[Modern policing has its origin in colonial violence. The
University of Chicago has long played a part in cultivating,
promoting, spreading, and normalizing the tools of such state
violence.]
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THE COLONIAL ORIGINS OF THE UCHICAGO POLICE  
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Julian Go
June 6, 2023
Rampart
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_ Modern policing has its origin in colonial violence. The University
of Chicago has long played a part in cultivating, promoting,
spreading, and normalizing the tools of such state violence. _

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_The following article is adapted from a panel discussion hosted by
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Chicago
in February 2023, entitled “Counter-Terrorism and Empire: State
Violence and the Right to Resist.” This panel was the culminating
event of SJP UChicago’s __#IsraeliMilitaryOffOurCampus campaign_
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a quarter-long student movement in the winter of 2023 aimed at
exposing the University of Chicago’s ties to the propagandistic
“__Israel Institute__”_
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opposing its decision to host “counter-terrorism” courses taught
by Israeli military personnel, notably __Brigadier General Meir
Elran_
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_The discourse of “counter-terrorism” has risen to prominence in
recent decades, providing political justification for such acts as the
US invasion of Iraq and the ongoing Israeli colonization of Palestine.
By exploring counter-terrorism’s origins, imperial applications, and
entanglement with other systems of gendered and racialized violence,
this discussion raises important questions about anticolonial
struggle, discourses of state violence, and the role of academic
institutions in normalizing and perpetuating them. Special focus is
placed on how these global forces come to manifest at University of
Chicago and with the university’s police department. The panel can
be viewed __here_
[[link removed]]_. _

The story I want to tell has to do with the Philippines in the early
twentieth century. But it will also have to do with policing across
the United States and here on campus, and ultimately with the
University of Chicago.

In 1898, the United States declared sovereignty over the Philippine
Islands, places which President McKinley and most Americans had no
idea even existed. But as a result of the Spanish-American war in 1898
the US did come to learn about the Philippines. It sent its troops
there to fight the Spanish, and upon defeating Spain, it seized the
Philippines and its millions of inhabitants as its new colonial
territory.

The problem for the Americans was that the Filipinos, who had been
subjected to Spanish rule for 300 years, were not happy about the
Americans coming and subjecting them to more colonial rule. They had
in fact already declared their independence from Spain, and so they
established an independent Philippines: The Philippine Republic. They
took up arms against the United States, leading to the so-called
Philippine-American war which lasted officially from 1899 to 1902 but
continued in various forms afterwards.

This was a formative war for the United States: it was the first
overseas guerilla war the US fought, one that prefigured what would
happen later in Vietnam. But unlike in Vietnam, the Americans
essentially won, crushing most of the rebel resistance. The war
ultimately cost some 400,000 Filipino lives.

The war involved brutal acts of violence on the part of American
soldiers, including the use of barbaric torture to extract information
from Filipino rebels, and a horrific massacre on the island of Sumar
in 1902. Led by US General Jacob H. Smith, US forces attacked villages
in Sumar, killing civilians and even children. General Smith had
ordered his troops: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and
burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me. I want
all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual
hostilities against the United States.” This campaign lasted four
and a half months, and an estimated 15,000 Filipinos were killed.

Importantly, this violence was justified to the US military and to the
American public on the grounds that Filipinos were criminals and
terrorists. And here we get to the discursive logic behind
counterterrorist discourse. In American discourse, the two terms 
“criminal” and “terrorist” were more or less the same.
Supposedly, Filipinos were criminals because the very act of taking
arms against the United States to call for independence—according to
the Americans’ new laws, about which Filipinos had no say— was a
crime. Filipino resistance fighters were called terrorists because
they were presumably forcing average Filipinos upon pain of violence
to join their cause. They were called terrorists simply because they
took up arms and were fighting against colonialism and for freedom.
General Jacob Smith in fact justified the massacre at Sumar on the
grounds that earlier that year Filipino troops had killed fifty US
soldiers. Rather than classifying this as an act of wartime defense,
or as an act of legitimate rebellion against an occupying oppressor,
the Americans called the attack a massacre by Filipino terrorists. It
was a crime and an act of terror.

State violence in the Philippines—from massacres to
torture—returned to the US through individuals like August Vollmer.

The logic of counterterrorism was this: the Filipino insurgents were
not freedom fighters, but irrational violent terrorists who respond
only to force. And if they respond only to force, state violence
against them is justified.

What does this have to do with policing?

The state violence in the Philippines, and state violence everywhere,
from massacres to torture, to all of the US army’s counterinsurgency
operations, did not stay put. As with so many cases of imperialism,
some of them came back to the United States through a number of
individuals, one of whom was a man named August Vollmer. Vollmer was
the chief of police at Berkeley starting in 1905, and today, Vollmer
is memorialized by historians and police officers alike for being the
“father of modern policing.” Ask any police officer—ask any
University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officer: “do you know
August Vollmer?” They’ll say, “yes, he’s the father of modern
policing!”

Vollmer is responsible for innovating all kinds of new tactics and
policing strategies in the early twentieth century, all of which
spread around the country to make modern policing what it is today.
For example, prior to this period, police forces were not mobile or
mounted. You just had a few cops walking around on their beats on
foot. But Vollmer came up with the idea of putting police forces into
mobile squads that would patrol on bike, motorcycles, and ultimately
squad cars: moving all over the city, concentrating force and raiding
houses like early SWAT teams. In a sense, he invented the early SWAT
teams and inspired other police departments in the US to create their
own mounted forces.

Vollmer also invented a police tactic known as pin-mapping. This
involves taking a map and putting a pin wherever you found a crime 
to show hot-spots of criminal activity. It allows police to then
mobilize their forces and concentrate them there.

Now, today this is called spot mapping or “predictive policing.”
Every department uses this in some form. They use more complicated
algorithms, but essentially these are all Vollmer’s tactics of
finding out where crime is and where it happened, and then mobilizing
police forces there and saturating those communities with police
forces.

Pin-mapping and “predictive policing” are racist tools of state
power.

This tactic is essentially how racist policing is justified; police
are sent only to those areas of high crime, but those areas that they
think are high crime or that show up on a map are only areas of racial
minorities. Not because racialized minorities commit more crimes, but
because of historical biases in data collection and racist assumptions
about criminality. Pin-mapping is a racist tool of state power.

Vollmer popularized this too, along with many other police tactics.
Now, the question you might ask is, where did Vollmer’s innovations
come from? And a large part of the answer comes from the fact that
Vollmer, before he became police chief, had been part of America’s
colonial empire and in fact had served in the Philippine-American war.

Vollmer  had been part of America’s colonial counter-insurgency
regime, squashing  so-called terrorists. In fact, he had been
hand-picked to join a new elite colonial counterinsurgency unit
charged with penetrating the interior to conquer and capture rebel
leaders, not unlike the sort of units that killed so many civilians in
Sumar. Only after this did Vollmer return to Berkeley and become chief
of police. And he brought with him some of those very colonial
counterinsurgency techniques—those so-called counterterrorist
techniques—that he had been exposed to and used in the Philippines.

His idea of mounting police forces, for instance, came partly from the
American army’s new counterinsurgency units that penetrated the
Philippine archipelago. In other words, the early police mobile units
that Vollmer created and popularized—these early SWAT forces—were
modeled upon America’s “counterterrorist” regime in the
Philippines. The same goes for his pin-mapping techniques: the US army
had innovated pin-mapping techniques specifically as a new tool to
track the movements of Filipino insurgents in order to locate their
camps in the vast terrain of central Luzon and embark upon their
search-and-destroy missions. It was through pin-mapping that the US
army was able to send troops to Sumar and conduct a brutal and
murderous campaign against civilians that was justified as
counterterrorism. Vollmer saw this as a tactic that could also be
applied to policing—he called it the art of making war on the map.

Using techniques of so-called “counterterrorist” state violence in
the colonies and applying them to “criminals” in the US followed
only naturally.

After all, Vollmer himself stated repeatedly that he thought of
criminals as racially inferior, as he and other US imperialists
classified Filipinos and justified their colonial rule on racial
grounds. They said the same thing about criminals, who were after all,
seen as terrorists, just as terrorists were thought of as criminals.

Thus, using techniques of so-called “counterterrorist” state
violence in the colonies and applying them to “criminals” in the
US followed only naturally. It’s fitting that Asha Bandele and
Patrisse Cullors, leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, titled
their memoirs _When They Call You a Terrorist._
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These examples of pin-mapping and mounted units are just two examples
of how so-called counterterrorist tactics in America’s colonies
returned home. For example, in the 1910s and 1920s, some police around
the country were soon discovered to be using modes of torture to
extract confessions, largely from Black Americans. They used a
technique called the “water cure.” This was an early variant of
“waterboarding” that we know was used in Iraq.  Police tried to
extract confessions from suspects by holding them down and pouring
water down their throats. But this too was an effect of empire.

The American military first learned about it during their colonial
counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines. This was the chosen
mode of torture used by the US army  during the Philippine-American
war. It was also reportedly being used by US forces in the 1910s
during the US occupation of Haiti.

Racist policing in the US in the early twentieth century through today
has its origins in America’s colonial occupation of the Philippines.
Policing is a colonial invention. It is an invention of so-called
“counter-terrorist” state violence. The state violence of military
engagements overseas, of counterinsurgency operations, and
“counter-terrorist” tactics, do not stay put, they do not only
live in the site of their origins, they move around. And in this case,
they came back to the imperial metropole to fundamentally shape state
violence at home with disastrous effects.

Policing is a colonial invention.

Presumed criminals here in the US become treated like presumed
terrorists, ostensibly warranting violence by the same set of
counterinsurgency tools, tactics and techniques used in the colonies.

The circulation of state terror has continued ever since. It has taken
many different forms, has been used by US empire, the British empire,
along with other colonial states, a list which today includes Israel.

Consider a training program [[link removed]] that has
been going on between US police and Israeli military and police ever
since 2001. Since then, officials and officers from US police forces
around the United States have been sent to Israel to learn and observe
counterinsurgency and so-called counter-terrorist techniques from the
Israeli military and the Israeli national police. A delegation of
officers from towns in Massachusetts in 2017, for example, toured the
West Bank, East Jerusalem, the border with Syria, and Israel’s
municipal police academy, to learn about intelligence gathering and
surveillance, and other tactics like roadblocks and weapons for crowd
control, which they have been trying to bring back for policing in the
United States.

US police also learned various other Israeli police tactics, with one
US county sheriff who attended going on record to say, in reference to
how Israeli forces used force during arrests, “We’d be in jail if
we did something like that here.”

US police officials from all around the country, in fact, have
participated in this program, with numbers of police officials going
on these training missions exceeding the thousands. Attendees include
police officers from the Chicago Police Department, as well as  a man
named Chief Timothy Fitch. In 2011, Fitch was sent to Israel for
training. He returned home by 2014 to serve as St. Louis County police
chief, thus overseeing the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
which is part of St. Louis County.

We see this pattern repeats with earlier in the century, when folks
like August Vollmer went overseas, learned tactics and techniques of
state violence there, and brought them home for police to use on
domestic populations. Again, state terror overseas, created in the
name of countering terror, created to mete out violence against
presumed terrorists and so-called criminals, this state terror does
not stay put. It is not something that just happens far away, it
circulates everywhere, and comes home.

Finally, what does this have to do with the University of Chicago?

Let me return to August Vollmer, for Vollmer did not stay put either.
After his stint at Berkeley, and then after serving as chief of police
in Los Angeles, he traveled around the country and was hired by
various police departments to advise them in adopting the new
techniques that he had brought back from the Philippines. He even
advised the Chicago Police Department. While in Chicago, he held a
conference at what is today Windermere House in Hyde Park. This
conference brought together police officials from around the US so
they could share policing practices, and all the new policing tactics
that Vollmer had brought back from the imperial frontiers. Vollmer’s
efforts were so popular in town that in 1929 he received a telegram
from a man offering him a new job based upon his work.

At the University of Chicago, August Vollmer became the very first
professor of police administration in any American university.

That man was named Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins had just been
appointed president of the University of Chicago, and he hired August
Vollmer to create a police training program here at the University of
Chicago. Hutchins appointed Vollmer to be professor of police
administration at the University of Chicago, making August Vollmer the
very first professor of police administration in any American
university, and making the University of Chicago the first university
to have a professor of police administration. His office was located
in room 317 of the social science research building, two doors down
from my current office.

Now Vollmer ended up teaching a number of courses here for a few
years, but he did not stay—he moved back to California in the 1930s.
And while the University of Chicago today does not have an official
police administration program anymore, it does have its own police
force, which is one of the largest private police forces in the
country. And of course it uses many of the tactics and forms that
Vollmer himself innovated. The University of Chicago also has
the Crime Lab
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works with the Chicago Police Department, and which hired as its
director a former Los Angeles police officer named Sean Malinowski.
Malinowsky is widely known for leading the LAPD in adopting so-called
predictive policing. This is a form of policing rooted in Vollmer’s
pin-mapping techniques, and which has, by all accounts, been a primary
method of racist policing, a tool by which police justify their
over-policing and harassment of Black and Latinx communities.

All of this to say that not only is it the case that state violence
circulates globally and lands at home, but also that there are parts
of the University of Chicago that have long played a part in
cultivating, promoting, spreading, and normalizing the intellectual
tools of such state violence. This state violence  goes under the
moral cover of the label “counterterrorism” or “counter-
crime,” but  is ultimately just another form of violence against
humanity.

All of this is why I would insist that the struggle against police
violence here in the United States cannot be separate from the
struggle against colonialism overseas. This is also why the struggle
against police violence here at the University of Chicago should not
be separate from the struggle against colonialism, and vice-versa. And
neither should it be separated from Indigenous struggles in the US,
Canada, and Australia, or elsewhere. Empire and its violence is
global, connects us all, and so resistors to empire and its violence
must also be global and connected.

_JULIAN GO [[link removed]] - Professor
Julian Go is a sociologist at the University of Chicago, focusing on
US empire and postcolonial/decolonial thought. His forthcoming
book Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and
America, 1829-Present details imperialism's impact on police
militarization in the US and Britain._

_RAMPANT MAGAZINE is firmly grounded in the need to strengthen and
expand the self-reliance of social movements and worker organizing. We
are unapologetically anti-racist, feminist, and revolutionary
socialist._

_Our goals are multiple and overlapping. We aim to make the structures
of ruling class power visible and to highlight how they shape
everyone’s lived realities. But our goal isn’t simply to
understand the world, we aim to change it. Rampant Magazine is a
platform for current debates about movement organizing and political
strategy. Finally, we want to open up space for dreaming, for
imagining a socialist future built from the raw materials of our
everyday lives._

_Rampant Magazine is based in Chicago, a city that has been both a
laboratory and ideological factory for capital as well as a red
metropolis of class struggle in the United States. From the Haymarket
martyrs, to the mass Communist Party stopping evictions in the 1930s,
to the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2012 teachers’ strike
that catalyzed a new wave of worker militancy, Chicago is the beating
heart of revolutionary politics in this country and we are proud to
call it home._

_Chicago is also on stolen land. We at Rampant Magazine acknowledge
that we are on the occupied lands of the Council of the Three Fires:
Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, the Indigenous keepers of this land
who, through acts of genocide, deceit, and dispossession, were
forcibly removed for the founding of the city of Chicago and the state
of Illinois. We also recognize the Nations that lived in and around
Illinois, and the at least 75,000 Indigenous people that live here
today. We stand in solidarity with all Indigenous people and their
ongoing struggle for self-determination and the re-matriation of
Native lands, including in Chicago._

_WE ARE AN EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE OF CHICAGO-BASED SOCIALIST ACTIVISTS
AND WRITERS: BRIAN BEAN, RACHEL COHEN, ANTON FORD, ERIC KERL, SEAN
LARSON, AND TYLER ZIMMER_

* chicago
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* Police
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* U.S. history
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* colonialism
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* imperialism
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* Violence
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* University of Chicago
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