[Thanks to years of hyper militarization, American police
departments are recreating our global war zones here at home. With
these weapons on our streets, our history of structural racism becomes
that much deadlier. ] [[link removed]]
THE POLICE AND THE PENTAGON ARE BRINGING OUR WARS HOME
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William J. Barber, Phyllis Bennis
June 30, 2020
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ Thanks to years of hyper militarization, American police
departments are recreating our global war zones here at home. With
these weapons on our streets, our history of structural racism becomes
that much deadlier. _
, Shutterstock
Uniformed U.S. soldiers occupied the center of the city, where an
armored personnel carrier was stationed at a major intersection. Was
it Kabul
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Atlanta
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A U.S. military helicopter hovered over crowds of unarmed civilians,
its down-drafts whipping debris and broken glass into their faces. Was
it Mogadishu
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D.C
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Armed, uniformed men surrounded unarmed civilians. One of them shouted
“light ’em up” and began firing projectiles. Was it Baghdad or
Minneapolis
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Armor-clad, armed U.S. officers targeted and fired on journalists. Was
it Iraq
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In every case, it was both. Thanks to years of hyper militarization,
American police departments are recreating our global war zones here
at home. With these weapons on our streets, our history of structural
racism becomes that much deadlier.
In recent weeks, overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrators protesting
police killings and racism have been met by riot police, National
Guard troops, and armed federal officers wielding tear gas, pepper
spray, and rubber-coated metal bullets. Armored personnel carriers
prowl the streets, turning U.S. cities and towns into war zones.
It’s shocking, but it’s not the first time. When a police officer
killed 17-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, an
armored personnel carrier stalked the agonized protesters
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filled the streets.
Throughout U.S. history, policing has always been bound up with racism
— and the military.
Organized police forces in the United States trace their roots
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the slave patrols organized to capture and return enslaved people who
managed to escape bondage.
After reconstruction, when a pandemic of lynching spread across the
country, police stood by
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initiated or assisted the kidnapping, torture and murder of people in
their custody.
In the 1950s and ’60s, brutal police attacks
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against civil rights activists and African Americans trying to
register to vote continued the pattern. So did police and National
Guard violence against antiwar protesters at Kent State
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State
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and the Chicano Moratorium
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Los Angeles in the 1970s.
This militarism at home is linked inextricably to U.S. militarism
abroad. The troops that Trump called in to deploy against protesters
in Washington, for example, had just returned from duty in Iraq
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Today’s “global war on terror” is less visible than in earlier
years. But those wars continue — and it’s mostly black, brown and
Muslim people who die. Civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombing
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Afghanistan, for instance, were higher last year than at any time in
the 20-year-long war.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. linked systemic racism and
militarism
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two of the three evil “triplets” he was committed to end. Yet that
linkage remains a hallmark of U.S. policy in general — and of the
militarization of police in particular.
Just in 2014, as Black Lives Matter demonstrations spread across the
country, more than 500 law enforcement agencies received MRAP
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carriers, designed to withstand bomb blasts in war theaters like
Afghanistan and Iraq. Police in North Little Rock, Arkansas
(population: 62,000) got two MARCbots, armed robots designed for war
in Afghanistan.
Local and state police departments across the country do not
ordinarily include budget lines to buy armored personnel carriers. But
under a once-invisible program known as 1033, the Pentagon offers
“surplus military equipment” free to any police agency requesting
it.
And if the good people of North Little Rock don’t really need armed
robots, well, they’ve got them anyway.
Does all that military gear make police officers more likely to act
like occupying armies? We can’t say for sure, but we do know the
relatively small town had two officer-involved shooting cases
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one two-week period this spring.
“When the government equips police departments like they’re
equipping the military, we undermine healthy relationships between the
police and the community,” explains Equal Justice Initiative
director Bryan Stevenson
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“We have created a culture where police officers think of themselves
as warriors, not guardians.”
From the beginning, the Poor People’s Campaign — a national
mobilization of poor and working-class Americans — has made ending
the 1033 program a centerpiece of its demands
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Rather than tinkering around the margins, we need to end systemic
racism and the militarism that makes it even deadlier — from Kabul
to Atlanta and Baghdad to Minneapolis.
_The Rev. Dr. William Barber II is the president of Repairers of the
Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral
Revival. Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at
the Institute for Policy Studies._
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