I’m still that 8-year-old, terrified and clinging to my mom’s arm as the police rip through our house in the middle of the night. The next day was to be a national holiday, and we didn’t have the flag flying in front of our house as we were told. They barged in, rifles in hand, roaming through our house searching for what, I still don’t know.
As they left, they told my mom to be sure to put the flag up in the morning. I could feel her seething, but she didn’t talk back like my mother usually would. This was not our first encounter with the police and it wouldn’t be the last, so we knew that all of this was a terror tactic. But knowing facts doesn’t make terrorism any less terrifying.
When men with weapons that can kill you in a flash barge into your house, you keep your head down. You say “yes sir” and “no sir” and hope that they don’t turn their weapons on you.
Hope is a fool’s errand that the most powerless people run, over and over again.
**
This and other experiences with the police informed my response to the patrol cars that rounded our block multiple times nightly, in a neighborhood where we were resettled with many other Southeast Asian refugees in an American city. I wondered why there was such a strong police presence. The adults told us they were looking for drug dealers, but I never saw drug dealers. I mean, nobody had money for drugs in that neighborhood ... unless the drug dealers were taking food stamps and government cheese as payment. I just saw the police harassing the older kids and young men in the neighborhood. Almost instinctively, I ran and hid every time I saw a patrol car.
**
You see, I’m going back and forth between past tense and present tense because the past is present for us. It’s always here, sitting on my chest like a boulder on a night like this.
A night when I can’t sleep. Police sirens are deafening in the city. Helicopters fly overhead almost all night long. There is a citywide curfew. I’m holding my children tightly as they sleep, wondering if they will inherit my scars.
My fears seep through my skin to caress them in the night. My trauma embraces them daily when they stop playing momentarily for a hug or a kiss. My terror is never spoken but is always heard in the sound of my voice when they ask about the police.
**
We have a landline in case of emergencies. Our children know that they should pick it up and dial 9-1-1 if one or both of us are hurt and unable to pick up the phone ourselves. They know to never call the police for any other reason. They know to never speak to the police on the street or to make eye contact. They have known this since they were verbal enough to be taught about the landline.
**
When we became parents, I considered taking a marker to all the police cars in my children’s board books. Or maybe taping those images up so that they couldn’t learn about state-sponsored terrorists in a gentle, colorful, playful cartoon way that the police are always represented in these books. But then, without these images, how would they know who to avoid? How would they know not to play cops and robbers at school, or not to glorify the police in their hearts and minds?
Children, you must know that they are not here to help us. Keep your heads down. Walk faster. Don’t say hi. They are not our friends. Never, ever talk to them.
**
Along my daily walks to preschool was a police station. In other words, I felt fear in my bones every morning and every afternoon.
What an education.
These men with guns and batons larger than my whole being patrolled the neighborhood like kings. They came and took what they wanted, when they wanted. They barked commands at us, and we cowered in fear because they could haul us off at any moment, for any reason, without giving reason.
**
Where I grew up, the police is called công an, literally meaning peace workers. So of course, I snickered when I first read the slogan on an American police patrol car: to protect and to serve.
Because when you live like that—in constant fear of people who are supposed to be protecting you but trained to be suspicious and abusive of you and the people you love—you learn quickly that they protect the state, the status quo, the way things are and have always been. You learn that they may be protecting and serving someone or something, but that someone isn’t you, and it sure as hell isn’t your property. It’ll never be you or anyone who looks like you, no one you love or cherish can be saved from their seemingly random acts of violence. So I trembled in fear whenever they appeared.
That fear was strengthened in the presence of American police when my mom and I landed in the States. Here, the police have riot gear, batons, pepper spray, tear gas, stun grenades, rifles, drones, helicopters, tanks, armored trucks, and so much more than the công an did. Here, they have military equipment worth billions and could kill you or someone who looks like you too. Here, you have repeatedly seen or heard of indigenous folx and people of color get abused, beaten, and murdered by them without consequence.
**
So this same trembling fear comes back during every traffic stop and every interaction I’ve ever had with the American police.
I remember the first time I was in a car with a white friend during a traffic stop. I remember being surprised that there was friendly banter when the police approached the car — they stopped him for going 95mph on the 405 North in his brand new Hyundai Accent. Typical of boys his age and in attempt to prove his masculinity, he wanted to see how fast it could go. My white friend got a speeding ticket, and he cheerfully took it because he knew they could have hauled him off to jail. And then we were on our way, just like that.
It was only after the windows were rolled up and the car was moving again that I realized my fists had been clenched so tightly that my fingernails left marks in the palms of my hands.
**
I’ve never told anyone about this easy, safe encounter between my white male friend and the cop. It’s too exhausting to have to explain why a petite Viet woman would fear the police — and to this extent. Most people would think I’m exaggerating. What has the police done to your people?
The thing is, the police have always harassed and targeted us, when we were in Viet Nam and now when we are here. And by us, I mean the dispossessed, the people who get blamed for being over-policed and under-nourished, the people who must be controlled and kept in line like animals in cages. In their eyes, we are seen as less than, as subhuman.
I’ve seen that look in policemen’s eyes many times – the same look a hunter gives his prey – the look that you’d only give someone you do not consider to be your equal. That look terrifies me almost as much as the weapons themselves because it is the leadup to being harassed, beaten, killed, or hauled away at random. We don’t have to be resisting; we don’t have to be angry; we don’t have to be breaking the law; we just have to be.
**
Police forces the world over were created to instill fear in people, to keep them in check, to keep them from rising up against their oppressors, not to serve or protect them. Simply put, they are sanctioned terrorists of the state.
Having spent my childhood under an authoritarian regime, I understood this about the police from an early age. To us, it is no secret that they are the enforcement arm of the Party. They subjugate, mock, and outright terrorize us on a regular basis as a show of their strength and a reminder of our weakness. They subject us to regular and random searches on the streets and in our own homes. We are given fines and threatened with jail time if we do not comply. To get anything done – and I mean anything – we have to bribe the police while begging them for mercy. Under these conditions, no one ever mistakes the police for people who protect and serve. Viet people know why the police exists – we are under no illusions about their role in maintaining the capitalist order.
In my current country of residence, perceptions of the police are strikingly different for the majority of inhabitants – especially for those who do not experience the terror of policing on a regular basis (that is, white, middle-class, suburbanites). This nation seems to be obsessed with funding and expanding its police forces. In the 100 largest American cities, police budgets account for 20-45% of discretionary funds.
This funding pattern reflects a deep, long-standing cultural love affair with the police for many Americans. Here, children are routinely exposed to friendly officers at station open houses, as participants in local parades, in school programs like D.A.R.E., and if they are old enough – on ride alongs. The media is chock full of examples of heroic cops so that children can admire them and aspire to be them. Children also play with police-themed toys, action figures, games, and costumes. American adults have access to a dizzying number of reality cop shows and feature films that simplistically portray police work as the courageous pursuit of law and order. This is where the prevailing American treatment and understanding of policing – and its close cousin militarism – departs from the perspectives of people of the Global South.
**
To fully understand differential perceptions and effects of policing locally, nationally, and globally, we must first understand that policing is not about individual police officers, units, police departments, or even the police in the abstract. Policing – like militarism – is a network of ideologies, institutions, practices, and technologies that seek to preserve safety, security, and order for the powerful within a colonial, capitalist social order. Thus, since its inception in various parts of the globe, policing always has been about protecting the rights and property of those in power and concurrently, to expand their right to accumulate more property.
Policing works in conjunction with legal systems that define orderly vs. disorderly, moral vs. immoral, lawful vs. unlawful, acceptable vs. untolerated ways of being, of living, of communicating, of conduct in general, and it contributes to an economy of mass incarceration that replaced slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. Even though policing is generally thought to be a matter of domestic – and far more often, local – policy, it is in fact intimately linked to colonial and capitalist efforts to preserve the rights and powers of the global ruling class.
In other words, police and military power are two sides of the same coin – both are forms of state violence that contribute to capitalist domination and the associated dehumanization of large swaths of people across the globe. In the name of “law and order,” to bring “civilization” to an “uncivilized” people, to “stabilize” a region, to “rescue” or perform “humanitarian” missions, and so on, we use policing and militarism to expand our power and to exert control over other peoples, their resources, and their livelihoods.
Policing and militarism, therefore, are part and parcel of a “veiled civil war” between the ruling class and working class in the capitalist world order, to borrow the terminology of Marx and Engels. How thick or thin this veil is depends on one’s positionality and perspective. Those who are most affected by and those who benefit least from policing and militarism are most likely to see these institutions for what they are. For example, many poor or working class folx, indigenous folx, and people of color in the United States would readily agree that police practices target and subjugate them, while middle-upper class and white folx are largely in denial of these statistical realities.
**
Therefore, it is not enough to defund or abolish the police. The United States would continue to be a police state even when the police are gone, and our impact on policing across the globe would also remain. Instead, we must reexamine and dismantle the power structures that led to policing and militarism in the first place. In doing this, we must also fundamentally change our ways of thinking about what it means to be human, to live among and relate to other humans, and to contribute to the well-being of humanity to get away from the current modes of social control and inequities in power distribution that rob the global majority of their rights to determine their own destiny. As the writer and lifelong activist Grace Lee Boggs repeatedly taught us, another world is possible. It involves us working together locally to solve problems of global importance: health, education, environment, safety, and self-determination for everyone, especially for the most marginalized among us. Only then can we envision a truly just world without policing. Only then will the terrified 8-year-old in me finally be at peace.
-- Que-Lam Huynh resettled with her single mother to the U.S. at age 11 and eventually found a place that felt like “home” in Los Angeles, CA. She is a professor of social psychology at California State University, Northridge. She finds hope and inspiration in teaching and mentoring students, and she strives to be a worthy parent to her amazing children.