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Facts first, logic always, truth before everything
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There is an interesting and valuable article in the NY Times, about how American police forces are taking up military style tactics to use against citizens in demonstrations, such as the Occupy movement. This trend actually dates back to the 1960s and the urban riots that shocked the nation. Below is the opening section of the article with a link to the Times. After that isThe TerryReport comment on this subject.
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News Analysis
When the Police Go Military
Published: December 3, 2011 |
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RIOT police officers tear-gassing protesters at the Occupy movement in Oakland. The surprising nighttime invasion of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, carried out with D-Day-like secrecy by officers deploying klieg lights and a military-style sound machine. And campus police officers in helmets and face shields dousing demonstrators at the University of California, Davis with pepper spray.
Is this the militarization of the American police?
Police forces undeniably share a soldier’s ethos, no matter the size of the city, town or jurisdiction: officers carry deadly weapons and wear uniforms with patches denoting rank. They salute one another and pay homage to a “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” hierarchical culture.
But beyond such symbolic and formal similarities, American law and tradition have tried to draw a clear line between police and military forces. To cast the roles of the two too closely, those in and out of law enforcement say, is to mistake the mission of each. Soldiers, after all, go to war to destroy, and kill the enemy. The police, who are supposed to maintain the peace, “are the citizens, and the citizens are the police,” according to Chief Walter A. McNeil of Quincy, Fla., the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, citing the words of Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern-day policing.
Yet lately images from Occupy protests streamed on the Internet, often in real time, show just how readily police officers can adopt military-style tactics and equipment, and come off more like soldiers as they face down citizens. THE LINK TO THE FULL ARTICLE.
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In trying to be balanced and fair, the Times reporter left out a lot. For one thing, we now have a police/security industrial complex to match the military one. There are hundreds of companies busy as bees developing new equipment to be sold to your local police department. No one would argue about a major city police department having some sort of small tank like vehicle in the event of a terrorist attack. Yet, how many of these things should there be nationwide? Hundreds? Thousands? Does the police department in Omaha have to be ready for a terrorist attack for the next 100 yrs.?
The problem with “advanced” equipment is it carries with it a built-in bias to use it. Why do departments issues pepper spray if it is not to be used? Is it better to blast people with chemicals rather than hit them over the head? The more sophisticated, high tech that piles up in warehouses, the more the police departments want to break out that gear and use it on citizens, regardless of whether it was called for.
The demonstrators at UC-Davis a couple of weeks back were being entirely peaceful when they were sprayed with chemicals (make no mistake, pepper spray is a far cry from pepper on your dinning table, it is a chemical designed to disable the person for five minutes to half an hour or more and it can cause permanent damage). Was there any reason to believe that those students could not have been safely and peacefully arrested and taken away? If there was no such reason, then what the campus police did was classical police brutality, the use of excessive force for its own sake.
As the Times article states, we have laws in the US preventing the military from engaging in law enforcement activities in interaction with civilians. There are good reasons for these laws. The military is not equipped to deal with the normal way that civilians conduct themselves. It is really only good for one thing. in the main: shoot to kill. Yet, if the police forces become just another branch of the military, where would we be then? We would be on our way to having a military style police state.
Doug Terry, 12.5.11
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Photography from Guatemala, Maryland, Italy and elsewhere by Doug Terry
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