What is the role of police? If you ask the police themselves, they will likely respond with some variation of the LAPD’s motto “to protect and serve.” But even beyond critiques of the police at large, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that police have no obligation to protect people from harm. More informed groups, such as the American Bar Association, would say police “are to safeguard freedom, to preserve life and property, to protect the constitutional rights of citizens and maintain respect for the rule of law by proper enforcement.” But such a claim is ignorant of the ways in which laws have been selectively applied throughout history to exclude certain populations because of race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, and ability.
No matter how much people try to believe otherwise, the United States has never been egalitarian. And as mechanisms of suppression and control, the police have played a key role in ensuring that reality. The police are agents of the dominant classes who oppress any threats to the hegemonic order. While structural inequality persists in the background, the police are the active arm to oppression as its chief enforcer. A central part to this is the regulation of movement. Though mobility is widely recognized to be a human right, police control movement by controlling access to space. This tenant certainly holds true in New York City
On September 17, 2024, Derell Mickles decided to hop the turnstile at the Sutter Avenue station Brownsville, Brooklyn. He was hardly the first to do so before the crackdown on fare evasion in 2022, some New Yorkers even considered it a rite of passage. But what separated Mickles from most other fare-evaders is that he acted in front of two police officers stationed to enforce this exact behavior. The police followed Mickles, but nothing happened. A few minutes later, he returned and entered through the emergency exist. After the police pursued Mickles for a few minutes, demanding that he stop to pay the $2.90 fee, he pulled out a knife. The police responded by tasering him, and when that did not work, shooting several bullets at Mickles, leaving him in critical condition. Bullets also hit the other officer and two bystanders, critically injuring one with a bullet to the head.
This account alone makes police regulation of movement strikingly apparent. From the start, the very fact that the police were stationed in the subway to prevent fare-evasion shows their control of that space. They decide whose movement is permissible and whose is not. When the police noticed Mickles the second time, they decided to pursue him specifically, even though video footage shows another person also entered the emergency exit behind him. This highlights the discretion police have in their enforcement. Because Mickles offended the police’s ego by ignoring their authority twice, the police were determined to punish him. When the police officers’ attempts to exercise control over Mickles by forcing him to stop moving were not acknowledged, they decided this was sufficient reason to taser, and soon after, shoot him.
It is no coincidence that Mickles is Black. The burden of policing falls the heaviest on the city’s marginalized populations. Mickles’ identity supplemented his dehumanization by the police, reinforcing their brute claims over his own body that manifests in violence. This disproportionate effect of policing is an intentional feature that underpins the true purpose of police: to surveil and oppress threats to the hegemonic order.
But the restrictions on movement do not end with police encounters. For people like Mickles, their contact with police colors how they interact with police and the wider surveillance apparatus in the future. They tailor their movement through space to avoid further contact with surveilling institutions like taking alternative routes to avoid crossing police or avoiding recording technologies like CCTV cameras. Space takes on a new meaning, and people are forced to change how they move through it.
Mickles’ story does not end with him. Because even outside those who directly contact police, the scars of policing permeate through their stories to the people who listen, impacting how they also move through space. And from centuries of policing in the United States, the stories are countless. Through this conditioning, the police have mastered control over space and can exert do it even when they are not present.
As long as the police exist, mobility will never be free.
Oscar Mata is a Macaulay Honors scholar at Hunter College in his senior year majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in public policy. His undergraduate research has largely been focused on human mobility and policing. After his undergraduate, Oscar intends to get some work experience within the field of transportation policy before pursuing a master’s in urban policy and planning.
