We can never rely on cops to prevent ICE from taking people or holding them accountable in Grand Rapids or anywhere else

Over the past week I have seen the information in the graphic below shared on social media. Some people in the Grand Rapids area have even asked what GR Rapid Response to ICE thinks about this information. I am not speaking on behalf of GR Rapid Response to ICE, but I am a volunteer organizer with them and understand where we stand on the relationship between cops and ICE agents.

ICE and Cops go hand in hand

The only thing in the graphic here on the right that I agree with is for people to record/document when ICE agents – masked or unmasked – take people. 

Calling the GRPD or any local police department is not only a bad idea, it could make it worse for the person or persons that have been taken.

The rest of the information in this graphic is also deeply problematic, since it is operating with the assumption that there is accountability with cops involved. “Verified Law Enforcement” is a meaningless term, primarily because it suggests that those who are identifiable are somehow legitimate. Police officers work for governments, thus they are state workers, or as David Correia and Tyler Wall state in their book, Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police, police are violence workers. The co-authors write, “The purpose of the police is to inflict pain or to threaten pain when order is is being threatened, just as the purpose of the taser is to inflict pain in order to control another human being.”

I get that ICE agents showing up with no badge and no visible evidence that they are ICE agents is deeply troubling, but it is troubling when people apprehend immigrants, regardless if they have their faces covered or not. We have to remain rooted in our opposition to anyone working for the state that wants to do harm to people in our community.

The rest of the information within the graphic continues the same worldview that the system works and that accountability can be achieve, especially if the police become involved. The cops take a statement, which pressures the cops to identify themselves, leading to a paper trail, with the possibility of a civil lawsuit. This line of thinking ends with accountability, the graphic claims. Again, this line of thinking demonstrates that the policing and legal system work and are a legitimate avenue for obtaining justice. Such thinking is both naive and historically inaccurate.

People really need to unlearn what we have all been taught about the cops, the courts and the Prison Industrial Complex. We really need to come to terms with what the actual function of policing is, which Alex Vitale describes beautifully, stating:

“The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behavior of poor and nonwhite people; those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements.”

I would highly recommend that people read some of the following books to being our process of unlearning what the real function of policy is: 

• Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, by Kristian Williams 
• The End of Policing, by Alex Vitale
• No More Police: A Case for Abolition, by Miriam Kaba and Andrea Ritchie 
• Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom, by Derecka Purnell 
• “Prisons Make Us Safer”: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration, by Victoria Law 
• Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, by Alec Karakatsanis 
• Beyond Courts, by Community Justice Exchange

What is ultimately missing from this graphic I have been deconstructing is that it omits the most powerful way(s) we can create community safety. In terms of preventing ICE from taking people, I believe that what Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are doing is already working to prevent ICE from taking people. The other major shift would be to stop funding ICE and Police departments and invest that money in meeting the basic community needs. This is why we say, Community Care, Not Cops!