “It’s a real
trouble spot, and the building that it’s in, I see lots of kids that
I would describe
as male prostitutes.” Others complained about areas near the
Port Authority
bus terminal where manual workers would hang out and party
loudly after quit-
ting time and said that there was a “circus atmosphere” around
the loading
dock of a paper depot in the neighborhood.
I could see that the delegation from the Midtown South Precinct
was having
trouble maintaining their looks of calm attention. They were
losing patience,
fidgeting and looking annoyed. Several times, either the
Neighborhood Asso-
ciation board member who had opened the meeting or the
commanding officer
from the police delegation attempted to cut the discussion short.
However,
each time they tried to move on to another topic, someone else
from the audi-
ence would speak up about another “hot spot.” It seemed that,
once the atten-
dees began to catalog their everyday experiences in the

neighborhood in terms
of “trouble corners” or areas where they felt uncomfortable or
in danger, they
tapped into a veritable geyser of stories. This was a well of
narratives about gut
feelings and fleeting impressions that seemed that it would
never run dry.
One intense-looking man, who had been sitting silently behind
me during
the entire meeting up to this point, shot his thin arm into the air
and began to
talk about what he called a “potential hot spot” on his block. He
said that con-
struction workers had set up a great deal of scaffolding near his
building. The
trucks parked on the street alongside the scaffolding made him
feel hemmed in
and endangered—“in a trap.” One officer asked if it was legal
for the trucks to
park there. The man replied that he thought it was, but he
wasn’t sure; he said
that the parking signs had all been knocked over by the careless
driving of the
construction workers. The police were visibly appalled by his
answer. One of-
ficer cut the man short, angrily demanding to know why “all
you people aren’t
coming to your Precinct Community Council meetings [see
below] with these
little petty concerns?”8

There was a short, stunned silence following the officer’s
outburst. With
this, it seemed that the police were ready for the meeting of the
Hell’s Kitchen
Neighborhood Association to come to an end. Someone from the
audience
spoke up again with another “hot spot” story, but the officers
simply ignored
him. Instead, they quickly filed out of the room, leaving us in
our seats, some
with hands still in the air and more stories to tell.
“It’s Pretty Obvious What the Police Should and Shouldn’t Do”
The above example demonstrates that there are multiple systems
of read-
ing the everyday experience of the city for signs of “disorder”
and that there
are different ways to define and look for “broken windows.”
The flexible,
open-ended quality of the trope of the broken window seems to
contradict one
of the tenets of the concept of community policing as it is
currently articulated
in New York City. This is the idea that the police and the
community should
share, first, a single definition of order and second, a single
definition of what
constitutes evidence that order is under threat (a “quality-of-life
offense”). But
such a state of consensus cannot simply be taken for granted.
Consensus and
order must be forged by specific actors, a process that involves
ordering out di-
vergent perspectives.

Such was the case in the meetings of the Midtown North
Precinct Com-
munity Council, which was another organization of
Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen
area residents. The Precinct Community Councils are groups set
up by the
NYPD to mediate between the police and the residents of their
territory, in this
case the area west of Times Square but north of the
neighborhood covered by
the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association. Unlike the latter,
the meetings
of the Midtown North Precinct Community Council were kept in
relatively
strict order by members of the group. Nonetheless, these
meetings produced
the same narrative swamp that characterized the
neighborhood association
meeting. Once again, talk about broken windows risked
becoming a broken
window itself. The police and their allies in these meetings were
presented
with the challenge of shaping these narratives, which they heard
as disjointed
and disorderly, into usable crime data and rational dialogue.
But, as with the
neighborhood association meeting, the police seemed loath to
do this narrative
shaping.
Instead of mediating these stories themselves, the police

delegated om-
budspersons to assemble and speak for the community. The
president of the
Midtown North Precinct Community Council was one such
figure. He was an
urbane man, who worked as a producer for a national network
news program.
When I interviewed him, he explained to me that he understood
his role in the
community council to be a mediator, someone to help put
speakers, stories, and
listeners into their proper alignment. However, his actual role in
these meet-
ings was somewhat more complex than this. He was charged
with producing
that which the council claimed to represent: the orderly
community. He did this
by staging a definition of community that was both friendly to
the NYPD and
intelligible to it.
As the council president explained, the purpose of the meetings
was to im-
merse the police in the everyday experiences of the Hell’s
Kitchen community.
“The more they [the police] know about a problem, the more
likely [they] are
to come up with a solution. . . . You hear a little old lady say
that [she’s afraid
of restaurant delivery men riding bicycles on the sidewalk],
suddenly it puts a
different spin on that particular motor code.” But the police
could not or would
not pay attention to everything that people complained about.
Sometimes the
council meetings produced stories about matters that ranged

beyond the role of
the police, as well as stories that didn’t seem to open up clear
demands for ac-
tion at all:
I hate to tell people, “You’re wasting our time. Why’d you
come to us with that?”
You know, you try to be polite, but . . . . She [an older woman]
always brings up
health care. “Health insurance for old people in this country is a
problem.” That’s
true, but it’s not something that the police department is
charged with dealing
with. So she gets the floor to talk about whatever issue she
wants, and then we just
go on. Because some of these things are just not anything that
the police depart-
ment is charged to do anything about.
As I attended more of these meetings, I began to notice the way
in which
the council president would lean forward intently when these
seemingly aber-
rant stories would start to unfurl. It was as though he was
physically straining
to find the kernel of rational police business within their
unstructured, wide-
ranging content. Only rarely would he ever interrupt anyone,
and I never saw
him cut anyone off outright. Instead, once the questioner had
finished, he
would often repeat a distilled version of their questions or try to
find the gist of
their rambling stories.
When I asked him about these editorial practices, he maintained

that he
was just “the ‘flow control’ person.” He said that all he did to
find the relevant
issue in someone’s complaint was to determine whether or not
their stories
matched up to violations of the criminal code:
It’s a question of “Is this something that the police should be
doing?” If you have
problems because you live in an apartment building with a
[broken] vending ma-
chine in the laundry room . . . that’s not the police department’s
problem to deal
with. If you have a problem with prostitutes sitting on your
front step, that is a
police department problem. . . . It’s not arbitrary, it’s pretty
obvious what the po-
lice should and shouldn’t do.
In fact, during the meetings I observed, he was at pains to craft
the “obvi-
ousness” of “what the police should and shouldn’t do” and to
help the commu-
nity to accept this. From our conversations, I came to see his
actions in the
meetings not simply as facilitating a dialogue between the two
groups but also
as marketing each to the other. This entailed a power dynamic
firmly tilted to-
ward the police. For example, he told me that he would give
each community

member who rose with a question only three minutes in which
to speak, to en-
sure that no single speaker dominated the proceedings. At the
same time, he
also mentioned that he would give the commanding officer from
the precinct as
much time to speak as he liked. In fact, he faulted his
predecessor who used to
cut the officer off in mid-sentence, which was, in his
estimation, not only rude
but harmful to the esteem in which he wanted the police to hold
the community.
The council president also told me that he would call on likely
attendees
about a week before every meeting to ask if they had any
questions they
wanted the police to address. He would then forward these
questions to the pre-
cinct. As he explained to me, he did this so that the police
would not be taken
by surprise by any requests for help or information. The
advance notice let the
police draft a complete answer to every question. In the
meetings I attended,
this practice had the effect of making the police appear
extremely professional
and quick to respond to community concerns, with little
confusion or fumbling
for words, let alone the outright hostility of the Hell’s Kitchen
Neighborhood
Association meeting. It also ensured that the police would carry
away a good
opinion of the community. They did not visibly scoff at anyone
or react as
though blindsided by outrageous or hostile requests.

However, while the council president’s efforts were largely
successful,
they were necessarily limited by the formal structure and setting
of the meet-
ings themselves. The council met monthly in the dining hall of a
halfway house
and residential treatment center for the mentally ill. This was an
interstitial
space in the crammed built environment of midtown
Manhattan—a place
where the community could gather in the midst of a densely
packed neighbor-
hood that possessed very little indoor public space. The dining
hall was
sparsely populated at the meetings I attended. Most of the large
round tables
scattered around the room held only two or three people. We
would all sit fac-
ing the long table that dominated the front of the room, drinking
tea and eating
the stale chocolate chip cookies laid out for us by the staff of
the treatment cen-
ter. Seated at the long table were the four or five community
council officials
and the commanding officer from the Midtown North Precinct.
The two or
three police officers he brought with him to every meeting
would either sit at
the long table or stand beside it, expressionless.
The meetings would begin with a salute to the U.S. flag. Once
we were all
seated again, the council officers would go over any questions
left from the
previous month’s meeting. The meeting would then move to

presentations
from local groups, followed by questions for the police from the
audience. The
meetings were, for the most part, calm, unhurried, and efficient:
a study in re-
laxed dialogue. Someone would raise their hand with a question,
for example,
wondering what they should do about a suspected drug dealer
working out of a
building on their block. The council president would carefully
rephrase the
question for the commanding officer, who would then look
thoughtful and re-
ply that citizens needed to know how to inform the police about
suspicious ac-
tivity without getting themselves directly involved. And we
would move on to
the next question.
Residents of the treatment center where the meetings were held
would
often be sitting around the room eating cookies and watching
the proceedings,
and at times, they would also speak up. On these occasions, the
orderly exchange
of information between community and police would begin to
slip into what I
thought of as a narrative miasma; a mire of tactile imagery or
endless tangents.
When I asked the council president whether he ever noticed this
dynamic at

play in the meetings, he laughingly agreed and told the
following story:
We have that young lady, she’s always there. . . . It was a few
months ago. I called
on her—her hand was up in the back, frantically [waves his
hand in the air]—I
called on her and she said [he adopts a slow, emphatic voice], “I
want to know,
what is the New York City Police Department going to do”
(We’re all listening in-
tently, like, “This woman’s right on target!”) “going to do about
all of these space
aliens walking around among us? There are more and more of
them showing up
every day; they’re walking down the streets with us. What are
the police going to
do about this?” The room went silent. . . . I didn’t want to insult
her with, “What
are you, a nutcase or something?” All I could think of was,
“Space aliens are a fed-
eral problem. You’ll have to call Senator D’Amato’s office—let
me get you the
number.” I could just see Senator D’Amato’s office the next day
calling, “Did you
tell her to call us?”
What he seemed to find funniest about this story was the fact
that he was
able to recover smoothly in the face of the woman’s question
about the prob-
lem of space aliens. Rather than dismiss her as a nutcase, he
referred her to a
governmental authority other than the NYPD. He was able to
play with knowl-
edge about “what the police should and shouldn’t do” in order

to keep the
meeting working and to avoid the disruptive potential of
questions that seemed
crazy or unintelligible. The same tactics also helped him to
avoid other ques-
tions, such as the concern about inadequate health care
mentioned above, that
might challenge the frame that the police draw around what
constitutes a qual-
ity-of-life problem. This is how he was able to construct,
maintain, and sell the
the intended role of the police in these meetings.
The Citizens’ Police Academy
The NYPD’s Citizens’ Police Academy is where community
members
can learn how to play this mediating role between the police and
the commu-
nity. They learn “what the police should and shouldn’t do” and
how to convey
this to others. I heard about the academy from several people I
met during the
early days of my fieldwork, including the council president, as
well as promi-
nent members of block associations, tenants’ rights
organizations, and other
community groups in the Hell’s Kitchen area. What the
Citizens’ Police Acad-
emy offers to community members selected by their local
precincts is an abbre-

viated simulation of the year-long training course that NYPD
cadets undergo
in order to become police officers. The program was set up by
the NYPD in the
early 1990s as part of the community-policing initiative under
Mayor Dinkins.
The course is given every spring. Classes are held in the
resolutely nondescript
Police Academy building on East 21st Street in Manhattan. For
three hours one
night per week for 14 weeks, the hundred or so attendees are
split into four
companies, based on the location of their home precinct.
Grouped by company,
they sit through classes taught by the police officers who work
as instructors in
the NYPD Academy. The topics covered range from
constitutional law to fire-
arms training and to testifying in court. At the end of the 14
weeks, there is a
festive graduation ceremony; attendees receive a diploma and
have their pic-
ture taken with the Police Commissioner.
Intrigued by the concept and encouraged by my informants, I
decided to
attend the Academy myself. I wanted to see what light the
Citizens’ Police
Academy would shed on the kinds of situations I’ve described
above. The
Academy intrigued me, both as a site to learn more about police
training meth-
ods and theories of social order, but also as an institution
crafted by the police
for the express purpose of interpellating key community
members even more

deeply into the police perspective.9
When my class gathered en masse in the Academy auditorium
on our first
night, we heard a speech given by the head of the Citizens’
Police Academy
alumni association. He told us that we were “all very special
people, singled
out by police folks” to become mediators between the police
and “our commu-
nities.” He said that, if we heard someone in a meeting
complain about how the
police treated them, we should now think, “Wait a minute, I was
in the Citi-
zens’ Police Academy,” and intercede. These sentiments were
repeated
throughout our course of training. As one instructor told us later
on, “What
we’re trying to do is open the door a little and give you a little
bit of insight.”
However, the insights that the Academy instructors gave us
were often am-
biguous, if not outright frightening. In some ways, the NYPD
portrayed itself
as an unpredictable and violent force, indigenous to a similarly
unpredictable
and violent world.
According to the instructors, the power of the police lies in
their ability to
gauge the world in terms of sources of potential threat—to read
the hidden
signs of crime. The picture they paint of the police worldview,
scanning a
threatening city for disorder that civilians cannot see, was far
from reassuring.

For example, in the class devoted to gangs and juvenile
offenders, we watched
a video purporting to educate police officers (and, in this case,
members of the
class) in the art of identifying gang members by their dress and
behavior. The
video began with a woozy solarized tracking shot along a
crowded school play-
ground. This clip recurred throughout the video, framing the
video as a whole
as well as providing segues between interview segments with
people identified
by subtitles as gang experts. The slow, wary scan of the
playground appeared
to simulate the perspective of a police officer, looking out the
window of the
patrol car as it rolled past an after-school crowd. The video
distorted the ap-
pearance of groups of children, making them harder to read. The
unintelligible
video image gave the scene an alien suspenseful quality. I was
sure that the
camera was going to pick out something: a fight, a mugging, a
dead body. I
found myself scrutinizing every out-of-focus bunch of kids,
looking for the
crime I felt sure would be there.
Later in the video, the camera did another drunken and distorted
pan along
a night-time street scene. The narrator told us that gang

members identify
themselves through “distinctive clothing.” The image suddenly
focused on a
kid wearing a puffy jacket, zooming in until the label on the
jacket filled the
screen: “North Face.” I was taken aback. What were the makers
of the video
trying to imply with this shot? Wasn’t North Face just a regular,
upscale brand
name? Was there a gang that calls itself “North Face,” or whose
members wore
North Face garb?
Whatever the message its makers intended, the gang video
hinted at a
world of menace to which prospective police officers had to
learn to attune
themselves. Nor was it clear that this world of threat was
confined to the spaces
of the city outside. One instructor asked our class, “You’re a
police officer and
you come into this room. You see 25 people, and what do you
think?” An older
woman called out, “Trouble!” and the whole class laughed. The
instructor went
on. “We don’t walk into the room and say, ‘25 pretty people.’
We walk into a
room and say, ‘Who doesn’t belong here?’ ” In effect, the
instructor was agree-
ing with the woman’s joke; the police looked at us, or any room
full of people,
and saw someone out of place, someone who “doesn’t belong:”
“Trouble!”
The academy instructors sometimes made the NYPD seem as
dangerous

and mysterious as the world that the gang video described. On
one such occa-
sion, our instructor blithely informed us that NYPD officers
(herself included)
carried concealed handguns nearly all the time, even when off
duty. An imme-
diate sensation of shock and dismay ran through the room. I
watched the class
recoil. People were outraged. They began calling out confused
and angry ques-
tions: “You’re kidding!” “Is this true?” “Is this safe?” “This
doesn’t seem
right. What if there’s an accident?” “What if they get drunk?”
The instructor
did not say anything in response. She just watched the
questioners with an affa-
bly blank expression on her face until they quieted down before
moving on to
another topic.
At the same time, the instructors worked to frame the Citizens’
Police
Academy in terms of a natural and egalitarian collective
identity—a social con-
tract encompassing citizens, instructors, the police, and law-
abiding society as
a whole. As our first instructor put it, “Most of the time, the
things you learn in
my classroom, you already knew.” There were several ways in
which the form
of the classes themselves reinforced this sense of a group that
was already in
agreement and in the know. The instructors would often engage
the class in a

staging of group consensus through a process of call-and-
response dialogue. In
a class on law, the instructor began by asking, “What’s our
definition of law?”
The class responded in unison, “Rules.” The instructor
followed, “And if we
didn’t have rules, how would we live?” The class answered,
“Chaos.” The in-
structor then asked, “Why? Aren’t we normal rational beings?”
“No,” the class
responded. The instructor continued: “We think we are, but we
need structure.
Other than that it would be—what?” But she answered her own
question this
time. “Survival of the fittest. What’s wrong with that?”
Someone from the back
of the classroom called out, “Some people are stronger than
others. They may
have a bias.” The instructor nodded. “The strong would prey on
the weak. But
isn’t that how it is? So we have these laws that are designed to
give everybody
a fair shot.”
The instructors were also fond of opposing the relative
informality of the
citizen’s academy to what they described as the rigid hierarchy
of the “real”
police academy, in whose classrooms we sat. They did this by
making a show
out of setting aside any kind of strict authority structure in the
classroom. The
instructors repeatedly told us to raise our hands and ask

questions at any point.
“If you have a particular incident, something that happened to
you that you
want to share, just shout it out.” And they stressed how
different this was, how
much more natural, than the bureaucratic, authoritarian
structure of the real
NYPD Academy. Another way they highlighted this distinction
was by slip-
ping from one register of formality to another, for example,
when one instruc-
tor mockingly berated someone in our group for being poorly
dressed and
slumping in their chair. The instructor then turned to the class
as a whole and
commented, “If this was a real class, I would have cited myself
for not shaving
right before I came in.” Another instructor, after having a long
argument with
various members of the class over racism and the NYPD,
applauded that we
could all disagree with each other “and still leave as friends.”
In short, the instructors worked to reinforce the feeling that we
were all
there together and bound by a common purpose. However, what
that common
purpose might actually have been was never explicitly raised for
discussion.
Instead, the officer-instructors claimed that what they taught
was organically
linked to social knowledge we already possessed. The back-and-
forth dialogue
exercises enacted this supposed natural agreement: they spoke;
we answered as
one. The instructors sought to maintain a frame of orderly

questions and an-
swers, with some room for “reasonable” personal digressions.
And any dis-
agreements we might have had were subsumed under our larger
social en-
meshedness. We could still “leave as friends.”
But this straightforward framework of rational friendship and
social contract
was disrupted time and again. The people in class didn’t always
act in a way
that fit the instructors’ frame. As in the police–community
meetings described
above, participants would occasionally spill forth with endlessly
detailed sto-
ries that seemed to wander far from whatever the topic of the
moment might
have been. For example, during the class on “traffic stops,” an
older man began
a long, rambling story about getting pulled over by the police.
The instructor
listened carefully to his story, unsuccessfully trying to find in it
an apt subject
for an explication of police procedure or the fine points of laws
governing
search and seizure. After a few minutes the instructor
interrupted the man’s
story and simply went on with the class as before.
Most often, however, the class was pulled away from the
instructors’ orderly

format by the presence of one particularly intense woman.
Always sitting
alertly in the front row of the classroom, she leapt upon nearly
every question
the instructors asked, brandishing loud, lengthy replies. Her
answers would be-
gin as free associations on the instructors’ topics but quickly
evolved into more
rambling and digressive monologues, speeding up and growing
more and more
vehement as she went on. When she wasn’t speaking up in class,
she didn’t seem
to be at all hostile toward the officers who were leading the
class or toward the
NYPD as a whole. On the contrary, she was always the first to
volunteer to pass
out paperwork or readings for the next week’s classes.
However, in her diatribes,
she often seemed to grow progressively angrier as she stitched
together topic
after topic, as in this story that she told during a class
discussion on crime:
When I was growing up, everything was sending the same
message. School, mu-
sic, parents, your churches, your synagogues, newspapers: stay
a virgin, go to a
trade school. Now you’ve got the left wing saying one thing, the
right wing saying
another, the academics think they know everything, nobody’s on
the side of the
parents. We live in a greed-driven society. I don’t believe in
money, I believe in
barter, but we have all these people who neglect their children
because they need
to fund their lifestyle. . . . The feminist movement has lied to

women, telling them
they’re not worth anything unless they work. People have no
shame, leaving their
children to support their lifestyle, with their $190 Nike
sneakers. . . . I’m a single
mother. You can’t just hand your children up to day care!
Whenever she began to speak, the rest of the class reacted
visibly. Some
sat forward to hear what she had to say, apparently fascinated.
Others slumped
back and muttered angrily to themselves or to their neighbors.
Still others
stared straight down, intently looking at their notes, their
textbooks, or just at
the tops of their desks.10 For their part, the instructors simply
watched her talk.
Their faces were perfectly composed, without expression. The
only time I ever
saw one of them react to her in any visible way was when, after
trying fruit-
lessly to cut her off, our instructor yelled “Excuse me for a
moment please!”
and stormed out of the room. He came back in after a minute or
two and
quickly apologized to her. He then resumed the class as though
nothing had
happened. Such moments served to illustrate the constant
tensions that arose
around the academy’s attempts to make us into a community
with a single, or-
derly voice. The police tried to set the terms of the relationship,
but theirs was
never the only agenda at work.
Conclusion

The meetings I have described were designed to produce social
bonds and
shared knowledge between the police and the community groups
of New York
City. This flow of knowledge and mutual sympathy is meant,
ultimately, to re-
duce fear by allowing the police to tap into citizens’ knowledge
of their neigh-
borhoods so that they might more effectively control crime,
while also accli-
matizing citizens to the presence of the police and thus lessen
their threatening
difference. They portray the police to these community groups
as sympathetic,
interested, and ready to remedy whatever threats citizens
perceive in their eve-
ryday lives. In many respects, these meetings did succeed in
meeting some of
these goals. The police were able to gather information about
crime and qual-
ity-of-life problems in Hell’s Kitchen, and many of the people
with whom I
spoke in the neighborhood and at the Citizens’ Police Academy
told me that
they appreciated the meetings and enjoyed getting to know more
about the po-
lice and their work.
In these institutions of police–community dialogue, the police
worked to

interpellate a particular community subject, one that spoke with
a unified voice
on topics the police regarded as reasonable. These institutions
attempted to cre-
ate a community subject that, while not entirely stable or
univocal, saw the so-
cial world through what it imagined were the eyes of the police
and to know
how to give the police what they wanted. In this way, these
meetings enacted
some of the harshest and most troubling aspects of the dominant
police dis-
course on social order—the discourse on broken windows.
First, the meetings privileged “community” perspectives, with
the atten-
dant dismissal of all those (workers, tourists, and visitors, not
to mention teen-
agers, the homeless, and petty criminals) who resided elsewhere
or who could
otherwise be defined as “outsiders.” Second, while not every
claim that people
raised was taken with equal seriousness by the authorities, the
meetings still
served to perpetuate the idea that everything one encounters in
the urban world
is a potential criminal offense and thus carries within it the
seeds of social col-
lapse. The discourse of “broken windows” asks us to imagine a
fragile world in
which every social structure comes to resemble a greenhouse
waiting to fall in
on itself once some unthinking person throws the first stone.
Third, no matter how much scrutiny the community meetings or
the Citi-

zens’ Police Academy placed on the police, their methods, and
their training, it
was ultimately the police perspective and police power around
which these in-
stitutions revolved. This perspective suggests that there does
exist something
called “order” to be maintained and “disorder” to be controlled.
It further sug-
gests that it is the proper role of the police to take these tasks in
hand and that it
is right for the community to scrutinize and edit itself—in
effect, to discipline
itself—to accommodate the systems of power and belief that the
police claim
to represent. Remarkably, even though the Abner Louima police
torture case
was in the headlines throughout my fieldwork, I never heard
anyone refer to
this, nor to any other incident of police misconduct, nor
mention race in any
explicit way, during any of my observations of meetings in
Hell’s Kitchen or
of the Citizens’ Police Academy.
Yet, if the NYPD dominated the structure of the
communications I have
described here, they never did so absolutely. As the police
struggled to maintain
the framework they desired, they sometimes came to view the
community as a
potential source of disorder. At the same time, the community

they imagined
remained fragmented by a host of individual and group agendas.
These agen-
das were not necessarily progressive or politically correct, as
was demon-
strated in the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association meeting
by complaints
about the Latin American presence in the area and, initially, in
the meeting it-
self. By playing into the dominant image of a closed,
homogeneous community
under assault by “outsiders,” they perpetuated or intensified the
segregated
status quo of everyday life and real estate in New York City.
Conversely, other
members of the community voiced critiques of a broad range of
real or imag-
ined social issues: dangers facing the elderly, the high cost of
health insurance,
insidious commodity fetishism, the plight of single motherhood,
and even vis-
its from space aliens.
All these diverse concerns shared something in common with
each other
and with the narrative quagmire and spiraling questions in the
stories above.
They showed how, in the institutions of police–community
dialogue, the people
hailed as “community” simultaneously accepted, extended, and
challenged the
police ideology of crime and crisis and its language of “broken
windows,” “hot
spots,” and “quality-of-life offenses.” As they accepted the
ideology of the po-
lice and of the neoliberal sociospatial order in general, they

extended this ide-
ology as well, into realms of social justice outside the purview
of the police.
They also extended it deeply into the experience of everyday
life in the
city—specifically, everyday life in a rapidly changing
neighborhood on the
margins of the massive Times Square redevelopment project, in
a city that is
infamously dense, confusing, anonymous, and annoying in the
best of circum-
stances. They used the terms of the discourse of broken
windows and quality-
of-life to speak about, speculate on, and talk back to the
transforming cityscape
around them, as represented most vividly by the changes in
Times Square and
their impact on Hell’s Kitchen. In other words, they spoke the
language of or-
der-maintenance policing to narrate their experience of how
their part of New
York City was changing under neoliberalism, with its pairing of
sweeping pri-
vatization and the government’s abandonment of public spaces
and services. In
so doing, they often challenged the police themselves, either
implicitly, when
they demanded that the police address health insurance or
housing questions,
or explicitly, as in the moment of visceral shock when the class
at the academy
heard that off-duty NYPD officers usually go armed.
All of these examples make the NYPD’s use of the image of
“visible signs
of a city out of control” vividly and ironically appropriate. The

people attend-
ing these meetings did their best to absorb the ideology of order
maintenance
policing, to feel and speak on its terms. They took the police’s
image of “a city
out of control” very seriously and worked with it as well as they
could. But they
were unable or unwilling to keep their talk about their “quality-
of-life” within
the bounds set by the police. Instead, they spoke about the
changes they were
witnessing in their neighborhoods and in the city around them—
changes that
broke all easy definitions of “order” and “disorder.” They saw
and experienced
a city around them that was indeed “out of control,” or certainly
out of their
control, in all sorts of ways: loud or threatening strangers; car
and burglar
alarms going off seemingly at random and ringing incessantly;
bikes on the
crowded sidewalks (usually ridden by underpaid immigrants
delivering food to
them or their neighbors); haphazard construction work; cars,
trucks, busses and
taxis jammed in the street; people sleeping on the sidewalks or
in parks and va-
cant lots. They saw that they could not afford health insurance,
that rents and
all the other costs of living in the city were shooting up, that
fancy new corporate

skyscrapers and apartment towers were being built a block or
two away from
their hundred-year-old tenement buildings. And they saw the
police themselves,
with their blue uniforms and sunglasses and guns, their air of
skeptical detach-
ment from the city around them, and their latent threat of deadly
force.
The reality of life in Hell’s Kitchen and similar neighborhoods
far ex-
ceeded, and still exceeds, the moralistic, black-and-white fable
of community
solidarity under siege offered by “broken windows.” As people
do everywhere,
the residents of Hell’s Kitchen experience multiple systems of
order and multi-
ple agendas for organizing the city in their everyday lives.
Needless to say,
most of these operate on scales far beyond the individual or
community-group
level on which these dialogues with the police were staged. So
they responded
to the police incitement to talk about these “visible signs of a
city out of con-
trol” with stories of fear and disorder that unfolded into unruly
spirals of ques-
tioning everything they saw around them, including things about
which the po-
lice would or could do nothing. Above all, these were stories at
least in part
about the larger changes people felt were disrupting their
neighborhood, their
city, and their place in the world—changes that were always
present, even
when only half-perceived, like a new office tower whose

shadow falls 40 sto-
ries to darken the streets below.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Ann Anagnost, the
anonymous reviewers
for Cultural Anthropology, and the many people who read or
heard earlier drafts of this
article and were so generous with their comments, including:
Steven Feld, Kathleen Ste-
wart, Donald Brenneis, Susan Harding, Greg Falkin, Terry
Rosenberg, Susannah Staats,
Henry Goldschmidt, David Valentine, Stephanie Brown, Heather
Levi, Laura Kun-
reuther, Brian Mooney, Susan Lepselter, Angela Torresan, Amy
Paugh, and Elana Zil-
berg, as well as all of the participants in the NDRI/MHRA
fellowship program. I would
also like to thank the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association,
the Midtown North Pre-
cinct Community Council, the New York Police Department,
and the NYPD Citizens’
Police Academy. Partial funding for the research and writing of
this article was provided
by NIDA under grant number 5 T32 DA07233-16. The views
expressed herein are solely
those of the author.
1. Rudolph Giuliani was Mayor of New York City from 1994
until 2002. The Gi-
uliani administration’s “order maintenance” police strategy
entailed such diverse pro-
grams as: the ComStat statistical mapping of crime data, which
catalogs the spaces of the
city in terms of “hot spots” and “trouble corners” where crimes

tend to occur; anti-drug
measures, from aggressive undercover sting operations up to the
wholesale police
occupation of entire blocks in poor black and Latino
neighborhoods such as Washington
Heights; and organizations meant to foster particular forms of
police–community dia-
logue, like those described in this article.
2. Along with studying community policing institutions in the
Times Square area,
my research included interviewing city planners, architects, and
real estate developers
and observing (and eventually volunteering in) a job- and life-
skills training program for
misdemeanor offenders called “Times Square Ink.” (Chesluk
2002). For more on the re-
development of Times Square, see Berman 1997, Delaney 1999,
Gilfoyle 1996, Reichl
1999, Sagalyn 2001, and Taylor 1996.
3. Police scientists, criminologists, and others argue that the
police need to develop
closer ties to local communities. As George Kelling puts it,
“The focus now is really on
crime prevention. . . . And that implies getting closer to the
community because the po-
lice know they can’t do it alone” (James 1999). These
community connections are meant
both to help the police draw on citizens as a source of crime
data and to solve chronic

problems of police practice, such as brutality, corruption,
inefficiency, or anomie (But-
terfield 1999; Editorial 1994; Faison 1994; Finder 1998).
4. This nostalgic bias against the disorderly present is not
confined to policing or
policy making; it also forms an important part of traditional
sociological and anthropo-
logical theories on the primacy of social order. Nicholas Dirks
argues, “In most of our
social scientific thinking, order is presented as a universal
human need, an expression of
reason and the basis of the social. Order thus becomes
naturalized, while all that pro-
duces and is produced by disorder becomes marginalized as
extraordinary and unnatu-
ral” (Dirks 1994:501).
5. Elsewhere I discuss my fieldwork at the Midtown Community
Court, an organi-
zation specifically set up by those involved in the
redevelopment of Times Square in or-
der to either remove these people from the public spaces of
Times Square and Hell’s
Kitchen or to transform them into more socially acceptable
potential employees of the
area’s new corporate tenants (Chesluk 2002).
6. For more on the social and spatial ramifications of “consumer
citizenship” in the
world of millennial capitalism, see Comaroff and Comaroff
2000 and also Dorst 1989,
Sorkin 1992, among many others.
7. The themes of the meetings to come included “Cleaner” and
“Greener,” reflect-

ing the neighborhood association’s unusually sophisticated
membership that included
lay city planners and housing activists.
8. As it happens, when I attended one of the meetings of the
Midtown South Pre-
cinct Community Council, I was the only one present, aside
from a few police officers
and a representative of the Fashion Center Business
Improvement District. He said that
he was there to “respond to community concerns.”
9. An article on similar citizens’ police academies claims that
the purpose of such
programs is “opening channels of communication, dispelling
myths and promoting un-
derstanding between the people and their police” (James 1997).
10. Examples of these behaviors can be observed at any
academic lecture or con-
ference, especially in those uncomfortable moments when a lay
member of the audience
asks an “inappropriately” lengthy, detailed, or personal
question.
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A B S T R A C T Institutions of police–community dialogue in
New
York City assume that communities possess an intuitive and
legally
sound sense of order and disorder, on which the police can rely

for
information and support. However, staged dialogues between
police
and community groups can produce complicated situations of
conflict
and tension. While the police work to interpellate a friendly,
coherent,
and controlled community subject, city residents use the
police’s
ideological language of order to offer a critique of the police
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