Outside agitators are a police myth

This boils down to the power of police departments in shaping security across the country. State and local officials rely on police sources to know what is happening on the ground and are willing to trust them. This is one of the great institutional powers of the police. When crime is invisible to the vast majority of the population, we rely on those who are supposedly designated to deal with these issues to supply us with information. The police inform state officials about Antifa and domestic terrorist and cartels and this is taken at face value. The police tell us the threat we face, and it is accepted, never minding the incentives police forces might have to exaggerate that threat for increased budgets and continued impunity.

Even well-meaning liberals who try to stress the role of right-wing extremists in driving the violence serve to justify heavy handed suppression by law enforcement. It reflects an inability, or unwillingness, to see the rage that has burst out as a result of another senseless, racist murder. There is a strange phenomenon occurring where some people are willing to call the police racists or murderers while being unable to call them out as liars as well.

Undoubtedly, as in any protest, there will be opportunists. No major uprising has ever been entirely unified in ideology or goals. However, videos of white individuals smashing up buildings do not reflect a conspiracy. It is the police that are driving this narrative of nefarious and nebulous outside agitators. Any explanations being pushed by these groups should be treated with the utmost suspicion. Indeed the only group with any real history of infiltrating protests are the police themselves. These protests were and remain centred on the institutional racism of the police in the United States. We must ensure that a protest against police violence does not turn into a paradoxical reassertion of the securitized narratives of threats that allowed for such a crisis to emerge in the first place.

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