Description
Recent critical scholarship on war and policing has begun to explicitly theorize the two in more intimate relation with each other, and especially in their connections to racialized violence and governance (for ex. Wall, 2016; Kelley, 2016; LeBron, 2019). Drawing on this body of work, I examine how logics of war and bombing operate within domestic spaces and reproduce racialized conceptualizations of threat. I focus on a confrontation between the MOVE organization and the Philadelphia police department in 1985, which led to the police firing of 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a row house in a middle-class black neighborhood where MOVE members and their children were living, and to the extensive use of military-grade explosives to penetrate the house, culminating in the police dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto the house. The bomb ignited a fire that killed six adult MOVE members and five children and destroyed 61 houses in the neighborhood. I examine the decision by the police to bomb MOVE and consider this incident in relation to the contemporary proliferation of drone strikes. As with the increasing procurement of drones by domestic police departments, the MOVE case shows not just the migration of military techniques into domestic spheres, but more significantly, it reveals practices of racialized targeting and surveillance that are common to both.
