Below is an excerpt from the zine Peace Police are Police: How Protest Marshals Sabotage Liberation and Protect the State, written by some abolitionists in L.A. and published by True Leap Press. Hyperlinks sourcing some statements have been added.
WHAT IS PEACE POLICING?
This is a term for individuals whose role at political demonstrations is to regulate the conduct of protestors in the name of protecting them, serving as the police's representatives within the crowd. These individuals often wear yellow vests and describe themselves as "protest marshals" who are either representing the "organizers" of a demonstration or "protecting" those organizers from the crowd's autonomous choices. We call these practices policing because that is their function. The goal is to keep protesters in line, abiding by the instructions of police.
Peace policing strips protests of power. Every protest or demonstration is an opportunity to demonstrate our collective power in opposition to injustice. We take the streets with many goals: to interrupt business as usual, to mark targets complicit in harm, to strengthen our cooperation, and to tangibly disrupt an economic order that runs on exploitation and slaughter. Only by materially disrupting everyday life and dislodging these institutions can we hope to create conditions for liberation. This potential is sabotaged when our own people enforce the orders of our oppressors.
Peace policing is also tactically dangerous. Peace policing, especially by self-appointed "protest marshals," is what the police state's response to protests is largely built around today. The state cannot outlaw all protest, so its best hope is to make protests manageable. The last thing the state wants is a protest completely out of its control or governance. At the same time, there are both practical and legal limitations on when police can use anti-riot weaponry to control and discipline a crowd. While police would love to unleash physical violence at every demonstration, their leadership has also come to understand that this is not the most sustainable way of managing protest.
This is where protest marshals come in. Even at demonstrations where organizers do not seek a permit, protest marshals reproduce the dynamics of a permitted march. Police actively cultivate this relationship, recognizing that it can be a far more efficient way to contain a protest than tear gas and rubber bullets. LAPD's proposals for protest-related reforms after 2020 uprising included millions for hiring cops tasked with liaising with protest organizers to manage "First Amendment activity." The U.S. Department of Justice has also been running a three-hour training for protest marshals, with the training materials explaining that a marshal's role is to "provide safe, welcoming, physical presence" and "serve as the conscience for those who would compromise public safety." These protest marshals, or the "organizers" commanding them, are who police communicate with during protests. Together they determine where the protest will remain or go, what protestors will and won't do, and who is acting within the bounds of permission versus who is not.
Protest marshals are an extension of riot police. In fact, protest marshals will often literally stand right in front of armed riot police, with their backs to them facing towards the protestors and holding the goal of keeping them in line. The goal is maintaining order. In this sense, protest marshals are the police state's keffiyah-wearing ("safe, welcoming physical presence" as the Department of Justice puts it) front line against the people, as seen at this December 8 protest outside a fundraiser for President Biden:
[Protest marshals and ‘organizers’ stand in front of a line of riot police, facing the protestors with their backs turned to the heavily armed threat]
Peace policing is a weapon of counterinsurgency. The goal is to divert, redirect, and contain the people's insurgent energy into protests that the state can tolerate. Organizers convening protests will often use militant language ("Long live the intifada" "No justice no peace" "Shut it down!") while protest marshals ensure that everyone's actions are not at all militant. Numerous demonstrations have been convened with the goal of "shutting it down" only for peace police to aggressively ensure that nothing is in fact being shut down.
The immediate impact of peace policing is that people who organize and show up to protests might go home without the goal of the action being achieved. This is literally demobilizing. Because peace policing centralizes power within well-resourced organizations and their enforcement teams, it gives these entities the ability to disperse energy by prematurely dispersing protests even when there is still energy to continue. Worse, sometimes people who would have been able to safely escalate against a protest's targets within a crowd are singled out by protest marshals as harmful, exposing them to police repression. We have even seen protest marshals get physically aggressive with protesters, pushing them up against walls and laying hands on them.
More broadly, peace policing means people new to direct action are conditioned to rely on designated authorities to tell them how, when, and why to escalate in the streets. This shapes people's expectations for what they can do at protests, which can be especially dangerous in moments of insurgency. These are times when a broader base of people are feeling inspired to join direct actions and disrupt oppressive institutions. Peace policing tells people that they should limit their activities to what a hierarchical leadership with open lines of communication to police have determined is acceptable. And it invites harsh consequences for anyone who dares step out of line.
As it happens, the true goal of peace policing is not safety. Rather, it's to maintain adherence to the dominance and hierarchical leadership of a particular organization or organizations. The long-term effect of peace policing is strangling the enthusiasm, effectiveness, and fluidity of our movement-building. We've even heard a protest marshal tell protestors to not worry about a march's safety or trajectory, saying: "This isn't your job. You're a protestor." The implication is that protestors have a limited "job" – following orders – and marshals have a different one, in which they are not even protestors yet can dictate what protestors do. These roles of hierarchy and subservience hinder effective organizing and demobilize the movement.