No Kings Wins: How Some Police Departments Engaged in Pro-Democracy Messaging

Multiple police departments described the protests as an exercise of First Amendment rights

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This essay for you is about law enforcement and protests. With masked ICE agents and National Guard members operating in new and disruptive ways in many American cities, police officers provide continuity in terms of interface with the public. To track the progress of authoritarianism and resistance to it, we need to watch what police departments are doing, along with monitoring how law enforcement bodies being assigned new roles (ICE, the National Guard, the military) are behaving on the ground.

So I decided to look at the messages about No Kings sent out by some police departments on X. The results were surprising.

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The tally is not yet official, but between 5.2 and 8.2 million people turned out for No Kings protests around the nation on Saturday. The Independent noted that organizers estimated that 7 million people participated.

Size matters for the efficacy of protests, as does keeping such demonstrations nonviolent. It matters for morale and for momentum, if we think of individual protests less as “one-offs” than as part of a process of building a mass pro-democracy movement.

There is a buoyancy and purpose in being one of so many. There is a feeling that we are creating something together, and we are on the right side of history. And size matters when we seek to attract the pillars of society to reduce or abandon their support for the authoritarian government: seeing that resistance is growing can lead them to think that it’s safe for them to join in too.

Consistent with my conviction that a reckoning is coming due to the scale and scope of the brutality, the No Kings demonstrations included many first-time protesters, who told New York Times journalists that they were

outraged over immigration raids, the deployment of federal troops in cities, government layoffs, steep budget cuts, the chipping away of voting rights, the rollback of vaccine requirements, the reversal on treaties with tribes and the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.

Size also matters in terms of physical protection of protesters, who feel less exposed in a large crowd. And this brings me to the subject of law enforcement and protests, and how some police departments messaged the event in ways that were at odds with government propaganda.

Law Enforcement and Protests

I am still tracking arrest figures, but as of now it seems as though less than two dozen people were arrested nationwide on Oct. 18. 13 were detained during secondary marches in Denver, 1 in Los Angeles, 1 in New York City, and 1 in Myrtle Beach, SC, where a woman “brandished a firearm” at protesters and was taken away in handcuffs by police.

Beatings and arrests of protesters by state troopers and other security forces occurred outside ICE facilities that day, as in Broadview, IL, as part of ongoing reprisals against anti-ICE demonstrations around the country.

One measure of the strength of authoritarian regimes is what police and state security forces do when assigned to protests: for example, the refusal of armed forces to fire on protesters, or an uptick in desertions, can be a sign that the edifice of collaboration and coercion upon which a regime depends is starting to crumble.

In established authoritarian regimes such as Turkey and Russia, protesters at mass demonstrations in cities are regularly beaten up by police and other security forces to “make an example” and discourage others from participating in the future.

There is also a newer way of punishing demonstrators which is used alongside on-site physical violence: you leave people to protest so you can surveil and track them and then you show up later to harass, beat up, or arrest them. This is what the world’s largest surveillance state, Communist China, did with many attendees of the 2022 lockdown protests.

ICE is now reportedly building a sophisticated surveillance system for future “crowd control” featuring iris scanners, phone hacking, facial recognition, and other tools. On-site tracking is another reason for the expansion of ICE offices in many cities. They want to be “everywhere” not just to terrorize, but to watch and record.

Police Departments

As the United States becomes a police state, I have no illusions about how the police, as an institution, could behave, despite the ethics and professionalism of individual officers and bureaucrats. The Donald Trump administrations have done their best to radicalize police departments. In August 2019, Attorney General William Barr told police that law enforcement was now “fighting a different kind of war. We are waging an unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society…a final victory is never in sight.”

This is a classically authoritarian idea that is now part of government dogma. The enemy must never be defeated but rather is always expanding and is also qualitatively different than the enemy you were used to fighting. This justifies new approaches and greater brutality.

The United States differs from foreign democracies that lost their freedoms in that we had a regional police state, the Jim Crow South, inside of a so-called national democracy. We have tolerated and abetted the continuance of racialized policing and incarceration systems and authoritarian methods of disseminating terror for non-white people in daily life: a routine traffic stop, or trying to enter your own home, can end with you being shot or arrested. This flows into how protests are seen. Majority-white protests are seen differently in terms of threat level than majority non-white ones.

The largest protest movement in American history —Black Lives Matter— addressed this institutionalized racism, and now we are living through the white supremacist backlash. White House policy chief Stephen Miller recently announced the creation of a new multi-agency task force in Memphis, telling law enforcement, police officers included, that they may consider themselves “unleashed.” We all know what that means in terms of interactions with the public.

The invasion of our cities by “unleashed” militarized elements means that local police have to contend with new levels of disruption and chaos. Think of the destruction ICE is causing on a daily basis as agents blow off doors of apartments, break car windows, block traffic, and pursue people in crowded urban areas. Local police departments in cities that have been targeted by this administration may have some feelings about all of that.

This is why I decided to look at the messages about No Kings sent out by some police departments on X. My sample is very small (these findings are intended as a prompt for future research by others) but the results are interesting from a pro-democracy point of view.

While many police departments chose not to mention anything about No Kings, others used their social media feeds to depart significantly from or ignore Trump administration framings of the No Kings protests as “Hate America” demonstrations or subversive actions by “Antifa.”

Instead, they described No Kings events as moments of the exercise of First Amendment rights, some not even mentioning the word protest. The repetition of language across police departments is striking.

“Thanks to the more than 25,000 people who came out and exercised their first amendment right peacefully and responsibly. Once again, no one was arrested,” the San Diego Police Department stated.

“Thank you to everyone who peacefully gathered in Santa Monica today to exercise your First Amendment rights. We appreciate the care, respect, and responsibility shown for our city and one another.” So reads the announcement issued by the Santa Monica Police Department.

“We had more than 100,000 people across all five boroughs peacefully exercising their first amendment rights,” the NYPD noted at 3:37pm, noting that no protest-related arrests were made. Later that day, the NYPD arrested a man who had boasted of plans to attend the protests to firebomb ICE agents, but he was not among the demonstrators.

Chicago is under siege by ICE, which has been terrorizing inhabitants and engaging in brutal acts. Here is how the Chicago Police Department described their mandate that day. “The Chicago Police Department was present across the city today protecting community members as they exercised their first amendment rights.”

This statement, which makes no reference to any specific event, could be read as the Chicago PD protecting protesters from people who might wish to interfere with said rights. In this communication, the nature of the gathering does not matter; it is the exercise of rights by community members that must be protected.

As a Red State comparison, the Austin Police Department did not mention First Amendment rights, and called it a “rally” and a “march.” These words carry less of a confrontational edge than protest. “Thank you to everyone who participated in the No Kings March today. The rally remained peaceful, with no arrests reported. We’re grateful to our community and event organizers for coming together to make sure voices were heard safely and respectfully. Great job ATX!”

Here, too, the police department chose to send a positive communication about collaborating to make sure voices were heard. Allowing people to speak, even if you disagree with them, without being beaten up (safely) or ridiculed (respectfully) is a foundation of democracy.

In this sense, No Kings was a democratic exercise not just for first-time protest attendees, but for police departments as well. They are navigating a new world in which a government that claims it is the keeper of law and order has pardoned individuals who assaulted police officers on January 6. In July, the Trump administration appointed a participant in the January 6 rally as the new head of the National Sheriff’s Organization.

I know from studying authoritarian regimes that people find spaces to maneuver within government institutions and communicate their independence from government propaganda and policy. Whatever happens with these police departments in the future, on a day of major protest at a dramatic time in national history, they chose to depict protesters as exercising basic democratic rights rather than demonize them.