Insurgent safety: Theorizing alternatives to state protection
| Author | Meghan G McDowell |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617713984 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617713984
Theoretical Criminology
2019, Vol. 23(1) 43 –59
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617713984
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Insurgent safety:
Theorizing alternatives to
state protection
Meghan G McDowell
Winston-Salem State University, USA
Abstract
In the United States, public safety is embraced as an unquestioned social good. Broadly
speaking, the criminal justice system is tasked with administering and maintaining
public safety through the use of law enforcement, the courts, and prisons. First,
through a focus on racialized police violence, this article develops a critique of the
dominant model of public safety practiced in the United States—identified herein
as ‘carceral safety’. Second, through an analysis of findings from the (Re)imagining
Public Safety Project (RPSP), this article seeks to sketch out an alternative model and
practice of safety that does not rely on banishment, policing, or mass criminalization.
In contradistinction to the forms of state protection exercised under the seemingly
innocuous rhetoric of ‘public safety’, RPSP participants conceptualized what I am
calling ‘insurgent safety’: locally determined, anti-capitalist practices and ethics for
reducing, and responding to harm.
Keywords
Penal abolition, police violence, safety
Introduction
Shortly after 2 in the morning on Tuesday, 19 November 2013 in Durham, North Carolina,
the family of Jesus ‘Chuy’ Huerta called 911 to report him missing. Huerta’s sister Evelin
later told reporters that they turned to the police for help after becoming concerned for
Corresponding author:
Meghan G McDowell, Winston-Salem State University, 601 S Martin Luther King Jr Dr, Winston-Salem,
NC 27110-0003, USA.
Email: mcdowellmg@wssu.edu
713984TCR0010.1177/1362480617713984Theoretical CriminologyMcDowell
research-article2017
Article
44 Theoretical Criminology 23(1)
Jesus’s safety.1 Dispatch sent officers a brief description of Huerta that read: ‘Jesus
Huerta, Hispanic Male, 17 years old. He does not have any medical or mental conditions
and is not at risk’ (City of Durham, 2014). Within the hour, two officers with the Durham
Police Department (DPD) ‘encountered’ Jesus walking with a friend, Jaime Perez. ‘All
we asked’, Evelin Huerta would later recount, ‘was that [Jesus] be brought back home.’
Instead, the responding officers ran a background check on both teenagers that revealed
an outstanding misdemeanor warrant for trespassing on Jesus, who was subsequently
searched, handcuffed ‘behind his back’, and placed in a patrol car (City of Durham,
2014). In what would prove to be an especially jarring finding, the state’s final report
declared: ‘Officer Duncan’s frisk [of Jesus] did not reveal any contraband’ (City of
Durham, 2014: 2).
Officer Duncan then proceeded to drive one mile to DPD Headquarters to pick up the
misdemeanor trespass warrant. Tragically, Huerta would never leave the back of Officer
Duncan’s patrol car. Upon arrival, Huerta—whose hands were still cuffed behind his
back—was dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The only narrative we have of the
incident is from the perspective of Officer Duncan and city and state officials. After
locating Huerta and Perez, Officer Duncan ‘did not log back on to the camera system;
consequently the camera was not recording during Huerta’s arrest and transport’ (City of
Durham, 2014: 3). The State Bureau of Investigation concluded that Huerta died of ‘a
self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head’.
Weeks of unrest followed Huerta’s death, the third man of color in just four months to
die during an encounter with Durham police officers (Clark, 2013). On the one-month
anniversary of Huerta’s death, hundreds of people, including the author, gathered in
downtown Durham for a vigil and march to protest police violence. The energy of the
crowd was palpable; marked by a rhythm of attentive silence when Huerta’s family
members took the bullhorn to express their grief, and then punctuated by righteous anger
as Huerta’s friends roused the crowd with protest chants and unsparing theories of police
violence: ‘[t]he police kill us youth of color, us young people, because they are afraid of
us! They are afraid of things we think and the things we know!’
Upon marching to DPD headquarters, where the Huerta family wished to place a
memorial to Jesus, we were confronted by law enforcement in full riot gear ordering us
to leave the premises or risk arrest, citing our ‘illegal occupation of private property’.
Ultimately, we marched on, back through the city returning to the public square where
we had begun. At this point the crowd thinned considerably, and roughly 60 of us
remained. A local organizer took the bullhorn to close out the protest with a call and
response. ‘Do the police keep us safe?’ R asked us. ‘No’ we called back. ‘Can we take
care of one another?’ ‘Yes!’ we exclaimed. Suddenly, riot police fired several smoke
grenades into the crowd and aggressively moved in on us, shouting that our gathering
had been deemed ‘unlawful’. Using their batons, officers began knocking signs out of
protesters’ hands, including a 60-foot banner that read ‘Jesus Huerta Murdered by Police/
Fue Matado por la Policia.’ As people fled the square for the streets, the police fired
teargas into the crowd and made several arrests.2
I chose to open with this extended ethnographic reflection because it illustrates three
core aspects of this article. First, Huerta’s death at the hands of the police is emblematic of
the contemporary legitimation crisis facing law enforcement in the United States. ‘My
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