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Abstract

In this paper, I analyze how an organization, Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), was formed to challenge the increasingly militarized racialized police force in Los Angeles during neoliberal industrial reorganization, regional abandonment, and massive prison boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Studying CAPA allows for an analysis of the radical ideas and actions that came out of on-the-ground mobilization by the very communities being criminalized and policed. By applying a framework combining social reproduction, racial capitalism, and police geographies, I argue that analyzing CAPA provides critical insight into how the police and police violence are integral to reproducing and securing racialized spaces, capitalist power relations, and expanded accumulation. Through CAPA, I demonstrate how a grassroots formation developed an analysis around policing and capitalism. This analysis informed their antipolicing infrastructure centered around social reproduction to raise counterhegemony and advance a broader challenge against ongoing state violence and the social relations of production, which they saw as upholding race-classed oppression. Doing so demonstrates a prefigurative politics which can inform the current moment of challenging policing, whereby struggles around social reproduction challenge the everyday conditions of existence and provide leverage for building consciousness around and contesting sociospatial relations to transform society.

Keywords

Carcerality racial capitalism social reproduction police geographies social movements

In 1975 and 1976, over 150 people were shot by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 60 of whom died (Thigpenn, 1977). Further, between 1975 and 1980, 334 people were shot by LAPD officers, of which 138 were killed and 80% were Black or Latino (Jordan and Thigpenn, 1981). Beyond police shootings and police killings, there was an exceeding number of cases, reported and unreported, of people being arrested, beaten, choked, harassed, attacked by police dogs, and humiliated by the LAPD. During the same period, the LAPD was organizing new units and utilizing city, state, and federal funds to implement new policing technologies, such as computerized command systems and helicopters, under the guise of crime control, intelligence gathering, and suppressing dissent (Davis, 1990). With the War on Crime starting in 1965 and the War on Drugs starting in 1971, the LAPD grew their political power, increased their budgets, and increased their use of militarized force and intelligence units, reinforcing the viewpoint that the LAPD was at war against Black and Brown residents and the spaces they lived in.

In alignment with Robin D. G. Kelley's (2002: 8) notion that social movements should be understood as “incubators of new knowledge,” this study of the grassroots formation, Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), examines the radical ideas and actions that emerged from on-the-ground mobilization by the very communities being criminalized and policed. CAPA formed in 1976 in the aftermath of the state-led destruction of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and during a period of rampant police brutality in Los Angeles's Black, Brown, and poor communities. Founded by former members of the BPP—Michael Zinzun, B. Kwaku Duren, and Anthony Thigpenn—who sought to retain the Panthers’ radical organizing model, grounded in serving the people and empowering oppressed people to engage in social transformation and revolution, though with a less hierarchical structure. Through analysis and movement building, CAPA took a multitactical approach to challenging the police in Los Angeles (LA), and centered their analysis and organizing on the police apparatus as a state function, specifically contesting an era of intensive neoliberal restructuring, regional abandonment, and increasing investment in militarized, racialized policing and prison expansion across California (Davis, 1990; Gilmore, 2007; Soja, 2000).

CAPA's work anticipated the current movements that organize against police abuse and ongoing debates over reform and abolition, informs our current understanding of organizational solutions and demands, and provides new insight into understanding policing and its relationship to social reproduction. An analysis of CAPA reconceptualizes how building community infrastructures can challenge hegemonic knowledge and governing power, through analyzing and organizing against landscapes of uneven development and the growth of the carceral state (Cowen, 2020; Gilmore, 2007; LaDuke and Cowen, 2020). Through the lens of social reproduction and racial capitalism, CAPA exemplifies a distinct spatial and organizational strategy, emphasizing alternative world-building and counterhegemony (Reyes, 2015).

I organize the rest of this article by first elaborating on my combined theoretical framework of social reproduction and racial capitalism, which helps to understand the dynamics of policing within the United States. I then outline my case study methodology. The remainder of the article focuses on four significant thematic findings that can add to our contemporary political praxis and understanding of social reproduction: (1) CAPA's tactics and strategies; (2) political economic analysis of policing; (3) knowledge and power as forming individual and collective agency; and (4) CAPA's struggles over sociospatial reproduction by building an infrastructure of social reproduction. In the last section, I turn to their focus on Black and Brown youth as being critical to their analysis of social reproduction as a racial-class project. Each section builds toward a synthesis of CAPA's praxis and how this created an infrastructure of social reproduction.

I show that CAPA analyzed how policing, as a racial-class institution, shapes the reproduction of labor-power, and, therefore, shapes the reproduction of what can be termed the racial capitalist relations of production. This framing highlights how policing, the racialized production of a relative “surplus” population, and uneven development are interconnected, and how CAPA intervened in the sphere of social reproduction to build counterhegemony and challenge the everyday conditions of existence, even if the ultimate goal was total societal transformation. The sphere of social reproduction presents an important avenue for contesting the ways in which policing violently reproduces sociospatial relations. Following Reyes’ (2015) political analysis of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, I do not necessarily analyze the outcome (success or failure) of each program or challenge against the police and the state, but rather understand how CAPA offers an analysis and organizing model that may be useful for the current Left.

Theoretical framework: The social reproduction of racial capitalist relations and the geography of policing

Social reproduction theorists have generally understood social reproduction in terms of those material practices of everyday life that reproduce labor-power, largely the activities occurring outside of the market—typically the gendered, unpaid, and sociospatial–economic relations which is integral into the capital value relation, rather than peripheral to it (Arruzza and Gawel, 2020; Corwin and Gidwani, 2025; Katz, 2001, 2008; Miraftab and Huq, 2024). We can further develop the concept to include those state functions that secure the social relations of production. Thus, social reproduction is not just the reproduction of the laborer and their labor power, but the reproduction of the power relations that are foundational to upholding a capitalist society, including the institutions and practices of policing. Social reproduction then is essential toward the condition of extraction and exploitation and is a necessary site of struggle and resistance (Arruzza and Gawel, 2020; Bhattacharya, 2017; Corwin and Gidwani, 2025; Fraser, 2016; Katz, 2008; Marx, 1981; Norton and Katz, 2017; Winders and Smith, 2019). Intersecting social reproduction through the lens of racial capitalism, where capitalism is predicated on racial difference-making and the reproduction of racial-class regime, we can identify how class and race intersect in the relations of production, and take on spatial forms (Melamed, 2015; Robinson, 2000; Woods, 1998).

Uneven development, as a structural function of capitalism, is the spatial process by which capital invests in a spatial fix to exploit new opportunities for investment and accumulation in one place, while other areas are disinvested and devalued (Harvey, 1981; Smith, 2008; Walker, 1978). Through uneven development, the reproduction of racialization and sociospatial inequality becomes central to (urban) capitalist redevelopment, rather than as an outgrowth or effect (Dantzler, 2021; Hackworth and Dantzler, 2025). Those disinvested areas become sites of future accumulation, through (re)development and increasing land valuation. Though uneven development underscores how city spaces are violently (re)produced through financial institutions, capital investment, property markets, and local governments, the racial dimensions of uneven development are undertheorized, whereby racialized spaces are those that are purposely disinvested and devalued, and thus spaces for future profit and (re)investment (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Bonds, 2019; Fields and Raymond, 2021; Hackworth and Dantzler, 2025). Here, racial sociospatial relations become reproduced and framed as natural under notions of criminality, danger, morality, and profitability, which mystifies the role of structural forces and state violence in the valuation and devaluation of urban space. This is critical for understanding social reproduction and space through the lens of the police (Boyce et al., 2023; Dorries et al., 2022; Gilmore, 2002; Launius and Boyce, 2021; Robinson, 2000; Smith, 2008).

Police are critical actors within uneven development and neoliberal urban restructuring, reproducing the sociospatial relations and conditions for capital reinvestment aimed at land value capture, neighborhood transformation, and gentrification (Cahill et al., 2019; Jefferson, 2016, 2017; Laniyonu, 2018; Ramírez, 2020; Smith et al., 2021). Following the intensified policing of militancy in the 1960s and 1970s and intensive antigang policing in the 1980s, police departments engaged in broken windows and order-maintenance policing. Doing so expanded their authority within local government and policed the conditions of everyday life, heavily policing and labeling devalued spaces as high-crime, morally deviant, dangerous, and a risk¹ (Cresswell, 1997; Jefferson, 2016; McKittrick, 2011; Rutland, 2022; Safransky, 2014; Shabazz, 2015; Smith, 1996).² The police, then, are an integral part of the racial capitalist structural dynamics that reproduce and secure racialized spaces and power relations through formal and informal practices of segregation, containment, banishment, and outright violence, making speculative profits possible and delegitimating claims to space from residents within (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Bloch and Meyer, 2019; Dorries et al., 2022; Launius and Boyce, 2021).

Beyond gentrification, police produce and reproduce the sociospatial power relations in other ways: postcarceral supervision (Massaro, 2020), houselessness (Dozier, 2019; Jefferson, 2017), the family and reproductive practices (Roberts, 2022), employment outcomes (Pager, 2003; Western, 2006), education (Kaba, 2021), public health and the environment (Pellow, 2017), social services (Nguyen, 2021), and in regulating and criminalizing immigration and migrant laborers (Boyce, 2021; Ferguson and McNally, 2015; Nicholls, 2016). In this way, policing has become pervasive within everyday life, targeting normal behavior done by a criminalized person or behavior deemed inconvenient, and causing residents to become criminalized (Herbert and Beckett, 2010). Taken together, policing has an emotional and financial toll that destabilizes households and reproduces racial and spatial inequality, while denying communities their ability to organize around their social reproductive needs (Boyce et al., 2023; Cahill et al., 2019; Gilmore, 2007).

Critical police geographies offer new directions for studying what Massaro and Boyce (2021) refer to as the carceral–police continuum, highlighting how state power and carceral logics become unevenly distributed through a complex web of sociospatial–state relations. These logics extend beyond the site of law enforcement, spatially, politically, and ideologically. This continuum is integral to the reproduction of racial capitalism and how controlling urban space is critical to controlling specific communities, that is, surplus populations, immigrants, and so on, through differentiation, fragmentation, and borders (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Derickson, 2017; Gilmore, 2007; Ramírez, 2020; Russell and de Souza, 2023; Safransky, 2019). These carceral logics are mapped onto already racialized, gendered, and classed divisions by which community becomes produced in concrete ways, and though not solely guided by capital, fits within the needs of capital. Massaro and Boyce highlight the importance of analyzing such conditions of policing that contribute to creating a framework for abolitionist praxis through the utilization of new methods and analysis, which might align with organizing and struggling against state violence and carceral power.

We can understand how state power, through the police, unfolds and becomes a set of visible and invisible practices,³ as opposed to solely as overt violence, by narrowing in on everyday life through the lens of subjectivities, practices, and discourses whereby the police are embedded within an infrastructure of control (Calhoun, 2023; Herbert, 1996; Herbert and Beckett, 2010; Jefferson, 2017; Safransky, 2019). As shown below, the LAPD was a repressive and overtly physical force that was also invested in intelligence-gathering on political dissenters and racialized spaces. They used both methods against CAPA and their larger community.

On the other side, social movements attempt to form infrastructures of resistance. Stefano Bloch (2021) and Chennault and Sbicca (2025) urge researchers not only to expand police geographies but also to explore the ways organizations and movements organize against carceral power in its hegemonic (ideological) and material forms. Such studies can yield new insights into policing and help develop methods and theories to limit and eventually abolish carceral power. Centering alternative knowledge creation challenges the traditional research model that assumes legitimacy from the vantage point of the police and, instead, connects such theories and methods with on-the-ground work. We need to attend to the geographies of knowledge production by focusing on communities in resistance and studying historical movements that challenged the police (Derickson, 2017; Jazeel, 2016).

Utilizing new methods and focusing on movements and struggles are essential to our understanding of the ways (largely racialized) communities resist policing (Bloch, 2021; Coleman, 2016). Bringing together police geographies and social reproduction opens an area for interrogating police challengers as active class subjects who confronted the relations of production. Such an analysis leads us to reconceptualize social space as it is being contested, in which space becomes a product of social practice and reproduction rather than a container of struggles (Harvey, 1990; Lefebvre, 1976; Sinwell, 2012).

Methodology

In what follows, I employ a qualitative case study (Yin, 2018) of CAPA to examine how an organization defines the problem of police abuse, the strategies and tactics it uses to oppose police abuse, and the challenges this presents to racial capitalist relations of production. I draw on two major sources of data: semistructured interviews with individuals in the CAPA nexus and a close analysis of archival materials. These documents—policy papers, pamphlets, program flyers, organizational meeting notes, organizing manuals, newsletters, speeches, position papers, and self-criticism, two articles by cofounder Anthony Thigpenn, interviews with cofounder Michael Zinzun, and speeches to City and Federal officials⁴—reveal the evolving patterns of organizational praxis and their shifting tactics. The CAPA archives provide a window into how leftist organizations create counterhegemony and intersect with civil society to shape the local political economy and challenge sociospatial relations.

I also performed 18 semistructured retrospective interviews with former CAPA members and close associates. I anonymized all my interviewees to protect their confidentiality. Interviews ranged from 30 to 90 min, depending on the person's role and capacity, and were conducted over Zoom due to COVID-19 restrictions. I asked questions about organizational analysis, the programs implemented, foundational ideologies, and how analysis influenced their work in the sphere of social reproduction.

I employed an interpretivist and inductive approach to my thematic analysis and utilized a two-round coding scheme: first, an open coding system looking for keywords and phrases, with attention to movement language and emergent organizational ideologies and events; then, a focused coding system categorizing or recategorizing these codes into a more advanced schema which allows for analyzing emergent themes, concepts, and patterns (Saldaña, 2009). I identified the ways in which CAPA analyzed the police in relation to the state and the public, while narrowing in on how this analysis informed their movement-building and social programs, to challenge the relations of power. I further narrowed in on themes from the broader codes concerning questions of knowledge production as a means of challenging state power and empowering individuals and the larger community.

My overall approach enables me to analyze how CAPA understood themselves as resisting sociospatial relations and sought alternative liberatory means of development, whether through raising counterhegemony and challenging top-down narratives or organizing around social reproduction through community-based solutions that are not tied to the police and violent carceral practices. By triangulating my different sources against and alongside each other, I aim to fill in gaps and provide a fuller understanding of CAPA's political and cultural conditions and how they organized to challenge state power and violence, specifically the police.

Building counterhegemony, building resistance: CAPA's tactics and strategy

CAPA initially saw itself as a vehicle to organize the disparate and fleeting organizing that was taking place in the 1960s and 1970s, largely in the form of defense and justice committees. A Defense Committee arises out of defending a person in court against charges, whereas a Justice Committee seeks justice in response to state violence. These committees typically revolved around a single case or issue and, therefore, were not vehicles for ongoing organizing. They also were comprised of other progressive organizations, unions, church groups, community organizations, and civil rights organizations (C.A.P.A.: A Spark, 1976; Jordan and Thigpenn, 1981; Thigpenn, 1977).

Through centralizing organizing and resources, CAPA enabled quick information sharing, preventing the duplication of work and opening a pathway for organizing against police violence. CAPA hypothesized that their organizing could contest the precarity of capital, which led communities to be unable to engage in reproductive functions that sustain life, while creating new solidarities that form a movement against state violence and capitalism (Mezzadri, 2021). This analysis prescribed new strategies and tactics to bring people into organizing, while on the ideological front, their struggle was mediated through knowledge production, language, and culture, which they connected to the material reality of police abuse and violence (Lefebvre, 1976).⁵ In contrast, on the community organizing side, CAPA attempted to build a larger infrastructural organization to the Left in what was a vast landscape of progressive organizations that spanned from reformist to radical tendencies. By doing so, they attempted to address the issues that they saw as fragmenting the Left, such as sectarianism and ultra-leftism, as well as issues stemming from other organizations’ insistence on working only within the system.

Therefore, CAPA sought to provide an organization that could bring people in and offer an analysis linking the multiple ways in which community members’ daily realities were (re)produced both by political-economic factors and police brutality, including identifying how capitalism and racism functioned together, and how radical organizing to challenge this was quelled. From their 1979–1981 report, they state: “C.A.P.A. not only sees organizing against police abuse as necessary but also organizing for more jobs and organizing against a ‘system’ that caters to a selective few who put profits before people” (C.A.P.A. Report, 1989–1990). Police are placed at the center of their organization, though, because policing is integral to the reproductive processes of criminalization and repression across LA. As a result of neoliberal restructuration and regional abandonment (Davis, 1990; Gilmore, 2007), CAPA proffers a theory of racial capitalist relations of production, whereby sociospatial relations of inequality were violently reproduced through both state and market institutions, as racialized populations were being thrown out of the labor market, created as a “surplus” population, and criminalized (Ramirez, 2020). Importantly, their analysis focused on how reproducing racialized-class relations were for the benefit of expanded accumulation, specifically for capitalists. Such an analysis will be deepened throughout the other sections, demonstrating how CAPA's analysis emphasizes how policing, social reproduction, and uneven development were tied together across LA.

CAPA aimed at challenging the daily reality of police abuse and crimes, which structured everyday life and social reproduction for citizens across Los Angeles, especially within Black and Brown communities. From their informational pamphlet:
[C.A.P.A] formed by community people who feel that the reign of terror by the police has remained unchecked for too long, that it is time to let the authorities know that we will no longer tolerate the senseless harassment, injury, and murder of community people by the police, and that we have resolved as our main purpose to organize and mobilize the masses in the Black and Brown communities, as well as other poor communities; through block clubs, church groups, labor committees, youth groups, women's groups, senior citizens clubs, and concerned individuals and families, to organize against police terrorism in our communities. (C.A.P.A. Pamphlet, 1976)

Here, CAPA demonstrated the necessity of organizing beyond sites of production, and instead, focused on sites of reproduction: youth groups, women's groups, block clubs, and so on. In doing so, they would be able to raise counterhegemony through groups that are peripheralized by capitalist relations and the labor process. CAPA, then, utilized their organization to politically educate both the broader left and working-class communities in LA on the role of the police in society, as a strategic decision for underscoring the analysis that police terror was an issue that was related to the sphere of production, but also critical to the sphere of reproduction, where organizing had to happen connected to the multiple ways that varying communities experienced police terror.

In Zinzun's words, focusing on police “as a single issue, in many ways hides the real enemy” by obscuring the capitalist power structure with more visible violence. Nonetheless, the police are still inherently connected to any struggle, and CAPA could intersect a myriad of struggles by focusing on police abuse. As Zinzun says in a 1983 Catalyst interview: “Anytime you organize resistance on any issue, you are going to be met with police abuse and repression. There is a natural thread” (Zinzun, 1983). (CAPA itself was under surveillance, infiltration, and harassment.⁶) Thus, CAPA went with this “natural thread” and built out their organizing from linking policing and economic crises to the lived experience of Black and Brown LA residents in order to raise counterhegemony and a left subjectivity in a landscape that lacked a mass-based movement or party that tied together a more significant movement of antipolicing, anticapitalist, left-labor, and antiracist organizing.

CAPA's research and organizing evolved with the intent of exposing police abuse and police intelligence as an interconnected issue. They employed various methods to achieve this, including lawsuits, demonstrations, rallies, marches, presentations to city hall, monthly newsletters, and reports. As a former CAPA member states: “C.A.P.A. was a community-based organization, that for us, that I came away with ingrained, which is research and study was important, which helps you form an analysis as you interact with community folks and how to marry analysis vs praxis” (Interviewee 1). The interviewee goes on to state: “It also means that the larger issue of public safety because … [it] was one thing to be young and revolutionary and fuck the pig, but also our grandmas and aunty do not get their head knocked in.” Initially police abuse was enough of a “galvanizing factor” for change and making noise, but not enough to sustain it. As Michael Zinzun states, this was based on their analysis that while the “sensational nature of police brutality” causes people to become outraged, people “drop off when the sensationalism wears off” (Zinzun, 1983).

This view is consistent with Interviewee 3, who states: “C.A.P.A. saw the police as a fundamental aspect of capitalism”… “However, they also understood that community residents were not just poor bodies, but racialized and poor bodies, which needed to be politicized to act.” While CAPA viewed governmental reforms and lawsuits as tactics in the overall struggle, they also recognized the limitations of such reforms, which transferred power from the masses to a professionalized class, thereby reinforcing the general division of labor. Instead, they saw the need to politicize community members. Hence, CAPA sought to disrupt traditional power relations by focusing on the subjectivity and knowledge of the masses, aiming to enable people to make their own history.

Knowledge and power: “We won’t struggle for ya, but we will struggle with ya”

The focal point of their organizing was most forcefully stated in 1992, when CAPA called for a “National Conference Against Police Abuse” in the wake of the 1-year anniversary of the LA Uprising. In their call for uniting left-based organizations and already radicalized individuals, they state:
A major component of our objective is to include those members of the community usually left out of policy discussions but first in line to suffer abuse at the hands of out-of-control law enforcement. Oftentimes, these individuals are left out of national conferences due to lack of travel funds and therefore valuable input is overlooked. We are calling on organizations to develop scholarships to assure these individuals participate in the national organizing process. (C.A.P.A. “National Conference,” 1992)

CAPA did not wait for professionals to take charge of the moment and organized around the phrase, “We won’t struggle for ya, but we will struggle with ya.” In recognizing the power that organizations typically hold, which people do not, CAPA adopted this motto to empower individuals with fierce self-determination while fostering a collective consciousness and legitimizing community knowledge. This shift challenges how normative knowledge production legitimates academic and technocratic knowledge over community knowledge, thereby reproducing a classed knowledge and separating those who have a claim to advancing social change. This same language was utilized throughout CAPA documents, focusing on action. For instance, they headed their report briefings and public materials with the words “C.A.P.A.: News you can use.” The emphasis was always on making change.

CAPA raised counterhegemony by having community people understand that they do have rights and creating defensive strategies for dealing with police stops. They politicized police stops and engaged (bounded) agencies by enacting political rights. For instance, on a flyer titled “Have You Been Harassed by the Police?” they informed people about how to deal with police stops: “you should say I have nothing to say until I talk to my lawyer, even if you don’t have one yet”; “Never confess to anything” (C.A.P.A. Flyer, 1976a). This approach to organizing demonstrates the connections between the everyday and the structural levels. Everyday experiences become moments of political education, revealing how individual cases can illuminate the system behind the encounter and provide an opportunity to be part of a larger movement. Importantly, CAPA advised people to remember all of the details of the occurrence, including the officer's badge number, so that people conceive of themselves as agents of potential future action. Flyers and other educational materials, translated into Spanish, attempted to challenge the structure of daily life created by police and the hegemony of the police and state apparatus. On the one hand, they provide material relief in the current crisis and contribute to the social reproduction of the community.

Another main thrust of their work within the realm of social reproduction was the formation of survival programs, which served the community's everyday needs, including food, clothing, medical assistance, and more. These programs were aimed toward serving the material and reproductive needs of the larger community, while building an extensive network of members, volunteers, and supporters who were provided access to different resources. However, this work also demonstrated to the broader community the seriousness of the organizing and the potential to make a difference in the current moment. For CAPA cofounder Anthony Thigpenn (1977), this challenged defeatism. He states:
At that point, the outrage can either lead to greater action or despair. This is the importance of C.A.P.A. If people can see organizing, the attempt at some sort of victory, they will move toward action rather than defeat.

This infrastructure of social reproduction challenged the conditions of organized abandonment through their creation of survival programs. This infrastructure aimed to meet the needs of people and consisted of programs such as a police watch and lawyer referral, political and technical education, a 24-h police abuse hotline, an “Off the Roach” program to eliminate pests, roaches, and rodents from peoples’ housing, citizen's police review board, computer and technological skills training, deep involvement in Communities in Support of the Gang Truce, creating manuals and factsheets about harmful policies and laws, and protest. These infrastructural projects remained essential for building dual power to challenge the state's authority and regional abandonment, and provided a potential pathway toward self-determination (Reyes, 2015). Rather than aiming to serve, they sought to bring people into movement work.

CAPA, then, did not view itself as an organization that would provide social services or welfare relief; instead, it was an organization that would create a network of groups that offered different resources and could bring the perspective of police accountability into various spaces and communities. These were then reinforced through organizing and workshops that focused on concrete proposals for action, such as building community relations, jobs and job training, building leadership, developing electoral politics and lobbying, community health and awareness of disease, and community survival programs: computer training, silk screening, political education, and outreach. These programs enacted a prefigurative politics, whereby CAPA sought to challenge the power relations of capitalist society by organizing and creating the world they wanted to see while analyzing the world as it existed around them. Their infrastructure and analysis developed and reinforced their on-the-ground work.

CAPA's political economic analysis: Policing racial capitalism

For CAPA, research, study, and documentation were essential to analyzing the productive and reproductive relations of police to Black, Latino, and poor communities during different moments of market cycles, economic expansion, and constriction, and organizing against the oppressive conditions in the community. CAPA's analysis centered on police abuse and capitalism as being integrally linked and demonstrated how policing was a necessary function of the capitalist system, perpetuating uneven development and reproducing racial capitalist relations of production. Therefore: “C.A.P.A. sees the necessity not only of organizing against police abuse, but also for educating our communities about the link between increases in police abuse and the growing economic crisis taking place, globally and in the United States” (C.A.P.A. Pamphlet, 1976).

While they linked heightened police repression to systemic crises, they identified how the post-1970s labor market could not meet people's social reproductive needs as a result of working-class people being thrown out of the means of production through automation, inflation, and a new global division of labor (Interviewee 5). Numerous references to this were made throughout their literature. On a flyer regarding police harassment, CAPA stated, referencing an increasing police presence, “As unemployment and inflation rises the rulers of America find it necessary to employ more police in our communities” (C.A.P.A. Flyer, 1976a). Or as they state on another flyer from that same period, “fewer jobs, more police, bigger prisons” (C.A.P.A. Flyer, 1976b). In LA in the 1970s and 1980s, an active presence of state violence and police abuse was a constant in daily life for primarily Black and Brown communities, though the intensity shifted given specific market conditions and as a function of growing inequality and capitalist growth.

This analysis critically framed CAPA's political mission against police violence as part of a larger radical social justice vision, whereby police were both centered as reproducing inequality and as an essential site to target the more extensive capitalist system:
[We] see not only the necessity of organizing against police abuse but also the need to link increases in police abuse to the rising economic crisis presently taking place in the United States. In other words, if workers strike for higher wages, who is called? The police. If you can’t pay your rent and refuse to move into the streets, who is called? The police. And if you organize demonstrations against a corrupt and unjust system, who is called? The police. (C.A.P.A. Leaflet, 1976)

While CAPA's analysis of policing was informed by much of the left activity in the 1960s and early 1970s, they refined their analysis and approach as sociospatial–economic relations shifted in the 1980s. They studied these changes through their research, forums, conferences, and on-the-ground organizing. Given the changing landscape of capital flight, demographic shifts, and a loss of living-wage work for the working-class in the 1970s and 1980s, CAPA sought to understand how these dynamics shifted and restructured the state, and how the police responded within working-class communities given these changing conditions in LA (Wolch and Law, 1989). CAPA draws the connection in this way:
Lurking behind these cases of murder and oppression lies a worsening economic and political crisis in which the government, guided by a false notion of law and order, has begun to legislate and order through the courts more repressive acts by the police. (C.A.P.A. Organizing Manual, 1984)

It is a question of economic, capital, and political power. The organizing manual continues:
Whereas, by legislating away the few human rights we have won through constitutional amendments, the government has put more and more power into the hands of the police. (C.A.P.A. Organizing Manual, 1984)

This viewpoint differed from that of other organizations in the 1980s, which largely distanced their critique from state violence and focused solely on narrow economic issues or influencing local state politics and policies (Gilmore, 2007; Richie, 2012). CAPA did not dismiss this organizing style, but instead attempted to demonstrate that new organizing needed to be leveraged during this neoliberal reorganization of the state.

Their analysis is underlined by a 1978 speech by CAPA Chairperson Charles Chapple. Speaking in Oakland at a grassroots conference titled “Repression and the Black Community,” Chapple emphasized that capitalism must create an upper and a lower class, and further, “uses racism to maintain the special oppression of Black and Brown and other minorities in this country in order to reap major profits” (Chapple, 1978). Thus, capitalism's difference-making through race functions to concentrate police and other state forces into specific spatial areas, largely poor, working-class communities of color. This same impulse is deeply coupled with the imperialist drive to expand markets beyond a nation's borders, exploit cheap labor to maximize profits, and “seize control of the world's resources.” This drive results in similar dynamics at the periphery and in the core: “in the position of having to protect its corporate investments on an international basis as well as a national basis at home, the imperialists must raise huge armies, navies, and police forces to forcibly subjugate oppressed people” (Chapple, 1978).

As overlapping crises hit the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, the state's carceral response intensified, as well as centralized through new Federal funding, targeting Black and nonwhite communities. For CAPA, this directly links capitalization, crises, and police: “capitalist industrialization for sure increased numbers and importance of police as an institution. Consequently, since the middle of the 60s, there has been tremendous attention given by the ruling classes, in particular, to developing ‘police mentality’” … “a more efficient and effective instrument” for securing order within urban space (C.A.P.A.: A Spark, 1976: 5).

CAPA, therefore, saw the police and police violence as an integral and educational function of the state rather than an externality or a failure of a benevolent state, as seen by liberal and reformist organizations. The police have a purpose to reproduce a specific order, which resulted in a contradiction for organizers. As the U.S. economy expanded beyond its borders through imperialism, communities became more polarized by wealth, which allowed the police to secure the buy-in of certain strata of the working-class and middle-class. As CAPA cofounder Anthony Thigpenn and organizer Joel Jordan (1981) explain, with expanded economic opportunities and progress for certain Black strata, primarily the professionalized class and portions of the Black working class who now sought increased police protection for their financial gains, and in some cases, viewed the police as allies (Jordan and Thigpenn, 1981).

CAPA provided a counterpoint to normalized relations through the state and raising counterhegemony to politically educate their working-class communities. Policing was understood as an essential function of the more complex state apparatus, defending the material interests of capital and reproducing the race-class power relations that pervade society.

Sociospatial reproduction: Community infrastructure, space, and social reproduction

In the firm belief that the key to achieving this goal is an organized, unified, community, C.A.P.A. has resolved to mobilize masses of community people. (C.A.P.A. Organizing Manual, 1984)

Given their analysis, strategy, and focus on political subjectivity, CAPA concentrated on building programs that served people's needs and would also benefit their data and research arm. In this way, CAPA sought material changes in everyday life that would lead to transformative world-making. Their organizing informed their written reports, political education, media knowledge, and coalition building. Their reports and other public-facing literature actively challenged the notion of legitimate authority, even when they sometimes used those avenues for change. They disseminated news and information through several avenues, including creating flyers, factsheets, reports, and newsletters (called “News You Can Use”), had a 24-h hotline, hosting educational meetings and conferences to raise community awareness, obtaining media publicity, starting a public access news network independent of corporate news (called “Message to the Grassroots), and most important to them, protests and block organizing. These methods created different networks of communication. In their organizing manual, they had a whole section devoted to dealing with the media, from getting publicity and creating a news release to obtaining a radio or television spot. In doing so, they leveraged general media networks or even swayed the media to their side to disseminate their analysis, and by creating a professional aura that people could take seriously and learn from (C.A.P.A. Organizing Manual, 1984; Parachini, 1986). Essentially, disseminating experiences, research, and analyses was used to inform and build.

Police Complaint Bureau

One critical program CAPA founded was a 24-h police abuse hotline, known as their Police Complaint Bureau (PCB), which, by 1997, was still receiving 10 complaints a day (Zinzun, 1997). According to Reft (2020), largely with the help of CAPA, “between 1972 and 1990, “citizens filed 15,054 complaints and over 5,500 lawsuits, the latter requiring the city to pay out $43 million.” The theory of the hotline was to both challenge the LAPD's internal complaint system and to transform the individual and collective consciousness of their community into a racialized, working-class subjectivity. CAPA recognized that when people called the official LAPD complaint hotline, they were generally not believed or followed up with. Therefore, CAPA set up their own hotline to take phone calls and provided hotline workers with essential tips to share. They ended each phone call with information about CAPA and ways to join, and made it clear that “C.A.P.A. is NOT a service agency, and that we help those that help themselves, or are willing to put forth some kind of effort in defense of self” (C.A.P.A. Manual, 1984). Notably, CAPA worked to involve people in organizing to change the social relations and conditions of existence across LA, but it also served as a community infrastructure for people to access information and helped link them to resources that it didn’t provide.

CAPA established its PCB to enhance its research capabilities and support individuals in challenging their on-the-ground realities. From the CAPA informational pamphlet, they state, “We have files on thousands of officers … we can help make formal complaints” (C.A.P.A. Pamphlet, 1976). They had a form and procedure in which the persons taking in police complaints gathered information from the caller, including a description of the action, the names of witnesses, the location, the names of officers or badge numbers, and other pertinent information such as court dates or potential lawsuits. These complaints were also archived and filed to keep track of officers’ history of abuse and as potential data points for their reports.

Their research from intake calls in the 1990s contained over 11,000 complaints against 13,000 different sworn civilian police personnel made to CAPA or CAPA-affiliated groups. These affiliated groups formed a network of legal workers and activists, such as Police Watch LA, Legal Aid, the Greater Watts Justice Center, the ACLU, and the Police Misconduct Lawyer Referral Services. CAPA connected calls from their PCB regarding police abuse and misconduct incidents with lawyers who would provide advice and take on cases. These lawyers were committed to pro bono or cheap legal services, and CAPA would blacklist lawyers who charged a certain amount.

By accepting anyone's call and giving these calls legitimacy, CAPA challenged the narrative and disrupted the reproductive logic of who has power, whose stories and knowledge is believed, and whose knowledge and experience is a catalyst for change (Bhattacharya, 2017). Although in normative society, the government, and legal structures, the police are viewed as telling the truthful or legitimate story, but CAPA realized the dehumanizing effect this has on people experiencing police violence. By connecting people with lawyers, they were involved in street-level planning (with oversight) and helped to alleviate some of the trauma that comes from policing and police violence. They also validated people's experiences, which helped them get involved in building a movement.

The PCB sought two main functions. First, to provide people with the knowledge and tools to address policing in the community. Second, it was to unite people into a collective body to intensify the fight against police abuse. For the first approach, they gave instructions for people to support each other and themselves when they witness police abuse. CAPA states, “When you’re on the streets and witness police abuse, note the date, time, and location, get the car number, and ask for their business card” (C.A.P.A. Pamphlet, 1976). The language then is one of individual and collective empowerment to challenge the conditions, and an ability to utilize this knowledge by making a complaint or filing a lawsuit against the city. Doing so intervened in the traditional state reproduction, which denies citizens the power to govern their everyday life and relies on professionalized expertise for legitimate knowledge. While they admit to the limitations of the PCB as only being able to address the issue of police abuse through legal channels, they nonetheless feel that organizations should still attempt to take advantage of legitimated channels that have largely disregarded their claims and their humanity in the past. CAPA states:
While we have developed this Complaint Bureau to address formal complaints against police, it will never take the place of grassroots organizing against police abuse and brutality. (C.A.P.A. Police Complaint Bureau, n.d.)

On a political level, this philosophy challenged the alienation and dehumanization that comes from denying people their reality. In this case, everyday instances of police abuse demonstrated the necessity of having people develop their tools for liberation (Bhattacharya, 2017). Doing so was a direct contestation against how policing informs the reproduction of racial capitalist relations of production, by renegotiating who has legitimacy and power in society (Derickson, 2017). CAPA shows how struggles around social reproduction are informed by listening to, bringing in, and centering peoples’ experiences with harm to challenge the dehumanizing reproductive logic of capital and transform social relations (Boyce et al., 2023; Katz, 2008). They incorporated this philosophy into their building of a national strategy against police abuse by radically rethinking how to legitimize people's stories regardless of whether they were reported to the police or not, and served to leverage reports of police abuse to transform people from a defensive position to an offensive struggle over life. Doing so elevated working-class consciousness of people against state violence that structured daily life and acted within the realm of their social situatedness, that is, by demonstrating the connectedness between police abuse, the making and maintenance of a racially stratified labor force, and organizing and getting involved (Katz, 2001). Hence, CAPA sought to utilize legitimate (government) channels to empower people, bring them into a larger struggle, and focus on people's everyday lives. This social reproductive model of organizing served the needs of individual community members by taking their complaints seriously, while building an organized movement among community members, progressive organizations, and individuals typically left out of political processes.

The LA Uprising and transforming strategies

The Rodney King videotape exposed policing nationally, resulting in the 1992 LA Uprising. Like most national crises, this was followed by a series of top-down reforms, ranging from intensifying law and order to community policing initiatives and promoting reduced tax and regulatory incentives for specific areas designated as Enterprise Zones (Knox, 1992; Oliver et al., 1993). Nonetheless, the stated objective was the same: the criminalization of urban space, communities, and youth in marginalized communities, and the increase of police presence (Cresswell, 1997; Davis, 1990). CAPA aimed to expose this by supporting youth and gangs and continuing to expose police abuse.

CAPA, as part of an analysis of the reproduction of the relations of production, focused on youth and gang issues by participating in LA Gang Truce and demonstrating the changing landscape whereby youth became increasingly expendable within and foreclosed from the labor market as the conditions of capital shifted (Gilmore, 2007). However, this presented a threat to the state, as these were youth from racialized and disinvested spaces, who were denied their reproductive needs, and represented a potential force for challenging state power (Zinzun, 1992). Police forcefully reproduced sociospatial inequality, presenting an intensive display of state force and power that delimited how young people could gather and organize. CAPA organized around how this intensified the policing of urban space, and increased youth criminalization, criminal records, reproduced urban inequality, and led to foreclosed lives and premature death because these youth were being reproduced as a growing surplus population. The focus was on how the conditions of youth reproduced the social relations of racial capitalism and the spatial conditions of the community, whereby people could not obtain work and, therefore, could not participate in their community, family, and neighborhood institutions. State-led practices, including policing and incarceration, became an all-out attack on poor Black and Brown youth in their analysis.

In a 1995 interview with Paul Burton in The Valley Advocate, Zinzun states, “I think it's [demonization of youth] all part of the whole attack on Black youth, Latino youth—justification for the rousting, the harassment, moving in military weapons and so on” (Burton, 1995). As the political and economic conditions in southern California changed, CAPA prioritized organizing youth. This shift was specifically in response to the local and federal states’ increasing targeting of marginalized youth through antigang legislation as well as CAPAs’ realization that “the vast majority of complaints about police brutality come from youth” (Zinzun, 1997). Such legislation included Prop 184 (the Three Strikes Law), Proposition 21 (sending youth to adult prisons), and Proposition 187 (anti-immigration), which were seen as attacks upon oppressed communities.

Not only was organizing around youth and gang issues a pressing demand, including building political awareness around new legislation impacting youth and immigrants, but it was also a clear strike against the intergenerational reproduction of racial capitalist relations of production. CAPA's analysis focused on the ways that youth were being reproduced within racial-classed relations, which represented a crisis. Youth were reproduced as a “surplus” population thrown out of the production process, and therefore, were not given the capacity to sustain daily life; thus, they were surveilled and policed to ensure compliance with larger structures. For CAPA, this represented an opportunity to center Black and Brown youth, who are typically marginalized and ignored even in Left organizations, as fundamental actors within movements challenging capitalism and social reproduction. Through emphasizing how youth's everyday experiences of marginalization are part of the reproductive practices of the system of racial capitalism, CAPA demonstrated the necessity of organizing those most marginalized within the class struggle.

“Forwards ever, backwards never”: Infrastructures of resistance

I have argued that placing critical police geographies and social reproduction through the lens of racial capitalist relations of production is a valuable way to understand how organizations challenge societal power relations entrenched and protected by the state. This approach allowed me to analyze how CAPA understood themselves as resisting sociospatial relations and sought other liberatory means of development, whether through raising counterhegemony and challenging top-down narratives or organizing around social reproduction through community-based solutions not tied to the police. In doing so, they also demonstrated how policing, as agents of social reproduction, had a basis in racial-class relations connected to the capitalist mode of production (Mezzadri, 2021). In the face of organized abandonment and uneven development, the connection between policing and state violence, the reproduction of race-class relations, and the unmet needs of what was deemed a surplus population during a moment of neoliberal restructuring (Gilmore, 2007; Massaro, 2020; Massaro and Boyce, 2021). Exposing and contesting the power relations and the production of legitimate knowledge that inform the reproductive practices of the state and capital was an important cleavage in a politics of social reproduction (Bhattacharya, 2017; Katz, 2008; Weeks, 2011).

By challenging the LAPD and the local state, CAPA created an infrastructure of social reproduction to raise counterhegemony and critique the conditions of existence. This infrastructure took lessons from the past while seeking to shape the future by challenging the reproduction of state violence and inequality. To achieve this, CAPA established an infrastructure that strategized against the police in the courts, media, and community, while developing a bottom-up infrastructural model for community reproductive needs. They provided essential services, including their 24-h police abuse hotline, computer and technology classes, and political education classes. In doing so, they developed counterhegemonic practices and organized against social control, racialized and capitalist state violence, and policies of containment, dispossession, and premature death.

They continued the BPP's emphasis within the realm of social reproduction through their survival programs, which addressed social reproductive needs neglected by the state. These programs also provided an informal revolutionary education aimed at building an alternative model of power based on self-empowerment and collective transformation. For the Panthers, as for CAPA, these survival programs emphasized the everyday needs and services of the community, and connected how these unmet needs were part of the larger structures of capitalist inequality (Heynen, 2009). Capitalism would not solve the productive or reproductive crises, only continually organizing around self-determination and social reproduction would. In the words of Zinzun, these programs and demands would not “pit one person against another” nor “promote black capitalism” but instead should be considered in the long line of “survival programs” (Zinzun, 1997).

Harkening back to the Panther ideology and CAPA's original thrust, their renewed focus on survival programs, rather than Black capitalist solutions, sought to challenge capitalist ideology and power relations by organizing and taking seriously the economic planning and reproductive needs of youth and the unwaged as part of a larger struggle for collective liberation. In contesting the state's violent neglect, they demonstrated a politics of care by supporting community survival, challenging structural inequalities, and demonstrating the agency held by the community to transform their conditions (Federici, 2020; Power and Mee, 2020). Although CAPA was attentive to the everyday survival against racial capitalism and organized abandonment, their organizational infrastructure of social reproduction advanced a broader challenge to the structural conditions and social relations of production, which they saw as upholding race-classed oppression. In doing so, they connected how liberation could not only be brought through a contestation of the power relations upholding an unequal society, but that this had to be done through meeting the broad and diverse collective needs of a community which emphasizes the global intersections of the working class (Boyce, 2021; Ferguson and McNally, 2015; Katz, 2001; Winders and Smith, 2019).

Through study, strategy, and mutual assistance, CAPA analyzed how police practices are embedded in reproducing these racial capitalist relations, by which residents are continually confronted with formal and informal practices of accumulation by dispossession. Policing was viewed as critical to racial capitalist projects and structured the urban sphere to produce and reproduce conditions advantageous to expanded accumulation, through containment, surveillance, dispossession, and violence. Such tactics are embedded in a larger carceral web, which reproduces the racial capitalist relations of production and a crisis in social reproduction.

CAPA built a community infrastructure, composed of governmental and nongovernmental routes and legal and informal ways of building community, to challenge the conditions leading to premature death. CAPA built these social infrastructures for collective action and was deeply invested in the revolutionary struggle through framing everyday life as a site of class struggle and building counterhegemony as part of challenging the reproduction of sociospatial inequality (Katz, 2001; Winders and Smith, 2019). Tactically, this supported collective action and, importantly, transformed daily lives, bringing a new understanding of one's relation to oneself and others, and forging relationships nationally, demonstrating the need for a unified struggle against the police. Yet, they centered the everyday structural police violence within LA.

Conclusion

In this paper, I analyze how an organization struggled around the conditions of everyday life and generational social reproduction, aiming to build consciousness and contest sociospatial relations. I demonstrated how through the lens of the racial capitalist relations of production, the relationship between the function of the police, uneven development, and capitalist reproduction are made explicit. Uneven development, as a structure of capitalism's drive for accumulation, violently reproduces racial, class, and spatial relations (Smith, 2008; Soja, 2000). Struggles organized around space and social reproduction contest these relations, providing an avenue for building consciousness and challenging the conditions of existence and state violence.

Through a case study of CAPA, I examine how an organization analyzed and mobilized during a moment of crisis and neoliberal restructuring, where the state and capital sought a spatial fix through urban redevelopment schemes that relied on the policing of unequal sociospatial relations. Their analysis anticipated the understanding of the police as being embedded within the larger system of racial capitalism, and therefore reproducing the racial capitalist relations of production. For an organization such as CAPA, building an antipolicing infrastructure focusing on reproduction was important to raising counterhegemony and creating a movement that not only challenged the police but ultimately, the system of racial capitalism.

Combining critical police geographies and the reproduction of racial capitalist relations allows for an analysis of both top-down structures and bottom-up challenges to police violence, within the context of the carceral–police continuum (Massaro and Boyce, 2021). In theorizing what needs to be done, what different groups can do to challenge the dominant carceral regimes and push for radical social reproductive models, CAPA worked toward an ongoing, open process of community building, which not only legitimized people's role in the community but actively worked against policing. CAPA formed around police abuse but recognized the ways that overlapping crises transformed the landscape and differentially affected people's lives. Their praxis challenged carceral frameworks by forging working-class solidarities, centering those most marginalized by capital, and documenting people's stories. As scholars who theorize social reproduction emphasize, reproduction is a sphere that can be exploited by class struggle to challenge the conditions of existence, extending beyond traditional struggles at the point of production and seeking to transform existing power relations within society.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Kristian Williams for his time and energy in strengthening this paper and providing invaluable feedback, as well as to Walter Nicholls, Jennifer Calabria, and Davin Phoenix for their insightful comments on earlier iterations of the paper. The author thanks the anonymous reviewers who provided extremely insightful and constructive comments. Additionally, the author gratefully also thank Geoff Boyce and Diego Martinez-Lugo for creating the original call for papers for an AAG session, which they then organized into this special issue, and especially for their detailed and integral feedback throughout. Last, the author would like to acknowledge the Environment and Planning D editorial team for their work.

ORCID iD

Ian Ross Baran

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Ian Ross Baran holds a PhD from the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA. His research examines issues of labor, racial capitalism, and the state at the intersection of carcerality, labor unions, environmental justice, and working-class organizing.

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Abolitionist infrastructures: Coalition Against Police Abuse,state violence,and the horizon of struggle

Abstract

Keywords

Theoretical framework: The social reproduction of racial capitalist relations and the geography of policing

Methodology

Building counterhegemony, building resistance: CAPA's tactics and strategy

Knowledge and power: “We won’t struggle for ya, but we will struggle with ya”

CAPA's political economic analysis: Policing racial capitalism

Sociospatial reproduction: Community infrastructure, space, and social reproduction

Police Complaint Bureau

The LA Uprising and transforming strategies

“Forwards ever, backwards never”: Infrastructures of resistance

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

ORCID iD

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Notes

Author Biography

References