Forum Post: The Origins of Our Police State
Posted 10 years ago on Sept. 16, 2013, 3:54 p.m. EST by LeoYo
(5909)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The Origins of Our Police State
Monday, 16 September 2013 09:10 By Chris Hedges, TruthDig | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/18853-the-origins-of-our-police-state
Elizabeth, New Jersey - JaQuan LaPierre, 22, was riding a bicycle down a sidewalk Sept. 5 when he noticed a squad car pulling up beside him. It was 8:30 on a hot Thursday night at the intersection of Bond Street and Jackson Avenue here in Elizabeth, N.J. LaPierre had 10 glass vials of crack cocaine—probably what the cops were hoping to find—and he hastily swallowed them. He halted and faced the two officers who emerged from the cruiser.
“We are tired of you niggers,” he remembers one of the officers saying. “We’re tired of all this shooting and robberies and violence. And we are going to make you an example.”
He was thrown spread-eagle onto the patrol car.
“What I bein’ arrested for?” LaPierre asked.
A small crowd gathered.
“Why you harassin’ him?” someone asked the cops. “He ain’t resisting. Why you doin’ this?”
One of the officers went though LaPierre’s pockets and took his keys and $246 in cash. LaPierre kept asking why he was being arrested. He was pepper-sprayed in the face. One officer threw him onto the street, and, while he was handcuffed, the two cops kicked and beat him.
“What you beatin’ my nephew for?” his uncle, Antoine, said to the cops.
More police arrived. They pushed back onlookers, including the uncle. LaPierre was gagging and choking. He was dragged across the asphalt. By the time the beating was over, blood was coming out of his mouth. He was unconscious. The assault was caught on a camera, even though when the police saw they were being recorded they pointed a flashlight beam into the lens.“It was so hot on my face,” LaPierre said of the pepper spray when we met a few days ago. “I was gasping for air.”
The only visible crimes LaPierre had committed was riding a bicycle on a sidewalk and failing to wear a safety helmet.
Police abuse is routine in Elizabeth, as it is in poor urban areas across the country. This incident did not make news. But it illustrated that if you are a poor person of color in the United States you know what most us are about to find out—we have no civil liberties left. Police, who arrest some 13 million people a year, 1.6 million on drug charges—half of those for marijuana counts—carry out random searches and sweeps with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many of those they arrest, even some eventually found to be innocent, to build a nationwide database. They confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions based on allegations of illegal drug activity and direct the proceeds into police budgets. And in the last three decades the United States has constructed the world’s largest prison system, populated with 2.2 million inmates.
As in most police states, cops serve as judge and jury on city streets—“a long step down the totalitarian path,” in the words that U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1968 when he decried expanding police powers. And police departments are bolstered by an internal surveillance and security apparatus that has eradicated privacy and dwarfed the intrusion into personal lives by police states of the past, including East Germany.
Under a series of Supreme Court rulings we have lost the rights to protect ourselves from random searches, home invasions, warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping and physical abuse. Police units in poor neighborhoods function as armed gangs. The pressure to meet departmental arrest quotas—the prerequisite for lavish federal aid in the “war on drugs”—results in police routinely seizing people at will and charging them with a laundry list of crimes, often without just cause. Because many of these crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The police and the defendants know that the collapsed court system, in which the poor get only a few minutes with a public attorney, means there is little chance the abused can challenge the system. And there is also a large pool of willing informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police.
The tyranny of law enforcement in poor communities is a window into our emerging police state. These thuggish tactics are now being used against activists and dissidents. And as the nation unravels, as social unrest spreads, the naked face of police repression will become commonplace. Totalitarian systems always seek license to engage in this kind of behavior by first targeting a demonized minority. Such systems demand that the police, to combat the “lawlessness” of the demonized minority, be, in essence, emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ these tactics against the wider society. “Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”
Once you are branded a felon, as Michelle Alexander points out in her book“The New Jim Crow,” you are “barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to ‘check the box’ indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions.” And this is for people who might have had only a small quantity of drugs, perhaps a few ounces of marijuana. There are 6 million people who because of felony convictions are permanently shut out from mainstream society. They are second-class citizens, outcasts. The war on drugs—aided by hundreds of millions of federal dollars along with federal donations of high-velocity weapons, helicopters, command vehicles and SWAT team military training—has become the template for future social control. Poor people of color know the truth. They were the first victims. The rest of us are about to find it out.
LaPierre was taken unconscious to a hospital. He woke up with both hands handcuffed to a gurney. He was vomiting blood. Two of the glass vials, each worth $10 on the street, came up with his vomit. The police, ecstatic, had the drugs they had hoped to find when they stopped him.
“It’s over for you,” he heard an officer say. “You’re goin’ down.” “You spittin’ at an officer?” one of the cops said laughingly. “Your boys are not here to protect you now, are they?”
LaPierre could not see. He heard the officers discussing the charges and making sure the official story was coherent. One officer, inexplicably, yanked out some of LaPierre’s hair, braided in cornrows, and stuffed the hair into the handcuffed man’s pants “on my private parts.”
“Trying to disarm an officer,” he heard one say as they tallied the charges. “Possession. Resisting arrest. Starting a riot.” By the time he was transferred out of the hospital five days later there would be nine charges and a $35,000 bail.
“During the last couple of days the police have been telling people in the neighborhood that if they go to court to testify about the beating of JaQuan they will be arrested and go to jail too,” Myrtice Bell, LaPierre’s grandmother, told me.
LaPierre, who was on probation for allegedly resisting arrest during another routine stop, a charge he says was false, and who has a pending charge of being in a vehicle with other men in which an illegal weapon was found by police, appears destined to be swallowed into the vast prison system. He will become, if he is railroaded into prison, one more person among the more than 2 million behind bars in the U.S. His experience, and the experience of others in poverty-stricken communities, should terrify us. Our failure to defend the rights of the poor in the name of law and order, our demonization of young black men, our acceptance that they can be stripped of the power to protect themselves from police abuse or find equality before the law, mean that their fate will soon become ours.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Letter to an Unknown Whistleblower: How the Security State’s Mania for Secrecy Will Create You
Tuesday, 17 September 2013 15:40 By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18905-letter-to-an-unknown-whistleblower-how-the-security-states-mania-for-secrecy-will-create-you
Dear Whistleblower,
I don’t know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee well along in years. You might be someone who entered government service filled with idealism or who signed on to “the bureaucracy” just to make a living. You may be a libertarian, a closet left-winger, or as mainstream and down-the-center as it’s possible to be.
I don’t know much, but I know one thing that you may not yet know yourself. I know that you’re there. I know that, just as Edward Snowden and Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning did, you will, for reasons of your own, feel compelled to take radical action, to put yourself in danger. When the time comes, you will know that this is what you must do, that this is why you find yourself where you are, and then you’re going to tell us plenty that has been kept from us about how our government really operates. You are going to shock us to the core.
And how exactly do I know this? Because despite our striking inability to predict the future, it’s a no-brainer that the national security state is already building you into its labyrinthine systems. In the urge of its officials to control all of us and every situation, in their mania for all-encompassing secrecy, in their classification not just of the millions of documents they generate, but essentially all their operations as “secret” or “top secret,” in their all-encompassing urge to shut off the most essential workings of the government from the eyes of its citizenry, in their escalating urge to punish anyone who would bring their secret activities to light, in their urge to see or read or listen in on or peer into the lives of you (every “you” on the planet), in their urge to build a global surveillance state and a military that will dominate everything in or out of its path, in their urge to drop bombs on Pakistan and fire missiles at Syria, in their urge to be able to assassinate just about anyone just about anywhere robotically, they are birthing you.
In every action, a reaction. So they say, no?
Give our national security managers credit, though: they may prove to be the master builders of the early twenty-first century. Their ambitions have been breathtaking and their ability to commandeer staggering amounts of our taxpayer dollars to pay for those projects hardly less so. Their monuments to themselves, their version of pyramids and ziggurats -- like the vast data storage center the National Security Agency is building for almost $2 billion in Bluffdale, Utah, to keep a yottabyte of private information about all of us, or the new post-9/11 headquarters the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built, again for almost $2 billion, so that its 16,000 employees could monitor our system of satellites monitoring every square inch of the planet -- are in their own way unique. In their urge to control everything, to see everything from your Facebook chatter to the emails of the Brazilian president, they are creating a system built to blowback, and not just from the outside or distant lands. Chalmers Johnson, who took “blowback,” an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, and embedded it in our everyday language, would have instantly recognized what they’re doing: creating a blowback machine whose “unintended consequences” (another term of his) are guaranteed, like the effects of the Snowden revelations, to stun us all in a myriad of ways.
They have built their system so elaborately, so expansively, and their ambitions have been so grandiose that they have had no choice but to embed you in their developing global security state, deep in the entrails of their secret world -- tens of thousands of possible you’s, in fact. You’s galore, all of whom see some part, some corner, of the world that is curtained off from the rest of us. And because they have built using the power of tomorrow, they have created a situation in which the prospective whistleblower, the leaker of tomorrow, has access not just to a few pieces of paper but to files beyond imagination. They, not you, have prepared the way for future mass document dumps, for staggering releases, of a sort that once upon time in a far more modest system based largely on paper would have been inconceivable.
They have, that is, paved the way for everything that you are one day guaranteed to do. They have created the means by which their mania for secrecy will repeatedly come a cropper. They have created you.
Worse yet (for them), they have created a world populated with tens of thousands of people, often young, often nomadic in job terms, and often with remarkable computer skills who have access to parts of their vast system, to unknown numbers of secret programs and documents, and the many things from phone calls to emails to credit card transactions to social media interactions to biometric data that they so helpfully store away.
And it doesn’t matter what they, in their post-Snowden panic, may do to try to prevent you from accessing their system. None of the new rules and programsthey are installing to prevent the next Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning from collecting anything right down to the national security equivalent of the kitchen sink will stop you. After all, you may even be one of the ones they have chosen to install those safeguards, to put those measures in place. You may be one of the ones they have specially trained in the intricacies and failsafe mechanisms of their system.
And here’s the uncanny thing about you: just doing what comes naturally, you will overcome any measures they try to install and make a mockery of any measures or training programs theyput in place to help your co-workers spot you. Almost by definition, they won’t be able to find you until it’s too late. You’ll dispay none of the traits that someone about to betray their world should exhibit. And no wonder, since you’ll be one of the many recognizable cogs in their machinery until almost the moment -- already too late in the game for them -- when you aren’t.
You are, in that sense, the perfect double agent. Until you, in essence, become a spy for the American people, for the old democratic system in which government was the people’s property and those we elect were supposed to let us know what they were doing in our name, you aren’t just masquerading as one of them, you are.
I have no way of knowing what will first strike you as wrong. I just know that something will. It might be very specific and close at hand -- something amiss you see in the program you’re working on, some outrageous expenditure of money or set of lies about what an agency or outfit is doing, or some act or set of acts that you, in growing up, had been taught were un-American. The possibilities are legion. After all, the national security system that they’ve built and engorged with taxpayer dollars, using fear and the excuse of American “safety,” has dispatched armies, and special ops outfits, and dronesall over the world to commit mayhem and increase global instability, to kill civilians, wipe out wedding parties, kidnap and torture the innocent, assassinate by robot, and so on.
Or maybe it all just sneaks up on you, the wrongness of it. Maybe, even if you’re too young to remember the totalitarian states of the previous century, something about the urge of our national security managers to create total systems of control, trump the law, and do as they please in the name of their need for knowledge will simply get under your skin. You’ll know that this isn’t the way it was supposed to be.
At some point, it will just creep you out, and even though until that moment you didn’t know it, you’ll be ready. They won’t be able to avoid you. They won’t be able to eliminate you. They won’t even be able to find you. You are, after all, part of their landscape, like the grass on the hillside or the steps to a house.
Even now, they are undoubtedly giving you tips on how to blowback on them. As the latest articles about the National Security Agency tell us, they have begun excusing their sins by claiming that the system they have created is now beyond even their understanding or control, so what hope do they have of understanding or controlling you? They have out-built even themselves.
Manning and Snowden were the first harbingers of the new world of whistleblowing. Snowden learned from Manning and other whistleblowers who preceded him and were persecuted by the state. You will learn from all of them. Each of them was a small tornado-like version of the blowback machine they are still in the process of creating. Each changed how the world looks America and how many of us look at ourselves. Each put in place some small part of the foundation for a world in which such a blowback machine would not be the creation of choice for those with the money and power to build monuments to themselves. Each was a raging embarrassment, a dent in the amour-propre of the national security state. Each was an insult to its ability to control much of anything, including itself.
Those running the government and many of those who write about you in the mainstream will revile you. You will be denounced as a traitor, a defector, a criminal, and your acts called treasonous, even if you’re one of the last hopes of the American republic. Right now, those like you are sure to be prosecuted, jailed, or chased implacably across the planet. But this won’t last forever. Someday, your country will recognize what you did -- first of all for yourself, for your own sense of what’s decent and right in this world, and then for us -- as the acts of an upright and even heroic American.
In the meantime, just remember: the national security state is a giant blowback machine and you, whoever you are, will be part of the answer, the remedy, to it.
Sincerely,
Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Act Erratically and the Police Will Shoot You
Tuesday, 17 September 2013 10:15 By Kristina Chew, Care2 | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/18879-act-erratically-and-the-police-will-shoot-you
Display unusual behavior and, although unarmed, you could be shot by a police officer.
That is precisely what happened to two men, in two different states, over the past weekend.
Officer Shoots Unarmed Man Fatally in North Carolina
Early on Saturday morning, 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell, a former Florida A & M football player, was shot and killed by Officer Randall Kerrick of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina, says the Charlotte Observer. After being a car crash severe enough that he apparently had to crawl out the back window, Ferrell walked about a half-mile to the nearest residence.
When the owner of the house saw Ferrell, who is African-American, she called “police because she thought he was trying to rob her,” the Charlotte Observer reports. Officers who arrived at the scene said that Ferrell was acting “aggressively.” After one officer unsuccessfully fired a taser, Ferrell “continued to run toward them.” Kerrick fired several times at Ferrell, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
Two Bystanders Shot By Police Pursuing Unarmed Man
On Saturday night in New York City’s Times Square, police also fired at an unarmed African-American man, says the Guardian. Two bystanders, including a woman using a walker, were wounded as people ran for cover.
The man has been identified as 35-year-old Glenn Broadnax of Brooklyn. His behavior on Saturday night was erratic, according to the New York Times:
Witnesses and officials said that Mr. Broadnax had been darting in front of cars at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue starting about 9:30 p.m. At one point, he appeared to have been hit and knocked to the ground by a taxi, [Kerri-Ann] Nesbeth [a bystander] said. She said Mr. Broadnax then picked himself up again.
“He was very disoriented,” she said. “It’s almost like he didn’t realize what had happened. He started to walk toward the taxi as though he was going to confront the driver.”
At that moment, she said, a police officer intervened and tried unsuccessfully to move Mr. Broadnax out of the intersection. Broadnax “reached into his pocket as if grabbing a weapon” as officers approached; two officers fired three shots, says the Guardian. With bystanders shouting at the officers not to shoot Broadnax, police tasered him and took him into custody. Now in stable condition at Bellevue Hospital, Broadnax told authorities that “I had a mission to kill myself.” He had previously served at least four years in prison for robbery and had been arrested a number of other times. While some authorities have said that he appeared “emotionally disturbed,” police said that he does not have a history of mental illness. Broadnax has been charged with “menacing, obstructing governmental administration, riot, criminal possession of a controlled substance, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.”
Use of Excessive Force
North Carolina police officer Kerrick has been charged with voluntary manslaughter and is now in custody. According to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Chief Rodney Monroe, Kerrick’s “shooting of Mr. Ferrell was excessive” and the police’s “investigation has shown that Officer Kerrick did not have a lawful right to discharge his weapon during this encounter.”
The two New York Police Department officers involving in the shooting of the two bystanders in Times Square are both “relatively new to the department,” according to commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Both have been placed on administrative duty while the NYPD investigates.
Outrage about the police and accusations that they were “reckless and sloppy” has been circulating on the Internet and for good reason. As ThinkProgress comments about the shooting of Ferrell,
While the FBI keeps detailed information on the numbers and types of crimes that are committed throughout the United States, there is no comprehensive tracking mechanism for police shootings. FBI spokespeople have said there is no mandate for them to keep such statistics and that it would take an act of Congress in order to establish a database. Congress, so far, has refused to ask for one. Such a mechanism is needed. Both Ferrell and Broadnax were African-American; would police have used their guns if they had not been?
The shootings of Ferrell and of the two bystanders in New York City were certainly “excessive.” While the mental health history of both Ferrell and Broadnax is unclear, cuts in mental health services have meant that police have increasingly been summoned to deal with people displaying “erratic behaviors.” Law enforcement officers need far more training about how to assist such individuals. Unusual behaviors and even aggression can be a sign of distress but not a reason to pull the trigger on an unarmed person in search of help.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
In the War on Drugs, Crime and Terror, We Are All Now Potential SWAT Team Targets
Tuesday, 17 September 2013 10:02 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
http://truth-out.org/news/item/18886-in-the-war-on-drugs-war-on-crime-and-war-on-terrorism-we-are-all-now-potential-swat-team-targets
To learn more about how American police are adopting and using military tactics, get Rise Of The Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces with a contribution of $35 or more to Truthout. Become informed and support corporate-free journalism at the same time.
The Economist writes of Rise of the Warrior Cop:
Mr Balko manages to avoid the clichés of both right and left, and provokes genuine outrage at the misuse of state power in its most brutal and unaccountable form: heavily armed police raiding the homes of unarmed, non-violent suspects on the flimsiest of pretexts, and behaving more like an occupying army in hostile territory than guardians of public safety. "Rise of the Warrior Cop", Mr Balko's interesting first book, explains what policies led to the militarization of America's police. To his credit, he focuses his outrage not on the police themselves, but on politicians and the phony, wasteful drug war they created.
Law enforcement in the US has been partaking of mission creep for decades, resulting in policing becoming a battlefield on which we all reside.
Truthout talked with Radley Balko about how the friendly police officer walking the streets evolved into the warrior cop.
Mark Karlin: The emergence of the SWAT team in the past few decades has come, in some ways, to symbolize the militarization of local police. How did the SWAT team emerge as a standard component of most police forces?
Radley Balko: It's really due to several policies implemented over the last 35 or so years. The first is a program started during the Regan administration that instructed the Pentagon to start making surplus military equipment available to domestic police agencies, for free, or basically for the cost of shipping. Literally millions of pieces of equipment designed for use on the battlefield have since been given to local agencies for use on American streets. The program was expanded then finally formalized with a new office and budget in a defense authorization bill passed by Congress in 1997.
So these agencies were getting all this military gear, and the logical next step was to use it to form a SWAT team. Reagan and subsequent administrations also encouraged cooperation between the military and domestic police when it comes to training, sharing intelligence and information and even teaming up for some interdiction efforts.
Finally, you have a series of anti-drug grants that then reward police agencies for prioritizing drug raids over other forms of policing. So you now have your SWAT team, and you can either keep it in reserve for one of the emergency sorts of situations for which SWAT teams were intended or you can start sending your SWAT team out on drug raids, which could actually generate revenue for your police department.
Mark Karlin: How have the political declarations from various White Houses of a war on crime, a war on drugs and a war on terror, for example, come to symbolize in language police forces becoming legalized paramilitary units in some situations?
Radley Balko: I think rhetoric is very important. For one, declaring war on drugs, crime, etc. conditions the public to be ready to give up some essential rights in order to win the war, as often happens during war. But it also of course has an effect on police, who have come to see themselves as soldiers on a battlefield instead of peace officers.
The war rhetoric has also been accompanied by efforts to dehumanize drug offenders. One Nixon official called them "vermin." William Bennett once floated the idea of public beheading of drug dealers. Daryl Gates once equated drug use with treason. When you tell the public that drug offenders are less than human, the public is more tolerant of treating them that way.
Mark Karlin: What is your response to a police chief who says that I have all this new technology and it can protect my men and women from bad guys, why shouldn't I use it?
Radley Balko: Police officers assume a certain amount of risk when they sign up for the job. That's part of being a cop. (Although, to be honest, policing is as safe today as it was in the early 1960s. You're more likely to be murdered just living in many large cities than while working as a cop.) We should protect police officers to the extent that we can, but not to the point where doing so means violating the rights - or transferring some of that risk onto - the people they serve. I would also argue that using dynamic, forced-entry tactics to serve search warrants on people suspected of consensual crimes is actually more dangerous than, say, waiting for your suspect to leave the house or apprehending him during a traffic stop. You're creating violence and confrontation. SWAT teams were once used to save lives when a violent person had put them at risk. Today, they're primarily used in a way that puts lives at risk.
Mark Karlin: How have the police become enforcers who suppress political dissent?
Radley Balko: I wouldn't phrase it exactly that way. I think politicians and public officials have chosen to use police in this manner. But I think the general thrust of your question is correct. The police response to protest today is to expect confrontation and to keep protesters as far away as possible from the conference or meeting their protesting. Where cities once assumed protesters would be peaceful, but perhaps kept the riot teams nearby in case things turned violent, today, the riot cops in full robo-gear are the first response. The sad thing is, if both police and protesters go into an event expecting confrontation, it’s probably going to happen. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
Mark Karlin: Various laws have given the police actual monetary incentives to seize property - as in the case of suspected drug dealers, and I emphasize the word suspected. Don't police forces have financial incentives to become more military in nature?
Radley Balko: Yes, I think so. In addition to the anti-drug grants I mentioned earlier, you now have DHS grants going out to police agencies across the country to buy yet more military gear. You have the civil forfeiture policies you mentioned, where police can seize your property, keep the proceeds and never even charge you with a crime, much less wait for a conviction. And civil forfeiture is overwhelmingly used in drug investigations.
Mark Karlin: Decades ago, the police officer in cities and towns used to walk a beat. Now, the average citizen has no contact with a police officer unless there is a problem of some sort or police action. Does this lack of contact create a lack of respect between police and the public?
Radley Balko: I think it contributes to the "us vs. them" mentality we see in too many police agencies today. If a cop’s only interaction with the citizens on his beat is when there’s a problem or when he’s confronting someone, that’s going to create a lot of animosity on both sides. It also creates a pretty miserable workday for the cop. Imagine a job where your only interactions with other people over the course of the day were negative. It wouldn’t take long for that to begin to have an effect on your state of mind.
Contrast that to community policing, where cops walk beats, attend community and neighborhood meetings and work to become a part of the communities they serve. They have a stake. So when it does come time to use force, they're seen by the community as one of their own who is using force to protect them, not an outside or occupying force that has been imposed upon them.
Mark Karlin: Are many particularly urban police forces tools of elected officials who have a political agenda?
Radley Balko: I don't know that I can really answer that question. I think policing in general is where it is today because of demagoguery by elected officials at all levels of government. But I don't know that it's any worse in urban areas. There are a lot of nasty county sheriffs and small-town police chiefs, too.
Mark Karlin: What do you say to defenders of disproportionate police overreach? Are you sympathetic to Ben Franklin's much-quoted statement, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Radley Balko: I'd imagine that the people who disagree with me wouldn't consider the police tactics they support "disproportionate." Oddly enough, in some ways, police are more professional today than they've been in the past. Rogue cops are more likely to be held accountable (although you could certainly argue that it still doesn't happen enough). Today you have civilian review boards and internal affairs departments. The point I try to make in the book is that the amount of force that is allowed, even encouraged, as official policy is much greater today than it has been in the past. Today, we see SWAT teams and SWAT-like tactics used for increasingly less-serious crimes. As I mentioned, overwhelming force is often today the first reaction to protest. In some jurisdictions, all search warrants are now served with SWAT teams, regardless of the crime. We're also seeing SWAT teams even used to enforce regulatory law or to send a political message.
Mark Karlin: With the emergence of Fusion Centers in the wake of 9/11 - and the growing cooperation between the Pentagon, the intelligence services and local police - are you concerned that law enforcement may become even more aligned with the military and federal priorites?
Radley Balko: I think there's definitely reason for concern. Remember, immediately after 9/11, the federal government started running commercials claiming that casual drug users were supporting terrorism. So they wasted no time capitalizing on the fear and outrage over the attacks and trying to transfer all of that to support for a more aggressive drug war. A few years ago, I believe it was The Atlantic that did a review of how the "sneak and peak" warrants authorized under the Patriot Act were actually being used. The overwhelming majority were being used in drug investigations. Those DHS grants are supposed to be used to fight terrorism, but they're going to some fairly unlikely terrorism targets, like Fargo or Tuscaloosa. Once they have the gear, they're of course going to use it. So it gets used in more routine, everyday police work.
I think we can expect to see more of this. With the DHS grants especially, that money is going to purchase new equipment, as opposed to the surplus gear agencies have been getting through the Pentagon. This has given rise to a cottage industry of companies who build this stuff in exchange for those checks. A new industry means a new lobbying voice. So you now have a police-industrial complex, which will try like hell to make sure this all continues and grows.
Mark Karlin: You are a libertarian who has worked at the Cato Institute and Reason magazine. Is concern over the warrior cop one of those crossover issues that libertarians and progressives should unite in working on?
Radley Balko: Absolutely. The reaction to the book all across the political spectrum has been really encouraging. Not just among libertarians and progressives but also from conservatives. One of the points I make in the book is that in the 1990s, it was mostly the right that was worried about police militarization, with Rub Ridge, Waco, the Elian Gonzalez raid, etc. And it was the left that was mostly defending these police actions - or at least dismissing conservatives' concerns. But when police started cracking down on Occupy protests, the left was up in arms, and it was the right dismissing them and defending the police actions. Given the overwhelmingly positive reception the book has received from both right and left, perhaps both sides are starting to realize when you defend the disproportionate use of force because you don't like the people the force is being used against, you make it easier for the government to use the same sort of force on you and your allies in the future. I hope that's the case. I think there's room here for work from libertarians, progressives and limited-government conservatives.
To learn more about how American police are adopting and using military tactics, get Rise Of The Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces with a contribution of $35 or more to Truthout. Become informed and support corporate-free journalism at the same time.
If you are in the Chicago area on Wednesday, September 18, 2013, join Balko and a panel discussion of increasingly battlefield-style police action at 6 PM at Roosevelt University. Please RSVP and learn more by clicking here. The event is cosponsored by Truthout.
Copyright, Truthout.
Great post and comments