Every 28 hours police kill another Black man in the United States. In Ferguson, Missouri, an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, stole cigars from a convenience store and may or may not have been stopped for this reason by a policeman who emptied his service revolver into Brown.
The Standard Time’s editorial on Brown’s killing correctly highlights the racial elements of police encounters in America today. The images of Ferguson’s police officers with their M16’s, MRAP (IED-resistant armed personnel carrier), and all the other Homeland Security-funded toys used against the community, shocked those who still remember Montgomery and Selma during Jim Crow.
Ferguson police acted as if they were at war with the Black community and journalists – acting as occupiers, not patrolmen. Armaments of war were employed. Journalists were arrested as they filed stories from a local McDonald’s. Police hauled an alderman from his car and roughed him up. They tear-gassed one group of journalists and dismantled their equipment. News helicopters were banned, journalists were bullied and prevented from covering the demonstrations, and police ignored the 72-hour requirement to publish a report of Michael Brown’s killing.
None of this is a surprise to any minority community. Police “serve” Whites differently than others. Recall the kid-gloves treatment that Cliven Bundy’s White supporters received from law enforcement – especially shocking since Bundy’s supporters had sniper rifles trained on them. But militarization of the police affects everyone, not just minorities. We saw it during the Boston Marathon bombing. We saw it during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, when police throughout the country used tear gas, water cannons, TASERs, and concussion grenades against protestors, denying them rights of assembly and speech.
Radley Balko writes in his “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” that 30 years ago only about a quarter of small towns had SWAT teams. Today, even with lower crime rates, that number is close to 90%. But when you have a big hammer, you have to pound every nail with it. According to Pete Kraska, a professor of Justice Studies in Kentucky, SWAT teams are deployed 137 times a day in the US. SWAT raids are used for everything from delivering a summons to raiding a house where marijuana might be found. Many innocent people have been killed in these raids. And not once has a policemen been held accountable.
Police, including most of our local forces, are armed with TASERS, which send 50,000 volts of electricity via a dart into a human’s nervous system. TASERS have been associated with hundreds of deaths, particularly when repeatedly used on mentally ill, convulsing, non English-speaking, or drugged civilians who cannot “comply” with an officer’s command. YouTube is full of dashcam videos of mouthy White suburban moms who have been tased for basically their “attitude” at roadside stops. Where once an officer was forced to de-escalate an incident with an upset person, mainly by just listening, now he can just blast him with 50,000 volts and slap on the handcuffs.
Funding all this expensive gear (via your tax dollars) is the Law Enforcement Support Office, an obscure federal agency that outfits police forces with military surplus. Similarly, the Defense Logistics Agency has an office whose motto is “from warfighter to crimefighter” and which also provides police with state of the art war gear. The Justice Department, too, has a program to transition veterans, many of whom have PTSD, into positions as police officers. All this has cost taxpayers $35 billion but communities are further on the hook for costs of upgrades and maintenance of these systems, which also include spy gear like “Stingrays,” which gather information from people’s cellphones.
The net result is that we are no longer being served by police forces that look like us, grew up with us, or even necessarily live among us. Certainly this is the case in Ferguson, 70% Black with a police department 95% White. Nationally it is true as well.
That’s because the goal is no longer the protection, but something nearer the occupation of citizens – all of us – by a government that increasingly distrusts its own citizens.
And this is the very definition of a Police State.
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