The Polkopticon
CW: Police Violence
“They grabbed what they could get for the sake of being got.” — Joseph Conrad
The Greater Des Moines area is a metro, like every city in America, marked by conspicuous class demarcations. Be it Boston or Fargo or Portland, the managers of capital establish and organize districts based on the social hierarchies we are forced to adhere to: the “good” neighborhoods, the white suburbs, exurbs, and revitalized urban enclaves, adjacent, yet disjoined from the “bad” BIPOC communities that provide any city's spine of labor. That binary has historically been a fundamental force of cultural development in America, and in our contemporary moment of mass gentrification, cultural larceny.
Des Moines, however, is unlike many cities in America in that its racial demographics are significantly disparate. Polk County as a whole is 85% white. The city itself is 80%. The suburbs range in the 90th percentiles. Looking at the municipal geography of the county, one sees a sort of discrete, yet fixed, civic enclosure.
Unsurprisingly, poverty is concentrated in several urban, ethnically diverse neighborhoods within Des Moines. To further illustrate the inequalities of the city, Infotainment shlocksite Roadsnacks has averaged census data to create their sleazy “Worst Neighborhoods of Des Moines” guide. And as gross and craven as their editors are, the scoring is grievously relevant:
Averaging unemployment rates, income, population density, home values, and crime, said travel guide cretins actually provided relevant corroboration regarding purported local certainties. The interior of the city is poor, it is neglected. This is not a natural phenomenon.
Polk County’s segregation is an unspoken understanding, a social order that most assume is the organic way of things. Waukee is wealthy, River Bend is not. This is life. In reality, Polk County’s racialized class divide is the result of a national, multi-decade project of the carceral system and white flight.
According to statistical analyses conducted by Professor Jessica Trounstine out of UC Merced, between the years of 1970 and 2011, “white property owners turned to suburbanization as their primary mechanism for protecting property values. After 1970, the dominant trend in both race and class segregation was increasing differentiation between cities. During this period, suburban governments grew more intensely than central cities, so by 2011 central cities accounted for a smaller share of total metro area spending than they had in 1970.” (19). Polk county is no exception to this longterm campaign. Racial stratifications within the greater metro are obvious.
Des Moines’s city planning, however, does stand out in other regards. While gentrification has spurred oppositional community struggles in metros throughout the US, Des Moines’s decades long campaign of redevelopment has largely been unobstructed. In fact, it’s bankroll has been continuously elevated and its architectural blitz nationally lauded.
In early 2016, ISU economist Peter Orazem figured that local petty bourg usurers were able to parlay a portion of a $228 million statewide civic award, entitled VIsion Iowa, into $2 billion of supplementary investments. That unfathomable amount of money could have sheltered every houseless person in Polk County several times over, but hey, at least we have a lot of sculptures now.
Gentrification is, of course, not just the process of renovation and rebuilding. It is also a reaffirmation of commitment to violently enforcing racial strata. Vision Iowa didn’t fundamentally alter the demographic composition of most neighborhoods, although it did in some cases, displace citizens. The Des Moines of 1960 more than resembles the contemporary. Segregation may no longer be legally entrenched, at least not in the explicitly apartheid formations of post-Civil War America, but it is absolutely still a culturally and civically divisive force. Vision Iowa brazenly reasserted the stark delimitation of class in Polk County. And in doing so, also further conceded the panoptic designs of American city planning, a cruelty only slightly veiled by the newfound marketable aesthetics of downtown:
A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control — to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them (Foucault 172).
As previously shown, the BIPOC population of Polk County has been socioeconomically confined into neighborhoods just outside the core of Des Moines proper. The suburban x urban boundary enforces a more soft, bureaucratically reticulate mutation of Jim Crow society, one in which the non-white subject is not necessarily barred from certain areas with outright aggression, but stigmatized through steady police surveillance and the economic subterfuge of conservative housing policy.
The carceral city’s most unabashedly dystopian force of control is, of course, law enforcement.
As of 2020, 39% of Des Moines’s city budget is wasted on all the weapons and gadgets police use to cosplay as one of The Expendables:
Des Moines’s local government blows 70+ million dollars on its police, and severely underfunds community welfare and its human rights department. This is not because there is some depraved Iowan criminal underground that our officers so righteously protect us from. The budget is one of the most effective ways the capitalist class socially engineers servility among the working class, especially black workers:
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects…in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so (Foucault 201).
The DMPD, with gratuitous funding and near absolute impunity, becomes the living inspection house, the mutable center of Betham’s horrific fever dreams.
The disciplinary objectives of the DMPD are far from clandestine. In fact, their presence has to be overtly combative in order to psychologically condition civilians to a punitive society. According to a report compiled by the Iowa ACLU:
- “A Black person in Iowa is 7.3 times more likely to be arrested than a white person for marijuana possession, even though both groups use marijuana at about the same rate”
- “In 2018, Black people in Iowa were arrested at a rate of 776 per 100,000 of the Black general population compared to just 107 per 100,000 of the white general population.”
- “Approximately 4 percent of Iowans are Black. But Iowa consistently has one of the highest rates in the nation for locking up Black people, with a Black person in Iowa being 11 times more likely to be incarcerated.”
Not only is the DMPD’s sadism publicly observable, it’s largely financed by the public itself. Panoptic engineering is considered successful when the imprisoned begin to internalize the state of constant scrutiny and individually reproduce their own subjugation. The American overclass spent the whole of the Post-WWII era molding society through both local demography and criminal policy. The working white majority was steadily coerced into accepting the legitimacy of extensive carceral networks, quite literally paying for them, on the proviso that most of the system’s violence would be directed downward into disaffected BIPOC working class communities.
J. Sakai’s analyses of the white working class are especially relevant to the last few weeks here in Des Moines. Between the end of May and mid-July, the city ranked 10th for most cases of police brutality.
Considering Des Moines is not even in the top 100 most populous cities in America, that is very troubling, but also not necessarily surprising. Des Moines may be the most racially diverse city in Iowa, but it is still defined and commanded by an upwardly mobile white petty bourgeoisie: “This labor aristocracy of bribed workers is not neutral, but is fighting for its capitalist masters. Therefore, they must be combatted, just like the army or police (who are the military base of the imperialists, while the labor aristocracy is its social base)” (Sakai 53).
After months of police rioting, the Des Moines City Council has yet to even offer a platitudinous written statement decrying the terror of their local paramilitary. And they most assuredly won’t. The Des Moines City Council is less of a city council, more of a grouping of corporate mascots for the local chamber of commerce. They are beholden to the financiers of this city, and these quaint midwestern businesspeople find the disruptions of racial justice protests to be unsightly.
I’ve linked below five recent Himmlerian incidents of the DMPD going berserk:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=574477756774453
https://www.facebook.com/desmoinesblm/videos/1163653527321417
https://www.facebook.com/desmoinesblm/videos/555047361818923
I have no illusions that any of these crimes will be litigated. To do so would be in opposition to the panoptic project of American law, an undertaking of colonial precedent. The violence of state and local police is unquestionably empowered because the overclass knows that “dissent and rebelliousness within the settler ranks can be quelled by increasing the colonial exploitation of other nations and peoples (Sakai 11).” The panoptic city is the actualization of the settler capitalist’s ideal of social control, prosperous, mostly autonomous, suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods constraining diverse, immiserated working class communities in adjacency.
While every American city has been built according to the carceral objectives of the ruling class, not every metro topographically resembles the basic layout of the panopticon. Incidentally, Polk County does. Des Moines is encircled by a penitentiary border of Super Targets and country clubs. Moreover, West Des Moines, Waukee, Urbandale, etc, these suburbs quarter 80% of the DMPD.
(Discussion regarding police residency begins about an hour in.)
They are quite literally an occupying regiment. In the gaze of your average DMPD officer, River Bend or Capitol East are not districts. They are wards, or blocks, within a larger confinement, and it is imperative that the denizens of these areas are intimidated by the underlying threat of criminalization, regardless of whether they stay in the city or if they think to leave.
The unchecked bloodshed of Officer Greg Wessels best illustrates the DMPD’s vehement purpose. The below profile explicates on his many transgressions against working people.
While every recorded case of his fury is vile (I’m sure he has been involved in dozens more terroristic interactions that have gone unreported), his arrest of Khy’la Williams stands out as particularly heinous. This grown man assaults a black teen, fulfilling both his professional directive and the personally villainous desires provided by his position. Wessels has racked up over a million in lawsuit payouts, which would probably lead many to ponder why he is still employed since he is such a liability for the city.
But, why would he be fired for accomplishing his primary task as an officer?
In 2012, his savagery was rewarded with a promotion to sergeant.
Another crucial example of this everyday violence occurred out in West Des Moines during the 2018 congressional cycle. Keilon Hill, a black man canvassing for then Representative Dave Young, was stopped and detained by police for being suspiciously not Anglo, in Anglo turf. How this man was not murdered under the low October sun is nothing but a Christly miracle.
The readiness of smartphone photojournalism has prompted a myriad of calls for police reform, but this leads one to inquire how a force that fundamentally must be violent in order to maintain a vast mode of economic production can be rehabilitated into a non-violent organization. In the last 20 years, empirical study has shown that reformist policy has been unequivocally inconclusive, and in some cases, more dangerous.
Body cameras were once fawned upon as the redemptive technology of the American judicial system, but in the last decade of their widespread popularization, social scientists remain uncertain if the tech affects an officer’s behavior and encourages department transparency.
Frankly, it is common for police leadership and the prosecution to treat video data as an irritating bureaucratic hindrance that is not worth the public’s trouble. Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri recently came into conflict with this institutional rebuke of vital evidence. Sahouri (who was arrested and assaulted with pepper spray while covering a BLM protest in June) and her legal team had their requests for body cam footage procedurally denied on the grounds “the defense can only see a certain amount of evidence in these lower-level crimes.”
Translated from legalese into English, Polk County Attorney John Sarcone knew that once body cam video started to widely disseminate, the obvious fact that the state’s dogs have been rabidly biting would be formally confirmed, as opposed to just colloquially known.
As of July 27th, Judge Kemp of Iowa’s Fifth Judicial District has mandated that the evidence must be released. One must gather from Sahouri’s case that the demand of due process is acutely irritating for local law enforcement.
Additionally, there is also the ostensibly paradigmatic shift of “community policing” that needs to be addressed, a reform with even less promise than body cams. This strategy of implanting officers into specific neighborhoods first came into wonk vogue in the late 20th century and has mainly proven to harm communities and embolden brutish cops. I’ve linked two salient studies below:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.587.584&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Considering the origins and practices of law in America, it logically follows that any supposed solution that involves increasing police presence would benefit their panoptic goals.
The fierce implementation of the owner class’s law and order in Des Moines mirrors metropolitan areas across the United States, but also stands out due to its nominally humble identity as a small city. The feeble morals of “Iowa Nice” don’t apply when the DMPD is deployed to beat and gas high schoolers and black women, for objecting to being beaten and gassed.
In Christian Parenti’s dissection of the Western police state The Soft Cage, the liberating power of movement is elegized:
Within the trope of geographic mobility rides a whole cosmology of real and imagined possibilities: to move away is the American surrogate for rebellion. Physical mobility is the palliative for the frustrations of social immobility; it is the promise of a better horizon; the proverbial backdoor, always open, awaiting one’s escape. But no longer. The anonymity of the road is dead (122).
Conservatives love to blither on about how “if you don’t do the crime, you won’t do the time,” which needless to say, is an utterly childish reduction of behavior within constant class warfare. Sure, one can avoid being convicted of crime if they are so lucky to have personally matured within a situation that did not lack material and emotional necessities. Crime prevention is the superficial role of police that intentionally distracts from a national, centuries-long settler looting. No citizen, particularly black and indigenous peoples, can just opt out of the deprivations of being a wage laborer. And if one tries to protest the violence and horror of the gross inequalities that characterize the American experience, they just might find themselves with a rubber bullet in their eye socket, and that is if they are having a fortunate week.
There is little socioeconomic mobility in capitalist society, and no matter how far you physically drive, one will find themselves subjected to the strictures of class, race, gender, and sexuality that it despotically demands in order to function.
Understanding the history of the law’s colonial motivations, which continue to this day, it is clear that in order for racial and economic justice to be cultivated, the carceral, capitalist state itself needs to be abolished by a self-governing and self-supporting working class. It would be imbecilic to try and predict both the moment a national, dauntless movement like Black Lives Matter will assume executive power, and also when the white labor aristocracy will finally have its capacity to subordinate BIPOC proles annulled, but my hope is that a considerable portion of my fellow settler descendants will evolve from racial opponents to allies to comrades, so that we may assist with the decolonization of the United States and the dissolution of this panoptic society.
Works Cited
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, Vintage Books, 1977
Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror. Reprint, Basic Books, 2004.
Sakai, J. Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. Amsterdam University Press, 1983.
Troustine, J. Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
