Recently on the Jacobin blog, Alex Hanna wrote some reflections on the relationship between Occupy movements and the police. He concludes with the provocative argument that the cops “can be the most ruthless, corrupt organizations, but they can be on our side. In the US, trying to battle them is often going to blow up in our faces.” This kind of argument always grates on me, maybe because I’m a child of the ’90s whose views on the cops were shaped by gangsta rap and crust punk. But it’s a form of hand-wringing that crops up all the time on the liberal-left, so I’m going to attempt to actually formulate a rational critique of what Hanna is saying. Although you can find a more complete theorization of why the cops aren’t your friend in this post by Richard Seymour, I’m just going to try to explain why the notion of getting cops “on our side” is such a problem from the perspective of radical mass movements. The main point is that police repression is a reality whether or not activists “provoke” it, intentionally or not, and recognizing that reality should change how we think about the relationship between protests and police.

Hanna’s post begins by blurring together two very different questions: whether mass protests should intentionally provoke violent conflict with the police, and whether movements should actively seek to maintain conciliatory and friendly relations with the police. The conflation occurs in the first two paragraphs. The opening refers to John Pike, the University of California Davis’s infamous pepper spray cop; the second paragraph asks, “what does provoking police actually accomplish towards the ends of Occupy?” Yet what made the pepper spray cop so shocking was precisely that his brutality was so clearly un-provoked. He casually inflicted agony on a line of seated demonstrators — and with copious photographic documentation, the university administration was left scrambling for the bizarre claim that peacefully disobeying a police instruction (i.e., civil disobedience) now constituted a form of violence.