For the 2019-2020 year, San Jose allocated over 40% of its departmental budget to the police: $446 million dollars. That’s 759 times what they allocated for housing and over $400 for each and every resident of the city. 

San Jose has spent over $100,000 less on housing each year since 2017, but the amount spent on police only grew. (San Jose’s current budget proposal would cut police funding by a measly 1.5% for next year.)

In this period of time, from 2017 to 2020, thousands of people were forced from the Bay Area by rising rents: in the period just before, from 2010 to 2016, 1.5 million people were displaced. Why does the city focus on increasing police funding as scores of residents are displaced? Because in 2016 the pigs executed Anthony Nuñez in his house and as the corpses of victims of police brutality are laid in the ground their surviving family members are priced out of their homes. But the resources for housing get fewer and fewer, and the police only ever have more money for guns.

Perhaps it’s an oversight, some astounding ignorance or unseen biases or honest mistake on the part of the highly-educated bureaucrats and politicians who run our cities. In that case, perhaps if we could just speak truth to power, say the right words at the right time in the right white tone of voice we could finally get them to realize their priorities are misplaced. It would be on us to find those magical sentences to get them to realize the error of their ways and the fault of not finding them would be, in part, ours.

Or maybe it’s just a fucking plan.

We’ve argued that gentrification and rising property values touch every piece of the social struggle in San Jose, just as in cities across the nation. Fear of poor Black and brown people, violence, and “gangs” is the only thing that’s kept many neighborhoods even a little affordable. So if a city realizes that replacing us with high-paid technical workers is how they make the most money, it makes perfect sense that funding for housing decreases just as money for policing goes up.

The job of the police in gentrifying cities is pacification: to import as much military weaponry as possible into working class Black and brown neighborhoods, to train police to occupy neighborhoods the same way the military does abroad (would love an example if this. I’ll try to find one), to impose a “peace” that will make our streets safe and palatable for our replacements and profitable for the landowners. The cost of this peace is our displacement and death. The cost of their peace is blood in the streets.

So those yelling for “non-violence” at protests better save some breath for the cops buying armored personnel carriers and AR-15s. Those denouncing property destruction better have equal condemnation for those being forced out of their childhood homes. Those who clamor for “civil discourse” better be showing up at eviction court. 

We don’t think police brutality is some aberration of a good system, that if we just got the right politicians at the top that all the cops would change who we see them to be every day. Because what’s motivating the police isn’t bad apples or bad ideas but cold hard cash and interests. Because we know the whole damn system is indeed guilty as hell. 

Struggle against the police means struggle against the people they work for. Struggle against the capitalists and gentrifiers means struggle against the police that keep them safe and put us in early graves. 

And between the pigs and the people, between oppression and liberation, there is another sector whose role is confused, even by many of those performing it. Just like all sectors, it is twisted by the centripetal force of displacement and profit. Though it may see itself as against the pigs or at least the upper limits of their brutality, its fundamental role in the system is pacification all the same. We will return to them in the final piece of our series.