Kill The Cop In Your Head

By Mack

Credit: Radical Graffiti

Depending on your relationship with psychology, you’ve likely heard of a guy named Sigmund Freud. If you haven’t, don’t stress it. What you need to know about Freud is that he had this idea that underneath all human beings is a hidden, irrational self, and this “hidden person” needed to be controlled for the good of us all. The idea suggests that humans are driven by something primal, and the job of society is to suppress these primal urges. This idea has been challenged by psychologists and clinicians for a very long time, but for decades, europeans (and americans) have toyed with this belief. From psych wards to electroshock therapy and various other forms of torture, our society shows that we are still deeply in line with this idea. We are forever looking for ways to control someone else. 

Not to make this a history lesson, but it is important to understand history. People who do not understand history will always find themselves trying to create solutions that don’t solve anything for anyone. So here we go. The concept of “policing,” which I am referring to here as “the maintenance of law and order,” stems from a lot of different places. In the american South, it began with slavery and slave patrols. Fear led to a need to control “rebellious” slaves. In the american North, policing popped up to control working class people. Fear led rich white capitalists to believe they needed to control their factory workers. This continued to happen all across the country in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Whether it was to control coal miners who wanted better working conditions, or Native Americans who were being forced onto reservations, the presence of police has always been about controlling people who are being abused or exploited. The presence of police is about control. Don’t forget that. 

“Police” is not just a noun, though. “Police” is not just a thing a person can be (an occupation). It is also a verb, a thing you can do to yourself or other people. You can experience being policed. When I was 17 years old and heading off to college, I was accepted into a scholarship program for Black men who wanted to be educators. It was called The Call Me Mister Program. I was excited to be in community with other Black men, especially at my majority white school. But I was not quite prepared for what was expected of the “Misters,” as we were called. 

Instead of being a program that fostered positive interactions and mentorship among the group, I found the program to be highly elitist and unnecessarily competitive. We were restricted to only being able to live on a certain part of campus. We had to sign contracts saying we wouldn’t join particular extracurricular activities and organizations— Black Greek life, for example. We were constantly told what to wear and what we could do with our hair. And we were discouraged from becoming too friendly with non-Misters. When I failed to comply with these things, I was berated by leadership in our weekly meetings. The other boys in the program worked to isolate themselves from me, as directed by our leadership. One night, they all got together, packed up my entire room, and put my belongings outside. I was constantly made an example of. In other words, I was policed. When I would question these practices, I was never given a satisfactory answer for why they had to exist. But I knew, deep down in my heart, that we were being policed because Black men are niggers. And niggers are wayward. And the only way to control a wayward nigger and get him to be successful is to police him. Give him boundaries. Decrease his freedom. Remove the potential for rebellion. I was eventually kicked out of the program. My scholarship was rescinded. I lost my housing. Did I mention this program was created and led by a Black man? 

Abolition is all about the destruction of oppressive structures and the creation of a better world. Harriet Tubman, for example, was an abolitionist. She worked to destroy the system of slavery. But as our constitution repeatedly reminds us via our 13th amendment, slavery was never destroyed, only transformed into something new: the prison industrial complex. And these prisons have been filled over the years with the help of policing. Governments creating arbitrary laws to punish you if you’re Black and caught in a certain part of town after a certain time is policing. The apps and various forms of technology that we use, like Facebook and Zoom, that constantly surveil us and use our information to work with law enforcement is another form of policing. Police do not exist to keep anyone safe. They exist to protect the rich and their property. But there are indeed ways that we, as people who are not employed by police departments, can also police each other. Mariame Kaba is a leader of contemporary abolitionist thought. She has this saying, “the cop in our heads, and the cop in our hearts.” To me, this quote asks one question: “who are we to believe that after centuries of being policed, we wouldn’t become the police ourselves?” 

Homophobia is a form of policing. So is transphobia. And so is sexism. And ableism. And fatphobia. Anything that aids in oppressing or “othering” people is a form of policing. Patriarchy is a system that exists to police women and their bodies. Racism functions to police Black people and our freedom. We cannot afford to miss these connections. When we tell Black women to quiet down and not be so “loud” or “angry,” we are policing their tone. When you tell a fat family member that they shouldn’t eat something, even though you just ate the exact same thing yourself, you are policing their body. When you tell your seven-year-old cousin that he shouldn’t “stand like that” or that he can’t be interested in dolls, you are policing his gender expression. Think about all of the times you were suspended from school over something like a missing ID or a dress code violation. You were being policed. Children are an important place to look and observe policing in practice. We refer to little Black girls as “grown” for wearing certain hairstyles. We demand that children call us “ma’am” or “sir” even though we have no idea why those superficial titles are important to us. Most of all, we insist on the idea that some kids need and deserve to be beaten as a form of punishment. We’ve convinced ourselves that is how we make kids “better” people. Even though every psychological study available to us tells us that punishment does not make people better, we insist that children should be beaten because it also happened to us. 

We have learned to be police, not just from The Police™ themselves, but from our schools, the media, and organized religion. Remember, the cop is not just in our heads, he’s also in our hearts. 

americans have been taught that policing is necessary. And for Africans living in america, we must also reconcile what we’ve learned about policing with the fact that we are a colonized people. We do not have a home in this country, and the entire continent from which we originate is controlled by violent white settlers. We are not in control of our political destiny (yet), so we constantly need to be evaluating the messages we are receiving from this country, and how we participate in american culture, or we run the risk of being brainwashed (word to Frantz Fanon). As a new generation that is carrying the torch to abolish slavery, which we refer to in the modern day as prisons, we must always keep in mind that we can defund every police department in this country, and we can shut down every prison from coast to coast, but if we don’t do the internal work that is unlearning what The Police™ have taught us, we will only recreate the very same structures we set out to burn in the first place. There is a policeman inside all of our heads. He must be destroyed.