By Thane
In response to the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion, police forces across the United States are preparing to crack down on future uprisings. The state is expanding its capacity for domestic war, in addition to its war-making capabilities abroad. This is how we might understand the current $3.39 billion building program of police training facilities – over 80 projects and counting across the U.S. – and the construction of San Pablo’s $44 million Cop Campus, in particular. These “cop cities,” as the police training facilities are called, are part of a state-led strategy for securing American imperialism domestically.
Beginning with Atlanta, where Anarchist forest defenders and New Afrikan revolutionaries have tenaciously resisted construction of the first well-publicized Cop City, there is now a nationwide movement to oppose this expansion of police power. Those of us organizing to halt construction of the San Pablo Cop Campus see ourselves as part of this wider movement.
For our work to be effective, we must apply the hard-won insights of the abolitionist tradition to our struggle in the Bay Area; must study the historical texts of revolutionaries like George Jackson, Safiya Bukhari, and Russell Maroon Shoatz who have organized against police institutions and prisons; and connect with other Stop Cop City movements nationwide as well as with our Black and Indigenous comrades struggling for survival and liberation. We must collectively theorize and strategize, build the musculature of the organized abolitionist movement in the Bay, and force our demands for decarceration and liberation upon the state.
Approved by the San Pablo City Council, the budget for San Pablo’s Cop Campus derives $28.8 million from lease revenue bond proceeds, $10.4 million from the city’s general fund, and $4.3 million from federal COVID-19 relief funds. Policing is also San Pablo’s biggest expense – in the financial year 2023/2024, it cost $15.6 million, or 41% of the annual budget. The city has the highest concentration of cameras surveilling public spaces in Contra Costa County. Meanwhile, the West Contra Costa Unified School District, which encompasses San Pablo, has laid off dozens of teachers and staff, with a $14.1 million reduction in salaries in 2024/2025, and another round of cuts forthcoming. The Doctors Medical Center, San Pablo’s only hospital, was closed in 2015.
Why would a municipality deprive its people of education and healthcare, while surveilling them and funding its armed agents? Because of the logic of capital accumulation. As capital circulates in its search for ever-increasing profits, it takes up and abandons specific geographic regions at will; establishing wealth and social goods like education and healthcare in some areas, and locating working and impoverished peoples and social harms like pollution in others. In short, San Pablo has undergone what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment”–the systematic withdrawal of capital and social goods from the community.
San Pablo has a majority Latine population (56.5%), with Black and Asian peoples coming in close after, and white people accounting for a small minority. In other words, San Pablo has the sort of population which constitutes the economic base of the Bay Area. Richmond, CA, immediately to the south, has similar demographics and continues to suffer from the toxic emissions of its Chevron oil refinery. Crucially, these are mostly racialized peoples; migrant and housing insecure individuals who are demonized by the mainstream media and Democratic and Republican parties; who are projected as “illegals,” criminals, drug addicts and distributors. In a capitalist empire like the U.S., these racist ideas legitimate the abandonment of working people and surplus populations and offer justification for the egregious violence against them.
So why would the government of San Pablo abandon its people? Because it is not interested in fulfilling their needs. That is not how governmental power is maintained. Instead, San Pablo’s ruling class aims only to accumulate wealth and protect their private property. The latter entails a massive, intensive police operation on the part of the state, given that the impoverished class created by capitalism poses a threat to that property. Basically, the state and capital know that they are exploiting the masses, so they are ready to preempt resistance to exploitation. Cop Campus therefore must be built to protect the wealth of private interests and the power of politicians and administrators.
Organizing to Stop Cop City
If you canvass the people of San Pablo and ask them what they think about the $44 million police training facility being built in their neighborhood, you will discover a few things. First, San Pablo residents largely do not know about the training facility. This is by design–so long as governments can allocate funds for prisons, military installations, cop training facilities, etc. without popular awareness, they will do so. They already know that their initiatives will be unpopular, so they appreciate discretion. When this is impossible, they hire PR firms and undertake attempts at dissimulation.
Second, when residents are made aware of the Cop Campus, they are very likely to oppose it. People in San Pablo, especially racialized people who have experience with police, understand that the campus will be a threat to their health and safety. Abolitionists do not need to be afraid to talk to people–our vision of community public safety as an alternative to policing is, in fact, highly rational. Abolitionists can offer the following facts. That increased policing doesn’t decrease social harms or reported “crimes.” In 2020, for instance, the United States spent $115 billion on police budgets, more than any other country’s military budget except for China. Therefore, if more policing means more safety, the United States should already have one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Additionally, police target Black and brown people, migrants, indigenous people, and the poor specifically, incarcerating and killing them at disproportionate rates. And the institutions which fund the police are misappropriating their tax dollars which could be used for education, public health, and jobs programs. Police supporters, meanwhile, must resort to copaganda–to imagined scenarios in police procedurals and frantic false reports about drug smuggling and mass murders on the news.
Cop supporters are in fact a rare, if rabid, minority in cities like San Pablo. They are either personally linked to police forces, wealthy enough to benefit from policing, or conservative ideologues. The only pro-police idea with traction among the population comes in the form of a desire for public safety. As such, a San Pablo resident might ask the following question of a canvasser: “if you don’t want the police to be expanded, how do you propose we stop crime?” For the police, it is vital that the citizenry conflates policing with public safety in this way.
What confuses people is that the same cop who may murder or imprison them might, on other occasions, help them with directions or locate their stolen property. The cop may perform mental health checks, or even apprehend a murderer–though this is rare and the idea that cops stop killers is truer on TV than in reality. Notably, these interventions can go awry, and murderers and abusers are often, themselves, cops.
It’s crucial that we as abolitionists develop a political response to the desire for public safety. We need to develop a practical, organized way to address the need for safety independently of the state, while clarifying for people that the essential function of police is to inflict violence against the opponents of capital. To borrow a term from Ahjamu Umi, an organizer with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, we need “revolutionary community defense.” This entails an autonomous, noncarceral infrastructure for deescalating conflicts and addressing harms within the community, the provision of medical services, cop watch programs, and self-defense practices which prioritize feminine and queer people.
The abolitionist movement to Stop Cop City San Pablo must perform two crucial tasks: develop practices of community care, mutual aid, and collective deliberation to address social harms, while at the same time mounting an audacious resistance to police power. These are necessary conditions, supposing it is even possible, in the present situation, to prevent the facility’s construction.
What’s more, we must achieve these conditions while also reckoning with the political situation on the ground. We must respond to the actually existing Stop Cop Campus / Stop Cop City Bay Area movement, with all its contradictions, and the many faults and foibles of its participants. In what follows, I will outline three contradictions which the Bay Area abolitionist movement will have to overcome to build a genuine resistance to the Cop Campus and propose some ways to address them.
It may not be possible to list all of the political tendencies which make up the Stop Cop Campus movement. The movement involves, minimally, different anarchist strands, socialist, communist, and decolonial formations, and a variety of nonprofits. This latter tendency includes nonprofits which are explicitly liberal and those which use abolitionist concepts.
The presence of nonprofits within what is fundamentally a movement against capital and the state is a profound contradiction. It is crucial to grasp that, on a structural level, nonprofits are a counterinsurgency force. This is a historical fact with a well-documented scholarship—see Robert Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America and the volume The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. As Dylan Rodriguez argues in the latter book, nonprofits including the Mellon, Ford, and Soros Foundations, were established in the 1960s and 70s in order to harness and restrict the potentials of U.S.-based progressive activisms. The nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) is a counterrevolutionary invention with strategic significance: the state and philanthropic capital offer wealth and access to power to would-be reformers. In return, these reformers are disciplined against a politics of revolutionary self-organization.
As Dylan Rodriguez puts it, the NPIC, through the massive funding injected into it by capital and the state, “grounds an epistemology–literally a way of knowingsocial change and resistance praxis–that is difficult to escape or rupture.” Nonprofits are taught to prize the patronage of donors, in order to advance their interest in “social change.” The NPIC strategically extends the pedagogy of the empire, creating hierarchically ordered social formations with executive directors, paid career organizers, fealty to foundation donors, and turf-based zero-sum thinking. Nonprofits therefore jealously guard their status against autonomous leftist organizations, accusing them of being “outside agitators.” At the same time, the NPIC serves as a replacement to the welfare state in the era of neoliberal capitalism. Nonprofits offer band-aid solutions to the social harms inflicted by capitalist imperialism, shoring up the status quo without impeding profit-seeking.
Crucially, this is a political critique of nonprofits, not a moral one, strictly speaking. The point is not that nonprofits are evil, but that they operate with clear functional imperatives and limitations. This gets us to the second aspect of the contradiction. Once we grasp that the NPIC is a counterrevolutionary invention, we need to produce an organized and strategic political solution to the problem that it poses. This is where leftists often go wrong. They reduce the problem to a moral one—they write polemics against nonprofits and attack them publicly, for no strategic gain and with the cost of alienating politically underdeveloped community members. An awareness of the fact that nonprofits, as institutions, pose a political problem means that we actually need a strategy to outmaneuver and out-organize them. Therefore, we need to avoid errors where we needlessly take up losing fights against nonprofits, or where we needlessly cede political ground to them. Practically, we need to organize ourselves outside of the NPIC, and politically educate autonomous leftist organizers on its nature. We need to raise the level of consciousness as regards the NPIC within abolitionist political spaces. Then, once this is done, we can collectively figure out how to deal with some given nonprofit on a case-by-case basis.
The most important practical consideration when it comes to outmaneuvering nonprofits is that we can usually avoid contact with them altogether. Take the city of San Pablo. San Pablo is a city of 32,000 people, the vast majority of whom have had little to no interaction with nonprofits. These are all people we can canvass, phonebank, meet with, befriend, and organize into a collectivity. These possibilities are completely open, so long as those of us on the left can organize ourselves to perform the necessary outreach. Whether a given nonprofit “permits” us to perform this outreach is irrelevant. If our message does not resonate with the masses, we will find out through canvassing. If our message does resonate with people, given their common stake in a future without police terror, we have a material basis for building an organization for abolition and revolutionary community defense.
Once we have organized ourselves, we can then proceed to make collective political decisions. Once we have made some political decisions—formulating our abolitionist politics and strategy—our organization will be able to decide how to relate to this or that nonprofit. We can meet with nonprofit organizers on an individual basis and decide whether, and to what extent, we are strategically aligned. If we are not aligned (and we likely won’t be), then we can refrain from working with them. Some nonprofit organizers are actually conscious of the political limits of the NPIC—lower-level employees will have ample opportunities to witness how their organization’s good intentions are disciplined by philanthropic capital and politicians. These are people we may be able to work with, since they do not politically identify themselves with the nonprofit. In the best case, they might willingly subvert the nonprofit’s directives, in support of the wider abolitionist movement. On the other hand, there are also nonprofit employees who politically identify with their nonprofit. These individuals tend to have a material stake in the NPIC—they are usually paid more, and they might enjoy having the ear of their favored politician. We can expect these nonprofit “organizers” to mislead and undermine the abolitionist movement at every opportunity.
The second contradiction which the Stop Cop Campus/ Stop Cop City Bay Area movement will have to work through is its political, social, and personal diversity. In fact, once we have properly accounted for this diversity, we can grasp it as a strength rather than a weakness. The left, broadly conceived, thrives when we can debate ideas with one another. We need a lively and dynamic revolutionary culture, to invent new ideas and practices that we can use to overcome capitalist social forces. We need Anarchists, Communists, Pan-Africanists, Chicanos, and Socialists all working together to the greatest possible extent. To claim otherwise means underestimating the divide-and-rule strategy of capitalist imperialism.
The current problem facing the Stop Cop Campus movement is that, up until now, we have failed to develop the social practices which collective deliberation requires. Literally, we have struggled with basic social skills. We have would-be revolutionaries who struggle to interact socially—who argue violently with their comrades, alienating community members and newer abolitionists we need to join our movement. It cannot be understated: political organizing requires considerable emotional self-regulation. If a person cannot regulate themselves so to connect with a larger collective, this will significantly hinder their organizing capabilities. Moreover, we need to bring curiosity to our organizing spaces. If a group has a different political approach than our own, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are untrustworthy. It may mean they have potentially helpful information that we don’t know ourselves. As such, we need to conduct social investigation to find out. If in the end it turns out that strategic unity with the other group is impossible, then we will learn this for certain, and we can act accordingly.
We need to be conscientious of the fact that zero-sum thinking and proprietary behavior are bourgeois social norms. Selfishness and mistrust is the norm under capitalism. Therefore, we should reject the following style of arguments: “our organization X should lead the movement,” “our organization is more authentic,” “we should use the movement to grow X organization.” We should reject claims of “outside agitators” and cop-jacketing. Instead, we need to evaluate arguments on their logical and practical merits.
Finally, we need to engage in activities which make our political organizations accessible to the masses. In San Pablo, a city with a majority Latine population, language accessibility is indispensable. If we cannot create Spanish-language meeting spaces and materials, then we will not be able to organize the larger part of San Pablo. Additionally, if we cannot reach people in their communities through canvassing, and create spaces for popular education and collective decision-making, we will have no means to engage community members in their self-defense and liberation. As such, we will not be able to adequately oppose Cop Campus.
The key contradiction, in the case of Cop Campus, is that the state will use every available means to build the facility. The people, meanwhile, must oppose it with all their might, since its construction will lead to increased state violence, surveillance, and repression. The only means to practically oppose the facility is through disruptive power—economic disruption through strikes and boycotts, or direct action which undermines, disorganizes, or dismantles state capacity. In other words, we need leverage. Without it we can raise awareness, perform mutual aid, and create a culture of opposition to state violence, but we will not pose any material impediment to the police state.
How, exactly, to surmount these contradictions and build disruptive power against the San Pablo Cop Campus is an open question for the author of this piece. Supporting direct action groups is one potential avenue of attack. Organizing workers and renters is another. Whatever avenue and actions we take, we must be thoroughly committed to abolition and the safety and wellbeing of the people of San Pablo.