REDONDO BEACH PD AND THE COST OF REFORM
Across the cramped spectrum of formal U.S. politics, there is a heavily promoted lore surrounding Martin Luther King’s conception of Black and White unity: a concept that has been so bastardized (but spread nonetheless!) throughout history that — when the oppressed peoples of America are offered it today — they find little difference between its fruits and those of plain old white supremacy.
The misremembering King’s philosophy has endured is no accident of course, but instead a result of the U.S.’s commitment to rendering any demand for white accountability toothless in the education system, the media, and anywhere else it might be possible for a white person in this country to discover the racial violence that provides their comforts. As the man himself assured, to “ever solve the turbulent problem of race confronting our nation…” there must be an “…honest confrontation with it and a willing search for the truth, and a willingness to admit the truth when we discover it.” And it is in the spirit of honest confrontation that we will today address the misremembering of Dr. King taking place in the Redondo Beach police department.
On January 20th of 2020 Redondo Beach PD, in collaboration with its community engagement board and a PR firm called “Sands and Shores”, put together a “celebration” of King’s legacy. Now, here we run into our first bit of honest confrontation, and if we hope to reach any real conclusions, we must address it seriously. Why is it that a police department would enlist the services of a PR firm, one which highlights mostly small business clients, to put together an event regarding Dr. King?
The answer lies largely in the fact that, like many businesses, police departments — and the local governments that legitimize them — place massive amounts of effort and funding into their public image. The preservation of the cop as the proverbial “good guy" in American society is essential to contradicting the trail of violence and harm law enforcement — by nature of its very existence — must leave in its wake. So long as state forces are empowered to patrol the communities of the oppressed to enforce the laws of the elite, harm is inevitable. And as the modern revolutionary has come to understand the inevitability of this harm, so too has the modern carceral system come to understand a need for it's erasure. Nearly 20% of Hollywood TV involves law enforcement. Of the ten longest running TV shows in the U.S., five are cop procedurals (a genre infamous for taking current event issues and presenting their solutions as the brutal tools of police departments).
The erasure of carceral harm isn't just a project of American media, however. There are specific practices police reformists, like Redondo Beach PD Chief Keith Kauffman, utilize to garner favor with the community and appease critics. Since his appointment as chief in 2015, the department has focused on policing with an emphasis in further integration into communities (going so far as to claim it is the community in its mission statement), transparency in the form of body cameras and public use-of-force statistics, and an ever-expanding budget. It cannot be understated how little any of these things do to remove Black people from under the boot of law enforcement.
Even the National Police Foundation admits that, at best, body cameras are a reactive tool for observing and correcting errors in training after misconduct has already taken place, and only occasionally stop brutality at a moment of conflict. But Black people are not practice, and should never be expected to smile through a beating in hopes that the next cop will know better for it.
There is also little to be said about the efficacy of transparency, that is, when it’s practiced by a group that holds all the leverage. What good does it do you to know that the men with all the guns (and the state backing to use them!) are willing to tell you who else they’ve brutalized? What power does this give you? If you were to tell your local officials of the many injustices that have no doubt taken place in your community, and present with them a spreadsheet of the tallied up police attacks, beatings, and murders accrued throughout the years, how high would the number have to be for said officials to admit just cause in your marching right up to your local department and disarming every cop inside? To get to the “truth” Dr. King spoke of just a month before his own assassination: no such body count exists. Look no further than every major city’s police budget, and secondly at the accounts of abuse against Black people in these cities, and the truth becomes undeniable.
It must be understood that there is no so-called police reform in America that is not synonymous with more money for the purposes of policing. Any mainstream solutions offered by an American politician up until the present day — body cameras, non-lethal weapons, bias training — have only resulted in additions to already inflated police budgets. Entire markets have formed and thrived around the production of tasers, alternative ammunitions, and new training methods — all of which served no utility when Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck until his life ended. Or when Eric Garner was choked to death on a New York city street in broad daylight. Or when Breonna Taylor was shot to death in her sleep by breaching police officers. Or, put simply, when any person given the arms and impunity of the state decides to assault, beat, or kill someone.
And so with a track record as uninspiring as that of American law enforcement, it becomes easier to see why a police department such as the one in Redondo Beach might look toward a PR and marketing firm for assistance. The event this collaboration produced, however, was equally uninspired. As Dr. King’s allyship with the white liberals of his time teaches us: the value of an alliance can most often be measured in what it produces for the most oppressed peoples involved. Unfortunately, the only gains the oppressed peoples within Redondo Beach have to claim following the so-called celebration is a bench erected in Dr. King’s honor in front of the department (with pleasantries like “dream” and “love” crafted into it) and two scholarships: both of which were funded not by the department directly, but by fundraising which occurred at the event.
Here again we must question seriously why a department with millions of dollars budgeted to its every need and desire felt it necessary to ask regular citizens to provide the funds for such a small gesture. Could the money reserved for the designing and building of what Chief Kauffman described as the “baddest-ass police motorcycle in America” not have been reallocated towards the small scholarships that were to be given to the students? And as if those gains were not pitiful enough, neither of the scholarships were awarded to Black students.
And so here we must take one last look at the matter, and take in the entirety of the failure that has occurred. A white-led police force used the likeness and imagery of a brutalized Black figure of the civil rights era to crowdfund for two scholarships — awards designed to ingratiate itself with the community, that were not even given to Black students. And so arrives the truth, exposed and quite pathetic: tumbling about in the engine of police reform is a long lineage of Black bodies. First the cop brutalizes a man and uses the footage to “teach” themself better, and later they come to use the very essence of the deceased to earn a dollar.
