The State of the Police: Part 2

In part one of this series, I started off talking about the long road we've taken where recent situations like the death of Eric Garner have become more and more prevalent. One of the major factors playing into instances like this is the "Rise of the Warrior Cop", the title of Radley Balko's best-selling book, where cops are becoming increasingly militarized in their efforts to double down on the failed War and Drugs. The outcome of this has been multiple generations of blacks and minorities being unfairly targeted and affected, a factor likely at play in the anger witnessed at protests resulting from the Mike Brown and Eric Garner decisions. In this part I'll discuss the role the War on Terror and our wars abroad have had in the militarization of our police here at home.

America as a Battlefield
Ever since 9/11, we have seen a massive growth in federal, state, and local law enforcement operations. After the failure to prevent 9/11, George W. Bush saw fit to create an overarching Department of Homeland Security that would supposedly streamline intelligence bureaus so that the interdepartmental communications failures leading up to those tragic events could be avoided in the future.

While this sounded heroic and noble at the time, what this has created is a national security apparatus that has put into irreversible motion the Big Brother state that George Orwell so presciently wrote about in his book 1984. It became the first step in a series of steps that might be akin to the "boiling frogs" analogy. This is the one where, if you put a frog in boiling water, of course it will jump out. But if you put a frog in cold water and gradually increase the heat, it will stay in the pot and not even realize that it's slowly becoming cooked to death. As we keep taking steps away from liberty and towards authoritarianism, our fate might soon reach the same outcome as the proverbial frog in boiling water.

If the creation of the DHS was the first big log in the fire, the next big increase in the water temperature would be the creation of the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration, another federal expansion brought to us by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. This is the department that now treats everyone as guilty until proven innocent, is allowed to physically molest your person, has been accused of hundreds of instances of theft, and generally makes airline travel miserable for everyone but still has yet to foil a single terrorist plot since its inception. While the TSA has mainly been confined to airport travel, since 2005 it has been expanded via the VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) program that allows the TSA to operate at sports stadiums, rodeos, music festivals, and other transportation hubs like bus depots and subway stations.

 The TSA and DHS are prime examples of what happens when you begin to paint America itself as a battlefield. While the politicians want you to believe that all the wars are being fought overseas, their rhetoric and their policies have predictably spilled over into domestic programs. Why is this? Because when people are fearful, they will happily trade in their liberties for promises of security. When they do this, it emboldens and enriches those tasked with providing our security, namely the federal, state, and local governments and they yet again ratchet up the heat on unsuspecting Americans who think the confines of the pot will keep them safe from any danger.

We are now commonly seeing local law enforcement agencies using federal grants from the DHS to purchase leftover battle equipment from our foreign wars to use here at home. Also, returning veterans from our wars abroad are now being recruited when their duty is over to serve on the police force. Why do tiny towns with populations of 50,000 or less people need military style mine resistant tanks to enforce the law? Why do the cops of Main Street, USA need full body armor, especially when the data shows that it's never been safer to be a cop?  What happens when you take people from one literal battlefield and transport them to a metaphorical one instead?

Combine this with the disturbing news article from several months back about the company providing law enforcement agencies with a line of "No More Hesitation" targets utilizing lifelike images of pregnant women, children, and elderly people for officers to use for target practice. The explicit purpose of the targets was to desensitize and accustom law enforcement officers to use deadly force to subdue non-traditional, threatening entities that might otherwise cause them to hesitate to shoot. This, of course, begs the question, who is the real enemy now? Have our politicians succeeded in transforming America into a battlefield and conditioning us, through privacy violating institutions like the TSA, to meekly submit to authority for our own safety's sake?

Putting It All Together
But how does this relate to the events in Ferguson? Well as I highlighted in my previous article, a heavy portion of this over-militarization of the police is going towards the enforcement of the War on Drugs with the SWAT style no-knock, flash grenade raids supplanting the traditional knock, we have a warrant to search your place, less violent and confrontational approach used once upon a time. All these tools and resources going to expand the War on Drugs further continues the cycle started awhile ago of the racial disparities that are readily apparent in the enforcement and application of the drug war. This has resulted in a long simmering anger in the black community of feeling unfairly targeted and punished by police for crimes committed equally as much by whites.

The simmer came to a boil after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson in the shooting of Mike Brown. While many people agree with the non-indictment and don't believe there should have been any protest or discontent associated with it, I made the point that perhaps these protests transcend just one case and are indicative of the latent feelings of a community as a whole sick of constantly being victimized while the victimizers are never brought to justice.

Enter the riot police. Of course looting shouldn't happen and it was the wrong response for those who were disenchanted with the Mike Brown verdict, but it was expected and so the riot police was called in. The role of law and law enforcement should be to protect persons and property. Instead, they seemed to be more playing the role of antagonizers than protectors. Their liberal use of tear gas at the Ferguson protests was directed more towards peaceful bystanders and on journalists than it was on any looters. It was also confirmed, after much speculation, that the no-fly zone enacted over the Ferguson airspace was indeed meant solely to keep news helicopters from flying around and not for the purported safety reasons they claimed. While nobody was condoning the tactics used by the looters in Ferguson, many people, including Senator Rand Paul, were equally as concerned about the militaristic and heavy-handed response from the police in trying to quell the violence.

Of course, when you arm your local police force to look like a standing army, what sort of affect do you think that has on the psyche of the police force? When you provide police agencies with targets designed to look like everyday Americans, what do you think that does to the psyche of a police officer? When potential violence is about to descend on an area, in light of all this hypermilitaristic outfitting and preparation, who do you think these police officers think the enemy is? It appears to be all of us, because in the post-9/11 era, America has indeed become the battlefield and we ordinary citizens have indeed been labelled the enemy. They are not here to serve and protect us but to keep us from getting in the way of carrying out the agenda set forth by the true people they serve and protect: their political masters.

While much of the narrative that has played out in Ferguson and the Eric Garner cases has focused on the black/white narrative, and to be sure there is certainly a great deal of that at play, what is getting missed in the meantime is that this does transcend race relations in that our police forces are directing their violence increasingly towards people of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities. This is not so much about black vs. white as it is them vs. us and tyranny vs. freedom. We are all in danger when we allow our local police officers to take on the dual role of standing army, a predicament we were warned about by our Founding Fathers.

There is a small beacon of light in all of this. While the National Guard was busy protecting the police headquarters in Ferguson and the riot police were busy teargassing journalists and innocent bystanders, there were some other brave souls who stood up for the people and businesses of Ferguson against the would-be looters: the Oathkeepers.

In the third and final part in this series about the state of the police, we'll look at the role the Oathkeepers played in Ferguson and explore other alternatives to the government goon squad, also known as the police force, and see whether there is a role for private security in the future to possibly provide competition to the government monopoly system currently in place.  

 

The State of the Police: Part 1

Another day, another non-indictment of a murdering cop. This is sadly becoming* the norm in our political system. Despite clear video evidence showing Eric Garner non-violently resisting arrest with his hands up, the cops forcibly took him down with a headlock/chokehold and then continued to hold his face smashed into the pavement despite several pleas that can all be heard on the video, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!", he managed to choke out.
*Becoming or has it been this way for awhile and we're only just becoming aware of it due to advances in technology and the internet?

After a series of high profile cases of cops being accused of using excessive force to subdue alleged criminals, the public is getting weary of this "shoot now, ask questions later" mentality that seems to never hold anyone behind the badge accountable.

The good news is, this has finally brought to the forefront conversations about police militarization, racial profiling, and a dire lack of accountability in the system that have long dwelled in the shadows. People are finally sitting up and taking notice that there is something very, very wrong with how the police do business. The veneer of your friendly, neighborhood Andy Griffith type police officer humbly abiding by the motto "To Serve and Protect" is crumbling day by day as more of these Cops Gone Wild videos surface on social media sites like Cop Block and Photography Is Not a Crime.

How did we get here?

Journalist Radley Balko documents in his blockbuster book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, the startling transition of our police force, from early arbiters of justice trying to capture real criminals, to warriors, perhaps even the standing army our Founders warned us about, that have become increasingly aggressive and militarized in the wake of the War on Drugs, War on Poverty, and War on Terror with each of these domestic "wars" bringing more power to the police while simultaneously eroding our civil liberties in the name of "security".

Balko documents that the number of SWAT team raids conducted has dramatically risen from just a few hundred a year nationwide in 1975 to 3,000 a year in the early 80's to 50,000 per year as of 2005. Not coincidentally, these SWAT team raids have increased ever since Richard Nixon introduced the War on Drugs, which in turn introduced the concept of no-knock raids (at one point deemed unlawful), which have become a main feature of SWAT team style tactics today.

The War on Drugs has been a boon to police departments. There is no shortage of grants and funding to make sure these departments have all the resources available to them to carry on the wasteful and failed War on Drugs. Combine this with the extremely immoral (but not illegal) practice of civil asset forfeiture, in which law enforcement agencies are allowed to seize the assets of a person who has not even been charged with a crime. More often than not, these searches stem from suspected drug crimes and are frequently later determined to be completely without merit but for which the victim still must sue the police department at their own personal expense to get their assets back.

This creates a perverse incentive for police to seize as much property as possible, as they often get to keep the seized assets for themselves to use or auction off for cash for the department. Naturally, this is particularly harmful to the poor and minorities, who cannot afford to fight the system to get their wrongfully seized assets back. This is but one of many byproducts of the war on drugs that has created a rift between minorities and law enforcement.

Of course, a larger problem of the war on drugs is the rate at which it disproportionately targets and incarcerates minorities. Blacks are nearly 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites despite the fact that marijuana use for both groups is virtually identical. Mandatory minimum sentences for mere possession of drugs make blacks, who are much more likely to be arrested in the first place, a permanent fixture of the prison system, often requiring them to serve more time than people put in prison for real crimes with real victims like rapists, robbers, and batterers.

And many of us are all too familiar with the sentencing disparities between people caught with crack cocaine, primarily associated with poor minorities, and powder cocaine, much more expensive and frequently used by more well-to-do white people, including certain presidents of ours. After suffering through these injustices for decades, decimating generation after generation of black families in particular, it is not hard to understand why blacks have a natural inclination to be distrustful of the police, to feel victimized, and to feel targeted rather than protected through the perverse incentive system offered by civil asset forfeiture laws and the war on drugs.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the recent high profile cases of black men being killed by police officers, for reasons justified or unjustified, have ignited a slow burning fury within their community. The outrage that has emanated from the failure to hold anyone accountable for even more black lives lost has reached a tipping point.

Although the focus has been on Mike Brown, and certainly there are many who disagree with the grand jury's failure to indict, perhaps what the community is really protesting about is not simply a young man who was gunned down by a police officer, but decades of systemic targeting and destruction of their communities. This is not to confuse the issue with Darren Wilson's guilt or innocence or the actions that led up to Mike Brown's demise, but to say that there are much larger, long simmering issues at play here than just the death of one more black man.

The heavily militarized response from the police in trying to quell the demonstrations arising from Mike Brown's case brings to light yet another troubling trend in modern day policing and one in which I intend to shed more light on in Part 2 of 3 of this mini-series examining the state of policing today.

In part 2 I will take a look at how the Global War on Terror has led to the militarization of our police and painted America as a battleground and how that relates to the violence that happened in Ferguson. In part 3, we'll look at ways to move forward and possible alternatives to the government monopolized police system. Stay tuned for more good stuff to come!