The unrest in Baltimore after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray after he was critically injured in police custody has reopened longstanding debates over public-order policing. Where does protest end and rioting begin? What counts as violence? Is property damage ever legitimate? Listening to Fox News analyze the meaning of the word “thugs,” it feels as if we are doomed to repeat Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote “Riots are the language of the unheard” until we are blue in the face. Baltimore, like Ferguson, Missouri, has seen the deployment of a hypertechnologized warrior-cop style of policing that has become unnervingly familiar, with recent exposés focusing further attention on the militarization of law enforcement. But these practices of so-called riot control are far from new. Riot control is — and always has been — about criminalizing acts of disobedience by controlling people, public space and even the air we breathe. The disturbing forms of policing we see in Baltimore provide a small window into a sprawling, transnational business with roots in colonialist violence.

An industry of repression

Riot control largely arose out of the repression of rebellious peasants and slaves. Early forms of policing in the U.S. included slave patrols that searched residences, broke up gatherings and monitored roads. A more structured practice for dealing with urban minority unrest after the Civil War was imported from white European colonial experience. In 1829, U.S. cities began to adopt parts of the British policing model, creating organized departments with full-time officers. These modernized police officers enforced public order, intervening in the daily lives and leisure activities of working-class and minority neighborhoods. This nascent form of broken-windows policing created tensions between officers and community members. Early police forces were also used to protect economic interests, breaking up labor organizing and strike activity among the working classes. World War I saw a wide-scale transfer of technologies from the military to local law enforcement, as early methods for crowd control were adapted from military practices. After civil unrest — and its repression — in the 1950s and 1960s, riot control became an industry of its own. Early riot control tactics included various police formations — the interlocked arm formation that uses officers’ batons to cordon off areas, the show of force demonstration that works psychologically and physically by making a surprise advance on a crowd, and the boxing in of public areas by occupying and sealing off intersections. We saw such space-based control practices play out in Baltimore on April 27. As Mother Jones reported, in the Modawmin neighborhood, where violence started that day, police shut down the local subway stop, forced people to disembark buses and corralled students into a police-controlled space. With public transportation cut off and streets blocked by heavily armored, shield-barrier police lines, people were trapped — forced to fight or attempt to flee, risking arrest and further brutality. Such acts of entrapment and suffocation are most visible when tear gas is also deployed, as police did in Modawmin, along with pepper balls. While pepper balls (PDF) and spray tanks filled with tear gas are modern inventions, the practice of poisoning the air to control populations has been used by U.S. law enforcement for nearly a century.

It is time to do away with the false dichotomy of the protest-versus-riot debate.

In a 1920s speech to the State Guard, Gen. Amos Fries, an early promoter of tear gas, explained that it could destroy the dignity of acts of public dissent: When you disperse [a crowd] by making noisy leaders and members publicly seasick, tearful and repentant, you make the whole disorderly movement ridiculous and arouse public laughter and derision. In Baltimore, tear gas pollutes an already toxic urban atmosphere. The city’s youth population under 18 has an asthma rate of more than 20 percent — twice the national average — vastly increasing the medical dangers of policing with chemical weaponry. Reports of skin burns, concussions and wounds from people on the streets suggest that riot control agents were fired at close range, in closed-off locations and in dangerously high doses.

Transnational trade