"For the Very Existence of Civilization": The Police Dog and Racial Terror

• Published in: American quarterly Vol. 68; no. 4; pp. 861 - 882
• Main Author: Wall, Tyler
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: College Park Johns Hopkins University Press 01-12-2016
• Subjects: Animals; Conversation; Demonstrations & protests; Dialectics; Essays; Malcolm X; Police; Police dogs; Power; Racism; Social networks; Surveillance; Violence; War
• ISSN: 0003-0678; 1080-6490; 1080-6490
• DOI: 10.1353/aq.2016.0070

Soon after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, a black eighteen-year-old, the "defenders of order" responded with a spectacular, if contested and incomplete, campaign to pacify urban space. Although popular attention quickly focused on the "militarized" response -- armored trucks, assault weapons, tear gas -- some of the first images circulating in media reports and on social media sites depicted snarling dogs policing a crowd of predominantly black residents. For many protesters, the animalization of police power proved symptomatic of a much-longer history of white organized violence against the black community. In Ferguson, the police dog appeared as a key symbolic figure of racist state violence that placed historical subjugation in conversation with the present. Although war has often been waged in the name of civilization, the police power is the civilizing project par excellence that, like war, presupposes violence against the "uncivilized." Often forgotten today is that at least since the bourgeois reforms of the eighteenth century the concept of police was synonymous with civilization.