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On the road to May Day: A non-report-back from Denver 2017

2017-05-11T19:09:59Z

Figure 1. “Diogenes Asking for Alms” by Jean-Bernard Restout (1767). Here Diogenes is begging from a statue, which he did to practice being rejected.

A spectrum of beggars

Being asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, Diogenes said, “Because they think they may one day be lame or blind, but never expect that they will turn to philosophy.”

Every other day of the year I’m dismissive toward churches, parties, unions, and holy days; but on May 1st, I’m somehow always hopeful that a large number of radicals will turn out and cause trouble. It’s been a few years since I’ve written a post complaining about the tameness of May Day in Denver. That’s because I realized that I’m too shy to contribute to or get much out of protests and stopped attending them. This year, however, with good weather, the drama around Trump, and the centennial of the 1917 revolutions, I thought the demonstrations could be big. I searched online and saw that the Democratic Socialists of America and some other groups planned a “May Day Against Trumpism” at the capitol building. Wanting to not miss out, I took the bus to the city.

Between Union Station and Denver’s capitol building is a mile of pedestrian shopping called 16th Street Mall. Recounting one’s walk down 16th Street Mall is often to sketch a continuum-forming typology of beggars:

Figure 2. A print-quality diagram depicting the perfectly sensible multi-dimensional typology of begging. I’m not at all embarrassed of the concept or drawing. The bus icon is by Naomi Atkinson; the capitol icon is by Loren Klein (CC-BY-3.0). The lines were drawn by me: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Click image for SVG version.

Almost as soon as I stepped outside of the bus station a woman approached me and asked if I had “a dollar or something to help with food.” I remembered that I had grabbed some extra change with my bus fare and handed her the two dimes. She cheerfully assured me that every little bit helps. This is the unpretentious beggar: she offers nothing in exchange for taking money except to live and beg another day. Every other beggar I’d meet on my way to the capitol would present their case as an exchange; they’d tell me that either I or an even more helpless third party somewhere would benefit from my donation.

A girl with a clipboard standing at the nearby intersection who witnessed my twenty-cent donation caught my eyes and asked, “Do you want to save a child with me today?” From what I gathered before the crossing light changed, the plan was for her to get paid to solicit donations for some sponsor-a-child charity scheme and for me to give her my money. I couldn’t even think of a sensible response to that offer of teamwork and just awkwardly shook my head before crossing the street. Later down the mall I met some more clipboard beggars, and I did much better. One girl got my attention with a friendly greeting and then explained that with Trump in office it is very important that I give to the ACLU. I told her I didn’t have any money. She was understanding and told me that I could donate online whenever I do have money.

A man begging on behalf of Save The Children, an organization currently helping victims of the Syrian civil war, asked if he could talk to me about their work. I told him I don’t have any money, and he politely asked if he could give me his spiel anyway. So I listened. When he got back to asking for a donation I wished him luck and walked on. It turns out that while he’s trying to extract money from unemployed anarchists on the mall, the President and CEO of Save the Children, Carolyn Miles (whose background is in marketing, specifically in selling American Express cards to college students), is paid $455,000 per year.

Further down the mall I looked down and walked fast to avoid interacting with a pair of clipboard-holders wearing Greenpeace shirts.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. When I crossed to the other side of 16th Street, on the first block of the mall, there was a man playing the flute along to some kind of electronic jazz music playing from a loudspeaker while also talking to passers-by trying to get them to dance. It was a tough crowd, but he was a skilled performer and there were several dollars in the wooden box on the ground in front of him.

Unlike most beggars, buskers are generally not only tolerated but desired by downtown business improvement districts because they provide some cultural authenticity which makes shopping a less sterile experience. People often give to buskers because they genuinely enjoyed the performance rather than out of pity, in which cases street performing is a commercial art rather than begging proper. While I’ve not witnessed them in Denver, other cases in which unsolicited services are pre-rendered with the expectation of payment, such as squeegee beggars who clean windshields at stoplights for donations, probably rarely make that transition (and so precede busking in the spectrum).

The claim that donations are actually payment for a service is a rhetorical game Diogenes played when he said people should pay him “not for alms, but for repayment of his due” (presumably for being such a great philosopher). And like some guilt-tripping clipboard beggars, he also tried leaning on potential donors' sense of fairness and morality to reason them into giving to him: “If you have already given to anyone else, give to me also; if not, begin with me.”

Jesus, the founder of the other ancient tradition of begging which has been gnawing the foundations of Western civilization for over 2,000 years, also gave some rather cynical advice on how to handle beggars. Included in his Sermon on the Mount are three of his most characteristic pronouncements. The first, “Do not resist an evildoer,” is followed by three examples of enduring more abuse than one’s day-to-day abusers expect (if someone slaps your face, turn turn the other cheek; if someone sues you for the literal shirt off your back, give them your cloak too; if you are conscripted to walk a mile, walk two miles). The third is “Love your enemies,” after which Jesus points out that even tax collectors — the very agents of exploitation — are nice to their friends, so that should be, like, the absolute minimum standard of behavior.

Perhaps less famous (though not less vexing) than those two paradoxical sayings is found right between them: “Give to everyone who begs from you.”

Jesus’s first followers were propertyless peasants who had left even their homes, were used to putting up with abuse at the hands of their social betters, to going without sufficient clothing, to walking more than even soldiers, were more often beggars than givers, and who nevertheless treated everybody well. Whatever the deeper and more general applications of these sayings, then, on their surface they not only presented the lifestyle of the early Christians (that which potential followers would be expected to adopt), they also seem to be lightheartedly self-serving in the same style of the Cynics who taught that it was virtuous to give to homeless philosophers.

The co-optation of Christianity by the rich and powerful not long after Jesus was executed imbued these sayings with even greater difficulty for their future audiences, especially “give to everyone who begs from you” which cannot be so easily philosophized away as a paradox. As an example, consider the case of a 19th-century Russian aristocrat named Leo Tolstoy who after a legendary career as a novelist attempted to take the sayings of Jesus seriously. His struggles with “do not resist an evildoer” produced several works which had profound influences on social justice movements around the world and are still read by pacifists and anarchists today. But it wasn’t until he was quite old that he finally got the courage (if sneaking away from one’s wife in the middle of the night counts as courageous) to leave all of his possessions by setting out on train with nothing but the clothes of a standard Russian peasant. He developed pneumonia and died within days of leaving home.

The pretensions of the cynical beggar are ironic in that the audience is aware of the rhetorical game, but like in the case of the street performer, it is the decision of those who give as to whether they are giving out of pity or gratitude. Beyond that, the type of beggar represented by the Cynic and the Christian are honest both in the sense that they present neither sob stories nor pretended friendliness, but even more so in that they invite their listeners to throw off their own pretensions about the society they are living in and reproducing. That is, to the Cynic and the Christian, giving to beggars is not in tension with more systematic solutions to poverty, it is the systematic solution to poverty. The clipboard-holding fundraiser, in contrast, who has perfected the sob story, the salesman-like friendliness, and who claims salvation is found in non-profit organizations, is perhaps the paragon of the dishonest beggar.

I didn’t have occasion to mention it, because I have thankfully never been a witness or victim to a robbery (not that such crimes are unknown on the 16th Street Mall), but robbers also make no claim to be helping their victims and should logically precede the unpretentious beggar in our spectrum. While of course theft and robbery, being characterized by their involuntary demands, are not begging properly, even muggers sometimes couch their activity in the language of a market exchange (‘your money for your life’).

Julian, the fourth-century Roman emperor (a nephew of Constantine) who tried to peacefully revert the empire from Christianity back to Paganism, was annoyed with the openly atheist and crude Cynics of his day. He wanted all Cynics to be as pious and educated as he imagined Diogenes and Crates were, and argued that most Cynics were even worse than bandits and pirates who were at least decent enough to be ashamed of their lifestyle and live in their faraway hideouts instead of preaching at people in the streets. He also referred to Cynics as “monks,” intending the association with Christians to be an insult (Christians were only one or three gods away from being atheists themselves).

At many of the intersections along the mall I saw newspaper salesmen — often older men with all of their possessions in bags on the ground at their feet — selling the Denver VOICE for a suggested $2 per copy. Originally founded 20 years ago as “a grassroots newspaper created by homeless people for homeless people,” the VOICE is now written for a general audience and sold by homeless vendors (who buy the papers for $0.50 each) as a way for them to earn some income. (The Denver VOICE is independent, but its operating model is influenced by similar street newspaper vending networks which operate in cities around the world.)

These charity vendors, whose sales depend at least as much on pity as on satisfying the wants of their customers, are located in the middle of the murky space where begging becomes selling (somewhere to the retail side of the children in third-world cities who sell trinkets to Western tourists).

Of course the entire mall is lined by actual retail shops and beggardly advertisements. Salespersons and advertisers (and the business owners they work for) likely imagine they are much further along the spectrum of begging than they actually are.

Downtown business associations and city councils will often commission artwork to help beautify shopping areas and, as in the case of buskers, will happily tolerate some guerrilla murals which provide a degree of authenticity to the shopping environment. But for the most part any art or graphic design which might distract from the commercial purposes of the property is forbidden. In the words of the street artist Banksy, “The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back.”

Banksy’s observation echoes one by GK Chesterton a hundred years earlier that “It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money”:

A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

Shop and restaurant owners on the 16th Street Mall have been known to be hostile to the more needy beggars operating on their turf and have enlisted the police to carry out revanchist actions against the most vulnerable. In 2012, legislation criminalizing the act of sleeping outside with shelter (defined as “any tent, tarpaulin, lean-to, sleeping bag, bedroll, blankets, or any form of cover or protection from the elements other than clothing”) was passed on behalf of downtown business owners. Under the authority of that code, police have conducted winter raids on homeless camps to confiscate blankets. Recently three individuals accused of camping with shelter were tried by jury, convicted, and sentenced to several days of forced labour.

The City of Denver in collaboration with downtown business owners has installed mechanical panhandlers — modified parking meters — which are meant to compete with live beggars. The city has promised the money collected by the machines will go toward “job training, meals and permanent housing options that help get people back on their feet,” but it has been caught spending it instead to help fund the police sweeps of homeless camps.

The mall ends where 16th Street dead-ends into Broadway. To the north is the financial heart of Denver’s business center. On 16th Street itself are the two Denver World Trade Center buildings and Republic Plaza (the tallest building in Denver); scattered beyond those are more high-rise office buildings and skyscrapers. These buildings exhibit almost none of the colorful and chaotic elements of the shopping mall and are instead dark, sleek, and inauspicious.

The craft of capital allocation and investment, which is practiced in many of these buildings, does not depend on demanding, begging, or offering so much as on staking ownership and simply taking interest. Like the robber on one end of our spectrum, we have financial capitalism on the other: the bandit subsumed. The full spectrum of begging plays out between these dialectical bookends of the modern capitalist economy, as it does everyday between Union Station and Broadway.

Walking a block south on Broadway brought me to the state capitol building. I could see maybe 100 demonstrators nestled up on the steps waving red and black flags. A large banner facing the street read “No War But Class War,” and another further back read “Workers & Oppressed People of the World Unite!” There were no police or pro-Trump counter-protestors in sight.

The prospect of joining them seemed both socially overwhelming and boring. Like some sort of party. So I continued walking down Broadway and spent my afternoon in the Denver Public Library. It was a good May Day.

Other people’s May Day 2017

Of course, some people actually followed through on their plans to attend a May Day demonstration. The local Fox News affiliate was kind enough to both get the word out about various May Day protests in Denver as well as to follow up with a short video and a couple of pictures from the event at the capitol: “May Day events taking place in Denver” (Fox31, 1 May 2017). More photos can be found on the Facebook event page.

A few cities around the world saw major protests, with the riot in Paris getting the most headlines because protesters responded to police tear gas with spectacular petrol bombs. Hundreds of protesters and six cops were injured during the clashes.

In the United States the most unusual thing about May Day this year was the presence of Trump-inspired right-wing counter-protesters who turned up in several cities. Seattle was unusually quiet though there was a minor confrontation with participants of a “Stand Against Communism” rally.

The most rowdy demonstrations were in Portland and Olympia. In Portland a minor riot broke out after a few protesters threw full cans of Pepsi at riot police who responded by charging into the mostly peaceful crowd of marchers. The bloc’d up [mostly-anarchist, no doubt] protesters who instigated the police response have been criticized for endangering the rest of the march.

There was also a small riot in Olympia where protesters threw rocks at police (and some counter-protesters threw rocks at marching demonstrators). In one unfortunate and embarrassing instance, a protester tried to pepper spray some taunting counter-protesters and accidentally sprayed passers-by including a dog. Most cops are not even that irresponsible with chemical weapons.

The Red Guards Austin, a Maoist group which has gained some notoriety in recent months due to their open-carry demonstrations, tried to march in Austin, but they were surround by an alarming number of reactionary counter protesters. Apparently racists and anti-communists of the InfoWars variety are numerous in the Austin area (I didn’t realize until now that Alex Jones lives in Austin and hosts his show there). Some Red Guards members were carrying rifles, and so were a few of the right-wingers. In their public self-criticism which they posted to their weblog, the Red Guards described this scary moment:

Early on in the march a fascist named William Fears physically assaulted one of the comrades who was guiding chants and for this Fears came very close to forcing our units to use lethal force. Those in attendance could see fear in his eyes as the Partisan unit moved into the ready position prepared to chamber a round.

My impression is that the Austin PD did a good job keeping the groups apart and possibly from literally killing each other. The independent journalist Kit O’Connell was present and wrote a good postmortem of the event: “Unpacking The Fascist Rampage On May Day In Austin: What Happened, What Went Wrong.” I could not find a single report from a main stream news outfit.

Sources of quotations

The sayings of Diogenes quoted above can be found in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VI. Those of Jesus are recorded in Matthew 5:38-48. Julian’s thoughts on Cynics are preserved in his seventh Oration: “To the Cynic Heracleios.” The Banksy quote is from his introduction to Wall and Piece. GK Chesterton’s opinion on advertisements can be found in his 1920 book The New Jerusalem.

When Police Kill the Homeless

2014-04-16T14:03:07Z

Homo sacer

In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men.

— Giorgio Agamben
Homo Sacer

Homer sacer (“the accursed/sacred man”) is an obscure figure from ancient Roman law whom anyone can kill without committing a crime, but who may not be sacrificed: an outlaw. Homo sacer thus inhabits the threshold of the political realm by being included within the law only by being abandoned by both profane and divine law. In his extensive study of this archaic figure, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees remnants of the original foundation of the Western political sphere in which political life (Aristotle’s bios) is constituted by excluding the ‘bare life’ (zoe) of the home.

The other limit of the political sphere is the mirrored figure of homo sacer: the sovereign whose inclusion in the law consists of the exclusive ability to suspend the law by declaring a state of emergency (the “sovereign exception”). Insofar as subjects are exposed to legal homicide (such as extra-judicial executions) under the state of exception, sovereign power produces bare life. “The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has been captured in this sphere.” (83)

In his book Citizens Without Shelter, Leonard Feldman presents a theory in which the homeless body is seen as an example of homo sacer. Through readings of U.S. case law on anti-homeless ordinances (those municipal codes which forbid begging, public feeding, sitting on sidewalks, sleeping outdoors, etc.) he shows that the courts have constructed homeless life as bare life. The homeless life, even when lived in the very center of the city, is included by the law only through its exclusion from political life.

Homeless life shares similar ambivalence as the sacred life of homo sacer: private and public, disgust and august, reviled and romanticized, criminal and victim, excluded and included. In recognizing homeless life as sacred life, Feldman has done well in following Agamben’s directive: “We must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live. In the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every internality and more external than every extraneousness.” (111)

Even anti-authoritarian or pacifist utopians might concede the benefit of a professional peacekeeping organization whose members, authorized in the use of violence, are dedicated to defending victims and seeking out and providing comfort to the hurting. But in the parlance of actually existing cities, `peace officer' is synonymous with `police officer,' who is often dedicated to enforcing the interests of the strong against the weak and to making cities into safe, clean spaces for bios — for capitalists and their worker-shoppers — by excluding bare life (and relegating the activities of bare life as much as possible to the sphere of the home).

If the production of homeless life within the cities of global capitalism can be seen as an instance of (or at least an approximation to) the production of bare life by sovereign power, then the sovereign counterpart to the sacred life of the homeless is the professional policeman (who shares the same, if mirrored, ambivalences as the homeless: respected and reviled, defender and criminal, public and private, human and animal, etc.).

In a quotable line from his Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell emphasized the role professional police play in maintaining property and class relations when he called the policeman the “natural enemy” of the worker. But a more diametric contrast would be between the policeman and the unemployed [non]worker: those unwilling or unable (or just too unlucky) to fit into capitalist society, including the ill and homeless.

In downtowns throughout the world, the homeless beg outside of skyscrapers which are guarded by police and full of financial workers allocating and reinvesting immense concentrations of wealth. Visible on these homeless bodies, refugees with no camp (or whose camp is the streets in the business district of the city), living without homes in the hearts of cities which have banned homeless life, is not only the ancient foundation of political life itself but also the extreme contradictions which characterize life under global capitalism today.

The interactions between the police and the homeless sometimes show the relation between homeless life and sacred life as more than mere approximation. When the police kill the homeless, they often do so with impunity. Below, I highlight four recent examples of police in the United States needlessly killing homeless men in plain sight of the public and video cameras. In all four cases it is undisputed that the police directly ended the life of the victim, and in three cases the state (local) jurisdiction determined that no crime was committed while carrying out the killing (in the other case, it was a jury which made that determination). Each of the cases reached national attention in part due to street protests following the announcements that officers would not be charged with criminal homicide.

In some of the cases below, the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are still conducting their own review of the incidents. Even if those investigations reveal violations of constitutional or federal law, however, it seems unlikely that the individual police officers who carried out the killings will be indicted for homicide by the federal government.

In the footnotes I provide at least one link to video of each incident. Most of these videos, and other videos of each incident, are available from several locations on the Internet.

Marvin Booker

On July 9, 2010, five Denver Sheriff’s deputies held, beat, and shocked Marvin Booker to death in the waiting area of Denver’s Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center. Booker, a 56-year-old homeless street preacher, was being held on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia. The incident was witnessed by tens of people and captured on several surveillance cameras.^[1]

Just as sacred life is excluded from legal sanctions against homicide, “The coroner ruled that Booker’s death was caused by homicide, meaning he died at the hands of others. But the deputies were cleared by a criminal investigation which found they had not broken any laws.”^[2]

In 2012, the FBI announced that it would investigate the slaying, but it’s been two years and no report has been released yet.^[3] In November, 2014, a federal civil suit found the deputies to have used excessive force. The City of Denver paid a record $6 million to Booker’s family.^[4]

Kelly Thomas

On July 5, 2011, officers in Fullerton, California, confronted Kelly Thomas, an unarmed homeless man whom they incorrectly suspected of breaking into cars. Thomas became impatient with the policemen’s questions and did not immediately comply with all of their demands. A digital recording device carried by the police captured one of the officers, Manny Ramos, calmly make the following statement to Thomas after putting on some white latex gloves, “You see my fists? They are getting ready to fuck you up.”^[5]

Two officers then began striking Thomas with their batons and tackled him to the ground. Once on the ground, backup officers arrived who helped to restrain, shock, and beat him. Thomas began apologizing repeatedly, complained he couldn’t breathe, called for help, begged for mercy, screamed in pain, and cried out “Dad! Help me, Dad! They’re killing me, Dad” before losing consciousness.

When paramedics arrived, they were directed to treat an officer’s minor injury while Thomas lay dying in his own blood on the street.^[6] In the eyes of the police officers at the scene, the bare, biological life of Kelly Thomas was excluded not only from the protections of law, but from also from medicine. Five days after the beating, Thomas was removed from life support and died.

An unusual element of this case is that (after significant public protest) three of the six officers involved were actually charged with crimes: officer Ramos was charged with murder in the second degree, and the other two officers were charged with involuntary manslaughter. A jury found the first two officers (including Ramos) not guilty, and the charges against the third officer were dropped.

The city of Fullerton agreed to pay Thomas' mother $1 million in order to avoid civil litigation.^[7]

Milton Hall

On the morning of July 1, 2012, members of the Saginaw Police Department in Michigan responded in force to an aggressive man suspected of stealing a cup of coffee and being impolite to the owner of a convenience store.^[8] The police confronted Milton Hall, a 49-year-old black man, in a parking lot. Hall was armed with a three-inch folding pocket knife — hardly a deadly weapon. The confrontation was witnessed by passing motorists and captured on video by both police dashboard cameras and a witness’s cellphone camera.^[9]

The dashboard cam videos were shown during a news conference and are available on the MLive website.^[10] The videos show that eight police officers (including a K9 unit) formed a semi-circle around Hall. Six of the officers had firearms, both pistols and rifles, trained on Hall who was squatting in a defensive position with the small knife in his hand. At one point, the K9 handler backed up, apparently deciding not to sic the dog on Hall. In response, Hall seemed to relax, took a few steps backward and then two steps to his right. But when Hall appeared to take a step back toward the police line, all six officers opened fire, discharging 46 rounds in a few seconds and killing Hall.

A video obtained and broadcast by CNN was captured by a witness across the street and shows the incident from a different angle and with audio.^[11]

An investigation by the Saginaw County Prosecutor’s Office and the Michigan State Police into whether the shooting was justified concluded that “Criminal charges aren’t warranted.”^[12] The Department of Justice and the FBI then conducted their own investigation and likewise determined that “this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to lead to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved.”^[13]

Milton Hall’s mother, Jewel Hall, described the shooting as “a firing squad dressed in police uniforms.”^[11] It is worth noting, however, that while the police presented themselves to Milton Hall as executioners and ended his life with an extreme degree of overkill reminiscent of a firing squad, the killing was not carried out according to any legal ritual or due process. Like homo sacer, Milton Hall’s homeless life was exposed to death by being excluded from both legal prohibitions against homicide and from sacrificial rites.

James M. Boyd

Jewel Hall is a retired public school teacher and community organizer in the Albuquerque, NM, area. In a tragic coincidence, at the time her son was killed by police in Saginaw, she was working to get the federal government to investigate an alarming pattern of shootings and use of force by the Albuquerque Police Department. In 2011 she wrote an opinion piece for the Albuquerque Journal urging “a full investigation by the Department of Justice.”⁠^[14] A year and a half after her son’s death, a similar shooting unfolded on the outskirts of her hometown in which police with a K9 unit shot an uncooperative homeless man to death.^[15]

On March 26, 2014, members of the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) approached and attempted to frisk 38-year-old James M. Boyd based on the suspicion that he was camping without a permit in the Sandia foothills just east of town — he was suspected, in other words, of getting his zoe all mixed up with the city’s bios. Boyd, who was homeless with no private place where he could legally sleep, refused to cooperate. The situation escalated into an hours-long standoff including a tactical team and a State Police liaison. Home video aired by KRQE News 12 shows six regular uniformed officers holding Boyd at gunpoint even before the APD Crisis Intervention Team arrived.^[16]

Boyd remained defiant. He armed himself with two small knives, and at one point he warned the officers that “I would have the right to kill you right now because you’re trying to take me over. Don’t get stupid with me.”⁠^[16]

The APD has released video footage from the helmet camera of one of the officers on scene which clearly shows how the standoff came to an end.^[17] Boyd, who had apparently had enough of the negotiations, began gathering up his belongings to leave the scene. One of the officers called out, “Do it!” and a flashbang grenade detonated a few feet in front of Boyd. Simultaneously a dog was released which appeared to bite Boyd’s hand, and both the dog’s handler and an officer with a rifle moved toward him. Boyd dropped his bags and put his arms up to his side (while still holding at least one knife.)

Boyd then turned to walk away, which is when two officers with rifles fired six live rounds at his back, striking him at least once. Boyd fell forward to the ground. Mortally wounded and lying prone, he was apparently unable to move his hands. The officers demanded that he drop the knife that was still clutched in his left hand. Boyd replied, “Please don’t hurt me. I can’t move.” Instead of moving to render aid, officers repeatedly ordered him to drop the knife while firing three beanbag rounds into his back from a shotgun. After some deliberation, officers then released the dog a second time. Boyd was unresponsive as the dog chewed at and pulled on his leg. Officers finally moved in, stepped on one of his hands, removed the knife from his other hand, and handcuffed him.

Boyd died from his gunshot wounds in the hospital the next day. At a news conference several days later, APD Chief Gordon Eden announced that the officer-involved shooting was justified.^[16]

In January of 2015, in an exceptional move which brings a challenge to the sovereignty of the police, Bernalillo County District Attorney has brought murder charges against the two officers who shot Boyd.^[18] The charges came in the wake of almost six months of large protests across the nation after district attorneys in several jurisdictions failed to indict police officers who shot and killed unarmed black men. Whether the charges will result in a criminal trial depends on the outcome of the preliminary hearing which will be held in a few months — at which point the charges may be downgraded or dropped.

Department of Justice Investigation

At the time of Boyd’s shooting, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice was already investigating the APD for its large number of shootings (37 since 2010) and apparent pattern of other uses of excessive force during arrests. After the video of Boyd’s death was released, and after hundreds of riotous protesters demanded reform to the police department,^[19] Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry wrote a letter to the DoJ requesting that they expedite their investigation.^[20] The DoJ complied, and on April 10, 2014, about 17 months after the investigation began, it released its findings in the form of a 46-page letter to the mayor.

The findings did not address the Boyd shooting because it is still under criminal investigation. It did, however, refer to Chief Eden’s comments at the press conference as evidence “that more work is needed to change the culture of APD.” (4)

According to the findings letter, the DoJ found “that the department engages in a pattern or practice of using excessive force during the course of arrests and other detentions in violation of the Fourth Amendment” stemming “from systemic deficiencies in oversight, training, and policy.” The report also noted that “A significant amount of the force we reviewed was used against persons with mental illness and in crisis.” (9-10)

Those and similar findings from the DoJ investigation reveal how members of the Albuquerque Police Department routinely constitute themselves as little sovereigns acting in de facto states of exception by suspending the constitutional rights of their victims, especially those subjects with mental illness and in crisis who misfit within and are excluded from the political life of the city.

As a final illustration of how both police (who are excepted from the normal prohibitions of the law) and homeless (who are excepted from the normal protections of the law) share in what Agamben calls the “relation of exception,” here is an account from the DoJ findings letter of an incident in which police confronted an angry 75-year-old homeless man named “Ben” who depends upon a cane to walk:

The incident happened in September 2012 after officers responded to a bus station because Ben refused to leave. When officers arrived, they offered to take Ben to a homeless shelter and also called a Crisis Intervention Team officer to assist. Ben sat on a bench and told officers that he was not going to leave peacefully and that he was angry with the bus company for refusing to let him board. After officers tried to convince him to leave for about an hour, Ben threatened bus company employees and reached for his cane. Officers ordered him to put his cane down, but he refused. As Ben was trying to stand up using his cane (presumably for support), the CIT-trained officer shot Ben in the abdomen with his Taser. He did so even though the threat from Ben was minimal: Ben had trouble walking on his own, a sergeant and three officers were standing around him, and there were no indications that bystanders were near Ben. The sergeant on the scene found the Taser use reasonable, as did other supervisors. One supervisor praised the officers' conduct as “exceptional.” (18, emphasis added)

References and Notes

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Feldman, Leonard C. Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library, [1938] 2008. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79h/

U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. “Re: Albuquerque Police Department.” Findings Letter. April 10, 2014. http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/apd_findings_4-10-14.pdf

1. YouTube video ID: vG7Mjt_j8Cs. Footage from the surveillance cameras is available elsewhere on the web, including the Denver Post website

2. Tom McGhee, “No discipline for deputies in Marvin Booker’s death at Denver jail,” The Denver Post, May 9, 2011.

3. Tom McGhee, “FBI looking into Marvin Booker’s 2010 death at Denver jail,” The Denver Post, February 21, 2013.

4. Noelle Phillips, “Denver to pay $6 million in Marvin Booker jail death settlement,” The Denver Post, November 26, 2014.

5. YouTube video ID: KU0Imk2Bstg. Witnesses with a cellphone also captured video

6. Eileen Frere, “Kelly Thomas Trial: Forensic Expert, Paramedic Testify,” ABC7 Eyewitness News, December 4, 2013.

7. Richard Winton, “Homeless man’s mother settles with Fullerton over his death,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2012.

8. David Ariosto, “Prosecutors: Police won’t face criminal charges in Michigan death,” CNN, September 13, 2012.

9. YouTube video ID: YC3OAMi9kjY. The cellphone video obtained by CNN is also available on LiveLeak: “Saginaw Police Shoots Homeless Man (Milton Hall) 46 time in 5 Seconds.”

10. Bob Johnson, “Video: Police cruiser footage shows events that led to Milton Hall police shooting,” MLive, September 13, 2012.

11. Jason Carroll and Sheila Steffen, “Video captures Michigan man’s shooting by police,” CNN, August 17, 2012.

12. Bob Johnson, “Saginaw officers who shot and killed Milton Hall won’t face federal charges,” MLive, February 25, 2014.

13. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Announces Results of Investigation into the Death of Milton Hall,” February 25, 2014.

14. Jewel Hall, “APD Protects a Culture Out of Control,” Albuquerque Journal, November 23, 2011.

15. I’m not the only one to notice the connections between the Hall and Boyd shootings: “Michigan police shooting similar to ABQ case,” Albuquerque Journal, April 8, 2014.

16. Chris McKee, “APD: Officer involved shooting was justified,” KRQE News 13, March 21, 2014.

17. YouTube video ID: dgRkkLyZMKM. A slightly edited version of the helmet camera video (as released by KRQE) is available on LiveLeak: “Police helmet camera captures fatal shooting of James Boyd armed with a knife as he’s turning away” (though the YouTube video has better audio)

18. “Officers in Boyd shooting charged with murder,” KRQE News 13, January 12, 2015

19. Elizabeth Barber, “Albuquerque protest over police shootings turns to `mayhem' (+video),” The Christian Science Monitor, March 31, 2014.

20. Anna Velasquez, “Mayor asks DOJ to fast-track review of APD,” KOAT Albuquerque, April 2, 2014.